-
President Faust, members of the Harvard
Corporation and the Board of Overseers,
members of the faculty, proud parents,
and, above all, graduates,
福斯特主席,哈佛公司和监察委员会的各位成员,
各位老师、家长、全体毕业生们:
The first thing I would like to say is
honour, but the weeks of fear and
nausea I’ve endured at the thought of giving this
commencement address
have made me lose
weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do
is take deep breaths, squint at the red
banners and convince myself that I am
at the world’s largest Gryffindors'
reunion.
首先请允许我说一声谢谢。哈佛不仅给了我
无上的荣誉,连日来为这个演讲经受的恐惧和紧张,
更令我减肥成功。
< br>这真是一个双赢的局面。
现在我要做的就是深呼吸几下,
眯着眼睛看看前面的大红
横幅,安慰自己正在世界上最大的格兰芬多(沪江小编:以防有
人没看过《哈利波特》
……
格兰芬多
是
小哈利所在的魔法学院的名字)聚会上。
Delivering a commencement address is a
great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast
my mind back
to my own graduation. The
commencement speaker that day was the
distinguished British philosopher
Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on
her speech has helped me enormously in writing
this one, because it
turns out that I
can't remember a single word she said. This
liberating discovery enables me to proceed
without any fear that I might
inadvertently influence you to abandon promising
careers in business, law or
politics
for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. <
/p>
发表毕业演说是一个巨大的责任,
至少在我回忆自己当年的毕业典
礼前是这么认为的。
那天做演
讲的是英国著名的哲学家
Baroness Mary Warnock
,对她演讲的回忆,对我写今天的演讲稿,产生了
极大的帮助,
因为我不记得她说过的任何一句话了。
这个发现让我释然,
让
我不再担心我可能会无意
中影响你放弃在商业,法律或政治上的大好前途,转而醉心于成
为一个快乐的魔法师(
gay
有快乐和
同性恋的意思)。
You see? If all you
remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard'
joke, I've still come out ahead of
Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals
- the first step to self-improvement.
你
们看,如果在若干年后你们还记得
―
快乐的魔法师
‖
这个笑话,那就证明我已经超越了
Barones
s
Mary Warnock
。建立可实现的目标
——
这是提高自我的第一步。
Actually, I have wracked my mind and
heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have
asked myself
what I wish I had known at
my own graduation, and what important lessons I
have learned in the 21 years
that has
expired between that day and this.
实际上,
我为今天应该和大家谈些什么绞尽了脑汁。
我问自己什么是我希
望早在毕业典礼上就该
了解的,而从那时起到现在的
21
年间,我又得到了什么重要的启示。
I have come up with two answers. On
this wonderful day when we are gathered together
to celebrate
your academic success, I
have decided to talk to you about the benefits of
failure. And as you stand on the
threshold of what is sometimes called
'real life', I want to extol the crucial
importance of imagination.
我想到了两个答案。
在这美好的一天,
当我们一起庆祝你们取得学业成就的时刻,
我希望告诉你
们失败有什么样的益处;在你们即将迈向
< br>―
现实生活
‖
的道路之际,我还
要褒扬想象力的重要性。
These may seem
quixotic or paradoxical choices, but bear with me.
这些似乎是不切实际或自相矛盾的选择,但请先容我讲完。
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I
was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable
experience for the
42-year-old that she
has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking
an uneasy balance between the
ambition
I had for myself, and what those closest to me
expected of me.
回顾
21
< br>岁刚刚毕业时的自己,对于今天
42
岁的我来说,是一个
稍微不太舒服的经历。可以说,
我人生的前一部分,一直挣扎在自己的雄心和身边的人对
我的期望之间。
I was convinced that
the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write
novels. However, my parents,
both of
whom came from impoverished backgrounds and
neither of whom had been to college, took the
view that my overactive imagination was
an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a
mortgage, or
secure a pension.
< br>我一直深信,自己唯一想做的事情,就是写小说。不过,我的父母,他们都来自贫穷的背景,没
< p>有任何一人上过大学,
坚持认为我过度的想象力是一个令人惊讶的个人怪癖
,
根本不足以让我支付按
揭,或者取得足够的养老金。
I know the irony strikes like
with the force of a cartoon anvil now,
but…
我现在明白反讽就像用卡通铁砧去打击你,但
...
