2. 论美国学者讲稿.doc

关于原作者爱默生： Ralph Waldo Emerson（1803-1882）： essayist, lecturer, poet, and representative of Romanticism in 19th Century America; leader of Transcendentalism in America: He was convinced that everything in nature had its exact counterpart in the mind. From this basic conviction flowed all his ideas: 1) Nature is a vast array of symbols, which could lead their individual interpreter toward the eternal truth of God and the cosmos; 2) Since such ultimate truth transcends nature or lies behind it. The intuitive means of discovering it is transcendental; 3) The method of interpretation calls for an intuitive leap without rational analysis from the thing observed in nature to the spiritual (moral) truth it symbolized. 二．关于原作《论美国学者》： “The American Scholar”： first delivered at Harvard on August 31, 1837; Emerson charged that the scholar’s job was to lead his people out of their bondage to old cultures and away from the “popular cry” of received wisdom and everyday modes of thought; Emerson exhorted his audience of native intellectuals to rouse and lead American society into mental independence and self-reliance; The address proved to be immensely popular, and Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”. 译文分析： Para 1: None is quite perfect. 译文一：凡事皆无绝对之完美。 译文二：万事皆无极致。 As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that should be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. 译文一：正如气泵无论如何也抽不出绝对真空一样，任何大师都不可能从其书中完全排除习俗、地域和应时应景的影响，或者说都不可能写出纯思想之书——那种在方方面面都能像对其同代人或下代人一样对遥远的后代也有直接作用的书。 译文二：正如没有气泵能够抽出绝对之真空，任何大师都无法免受习俗之束缚，不受时空之桎梏，创作出体现纯粹思想之书。此书要能在方方面面都对同代、下代，乃至后代的后代产生相同的影响。 译注： ①常见词的不同含义，artist：a person whose work shows exceptional creative ability or skill，高手，能手。Eg. You are an artist in the kitchen. 你是一位烹饪大师。 ②注意“the+常见形容词”的译法，常译为相应的名词。peri