This probably only confirmed to our goggle-eyed kids the make-believe quality of American history.
去年夏天，我们和我弟弟一家在一起度过了一周，他们住在马萨诸塞州的康科德城。我们带孩子们参观北桥，让他们看一眼美国独立战争的遗址。我们碰巧赶上了一个表演，表演重现了触发大战的小规模战斗的情景。演出中男士都戴着三角帽，而女士戴着有带子的帽子。这也许恰恰让这些瞪大眼睛的孩子们加深了美国历史虚幻性的印象。 7 6个月后，我们吃饭时在饭桌上回忆起参观的情景，我问路易丝美国独立战争是怎么一回事。她认为这和一个人骑着马从一个镇子跑到另一个镇子有关。“啊，”我回答道，满意之情在心中油然而生，接着问道：“这个人叫什么名字？”“格列佛？”路易丝答道。至于亨利，他知道独立战争是英国人和美国人打仗，而且打仗也许是为了奴隶制。
Six months later, when we were recalling the experience at the family dinner table here, I asked Louise what the Revolution had been about. She thought that it had something to do with the man who rode his horse from town to town. “Ah”, I said, satisfaction swelling in my breast, “and what was that man’s name?” “Gulliver?” Louise replied. Henry, for his part, knew that the Revolution was between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about slavery.
6个月后，我们吃饭时在饭桌上回忆起参观的情景，我问路易丝美国独立战争是怎么一回事。她认为这和一个人骑着马从一个镇子跑到另一个镇子有关。“啊，”我回答道，满意之情在心中油然而生，接着问道：“这个人叫什么名字？”“格列佛？”路易丝答道。至于亨利，他知道独立战争是英国人和美国人打仗，而且打仗也许是为了奴隶制。
As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the children knew instead. Louise told us that the French Revolution came at the end of the Enlightenment, when people learned a lot of ideas, and one was that they didn’t need kings to tell them what to think or do. On another occasion, when Henry asked what makes a person a “junior” or a “II” or a “III”, Louise helped me answer by bringing up kings like Louis Quatorze and Quinze and Seize; Henry riposted with Henry VIII.
然而当我们进一步讨论这个话题，我们知道小孩子们都掌握了哪些知识。路易丝告诉我们法国大革命发生在启蒙运动末期，那时人们已经懂得很多道理，其中一个道理就是人们不需要国王告诉大家该想什么、该做什么。还有一次，亨利问为什么要在一个人名字后面加上“小”，或者加上“二世”，或者“三世\，路易丝帮我回答了这个问题，举了路易十四、路易十五和路易十六几位国王的例子，亨利立刻机敏地回以亨利八世的例子。
I can’t say I worry much about our children’s European frame of reference. There will be plenty of time for them to learn America’s pitifully brief history and to find out who Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt were. Already they know a great deal more than I would have wished about Bill Clinton.
我不能说我很担心对孩子们凡事都以欧洲作为参照系有多少担忧。让他们学习美国短得可怜的历史，了解托马斯?杰斐逊、富兰克林?罗斯福是谁来日方长。他们现在对比尔?克林顿的了解已经比我希望的要多了。
If all of this resonates with me, it may be because my family moved to Paris in 1954, when I was three, and I was enrolled in French schools for most of my grade-school years. I don’t remember much instruction in American studies at school or at home. I do remember that my mother took me out of school one afternoon to see the movie Oklahoma! I can recall what a faraway place it seemed: all that sunshine and square dancing and surreys with fringe on top. The sinister Jud Fry personified evil for quite some time afterward. Cowboys and Indians were an American cliché that had already reached Paris through the movies, and I asked a grandparent to send me a Davy Crockett hat so that I could live out that fairy tale against the backdrop of gray postwar Montparnasse.
如果说我对这一切产生共鸣，也许是因为我们家在1954年就迁往巴黎，当时我才3岁。我大部分小学时光都在法国学校里度过。我不记得在学校或是在家里学了多少关于美国的知识。我记得很清楚的是有一天下午妈妈把我从学校里领出来去看电影，电影名叫《俄克拉荷马!》。我记得那看起来似乎是个非常遥远的地方：阳光普照，人们跳着方形舞，还有顶盖饰有流苏的萨里式游览马车。此后很长时间里阴险的贾德?弗赖成了邪恶的化身。通过电影，巴黎早就熟悉了像牛仔和印第安人这样代表美国的陈词滥调。我还让一位祖辈给我寄了一顶戴维?克罗克特式的帽子，这样，我就可以在蒙巴纳斯二战后灰蒙蒙的背景下重现当年的传奇了。
Although my children are living in the same place at roughly the same time in their lives, their experience as expatriates is very different from mine. The particular narratives of American history aside, American culture is not theirs alone but that of their French classmates, too. The music they listen to is either “American” or “European,” but it is often hard to tell the difference. In my day little French kids looked like nothing other than little French kids; but Louise and Henry and their classmates dress much as their peers in the United States do, though with perhaps less Lands’ End fleeciness. When I returned to visit the United States in the 1950s, it was a five-day ocean crossing for a month’s home leave every two years; now we fly over for a week or two, although not very often. Virtually every imaginable product available to my children’s American cousins is now obtainable here.