They had hoped that I would take a
vocational degree; I wanted to study English
Literature. A
compromise was reached
that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up
to study Modern Languages.
Hardly had
my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of
the road than I ditched German and scuttled off
down the Classics corridor.
他们希望我去拿个职业学位,
而我想去攻读英国文学。
最后,<
/p>
达成了一个双方都不甚满意的妥协:
我改学现代语言。可是等到父
母一走开,我立刻放弃了德语而报名学习古典文学。
I
cannot remember telling my parents that I was
studying Classics; they might well have found out
for
the first time on graduation day.
Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they
would have been hard put to
name one
less useful than Greek mythology when it came to
securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
我不记得将这事告诉了父母,
他们可能是在我毕业典礼那一天才发现的。
p>
我想,
在全世界的所有
专业中,
他们也许认为,
不会有比研究希腊神话更没用的专业了,
< br>根本无法换来一间独立宽敞的卫生
间。
I would like to make it clear, in
parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for
their point of view.
There is an expiry
date on blaming your parents for steering you in
the wrong direction; the moment you are
old enough to take the wheel,
responsibility lies with you. What is more, I
cannot criticise my parents for
hoping
that I would never experience poverty. They had
been poor themselves, and I have since been poor,
and I quite agree with them that it is
not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear,
and stress, and
sometimes depression;
it means a thousand petty humiliations and
hardships. Climbing out of poverty by
your own efforts, that is indeed
something on which to pride yourself, but poverty
itself is romanticised only
by fools. <
/p>
我想澄清一下:
我不会因为父母的观点,
而责怪他们。
埋怨父母给你指错方向是有一个时间段的。
当你成
长到可以控制自我方向的时候,
你就要自己承担责任了。
尤其是
,
我不会因为父母希望我不要
过穷日子,而责怪他们。他们一直
很贫穷,我后来也一度很穷,所以我很理解他们。贫穷并不是一种
高贵的经历,它带来恐
惧、压力、有时还有绝望,它意味着许许多多的羞辱和艰辛。靠自己的努力摆
脱贫穷,确
实可以引以自豪,但贫穷本身只有对傻瓜而言才是浪漫的。
What I feared most for myself at your
age was not poverty, but failure.
我在你们这个年龄,最害怕的不是贫穷,而是失败。
At your age, in spite of a distinct
lack of motivation at university, where I had
spent far too long in the
coffee bar
writing stories, and far too little time at
lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations,
and that,
for years, had been the
measure of success in my life and that of my
peers.
我在您们这么大时,
明显缺乏在大学学习的动力
,
我花了太久时间在咖啡吧写故事,
而在课堂的
时间却很少。我有一个通过考试的诀窍,并且数年间一直让我在大学生活和同龄人中不落人后。
I am not dull enough to suppose
that because you are young, gifted and well-
educated, you have never
known hardship
or heartache. Talent and intelligence never yet
inoculated anyone against the caprice of the
Fates, and I do not for a moment
suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an
existence of unruffled privilege
and
contentment.
我不想愚蠢地假设,因为你们年轻、有天份,并且受过良好
的教育,就从来没有遇到困难或心碎
的时刻。
拥有才华和智慧,
从来不会使人对命运的反复无常有所准备;
我也不会假设大家坐
在这里冷
静地满足于自身的优越感。
However, the fact that you are
graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not
very well-acquainted
with failure. You
might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much
as a desire for success. Indeed, your
conception of failure might not be too
far from the average person's idea of success, so
high have you
already flown
academically.
相反,你们是哈佛毕业生的这个事实,意味着你们并不很
了解失败。你们也许极其渴望成功,所
以非常害怕失败。说实话,你们眼中的失败,很可
能就是普通人眼中的成功,毕竟你们在学业上已经
达到很高的高度了。
< br>
Ultimately, we all have to decide
for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the
world is quite eager to
give you a set
of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to
say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven
years after my graduation day, I had
failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-
lived marriage had
imploded, and I was
jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is
possible to be in modern Britain, without
being homeless. The fears my parents
had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had
both come to pass,
and by every usual
standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
最终,
我们所有人都必须自己决定什么算作失败,
但
如果你愿意,
世界是相当渴望给你一套标准
的。所以我想很公平
的讲,从任何传统的标准看,在我毕业仅仅七年后的日子里,我的失败达到了史
诗般空前
的规模:短命的婚姻闪电般地破裂,我又失业成了一个艰难的单身母亲。除了流浪汉,我是
当代英国最穷的人之一,真的一无所有。当年父母和我自己对未来的担忧,现在都变成了现实。按照
惯常的标准来看,我也是我所知道的最失败的人。
Now, I am not going to stand here and
tell you that failure is fun. That period of my
life was a dark one,
and I had no idea
that there was going to be what the press has
since represented as a kind of fairy tale
resolution. I had no idea how far the
tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at
the end of it was a
hope rather than a
reality.
