Advice to Youth 给青年的忠告(中英文对照) (2014-03-01 12:59:42)
标签: 马克吐温 advice to youth 给青年的忠告 杨自伍 教育    分类: 文学翻译欣赏
Note: Novelist Mark Twain(1835-1910), the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is one of America's great humorists and social critics. In "Advice to Youth," a talk he delivered to a group of young girls, Twain turns the conventional moral lecture on its head.
英文原文:The Norton Reader.
shudder中文译文:杨自伍译,选自《美国文化选本》(上),华东师范大学出版社。
Advice to Youth
                    by Mark Twain
Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of a talk I ought to make. They said it should be something suitable to youth--- something didactic, instructive, or so
mething in the nature of good advice. Very well, I have a few things in my mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable. First, then, I will say to you, my young friends ----and I say it beseechingly, urgingly ----
Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in long run, because if you don’t, they will make you do. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on you own better judgment.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offends you and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you stuck him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kin
dness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and the unrefined.

版权声明:本站内容均来自互联网,仅供演示用,请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198,我们将在24小时内删除。