翻译(Translation) 英汉-汉英互译练习 Passage 1 The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life The other day an acquaintance of mine, a gregarious and charming man, told me he had found himself unexpectedly alone in New York for an hour or two between appointments. He went to the Whitney and spent the "empty" time looking at things in solitary bliss. For him it proved to be a shock nearly as great as falling in love to discover that he could enjoy himself so much alone. What had he been afraid of, I asked myself? That, suddenly alone, he would discover that he bored himself, or that there was, quite simply, no self there to meet? But having taken the plunge, he is now on the brink of adventure. he is about to be launched into his own inner space to the astronaut. His every perception will come to him with a new freshness and, for a time, seem startlingly original. For anyone who can see things for himself with a naked eye becomes, for a moment or two, something of a genius. With another human being present vision becomes double vision, inevitably. We are busy wondering, what does my companion see or think of this, and what do I think of it? The original impact gets lost, or diffused . "Music I heard with you was more than music." Exactly. And therefore music itself can only be heard alone. Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience. "Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, walking in a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there." Loneliness is most acutely felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences of taste, temperament, mood. Human intercourse often demands that we soften the edge of perception, or withdraw at the very instant of personal truth for fear of hurting, or of being inappropriately present, which is to say naked, in a social situation. Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel absolutely. That is a great luxury! For me the most interesting thing about a solitary life, and mine has been that for the last twenty years, is that it becomes increasingly rewarding. When I can wake up and watch the sun rise over the ocean, as I do most days, and know that I have an entire day ahead, uninterrupted, in which to write a few pages, take a walk with my dog, lie down in the afternoon for a long think (why does one think better in a horizontal position?), read and listen to music, I am flooded with happiness. 
I am lonely only when I am overtired, when I have worked too long without a break, when for the time being I feel empty and need filling up. And I am lonely sometimes when I come back home after a lecture trip, when I have seen a lot of people and talked a lot, and am full to the brim with experience that needs to be sorted out. Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering the plants, perhaps, and looking again at each one as though it were a person, by feeding the two cats, by cooking a meal. It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains at the end of the field, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse again with my hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part. 译文： 独自生活的报偿 前些日子，我的一个熟人，一位热爱交际且富有魅力的男士告诉我，他在纽 约的两个约会之间偶然有一两个小时的空闲，便去了惠特尼博物馆，四处浏览着 展品，无比幸福的度过了那些时光。发现自已独自一人也能如此的幸福，他感觉 像坠入爱河那般震惊。 “他一直在害怕什么呢？”，我问自已。 怕突然一个人呆着会发现自已厌烦 自己，或者怕会失去自我？但是有了这次偿试，他便要开始探险了，即将发射到 自已内心的宇宙之中。他的所见所感对他来说将是全新的，一度会新颖的让人惊 奇。 因此，每个能用肉眼亲自观看事物的人一时之间便成为天才。如果身边有别 人，一个看法便不可避免地变成双重看法。我们急于知道周围人的看法，以及自 己的观点？” 最初的印像消失了，或者变得模糊不清。 “与你共享的音乐便不止是音乐了。” 的确如此。因此，音乐本身只能独自 一人聆听。独处是人生的趣味所在，它让人感受到所有经历的真实韵味。 “独居但不孤独：精神在不停的探索，徜徉于静寂的花园中，徘徊在阴凉的 房舍里，独自在那逗留。 与别人呆在一起时孤独感更为强烈，因为与他人在一起，即使是恋人，我们 也会被不同的品味，不同的性格，以及不同的情绪所困扰。人际交往要求我们必 须磨掉感知的棱角，在每每涉及个人私事时，我们因为怕伤害别人而避而不谈， 或者害怕在社交场合不合时宜,比如过于暴露自已。而独自一人，我们便可以随 心所欲，感受真正的自我。那真是有些奢侈的享受！ 我已独自生活了二十年。对我来说，独自生活最大意义在于它变得越来越有 裨益。 每当早晨醒来， 看着旭日从海平面上冉冉升起， 我知道后面还有整整一天。 在这一天里， 我可以不受打扰地写几页书，带着我的狗一起散散步，下午长时 间地躺着想一些事情（为什么人躺着时能更好地思考？） ，读读书，听听音乐。 想到这些，我便沉浸在幸福之中。 
只有在我过度劳累的时候， 在我长时间不断工作的时侯， 在我感到内心空虚， 需要充实的时候，我才会感到寂寞。有时，外出演讲回来，见了许多人,讲了许 多话，心中满是纷乱的体验需要整理，偶而也会觉得孤独。 于是有那么一会儿，我感到整个房子非常大，空荡荡的。不知此时的自我又藏匿 于何处。这时，我会给花草浇浇水，挨个瞅瞅，仿佛它们是活生生的人一样，或 是喂喂两只小猫，亲手做顿饭菜，这样自我就慢慢地重新找回。 田野的尽头泉水喷涌翻腾，我注视良久。现实世界逐渐消退，自我再次从内心深 处浮现。最近的种种经历都随之而来，以待我可以再次同内心潜在力量交流时慢 慢地探究和领会。这些力量便如此慢慢增强，不断获得新生，直至死神将我们分 开. Passage 北京世博翻译公司2 It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill- directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any province of experience - would not that man be in a poor way for amusement ever after? One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book down to 
contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten note-books upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the DECLINE AND FALL, he had only a few moments of joy; and it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours. Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that they are two instead of one. "Of making books there is no end," complained the Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever, and we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. In the infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and delight us. There is only one wish realizable on the earth; only one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining. A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras, ceaselessly marching,  翻译公司 (责任编辑：北京翻译公司)