-
1
2013
第
4
周翻译练习
英译汉：
In
my
younger
and
more
vulnerable
years
my
father
gave
me
some
advice
that
I’ve
been
turning over in my mind ever since.
“
Whenever you feel like
criticizing any one,‖ he told me, ―just remember
that all the people
in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve
had.‖
He didn’t say any
more, but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way,
and I
understood that he meant a great deal more than
that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve
all judgments, a habit that has opened
up many curious to natures to me and also made me
the
victim of not a few veteran bores,
the abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach
itself to this
quality when it appears
in a normal person, and so it came about that in
college I was unjustly
accused
of being
a politician,
because
I
was
privy
to
the
secret grieves
of
wild,
unknown
men.
Most
of
the
confidences
were
unsought
—
frequently
I
have
feigned
sleep,
preoccupation,
or
a
hostile levity when I
realized by some unmistakable sign that an
intimate revelation was quivering
on
the
horizon,
for
the
intimate
revelations
of
young
men,
or
at
least
the
terms
in
which
they
express them, are
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious
suppressions. Reserving judgments is
a
matter of infinite hope. I am still a little
afraid of missing something if I forget that, as
my father
snobbishly suggested, and I
snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental
decencies is parceled
out unequally at
birth.
And,
after
boasting
this
way
of
my
tolerance,
I
come
to
the
admission
that
it
had
a
limit.
Conduct
may be founded on the hard rock or the wet
marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care
what it’s founded on. When I came back
from the East last autumn, I felt that wanted the
world no
more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only
Gatsby, the man who
gives his name to
this book, was exempt from my
reaction
—
Gatsby, who
represented everything
for which I have
an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken
series of successful gestures,
then
there was something gorgeous about him, some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,
as if he were related to one of those
intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles
away. This
responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby
impressionability which is dignified
under the name of the ―creative
temperament‖—
it was an extraordinary
gift for hope, a romantic
readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and
which it is not likely I shall ever find
again.
No
—
Gatsby
turned
out
all
right
at
the
end;
it
is
what
preyed
on
Gatsby,
what
foul
dust
floated in the wake of
his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows
and short-
winded elations of men.
My families
have been prominent well-to
–
do people in this Middle
Western city for three
generations. The
Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a
tradition that we’re descended
from
the
Dukes
of
Buccleuch,
but
the
actual
founder
of
my
line
was
my
grandfather’s
brother,
who came here in
fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and
started the wholesale hardware
business
that my father carried on today.
I
never saw this great-
uncle, but I’m
supposed to look like him—
with special
reference to the
rather hard-boiled
painting that hangs in fath
er’s office.
I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just
a
quarter
of
a
century
after
my
father,
and
a
little
latter
I
participated
in
that
delayed
Teutonic
migration
known
as
the
Great
War.
I
enjoyed
the
counter-raid
so
thoroughly
that
I
came
back