现在,我不打算站在这里告诉你们,失败是有趣的。那段日子是我生
命中的黑暗岁月,我不知道
它是否代表童话故事里需要历经的磨难,
更不知道自己还要在黑暗中走多久。
很长一段时间里,
前面
留给我的只是希望,而不是现实。
So why do I talk about the benefits of
failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping
away of the
inessential. I stopped
pretending to myself that I was anything other
than what I was, and began to direct all
my energy into finishing the only work
that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at
anything else, I might
never have found
the determination to succeed in the one arena I
believed I truly belonged. I was set free,
because my greatest fear had been
realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a
daughter whom I adored,
and I had an
old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom
became the solid foundation on which I
rebuilt my life.
那么为什么我要谈论失败
的好处呢?因为失败意味着剥离掉那些不必要的东西。
我因此不再伪装
< br>自己、
远离自我,
而重新开始把所有精力放在对我最重要
的事情上。
如果不是没有在其他领域成功过,
我可能就不会找到
,
在一个我确信真正属于的舞台上取得成功的决心。
我获得了自
由,
因为最害怕的
虽然已经发生了,
但
我还活着,
我仍然有一个我深爱的女儿,
我还有一个旧打字机和
一个很大的想法。
所以困境的谷底,成为我重建生活的坚实基础。
You might never fail on the scale I
did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is
impossible to live
without failing at
something, unless you live so cautiously that you
might as well not have lived at all
–
in
which case,
you fail by default.
你们可能永远没有达到我经历的那种失败
程度,
但有些失败,
在生活中是不可避免的。
< br>生活不可
能没有一点失败,除非你生活的万般小心,而那也意味着你没有真正在生
活了。无论怎样,有些失败
还是注定地要发生。
Failure gave me an inner security that
I had never attained by passing examinations.
Failure taught me
things about myself
that I could have learned no other way. I
discovered that I had a strong will, and more
discipline than I had suspected; I also
found out that I had friends whose value was truly
above the price of
rubies.
失
败使我的内心产生一种安全感,
这是我从考试中没有得到过的。
失败让我看清自己,
这也是我
通过其他方式无法体会的。我发现
,我比自己认为的,要有更强的意志和决心。我还发现,我拥有比
宝石更加珍贵的朋友。
The knowledge that you have
emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means
that you are, ever after,
secure in
your ability to survive. You will never truly know
yourself, or the strength of your relationships,
until both have been tested by
adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all
that it is painfully won, and it
has
been worth more to me than any qualification I
ever earned.
从挫折中获得智慧、
变得坚强,<
/p>
意味着你比以往任何时候都更有能力生存。
只有在逆境来临的时<
/p>
候,你才会真正认识你自己,了解身边的人。这种了解是真正的财富,虽然是用痛苦换来的
,但比我
以前得到的任何资格证书都有用。
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my
21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in
knowing that
life is not a check-list
of acquisition or achievement. Your
qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though
you will meet many people of my age and
older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and
complicated, and
beyond anyone's total
control, and the humility to know that will enable
you to survive its vicissitudes.
如果给我一部
时间机器,
我会告诉
21
岁的自己,<
/p>
人的幸福在于知道生活不是一份漂亮的成绩单,
你的资历、
简历,
都不是你的生活,
虽然你会碰到很多与
我同龄或更老一点的人今天依然还在混淆两
者。生活是艰辛的,复杂的,超出任何人的控
制能力,而谦恭地了解这一点,将使你历经沧桑后能够
更好的生存。
You might think that I chose my
second theme, the importance of imagination,
because of the part it
played in
rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so.
Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories
to
my last gasp, I have learned to
value imagination in a much broader sense.
Imagination is not only the
uniquely
human capacity to envision that which is not, and
therefore the fount of all invention and
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