翻译练习08

Harry Potter and the meaning of life

哈利波特和生活的意义

Once upon a time, it was record shops that staged high-profile midnight openings to see the latest hot release to queues of impatient fans; it was senior politicians who found themselves grilled on national TV by the BBC’s flagship interviewer Jeremy Paxman; and it was intellectuals and literary novelists who shaped great debates about moral values, social structures and our essential humanity. 曾几何时，音像店曾高调上演午夜营业，门外是急不可耐的粉丝们排队等候着最新火爆专辑的发行；有BBC金牌主持人杰里米·帕克斯曼拷问资深政客的全国电视节目专辑；还有知识分子与文学小说家对道德观念、社会架构和基本人性探讨的辩论专辑。

But that was a long, long time ago, when the world had never heard of JK Rowling, and Harry Potter was just a manuscript on a literary agent’s desk. Now, six years on from the first Potter publication, bookstores will open at one minute past midnight on Saturday 21 June to sell the first copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to hordes of parents and young professionals. A Paxman special – JK Rowling: The Interview – will be broadcast on Thursday night on BBC2. And even before anybody has read this new book, the commentary has started about the moral magic of Harry Potter and Why It Speaks To Us.

但是这些都是咸丰年代的事情了，当时世界上还没有听说过罗琳这个人，而《哈利波特》还只是一本放在文稿经纪人桌面上的手稿而已。现在，自第一本《哈利波特》发行已经过去六年了，书店在6月21日这个星期六午夜过去一分钟的时间都还在营业，向家长和年轻的忠实粉丝群发售《哈利波特与凤凰社》的第一个副本。帕克斯曼的罗琳专访将于周四晚BBC2播出。甚至在新书发售之前，就已经出现《哈利波特》道德魔法和《它为什么告诉我们》的解说。

What’s behind this Potter-mania? Clearly something other than the quality of the novels. When Harry and friends first took off as a favorite read for British children, earnest commentators made earnest attempts to talk up the literary merits of our modern JRR Tolkein – now, Rowling’s journalist fans concede that the books have certain leadenness in their prose and an absolute formula in their plotting”, and you no longer risk getting shot for comparing Rowling more with Enid Blyton than with CS Lewis. When reviewers finally get to read the new Potter, no doubt there will be the predictable backlash of claims that it is not that good – but who cares? The discussion has gone beyond all that. 哈利波特热潮的背后到底隐藏着什么呢？显然热潮并非来源于小说本身。当哈利和他朋友们的第一次探险故事成为了英国孩童的热门读物的时候，认真的文学评论员对现代文学家JRR Tolkein做了一次认真的文学价值探讨尝试，而现在，罗琳的记者粉丝也坦承这本书的确文笔单调，情节公式化，同时也不会因为多将罗琳和伊妮德布莱顿比较而非CS刘易斯而被口诛笔伐。当评论员拿到新书时，毫

无疑问可以预见一批强烈的“也并没有那么好”的评论，但是谁在意呢？评论反而证明了一切。

Since it began, Potter-mania has represented a cultural infantilism, that only grows as the years go by. It is about what we expect from our kids, our books, our value system and ourselves. Whatever happens in The Order of the Phoenix, the story of our obsession with Harry Potter is unlikely to have a happy ending.

自创刊以来，哈利波特热潮就代表着文化的幼稚，只有随着年岁增长，才会慢慢成长起来。这正是我们对我们的孩子、书籍、价值观和我们自己的期待。无论《哈利波特与凤凰社》的故事如何发展，我们对哈利波特的迷恋都不可能会有一个圆满的结局。

Cast your minds back to the late 1990s, when parents, teachers and cultural commentators began to spot an interesting trend. A new series of books about a boy wizard at boarding school had captured the hearts of the nation’s school-children, with the consequence that – shock horror! – kids actually wanted to read.

回首上世纪90年代末，当时家长、教师和文化评论家开始发现一种有趣的趋势。一个关于在寄宿学校的男孩巫师的故事系列丛书吸引了全国在读学童的眼球，而且引爆了一个惊人的效果，原来孩子们都会想阅读。

Bearing in mind that these kids are commonly referred to as the ‘PlayStation generation’, and presented as unwilling illiterates who will happily while away the hours with a keyboard mouse or TV remote but would not be seen dead with their noses in a book, the fact that they hungered to read about Harry was assumed to be nothing short of a miracle. The fact that the Potter books, with their male protagonist and the author’s androgynous byline, appealed to boys-those sporty, techie creatures widely assumed to be the losers and drop-outs in the reading game-was even better. 要知道这代孩子被普遍认为是“游戏机一代”，他们不愿意阅读，被看成是终日只会浪费时间在电脑或电视上玩得开心而不愿看书的文盲，所以他们渴求阅读《哈利波特》这个事情简直就是一个奇迹。事实上《哈利波特》系列丛书中的男主角和作者难分性别的署名更能吸引那些被广泛认为更易放弃阅读、爱好运动、爱搞技术的男孩子。

Parents and teachers started stockpiling Potter references as commentators waxed lyrical about the way that one female first-time author had single-handedly solved a problem where government national literacy strategies had persistently failed.

家长和教师开始学习评论员的措辞去评价《哈利波特》，他们认为这位第一次参与写作的女性作家凭借她个人的一只手就解决了一个问题，而这个问题的政府策略处理已经失败了很多次。

Okay, so it’s good that children read books – and we can assume, for the sake of argument, that they could do with reading more of them. But the excitement surrounding Potter indicated just how far our expectations have fallen. Not so very long ago, it was not considered enough for children just to read books - they had to be good books. For example, the very fact that kids enjoyed the Famous Five led to the suspicion that Blyton was brain-rot, and the compulsion to teach Narnia in class.

所以孩子愿意读书是一件好事，为便于讨论，我们可以假设他们是有丰富阅读经历的人。但是哈利波特的热潮令我们的预期下降。因为在不久之前，我们还认为它还不适合孩子们去阅读，适合孩子们阅读的必须是好书。比如孩子们都很喜欢的《五人帮》，使得布莱顿就被怀疑是个大脑生锈，教坏孩子的人。

For all the original artificial hype of Potter’s literary qualities, it is self-evident that their readability, not their quality, is what made them popular with children. Yet while Enid Blyton was actively resisted by school libraries in the past, on the grounds that it might distract from the better quality stuff, Rowling’s equivalent has all but formed the basis of English exams.

对于那些炒作《哈利波特》具有文学性的话题，人们显然知道真正让孩子们着迷的不是这些原因而是书本的可读性。以往伊妮德布莱顿的作品被学校图书馆所限制，理由是它可能分散学生对认真读好书的注意力，而罗琳的作品却变成英语考试的基础内容。

In recent years, it seems that our expectations of children, and of the books that they should read, have plummeted: so much so that when the last Potter book was published three years ago, many even complained that it was too long for Rowling’s young fans.

近几年，我们对孩子、对他们应该阅读的书籍的要求似乎都有所下降：以至于在三年前《哈利波特》系列的最后一本出版时，很多人抱怨这对罗琳的年轻粉丝来说时间太长了。