｛蜂蜜公爵｝

    最近挺无聊的，突然想起了“沪江有歌来译”的活动，就去逛了逛，顺便注册了。没怎么仔细看，因为东西太多了，看起来很费时。记得那时候在豆瓣安家是因为那个网站刚刚建立不久，内容不多，等人和内容都多起来是我已经完全熟悉豆瓣了。在一个拥挤的地方摸索的感觉真不妙。
   不过实话说，沪江这个网站还不错。我喜欢沪江BBS，里面很多翻译等等的活动。总之我觉得是个挺有意思的外语学习网站，比其他的我去过的那些好一点。推荐一下吧。我觉得那个什么super在线测试不错。话说我的词汇量真的是少得可怜。

   讲到“沪江有歌来译”，就想起那期的翻译冠军作品，Coldplay的《Viva La Vida》，我觉得翻译得非常好，看了这么多期，最好的应该就是它了。我很想把它转过来，不过这是不符合Creative Commons协议的，而且我也懒得回头找原文出处，所以还是算了。
   我想在这里说一下Creative Commons协议，即知识共享协议。它有一个知识共享中国站，有兴趣的可以去看一下。很多次在人家的博客里看见CC的图标，今次自己也整了一个（见本博客footer）。并不是好玩才去弄的，而是因为我是一个把规范看得很重的人，比如大半夜的过马路，即使没有人没有车了我还是老老实实地守在斑马线旁边等红绿灯。无规矩不成方圆，我喜欢它们按照规则来，整齐而有秩序，所以我也支持Creative Commons协议在中国的推广。很多有名的博客主都抱怨过别人不经允许、不说明作者、不链接原文地址地直接转载他们的文章，所以，这么一个规范也许能对这种状况作出一点点改善。当然这个是要靠主动遵守的，因为一个协议实际上没有什么法律约束力。好歹博客文章也是有著作权的，也是人家作者辛辛苦苦写的，转载作品的最低限度也应该是署名并链接，能不能修改最好也要看人家博主的意思。

   问了很多同学，想学哪种口音，清一色的想学美式。在我看来这是个很奇怪的现象，不仅仅因为我觉得英式更饱满更好听，而是因为这个比例太惊人了，MS全班就我一个立志学习英式的？其实我觉得这和她们不了解英国有关，就像很多人说想去法国巴黎（只是听说巴黎很浪漫而已……不过就是因为一张照片么，搞得这么“令人向往”，浪漫的又不止巴黎。），听我说个托斯卡纳就觉得惊讶，我想很多不了解西方国家的学生，学习英语都有一种“美国梦”式的热情，想着出国（去美国），把美国想得非常发达非常美好，似乎除了美国就再也没有别的好的选择了。只有两个同学对于我的问题明确表示，她们认为美式英语更好听。其他的人，似乎都是随大流地做“美国梦”。我觉得作为一个英语专业生，这样是很可笑的。连一个明确的学习方向都没有，每天记单词背课文，你确定你真的能学会这门语言？我现在觉得很多歌的歌词，我能看懂每一句，字典上也查不到更多，但是它就是有不同的意思，比如“blue moon”和“karma killer”，单词都认识吧？字典上也查不到具体含义吧？你看得懂？现在仍然是死抠书本，站起来读书那个发音从来不能全部到位，调门还怪里怪气的，一听就知道是“自学成才”的类型。你不听人家外国人的调调按着中国人的调调来，为什么还要学英语专业？
   回过头来讲口音。上次在Allen家聊天，他讲到美国各个地方的方言，结果我一头雾水，然后他很认真的告诉我，他以为我能听出美国那些州的口音……您真是太抬举我了囧。然后我就跟他说我只能听出英式和美式，至于澳洲英语我还只能从用法上分辨。至于其他国家的，呃，我还真搞不清楚……
   刚开始学英语的时候我就决定要学习英式，不过英式的材料太少，而且英式的发音部位很难掌握，所以为求速成，我从初中开始就学习的美式。现在，我都扭不回来了。Allen在班里说我的发音很好的时候，他大概不知道我在下面有种被雷劈的感觉吧。想死额……他如果是个英国人我当然会很高兴，可惜的是……他是个美国佬。我感觉我离英式英语越来越远了……为了学英式发音，我真的有很努力地四处搜集少得可怜的声音资料。推荐BBC China 的Learning English，这个栏目是专门为了中国学生学习英式英语而设的，一个中国主持一个英国主持，尤其是主持人，语速难得的慢，发音也很清晰，而且栏目内容也很不错。还有在一些外国网站上下载英文诗歌朗诵，有些相当不错。还有像VeryCD上有英国口音教程下载，只不过速度太慢了。个人觉得目前值得推荐的就只有这么多。
   根据我的感觉，英式发音和美式发音的区别就在于元音，尤其是短元音。双元音在英式口音中很饱满，听起来更厚重一些。而短元音，我觉得美式的非常短促，而且明显的有变音，这个不用解释。英式的短元音更标准。但是英式英语速度太快，吞音太多，学起来难度还是挺大的。嗯嗯，所以要想学好就得加油了！！！

