在英语日益重要的今天,考证热也此起彼伏。为帮助同学轻松考专四,特收集以下阅读翻译:
121. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs (烈士) ; he is provided with comport and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvellous, life like electronic sound and image reproductions he is enjoying.
122. Each highbrow did and does congratulate himself on being unique in his unlikeness to other men; and conversely each lowbrow now congratulate himself on being in some mystical way unique in his likeness—on being, so to say, outstandingly average and extraordinarily ordinary.
123. As for the lowbrows' claim to be specially "human", I for one have never been able to understand why it should be "inhuman" to use the faculties that distinguish us from pigs and geese and "human" to use those which we share with the lower animals.
124. There is no disputing, says the proverb, about taste—though, in fact, human beings spend at least half their leisure doing nothing else—and if highbrowism and lowbrowism were exclusively ( as it is certain that they are in great part) matters of individual taste, there would be no more to say about them than what I have said in the preceding lines.
125. Thus I desire a great deal less pleasure from jazz and thrillers than from the music, let us say, of Beethoven(贝多芬) or the novels, for example, of Dostoievsky; and the sex appeal of the girls on the covers of magazines seems to me less thrilling than the more complicated appeal to a great variety of feelings made by a Rubens, an EI Greco, a Constable, a Seurat.
121、他享受着数世纪来哲学天才和政治英雄们连系取得的自由,这是被烈士的鲜血神圣化了的自由;着人类有史以来最发家的经济供给的舒适与休闲;科学解开了自然的奥秘,使他能享受神奇传神的音响和影像效不美观。
122、每个有学问的人信用着自己与其他人的纷歧般;反过来没有学问的人则正信用着自己说不清的与别人的相似性——对于存在,这么说吧,精采的公共化和不凡的通俗。
123、对于没学问者自称非凡的“人类”,有一点我一向搞不大白,为什么是“非人类”去使用那些行动措施来将我们和猪啊、鹅啊划分,而“人类”去使用那些我们与低等动物共享的工具。
124、谚语中说对于口胃来说,是没有争议的——尽管在事实上,人类一—至少在一半的休闲时刻里什么也不做——而且如不美观阳春白雪和下里巴人对于个进口胃的问题是排外(这一点在很大水平上是必定的),那么对于他们来说,除了我在前面讲的,就没什么说的了。
125、是以我从爵士乐和刺激性事物中找到的乐趣需比音乐里的少得多,好比说,贝多芬的或者是Dostoievsky的小说;杂志封面上的性感女郎比Rubens,Greco,Constablet Seurat所缔造的邃密复杂的激情对于我来说要减色得多。