学生翻译练习材料Word文档格式.docx

1、Technically, it begins next week. Actually, it began with the epic sigh of relief that could be sensed all over the U. S. right after Labor Day. Even before it arrives, Americans always manage to get into autumn. And no wonder. It is easily the most habitable season of the year.Indeed, autumn deserv

2、es a hymnand it has received far less tribute than it deserves. True, some mixed notices have come in over the centuries. Horace slandered autumn as a “dead” period“harvest-season of the Goddess of Death.” He was dead wrong, of course, for as Ovid noted, once he got his mind off sex, autumn is “cum

3、formossisimus annus”“the fairest season of the year.” Had he lived a little later, Horace might have found out from the U. S. census Bureau that the death rate is usually lower in autumn than in winter and spring. Why? Science doesnt know, but it is quite possible that the will to live is stronger i

4、n the fall. Conversely, the will to mayhem weakens: nobody has ever worried about a Long Hot Autumn.So autumn is a blatantly vital season, contrary to the allegation of sorrowful pets who misconstrue the message of dying leaves. A more realistic poet, Archibald MacLeish, says that “Autumn is the Ame

5、rican season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.”Autumn is also the authentic season of renewal. Yale Lecturer William Zinsser hit

6、the nail squarely: “The whole notion of New Years Day as the time of fresh starts and bold resolutions is false.” In truth that time is autumn. Popular pleasure shows itself in those hastening steps and brightened smiles encountered ass the air grows nippier. Some psychiatrists have patients who gro

7、w almost alarmed at how congenial they suddenly feel. Autumn is a friendlier time.Passage 2There is a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wid

8、e universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not f

9、or nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashame

10、d of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has

11、 said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.Trust yourself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the societ

12、y of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we

13、 are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. Passage 3The 20th cen

14、turythe century of metamyths and of megadeathsspawned false notions of total control, derived from arrogant assertions accepted reality as God-ordained, had given way to the secular fanatic, increasingly inclined to usurp God in the effort to construct heaven on earth, increasingly inclined to usurp

15、 God in the effort to construct heaven on earthsubordinating not only nature but humanity itself to his own utopian vision. In the course of the century, this vision was perverted into the most costly exercise of political hubris in mankinds history: the totalitarian attempt to create coercive utopi

16、as. All of realityon the objective level of social organization and on the subjective level of personal beliefswas to subject to doctrinal control emanating from a single political center. The price paid in human lives for this excess is beyond comprehension. Adding them all up, somewhere between 167 million and 175 million individual human beings were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnagethe scores of millions of