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

J.K. Rowling

Copyright June 2008

As prepared for delivery

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced 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 fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

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.

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 towards personal improvement.

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.

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.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

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.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 already 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.

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.

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 rubies.

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.

Given a time machine or 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.

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 innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

上次阅读课老师给我们看了Scarborough Fair的诗经体翻译...真的很强...据说是一个叫莲波的人译的，发到博客里自己瞻仰：

问尔所之，是否如适 Are you going to Scarborough Fair


蕙兰芫荽，郁郁香芷 Parsley sage rosemary and thyme


彼方淑女，凭君寄辞 Remember me to one who lives there


伊人曾在，与我相知 She once was a true love of mine




嘱彼佳人，备我衣缁 Tell her to make me a cambric shirt


蕙兰芫荽，郁郁香芷 Parsley sage rosemary and thyme


勿用针剪，无隙无疵 Without no seams nor needle work


伊人何在，慰我相思 Then she will be a true love of mine


伴唱：

彼山之阴，深林荒址 On the side of hill in the deep forest green


冬寻毡毯，老雀燕子 Tracing of sparrow on snow crested brown


雪覆四野，高山迟滞 Blankets and bed clothes the child of maintain


眠而不觉，寒笳清嘶 Sleeps unaware of the clarion call




嘱彼佳人，营我家室 Tell her to find me an acre of land


蕙兰芫荽，郁郁香芷 Parsley sage rosemary and thyme


良田所修，大海之坻 Between the salt water and the sea strand


伊人应在，任我相视 Then she will be a true love of mine


伴唱：

彼山之阴，叶疏苔蚀 On the side of hill a sprinkling of leaves


涤彼孤冢，珠泪渐渍 Washes the grave with slivery tears


