(完整版)Unit7TheMonster課文翻譯綜合教程四

1、Unit 7 The Monster Deems Taylor 1 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. 2 He was a monster of conceit

2、. 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

3、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. 3 He had a mania for being i

4、n 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 a

5、gree with him, for the sake of peace. 4 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

6、 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. 5

7、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

8、 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. 6 He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. He was convinced that the wor

9、ld owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan men, women, friends, or strangrse. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to h

10、is support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. 7 What money he could lay his hand on he spent like an Indian rajah. No one will ever know certainly he never knows how much money he owed. We do know that his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000 to pay the most pressing of

11、 his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for debt. 8 He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of women marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgivi

12、ng his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a friend to inquire whether he could suggest some wealthy woman any wealthy woman whom he c

13、ould marry for her money. 9 He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who disagreed with him about the weather. He would pull endless wires in order to meet some man who admired his work and was able and anxious to be of use to him and would proceed to make a mortal enemy of him with

14、 some idiotic and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of arrogance and bad manners. A character in one of his operas was a caricature of one of the most powerful music critics of his day. Not content with burlesquing him, he invited the critic to his house and read him the libretto aloud in front of his

15、friends. 10 The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything I have said about him you can find on record in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it d

16、oesn t matter in the least. 11 Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time, the joke was on us. He was one of the world s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ev

17、er seen. The world did owe him a living. What if he did talk about himself all the time? If he talked about himself for twenty-four hours every day for the span of his life he would not have uttered half the number of words that other men have spoken and written about him since his death. 12 When yo

18、u consider what he wrote thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world s great music-doramatic masterpieces when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don t seem

19、much of a price. 13 What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives? He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been

20、conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn t b

21、urst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a grea

22、t genius. Is it any wonder he had no time to be a man? 畸人 迪姆斯泰勒 1 他是個(gè)大頭小身體、病怏怏的矬子；成日神經(jīng)兮兮，皮膚也有毛病。假使貼肉的地方不 穿綾羅綢緞，他便痛苦至極。他還有自大妄想。 2 他是個(gè)驕傲自大的畸人。除非他以自我為中心和出發(fā)點(diǎn)，否則他片刻都不拿正眼看這 個(gè)世界，看這些世人。他認(rèn)為自己是這世上最偉大的劇作家之一， 最偉大的思想家之一，還 是最偉大的作曲家之一。 聽他說話， 人們感覺他集莎士比亞、 貝多芬和柏拉圖于一身。 他是 有史以來最能把聽眾搞得疲憊不堪的話癆之一。 有時(shí)他妙語連珠， 有時(shí)卻又令人厭煩到無法 忍受。

23、但不管他出彩也罷，乏味也罷，他的話題只有一個(gè)：他自己 他自己的所思所為。 3 他有種堅(jiān)持自己一貫正確的狂熱。 任何人只要有一絲半點(diǎn)的不同意見， 即使再微不足道， 也是夠讓他高談闊論幾個(gè)鐘頭， 用他那十分累人的雄辯從多方面論證自己是正確的， 結(jié)果是 他的聽眾聽得目瞪口呆，兩耳震聾，為了息事寧人，只好順從他。 4 他從未意識(shí)到， 那些與他來往的人對(duì)于他本人和他的所作所為并沒有太大的興趣。 他 對(duì)萬事萬物幾乎都有自己的理論，包括素食主義、 戲劇、 政治與音樂。 為了支持這些理論他 寫下小冊(cè)子、信件和書籍他寫了千言萬語，成百上千頁。他不僅著書立說，還要刊行于 世，而且往往不用他自掏腰包。 他還正襟危坐

24、，面對(duì)朋友和家人高聲朗讀這些作品，連續(xù)數(shù) 小時(shí)而孜孜不倦。 5 他的情感狀態(tài)像 6 歲小兒那樣不穩(wěn)定。身體不舒服時(shí)，他會(huì)暴跳如雷，跺腳發(fā)泄；或 是垂頭喪氣，痛不欲生，陰郁地表示他要遠(yuǎn)走東方，出家當(dāng)和尚，終老一生。十分鐘后，來 了讓他開心的事，他會(huì)沖出門去，在花園里奔跑打轉(zhuǎn)，或在沙發(fā)上上蹦下跳，或者拿大頂。 一只寵物小狗的死去會(huì)讓他難過至極，但他的冷酷無情又足以令羅馬暴君不寒而栗。 6 他幾乎一點(diǎn)責(zé)任感都沒有，堅(jiān)信世人就該供養(yǎng)他。為了支持這種信念，他從所有能借 到錢的人那里借錢 男人，女人，朋友，甚至是陌生人。他大量寫信求人家借錢給他，有 時(shí)不知羞恥， 低聲下氣， 而有時(shí)卻又傲慢地給他看上的施主

25、授予資助他的特權(quán)。 如果收信人 拒絕接受幫助他的尊榮，他便大為光火。 7 對(duì)于他僅有的一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)錢，他也揮霍無度，堪比印度的王公。從來沒人知道 - 當(dāng)然他自 己也從來不知道 他到底欠了多少錢。我們能確證的是，對(duì)他最慷慨的施主給了他 6,000 美元來償還他在某城市欠下的債務(wù)，解了他的燃眉之急；一年之后又不得不給他 16,000 美 元使他能在另一個(gè)城市混下去，免遭因債臺(tái)高筑而被投入大牢的命運(yùn)。 8 其他方面他也一樣肆無忌憚，寡廉鮮恥。無數(shù)女人在他生活中往來不絕。第一任妻子 和他相處了 20 年，不斷忍受和原諒他的不忠。第二任妻子曾是他最忠實(shí)的朋友和仰慕者的 前妻，他還是將她據(jù)為己有。 甚至在他勸說這個(gè)即將成為他第二任妻子的女人離開她丈夫的 同時(shí)，他還在給一個(gè)朋友寫信，問他是否能推薦一個(gè)富婆 隨便什么