第12届韩素音青年翻译比赛汉译英原文及参考译文
原文
霞
冰心
四十年代初期,我在重庆郊外歌乐山闲居的时候,曾看到英文《读者文摘》上,有个很使我惊心的句子,是:
May there be enough clouds in your life to make a beautiful sunset.
我在一篇短文里曾把它译成:“愿你的生命中有够多的云翳,来造成一个美丽的黄昏。”
其实,这个sunset 应当译成“落照”或“落霞”。
霞,是我的老朋友了!我童年在海边、在山上,她都是我的最熟悉最美丽的小伙伴。她每早每晚都在光明中和我说“早上好”或“明天见”。但我直到几十年以后,才体会到云彩更多,霞光才愈美丽。从云翳中外露的霞光,才是璀璨多彩的。
生命中不是只有快乐,也不是只有痛苦,快乐和痛苦是相生相成,互相衬托的。
快乐是一抹微云,痛苦是压城的乌云,这不同的云彩,在你生命的天边重叠着,在“夕阳无限好”的时候,就给你造成一个美丽的黄昏。
一个生命会到了“只是近黄昏”的时节,落霞也许会使人留恋、惆怅。但人类的生命是永不止息的。地球不停地绕着太阳自转。东方不亮西方亮,我床前的晚霞,正向美国东岸的慰冰湖上走去……
译文
The Rosy Cloud
by Bingxin
During the early 1940s I was living a retired life in the Gele Mountains in the suburbs of Chongqing (Chungking). One day, while reading the English language magazine Reader's Digest I found a sentence that touched me greatly. It read: "May there be enough clouds in your life to make a beautiful sunset."
In a short article of mine, I quoted this sentence and translated it as "Yuan ni de shengming zhong you guo duo de yunyi, lai zaocheng yige meili de huanghun. " (literally: May there be enough clouds in your life to make a beautiful sunset.) *
As I see it now, the word "sunset" in the English sentence should have been translated as luozhao (the glow at sunset) or luoxia (the rosy cloud at sunset), instead of dusk.
She has been my dear old friend, the Rosy Cloud! She was my closest and most beautiful little companion when, in my childhood, I played on the beach or in the hills. Bathed in the brilliant sunshine, she would say to me "Good morning!" at dawn and "See you tomorrow!" at dusk. But not until several decades later did I come to realize that the more clouds there are the more beautiful the rays of sunlight will be, and the glow of the sun breaking through the clouds becomes most resplendent and colorful.
Life contains neither unalloyed happiness nor mere misery. Happiness and misery beget, complement and set off each other.
Happiness is a wisp of fleecy cloud; misery a mass of threatening dark cloud. These different clouds overlap on the horizon of your life to create a beautiful dusk for you when "the setting sun is most lovely indeed."**
An individual's life must inevitably reach the point when "dusk is so near,"*** and the rosy sunset cloud may make one nostalgic and melancholy. But human life goes on and on. The Earth ceaselessly rotates on its axis around the sun. When it is dark in the east, it is light in the west. The rosy sunset cloud is now sailing past my window towards Lake Waban on the east coast of America ...