昔我长剑，日日拂拭 A soldier cleans and polishes a gun


寂而不觉，寒笳长嘶 Sleeps unaware of the clarion call






嘱彼佳人，收我秋实 Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather


蕙兰芫荽，郁郁香芷 Parsley sage rosemary and thyme


敛之集之，勿弃勿失 And gather it all in a bunch of heather


伊人犹在，唯我相誓 Then she will be a ture love of mine


伴唱：

烽火印啸，浴血之师 War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions


将帅有令，勤王之事 Generals order their soldiers to kill and to fight


争斗缘何，久忘其旨 for a cause They have long ago forgotten


痴而不觉，寒笳悲嘶 Sleeps unaware of the clarion call

其实我自己的英语水平也就是这个样子，完全是靠天赋，吃老娘给的本～太懒了。但是我觉得我还是有不少东西可以传授的～如果有人愿意看，说不定能有点帮助咩...
在开始阶段，我觉得最重要的是语音和对英语的总体的一种感觉（现在还没到语感的程度，要说的话，就是你对英语这门语言的接受度，不觉得它陌生或者怪异）。很多人那个时候都是被老师催着学，真正重要的地方没注意到。我觉得这一阶段的英语学习可以把重点放在“听”上。听，可以让你尽快适应这门语言，也能帮你打下很好的语音基础。其实就和小孩学说话一个原理，听多了自然就会说了。不能完全听老师的，绝对不能。我们当时的英语老师发音很不错，但是如果跟着他学的话，要超过他不可能。上了他两年的课，直到初三我才发现我们老师某些元音从不弱读，有几个简单单词永远发不到位，还有譬如the在元音前面要变音他也从不注意。我注意到他这些问题之后，自己强迫自己在这些方面进行修正，才没有出现他的问题。启蒙老师的发音对于学习者很重要，除非你的启蒙老师是BBC的朗读专家，不然不要过于相信他的发音。最好就是不停地听课本配的磁带，对比自己老师的发音，有什么不同赶快记在心里，听别的材料时注意一下，到底谁的是对的。最好自己找尽量多的材料，多听，即使听不懂也没关系。还有我觉得背课文很有效，因为那个阶段的课文都是最简单最基础的，是语感形成的最快途径。
然后，说说高中阶段。这个我就很汗颜了，高中我没听过英语课（因为我和我们老师杠上了），不过我觉得高中的词汇量和视野会更宽广些。如果语音不好，我建议高中注意自己修正。我的语音自己在高中修正了一些，因为自己本来在这方面就有一定基础，倒是没怎么用功，只是调整个别发音，使自己的中国音尽量淡去（说到这个，我觉得中国人要将英语发到完完全全的标准是极难极难的，因为我们的发音部位不一样，多少都会有一些不像的地方），虽然我想学的是英式口音，但是我有意自己模仿美音，因为美音的发音部位较英音更容易掌握，而且吞掉的音没英音多，学起来更容易见成效，至于英音，努力慢慢揣摩。高中学到的单词也是很常用的，但是没有初中那么基础，它的层次要高一些，所以我觉得高中单词很重要，词汇量在这一时期是重点。而且在高中阶段，我觉得有必要开始阅读一些水平较高的书籍杂志之类，因为这一阶段掌握得好的话，语感和对英语的理解能力，或者说英语思维能力，会有大幅度的提升。有一些东西你用中文是无法解释清楚的，但是那确实是对的，是说得通的，那这个就是属于英语思维方式不同于汉语思维方式的表现。英语里的长句，你不用语法结构就能迅速断句并且知道哪几个单词是修饰什么的，而且别人觉得莫名其妙的东西，你能够觉得很熟悉很理所当然（前提是必须是正确的），那么在这个方面就能够算是小有所成了。对于这个最好的检测方式就是完形填空题。我记得有一次我们考试的完形填空里，有一题是说许多小孩们拥在一个小摊的周围，伸出自己的手，用什么来形容那拥挤着伸过来的小手呢？我们班绝大部分同学选的都是forest，我选的是wave，最后，wave是正确的。具体原因我说不明白，但是我觉得forest是朝上方、静止不动的，而wave是汹涌而来的，比较接近事实。很多东西，直接套用中文是大错特错的，最好的方式就是适应英语的思维方式。（如果不是有完形填空撑着，我英语考试肯定死定了——考察语法的单选题向来是我的死穴，甚至有十五分只得四分的囧事，但是完形经常全对或者只错一个帮我拉回不少分）
现在我是大一，还是学的英语专业，我给自己的目标就是把除听力和语音外的其他方面都努力加强。因为我的听力和语音是不需要再操心了，其他方面却不怎样，依据那个“水桶的容水量由最短的木板决定”的理论来看，我要学好英语还有好长的一段路要走...路漫漫其修远兮，吾将上下而求索...
在学习英语的道路上大家一起努力吧...