“CATTI杯”第二十七届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛

 

英译汉竞赛原文：

The Posteverything Generation

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.

According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.

In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11...at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw segregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.

On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for blind imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.

Jameson calls it “Pastiche” – “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own – borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichés of social change and moral outrage – a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language – the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?

How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it – as an incubator of radical social change – is coming to an end. To our generation the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s – it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

汉译英竞赛原文：

保护古村落就是保护“根性文化”

传统村落是指拥有物质形态和非物质形态文化遗产，具有较高的历史、文化、科学、艺术、社会、经济价值的村落。但近年来，随着城镇化快速推进，以传统村落为代表的传统文化正在淡化，乃至消失。对传统村落历史建筑进行保护性抢救，并对传统街巷和周边环境进行整治，可防止传统村落无人化、空心化。

古村落是历史文化遗存的特有形式之一，是地方历史经济发展水平的象征和民俗文化的集中代表。古村落文化是传统文化的重要组成部分，它直接体现出中华姓氏的血缘文化、聚族文化、伦理观念、祖宗崇拜、典章制度、堪舆风水、建筑艺术、地域特色等。

古村落是传统耕读文化和农业经济的标志，在当前城市化巨大浪潮的冲击之下，古村落不可避免地被急功近利所觊觎和包围。之所以强调保护古村落，不是为了复古，更不是为了倡导过去的宗族居住生活模式，而是为了了解和保留一种久远的文明传统，最终是为了体现现代人的一份历史文化责任感。

古村落与其说是老建筑，倒不如说是一座座承载了历史变迁的活建筑文化遗产，任凭世事变迁，斗转星移，古村落依然岿然不动，用无比顽强的生命力向人们诉说着村落的沧桑变迁，尽管曾经酷暑寒冬，风雪雨霜，但是古老的身躯依然支撑着生命的张力，和生生不息的人并肩生存，从这点上说，沧桑的古村落也是一种无形的精神安慰。在城市进入现代化的今天，对待古村落的态度也就是我们对待文化的态度。一座古村落的被改造或者消失，也许很多人没有感觉出丢了什么，但是，历史遗产少了一座古老的古村落，就少了些历史文化痕迹，就少了对历史文化的触摸感，也就很容易遗忘历史，遗忘了历史，很难谈文化延承，同时失去的还有附加在古村落上的文化魂灵。看一个地方有没有文化底蕴，有没有文化割裂感，不仅要看辉煌灿烂的文物遗留，还可以从一座座古村落上感受出来，从古村落高大的厅堂、精致的雕饰、上等的用材，古朴浑厚、巧夺天工的建筑造型上感受出来。台湾作家龙应台曾写过一篇和大树保护有关的文章：一条计划中的道路要穿过一位老人家门口，要砍倒一株老樟树。树小的时候，老人家还是孩子；现在，她人老了，树也大了。如果树能留下，老太太愿意把自己的一部分房子捐出来，经过协调，工程部门同意留树。龙应台感慨道:“人们承认了：树，才是一个地方里真正的原住民，驱赶原住民，你是要三思而行的；不得不挪动时，你是要深刻道歉的。”对于古村落，不得不改造和推倒时，同样需要三思而行。