exclusively全新版大学英语5 TEXT B 翻译 UNIT1

Malcolm X grew to

fame

for championing the rights of his fellow black Americans in the

1950s

and 1960s. Early on in life, he lost interest in school when a favorite teacher told him

his dream of becoming a lawyer was

and ended up serving a long prison sentence. It was time he did not allow to go to waste.

马尔科姆

·

艾克斯因其在二十世纪五十年代和六十年代扞卫美 国黑人权利而出名。他早年曾对读书失去兴

趣，

因为当时他最喜 欢的一位老师告诉他，

梦想成为律师

“

对黑鬼来说是不现实的

”

。

他步入了犯罪的歧途，

最后被判长期监禁。他不能再虚度光阴了。

Prison Studies

Malcolm X

1 Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read

som

ething I’ve

said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression

is due entirely to my prison studies.

狱

中

学

习

马尔科姆

·

艾克斯

今天，许多在什么地方直接听我讲话的人，或在电视上听我讲话的人，或读过我写的东西的人，都会以为

我上学远不止只读到

8

年级。这一印象完全归之 于我在监狱里的学习。

2 It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel

envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always

taken charge

of

any conversation he was

in, and I had tried to

emulate

him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which

didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the

words that might as

well have been in

Chinese [ … the words that might as well have been in Chinese

: … it would have made no

difference if the English words had been in Chinese, because I didn’t have the slightest

knowledge of either.] When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with

little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going

through only book- reading motions. Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions,

unless I had received the

motivation

that I did.

其实这事要从查尔斯顿监狱说起，一开始宾比 就让我对他的知识渊博羡慕不已。宾比总是主宰谈话话题，

我总想效仿他。可是，我随便 打开一本书，几乎没有一个句子不是少则一两个字，多则差不多所有的字都

不认识。我只 好跳过这些字，结果自然是对书上说的几乎一无所知了。因此，我被解送到诺福克拘留所时，

读书还只是为了摆摆样子而已。要不是我真的获得了学习动力，我恐怕没多久就会连读书的样子也懒得去

摆了。

3 I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary

—

to study, to learn

som

e

words. I

was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship.

It was sad. I couldn’t

even

write in a

straight line. It

was both ideas together that moved me

to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony

school.

我认识到，最要紧 的是得到一本字典好认字学字。幸好我还认识到得好好练习写字。说来悲伤，我写字都

不 能写得齐整成行。这两个想法促使我向诺福克拘留所学校要了字典，还有本子和笔。

4 I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary

’s pages. I’d never

realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just

to start some kind of action, I began copying.

整整 两天，我把字典一页页翻了个遍，不知该怎么学。我压根儿没想过会有那么多字。我不知道自己需要

学哪些字。最后，总得有所行动吧，我便开始抄写。

5 In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything

printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

我写字又慢又费劲，而且歪歪斜斜，但我在本子上抄写下了第一页上包括标点在内的所有印刷符号。

6 I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written

on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

记得我抄写了一天。然 后

,

我把本子上抄写下的所有字大声朗读给自己听。一遍又一遍 ，我大声朗读自己抄

写的字。

7 I woke up the next morning, thinking about those

words

—

immensely proud to realize

that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew

were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could rem

ember

what many of these

words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from

the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had

a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-

eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off

termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.

我第二天早上醒来，

仍 想着那些字

——

想到自己不仅一次写 了那么多字，

而且还写了以前根本不认识的字，

不由得深感自豪 。更何况，略加回想，我还能记住其中许多字的意思。没记住的字我都复习了一遍。有趣

的是，此时此刻，那本字典第一页上

“aardvark”

这个 字跃入了我的脑海。字典上有一幅画它的插图，那是

一种长尾巴长耳朵会掘洞的非洲哺乳 动物，像食蚁兽捕食蚂蚁那样伸出舌头捕食白蚁。

8 I was so fascinated that I went on

—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same

experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned

of people

and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a

miniature

encyclopedia.

Finally the dictionary’s A section had

filled a whole tablet

—and I went on into the B’s. That

was the way I started copying what eventually becam

e the entire dictionary. It went a lot

faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I

wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I

wrote a million words.

我完全着迷了，于是继续抄

——

我又抄写了字典的第二页。我学这一页上的字时体验到了同样的感受。每

学一页字，我还学到了一点有关人物、地方和历史事件的知识。字典实际上就像是一部小型百科全书。最

后，字典上

A

那部分字的条目抄满了整整一 个本子

——

接着我抄写

B

字部。我就是这样开始抄写的，最后

抄完了整本字典。大量的抄写帮助我提高 了书写速度，以后抄写起来就快了许多。从在本子上抄写，到后

来在那段余下的服刑时间 里写信，我估计自己在监狱里写了一百万字。

9 I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time

pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone

who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you

som

ething: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not

reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books

with a

wedge

. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my

visitors

—

usually Ella and Reginald

—

and my reading of books, months passed without my

even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in

my life.

想来也是自然而然的，随着词汇的增加，我第一次能够拿起一本书读下去，开始明白书上说的是什么。任

何阅读广泛的人都想象得出在我面前展现的崭新世界。我不妨告诉你：从那时起，直到我离开那 座监狱，

在任何可以自由支配的时间里，我不是在图书室里，就是在自己的铺位上看书。 真的是手不释卷。我的日

常活动就是听穆罕默德先生传道，写写信，会会客

——

来探视的一般都是埃拉和雷金纳德

——