金星女儿:第二十一届韩素音青年翻译大赛启动

随着全球化进程的加速、我国加入世界贸易组织，中外交流日趋频繁。翻译，作为沟通中外交流的桥梁，正在我国社会生活的各领域发挥越来越重要的作用。值此之际，中国译协《中国翻译》编辑部、北京大学翻译硕士教育中心将联合举办第二十一届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛。参赛原文见本期，具体参赛规则如下：
一、本届竞赛分别设立英译汉和汉译英两个奖项，参赛者可任选一项或同时参加两项竞赛。
二、《中国翻译》2009年第1期刊登竞赛规则、竞赛原文和参赛券(复印件有效)。
三、参赛者年龄：44岁以下。
四、参赛译文须独立完成，杜绝抄袭现象，一经发现，将取消参赛资格。请参赛者在大赛截稿之日前妥善保存参赛译文的著作权，请勿在书报刊、网络等任何媒体公布自己的参赛译文，否则将被取消参赛资格并承担由此造成的一切后果。
五、参赛译文请用电脑打印或用稿纸(有单位名称抬头的译文稿纸无效)誊写清楚。译文前加一封面，将填好的参赛券剪贴在此封面上(请勿贴在信封上)。译文正文内请勿书写译者姓名、地址等个人信息，参赛译文内如涉及任何参赛者个人信息，将被视为无效译文。每项参赛译文一稿有效，恕不接收修改稿。
六、参赛截稿日期：请参赛者于2009年5月31日以前(以寄出日邮戳为准)将参赛译文挂号寄至：北京市阜外百万庄大街24号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编：100037，请在信封上注明：“参赛译文”字样，北京大学翻译硕士教育中心不接收参赛译文。
七、参赛者在交寄参赛译文的同时，交寄报名费40元，如同时参加两项竞赛，请交报名费 80元。汇款地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街24号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编：100037。请在汇款单附言上注明“参赛报名费”字样。未交报名费的参赛译文无效。
八、本届竞赛设一、二、三等奖和优秀奖若干名，授予一、二、三等奖获得者奖金、证书和纪念品，授予优秀奖获得者证书和纪念品。2009年第6期(11月15日出版)《中国翻译》杂志将公布竞赛结果。
九、将于2009年秋天在北京举行本届竞赛颁奖典礼，竞赛获奖者将被邀请参加颁奖典礼。
十、竞赛具体安排和最新信息请关注竞赛官方网站：www.tac-online.org.cn; http://sfl.pku.edu.cn/MTI
十一、竞赛组委会联系方式： 电话：010-68995956
信箱：ctjtac@gmail.com; mticenter@pku.edu.cn
地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街24号《中国翻译》编辑部 邮编：100037
北京市海淀区颐和园路5号北京大学俄文楼211室 邮编：100871
第二十一届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛评审委员会
参赛券（请沿虚线剪下，贴在译文前加的封面上）
（参赛券复印有效）
－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－
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参赛原文：
英译汉
Beyond Life
I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is not asking very much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible to me! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose this universe was intended, to what end it was set a-going, or why I am here, or even what I had preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I am expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what it is I have no notion. And indeed, what have I done hitherto, in the years behind me? There are some books to show as increment, as something which was not anywhere before I made it, and which even in bulk will replace my buried body, so that my life will be to mankind no loss materially. But the course of my life, when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of water that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice and grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done nothing with pre-meditation, but rather, to have had things done to me. And for all the rest of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave every morning in order to be ready for no more than this!
I have attempted to make the best of my material circumstances always; nor do I see to-day how any widely varying course could have been wiser or even feasible: but material things have nothing to do with that life which moves in me. Why, then, should they direct and heighten and provoke and curb
every action of life? It is against the tyranny of matter I would rebel—against life’s absolute need of food, and books, and fire, and clothing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life perish. No, all that which I do here or refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I detect any symmetry anywhere, such as living would assuredly display, I think, if my progress were directed by any particular motive. It is all a muddling through, somehow, without any recognizable goal in view, and there is no explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere procurable. It merely seems that to go on living has become with me a habit.
