Unit-6-A-French-Fourth課文翻譯綜合教程四(共5頁)

1、Unit 6 A French FourthCharles Trueheart1 Along about this time every year, as Independence Day approaches, I pull an old American flag out of a bottom drawer where it is folded away folded in a square, I admit, not the regulation triangle. Ive had it a long time and have always flown it outside on J

2、uly 4. Here in Paris it hangs from a fourth-floor balcony visible from the street. Ive never seen anyone look up, but in my minds eye an American tourist may notice it and smile, and a French passerby may be reminded of the date and the occasion that prompt its appearance. I hope so.2 For my expatri

3、ated family, too, the flag is meaningful, in part because we dont do anything else to celebrate the Fourth. People dont have barbecues in Paris apartments, and most other Americans I know who have settled here suppress such outward signs of their heritage or they go back home for the summer to refue

4、l.3 Our children think the flag-hanging is a cool thing, and I like it because it gives us a few moments of family Q&A about our citizenship. My wife and I have been away from the United States for nine years, and our children are eleven and nine, so American history is mostly something they have le

5、arned or havent learned from their parents. July 4 is one of the times when the American in me feels a twinge of unease about the great lacunae in our childrens understanding of who they are and is prompted to try to fill the gaps. Its also a time, one among many, when my thoughts turn more generall

6、y to the costs and benefits of raising children in a foreign culture.4 Louise and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school, and most of their friends are French. They move from language to language, seldom mixing them up, without effort or even awareness. This is a wonderful

7、thing, of course. And our physical separation from our native land is not much of an issue. My wife and I are grateful every day for all that our children are not exposed to. American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of the society we hold at a distance.5 Nat

8、urally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being American and to try to convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do from afar, and the distance seems more than just a matter of miles. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them must seem like Aesops (or La

9、Fontaines) fables, myths with no fixed place in space or time. Still, connections can be made, lessons learned.6 Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in Concord, Massachusetts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them a glimpse of the American Revolut

10、ion. We happened to run across a reenactment of the skirmish that launched the war, with everyone dressed up in three-cornered hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our goggle-eyed kids the make-believe quality of American history.7 Six months later, when we were recalling the exp

11、erience 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 mans name?” “Gulliver?” Louise replied. Henry, f

12、or his part, knew that the Revolution was between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about slavery.8 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 p

13、eople learned a lot of ideas, and one was that they didnt 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

14、 Henry VIII.9 I cant say I worry much about our childrens European frame of reference. There will be plenty of time for them to learn Americas 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

15、Bill Clinton.10 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 dont remember much instruction in American studies at school or at home. I do remember that my mother took

16、 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 clich that had alread

17、y 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.11 Although my children are living in the same place at roughly the same time in their lives, their experience as ex

18、patriates 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

19、 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 months

20、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 childrens American cousins is now obtainable here.12 If time and globalization have made France much more like the United States than it was in my youth, then I

21、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

22、 world. That experience no longer seems possible in Western countries a sad development, in my view.在法國慶祝美國獨立日查爾斯特魯哈特1 每年差不多到了獨立日日益臨近的時候，我都會把一面折疊好的舊的美國國旗從底層抽屜里取出我承認我折疊國旗不是官方規(guī)定的三角形，而是正方形。我擁有這面國旗很長時間了，每年到了7月4日我總是把它掛出來。身處巴黎的我把它掛在四樓的陽臺上，在馬路上都看得到。雖然我沒見過有人抬頭看它一眼，但在我腦海中，我想象著美國游客或許會注意到它并莞爾一笑，而法國路人會從中想起促使這面國

23、旗出現(xiàn)的相關日期和原因。誠愿如此。2 對我們這個旅居國外的家庭來說，這面國旗之所以意義深遠，部分是因為我們沒有其他任何活動來慶祝獨立日。巴黎人不在公寓里燒烤，我認識的大多數(shù)在此定居的美國人并不張揚他們的這種傳統(tǒng)，他們寧可回國消夏來為自己加油打氣。3 我的孩子們覺得懸掛國旗很酷，我也喜歡這種做法，因為它讓我們家有機會就我們的公民身份問答一番。我們夫妻離開美國長達9年，兩個孩子一個11歲一個9歲，所以美國歷史對他們來說，很大程度上要么是從父母那里已經學到的知識，要么是還沒學到的知識。每到類似7月4日這樣的日子，我的美國心便感到忐忑不安，因為孩子們對他們身份的認同存在巨大的空白，所以我想盡力填補這些

24、空白。這也是很多場合中的一個，讓我的思想更全面地考慮在異國文化氛圍中養(yǎng)育子女的利與弊。4 路易絲和亨利法語都說得很流利。學校里使用法語教學，他們的朋友大多數(shù)是法國人。他們在法語和英語之間切換自如，不費吹灰之力，極少把兩種語言搞混。這當然很棒。我們遠離故國，相隔千山萬水，也不是什么問題。每天我們夫妻倆都為兒女不用面對的一切壞事而心懷感激。美國校園槍戰(zhàn)對我們孩子來說是避之不及的社會愚蠢行為的極好反面教材。5 當然了，我們也希望能提醒他們身為美國人而自豪的原因，想方設法告訴他們這樣做意義何在。在遠離祖國的情況下這樣做不容易，距離并不是和祖國相隔有多遠的問題。有時我想我們給孩子們講的故事聽起來一定很像

25、伊索寓言或拉封丹寓言，都是些沒有確鑿時間地點的神話。但無論如何，畢竟還能做點聯(lián)系，學點東西。6 去年夏天，我們和我弟弟一家在一起度過了一周，他們住在馬薩諸塞州的康科德城。我們帶孩子們參觀北橋，讓他們看一眼美國獨立戰(zhàn)爭的遺址。我們碰巧趕上了一個表演，表演重現(xiàn)了觸發(fā)大戰(zhàn)的小規(guī)模戰(zhàn)斗的情景。演出中男士都戴著三角帽，而女士戴著有帶子的帽子。這也許恰恰讓這些瞪大眼睛的孩子們加深了美國歷史虛幻性的印象。7 6個月后，我們吃飯時在飯桌上回憶起參觀的情景，我問路易絲美國獨立戰(zhàn)爭是怎么一回事。她認為這和一個人騎著馬從一個鎮(zhèn)子跑到另一個鎮(zhèn)子有關?！鞍?，”我回答道，滿意之情在心中油然而生，接著問道：“這個人叫什么名字？”“格列佛？”路易絲答道。至于亨利，他知道獨立戰(zhàn)爭是英國人和美國人打仗，而且打仗也許是為了奴隸制。8 然而當我們進一步討論這個話題，我們知道小孩子們都掌握了哪些知識。路易絲告訴我們法國大革命發(fā)生在啟蒙運動末期，那時人們已經懂得很多道理，其中一個道理就是人們不需要國王告訴大家該想什么、該做什么。還有一次，亨利問為什么要在一個人名字后面加上“小”，或者加上“二世”，或者“三世，路易絲幫我回答了這個問題，舉了路易十四、路易十五和路易十六幾位國王的例子，亨利立刻機敏地回以亨利八世的例子。9 我