笔译练习

Venus and the Cat

（1）A cat having fallen in love with a young man, besought Venus to change her into a girl, in the hope of gaining his affections. （2）The Goddess, taking compassion on her weakness, changed her into a fair damsel; and the young man, enamoured of her beauty, led her home as his bride.

（3）As they were sitting in their chamber, Venus, wishing to know whether in changing her form she had also changed her nature, set down a mouse before her. （4）The girl, forgetful of her new condition, started from her seat, and pounced upon the mouse

as if she would have eaten it on the spot; whereupon the Goddess, provoked at her frivolity, straightaway turned her into a cat again. （5）What is bred in the bone, will come out in the flesh/blood. （155 words）

2011-9-26 passage 2

The worth of super-slow reading

I discovered the worth of super-slow reading years ago. Previously, if I had been really interested in a book, I would race from page to page, eager to know what came next. Now, I decided, I had to become a miser with words and stretch every sentence like a poor man spending his last dollar. I had started with the practical object of making my book last. But by the end of the second week I began to realize how much I was getting from super-slow-reading itself. Sometimes just a particular phrase caught my attention, sometimes a sentence. I would read it slowly, analyze it, read it again-perhaps changing down into an even lower gear-and then sit for 20 minutes thinking about it before moving on. I was like a pianist studying a piece of music, phrase by phrase, rehearsing it, trying to discover and recreate exactly what the composer was trying to convey.

2011-10-10—17-24 passage 3

Why measure life in heartbeats?

① On my last holiday in the Bahamas, as

I walked along the beach feeling the gentle waves wash over my feet, I felt part of universe, even if only a minuscule one, like a grain of sand on the beach.②Although I had to restrict the size of my practice, I felt a closer empathy with my patients. ③When I walked into the Intensive Care Unit there was an awesome feeling knowing I, too, had been a patient there. ④It was a special satisfaction to comfort my patients with cancer, knowing that it is possible to enjoy life after the anguish of that diagnosis. ⑤It gave me a feeling to see the sparkle in one patient’s eyes—a man with a total laryngectomy(喉切除手术)—when I asked if he would enjoy a cold beer and went to get him one.⑥If one realizes

that our time on this earth is but a tiny fraction of that within the cosmos, then life calculated in years may not be as important as we think. ⑦Why measure life in heartbeats? ⑧When life is dependent on such an unreliable function as the beating of the heart, then it is fragile indeed. ⑨The only thing that one can depend upon with absolute certainty is death. 2011-10-24

Passage 4 On the “government”

（1）Someone once remarked that the British and the Americans are two peoples separated by the same language.（2）Most epigrams exaggerate for effect, and this one is no exception.（3）But it is, nevertheless, undeniably true that some commonly used words mean different things in these two cultures. （4）Consider the seemingly single term—“the government.”

（5）To parliamentarians trained in British

terminology, “the government” means “the cabinet: a group of the legislature’s own members, chosen by it to devise public policies, to manage the legislature’s major activities, and to exercise executive powers. （6）In theory, at least, the government continues office only so long as it commands the support of a majority of the legislature.（7）Losing that support, it may be turned out of power at almost any moment.

（8）When Americans say “the government,” they mean something quite different: it connotes the whole governmental structure—executive, legislative and judicial. （9）Americans assume a situation in which the branches of government are deliberately separated and in which the powers of each check and balance those of the other. (205words)

2011-10-31 Passage 5

The Beauty of Britain

J. B. Priestley

（1）I suspect that we are always, faintly conscious of the fact that this is a smallish island, with the sea always round the corner. （2）We know that everything has to be neatly packed into a small space. （3）Nature, we feel, has carefully adjusted things---mountains, plains, rivers, lakes---to the scale of the island itself. （4）A mountain 12,000 feet high would be a horrible monster here, as wrong as a plain 400 miles long, a river as broad as the Mississippi. （5）Though the geographical features of this island are comparatively small, and there is astonishing variety almost everywhere, that does not mean that our mountains are not mountains, our plains not

plains.