尽管我的孩子们在大概像我小时候那样的岁数时住在同样的地方，他们作为外国侨民的经历和我的大不相同。撇开特别的美国历史的叙述不谈，美国文化不仅仅属于他们，还属于他们的法国同学。他们听的音乐不是“美国的”就是“欧洲的”，但经常很难加以区别。我小时
候法国小孩看起来就是法国小孩，但路易丝和亨利还有他们的同学穿着打扮和美国的同龄人很像，尽管美国小孩可能因为穿的是“极点牌”的时装，看上去更加毛茸茸一些。20世纪50年代，每两年我回美国探亲一次，要花5天时间横跨大洋，然后在美国呆上一个月。如今我们乘飞机过去住上一两周，尽管不太频繁。孩子们的美国表兄弟姐妹们可以想象得到的几乎任何产品现在在法国也买得到。
If time and globalization have made France much more like the United States than it was in my youth, then I can conclude a couple of things. On the one hand, our children are confronting a much less jarring cultural divide than I did, and they have more access to their native culture. Re-entry, when it comes, is likely to be smoother. On the other hand, they are less than fully immersed in a truly foreign world. That experience no longer seems possible in Western countries － a sad development, in my view.
如果时间和全球化使法国变得比我青少年时代更像美国的话，我可以得出几个结论。一方面，我们的孩子们所面临的文化差异不像我少时那般难以调和，他们有更多的机会接触他们的本族文化。如果会出现这样的情况，也就是再次进入一种文化，有可能更加顺利。另一方面，他们不是真正浸淫在纯正的外国世界中。在西方国家，生长在纯粹异域文化中的那种经历似乎再也不可能了——在我看来，这种发展是件悲哀的事情。
Unit 7 The Monster
He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body ― a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
他是个大头小身体、病怏怏的矬子；成日神经兮兮，皮肤也有毛病。假使贴肉的地方不穿绫罗绸缎，他便痛苦至极。他还有自大妄想。
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
他是个骄傲自大的畸人。除非他以自我为中心和出发点，否则他片刻都不拿正眼看这个世界，看这些世人。他认为自己是这世上最伟大的剧作家之一，最伟大的思想家之一，还是最伟大的作曲家之一。听他说话，人们感觉他集莎士比亚、贝多芬和柏拉图于一身。他是有史以来最能把听众搞得疲惫不堪的话痨之一。有时他妙语连珠，有时却又令人厌烦到无法忍受。但不管他出彩也罢，乏味也罢，他的话题只有一个：他自己——他自己的所思所为。
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
他有种坚持自己一贯正确的狂热。任何人只要有一丝半点的不同意见，即使再微不足道，也是够让他高谈阔论几个钟头，用他那十分累人的雄辩从多方面论证自己是正确的，结果是他的听众听得目瞪口呆，两耳震聋，为了息事宁人，只好顺从他。
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books ... thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them ― usually at somebody else’s expense ― but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends, and his family.
他从未意识到，那些与他来往的人对于他本人和他的所作所为并没有太大的兴趣。他对万事万物几乎都有自己的理论，包括素食主义、戏剧、政治与音乐。为了支持这些理论他写下小册子、信件和书籍??他写了千言万语，成百上千页。他不仅著书立说，还要刊行于世，而且往往不用他自掏腰包。他还正襟危坐，面对朋友和家人高声朗读这些作品，连续数小时而孜孜不倦。
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down off the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
他的情感状态像6岁小儿那样不稳定。身体不舒服时，他会暴跳如雷，跺脚发泄；或是垂头丧气，痛不欲生，阴郁地表示他要远走东方，出家当和尚，终老一生。十分钟后，来了让他开心的事，他会冲出门去，在花园里奔跑打转，或在沙发上上蹦下跳，或者拿大顶。一只宠物小狗的死去会让他难过至极，但他的冷酷无情又足以令罗马暴君不寒而栗。
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan ― men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the