And I want beauty in my life. I have seen beauty in a sunset and in the spring woods and in the eyes of divers women, but now these happy accidents of light and color no longer thrill me. And I want beauty in my life itself, rather than in such chances as befall it. It seems to me that many actions of my life were beautiful, very long ago, when I was young in an evanished world of friendly girls, who were all more lovely than any girl is nowadays. For women now are merely more or less good-looking, and as I know, their looks when at their best have been painstakingly enhanced and edited. But I would like this life which moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeliness, though but in transitory performance. The life of a butterfly, for example, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in that its loveliness is complete and perfectly rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker through existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and contribute to deserving charities: and the program does not seem, somehow, quite adequate. There are my books, I know; and there is beauty “embalmed and treasured up” in many pages of my books, and in the books of other persons, too, which I may read at will: but this desire inborn in me is not to be satiated by making marks upon paper, nor by deciphering them. In short, I am enamored of that flawless beauty of which all poets have perturbedly divined the existence somewhere, and which life as men know it simply does not afford nor anywhere foresee.
And tenderness, too—but does that appear a mawkish thing to desiderate in life? Well, to my finding human beings do not like one another. Indeed, why should they, being rational creatures? All babies have a temporary lien on tenderness, of course: and therefrom children too receive a dwindling income, although on looking back, you will recollect that your childhood was upon the whole a lonesome and much put-upon period. But all grown persons ineffably distrust one another. In courtship, I grant you, there is a passing aberration which often mimics tenderness, sometimes as the result of honest delusion, but more frequently as an ambuscade in the endless struggle between man and woman. Married people are not ever tender with each other, you will notice: if they are mutually civil it is much: and physical contacts apart, their relation is that of a very moderate intimacy. My own wife, at all events, I find an unfailing mystery, a Sphinx whose secrets I assume to be not worth knowing: and, as I am mildly thankful to narrate, she knows very little about me, and evinces as to my affairs no morbid interest. That is not to assert that if I were ill she would not nurse me through any imaginable contagion, nor that if she were drowning I would not plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies at swimming: what I mean is that, pending such high crises, we tolerate each other amicably, and never think of doing more. And from our blood-kin we grow apart inevitably. Their lives and their interests are no longer the same as ours, and when we meet it is with conscious reservations and much manufactured talk. Besides, they know things about us which we resent. And with the rest of my fellows, I find that convention orders all our dealings, even with children, and we do and say what seems more or less expected. And I know that we distrust one another all the while, and instinctively conceal or misrepresent our actual thoughts and emotions when there is no very apparent need. Personally, I do not like human beings because I am not aware, upon the whole, of any generally distributed qualities which entitle them as a race to admiration and affection. But toward people in books—such as Mrs. Millamant, and Helen of Troy, and Bella Wilfer, and Mélusine, and Beatrix Esmond—I may intelligently overflow with tenderness and caressing words, in part because they deserve it, and in part because I know they will not suspect me of being “queer” or of having ulterior motives.
And I very often wish that I could know the truth about just any one circumstance connected with my life. Is the phantasmagoria of sound and noise and color really passing or is it all an illusion here in my brain? How do you know that you are not dreaming me, for instance? In your conceded dreams, I am sure, you must invent and see and listen to persons who for the while seem quite as real to you as I do now. As I do, you observe, I say! and what thing is it to which I so glibly refer as I? If you will try to form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a something that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control your flesh and blood body, you will encounter a walking bundle of superfluities: and when you mentally have put aside the extraneous things—your garments and your members and your body, and your acquired habits and your appetites and your inherited traits and your prejudices, and all other appurtenances which considered separately you recognize to be no integral part of you,—there seems to remain in those pearl-colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little save a faculty for receiving sensations, of which you know the larger portion to be illusory. And surely, to be just a very gullible consciousness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is not an enviable plight. And yet this life—to which I cling tenaciously—comes to no more. Meanwhile I hear men talk about “the truth”; and they even wager handsome sums upon their knowledge of it: but I align myself with “jesting Pilate,” and echo the forlorn query that recorded time has left unanswered.
Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I believe this is the rarest quality in the world. Indeed, it probably does not exist anywhere. A really urbane person—a mortal open-minded and affable to conviction of his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in anything by irrational blind prejudices—could not but in a world of men and women be regarded as a monster. We are all of us, as if by instinct, intolerant of that which is unfamiliar: we resent its impudence: and very much the same principle which prompts small boys to jeer at a straw-hat out of season induces their elders to send missionaries to the heathen…
汉译英
可贵的“他人意识”
上世纪中叶的中国式“集体主义”，自从在世纪末之前，逐渐分解以及还原为对个人和个体的尊重，初步建立起个人的权益保障系统之后，“我们”——这个在计划经济时代使用频率极高的词，已被更为普遍的"我"所代替。我喜欢说“我”，也因此欣赏其他的那些“我”。如果没有“我”的确立，没有无数“我”的合作，“我们”必定是空洞、脆弱、空心化以至于不堪一击的。
然而，在“我”和“我们”之间，是以“他人”作为连接点的。“我”因“他人”而成为“我”；“我们”因“他人”而成为“我们”。当“我们”过度地强化、放大“我”，而舍弃“他人”的时候，“我”便处于四面受敌的孤立无援之中。在我们的传统习性中，“他人”这一概念，更多的情况下，只是一种被供奉的虚设牌位。我们的成语中曾有“以邻为壑”一词，可以佐证；有“只扫自家门前雪，哪管他人瓦上霜”的谚语，可以证言。即便在集体主义理想教育最为鼎盛之时，“他人”不仅未能成为国人的自觉意识，“他人”反而意味着告密、背叛、异己、危险、离间等等。这种体制下的集体主义文化，终于导致了“他人即地狱”的严酷后果。闻“他人”而心颤，近“他人”而丧胆。也许正是由于对“他人”的恐惧，“文革”之后，“我们”迅速土崩瓦解，“我”自仰天长啸——而“他人”却不得不退出公众的视线，淡化为一个可有可无的虚词，成为公民道德的模糊地带。
五十年代以来，人口的高速增长，造成生存空间的高密度化；人口压力长期形成经济发展与卫生保健的沉重负担；部分农村以及偏远地区的计划生育仍然阻力重重。“我”生我的娃，关你什么样事？在人口问题上，可有“他人”的意识么？餐馆大肆收购、杀戮、烹煮野生动物为牟取暴利；食客面不改色食用野生动物以饱“口福”或炫耀财富；官吏不惜以野生珍稀动物作为最高规格的宴席；“贿赂”上级领导为自己铺设升官晋级的阶梯——在这个破坏自然生态的“人链”中，可有“他人”的位置么？长期以来，城市与乡村的公共卫生系统始终没有得到真正重视：办公室的脏乱差、公共场所的日常消毒防护、公共厕所的洗手设备、污水处理、生活垃圾等等。但公共卫生的管理者与被管理者的心态，却有着惊人的共识：这又不是我一个人的事情。在这些被忽略的公共卫生死角中，可有“他人”的概念？日积累月的民众生活卫生习惯中，沉淀下多少恶习陋性——随地吐痰、随地大小便、随地抛弃果皮塑料袋、就餐分餐制难以推行、酒后驾车、公共场所吸烟等等……“我们”的传统文化是“不患寡，患不均”——在这利益与灾祸均享均沾、“同甘共苦”的行为惯性中，可有愿为“他人”避免灾祸而自控自律的一份责任感？
我们似乎一直在无意中铺设着迎接它到来的无障碍通道。然而，在公共领域里，“零距离”是有害的。距离便是“他人”，而“他人”即社会公德。因为在这个世界上，除了“你”和“我”之外，地球上更多存在的是陌生的“他”——“他人”，还有“它”——与人类共存的动物朋友们。正是为了“我”的安全与自由，请不要再“唯我独尊”，而多些对“他人”的关爱吧。“我”的自由是他人自由的终结。而他人的自由，最终才能成全“我”的自由。