全国大学生第二届“海伦·斯诺翻译奖”译文揭晓

 

参考译文

 

英译汉部分

 

摘自《我在延安的小屋》（海伦·福斯特·斯诺）

 

    黄华带我去见外交人民委员博古，他是毛泽东的反对派之一。博古陪同我去了外交大院，把我领进专为我安排的一个小房间。窗棂上糊着纸，门上挂着一吊笨重的蓝色棉布帘。紧靠窗户，摆着一张带有纹饰的大方桌，上面放着一支蜡烛和我那把别致的茶壶。除了一角打进去的寝室、吊着一块蓝布帘遮掩床铺外，其余的陈设就是两把椅子和两条长凳了。蓝布帘的后面，是一个用青砖砌起来的平台，那就是火炕。我把帆布床和睡袋放在炕上，帆布床的四条腿，放进四只装满煤油的锡制香烟桶里。这样以来，那些小爬虫们确实无能为力了，但对跳高健将跳蚤们来说，似乎并没有多大的威慑力。

    地面是用砖铺的。虽然我用石灰粉填塞了砖缝，但是各种昆虫仍然栖居在那儿，有相互争斗的，也有紧紧地拥挤在一起的。每天晚上，我把我的凉皮鞋“束之高阁”，每天早晨把它们抖了又抖，看看里面有没有蝎子和蜈蚣，有没有虱子和跳蚤。头顶上的天花板，是一块塌拉下来的白布，老鼠在木椽上面来回奔跑，彻夜不休，每跑一趟，便是一阵“金色的尘雨”。我的床下，放置着一把鼠夹，夹住老鼠时，我就尖叫起来，把全院子的人吵醒。这是纯粹的有机物生活的时代——没有杀虫剂，没有化学药品，没有机械设施。

    传播鼠疫的是跳蚤，而不是老鼠。这种致命的疾病，在地球上依然流行的地方已为数不多了，而陕北便是其中之一。我房间的地面上尽是跳蚤，并且群居在一起，对外国人颇为多情。中国人没免疫，然而，祖祖辈辈任凭虱叮蚤咬，在他们的血液里产生了一支坚强的抗体大军，保护他们免遭疾病的侵害。我永远不会忘记，鼠疫曾经毁灭了基督教人口的一半，于是，讲究清洁卫生，便在欧洲风行起来。而这一点，似乎在几个世纪之后，还没有传到中国。那年夏天，使我感到欣慰的是，我住的那个院子里没发生鼠疫。不过，有一个人得了伤寒，一个人患了严重的痢疾，还有许多常见的小病。我的警卫员患晚期肺结核。当时肺结核相当普遍，但却很少有人注意这个问题。生活在延安的人，或许都患有痢疾，然而，中国人似乎对此并不大在乎。

 

 

附：英文原文

 

Excerpt from My Room by Helen Foster Snow

 

Huang Hua took me to see Po Ku, the commissioner of Foreign Affairs, one of the opposition to Mao Tse-tung. Po Ku escorted me to the Foreign Affairs compound, to a small room of my own, with paper windows and a heavy blue padded curtain for a door. A carved square table near the window held a candle and my special teapot. Two chairs and two benches made up the rest of furnishings, except for the build-in bedroom in one corner, hung with blue cloth for privacy. This was a k’ang, or raised platform of brick, where I put my canvas cot and sleeping bag. The legs of my cot sat in four cigarette tins filled with kerosene, which did discourage crawling insects, though it seemed to have little deterrent effect on the high-jumping fleas.

The brick floor was inhabited by both competitive and communist insect life, despite the lime dust with which I covered the cracks. I put my leather saddle shoes up high every night and shook them out every morning, looking for scorpions and centipedes as well as lice and fleas. Overhead the ceiling was of sagging white cloth, and rats ran back and forth on the rafters all night, shaking the golden dust down as they raced. Under my bed was a rat trap, and when it caught one, I waked the whole compound with my screams. This was the pure, organic life – without pesticides, without chemicals, without machinery.

It is not the rat but the flea that carries the black plague – and northern Shensi was one of the few places on earth where that killer disease was still endemic. My floor was covered with fleas, all gregarious and fond of foreigners. The Chinese were not immune, but generations of exposure had created a mighty army of antibodies in their blood to protect them from disease. I never forgot that the black plague had once destroyed half the population of Christendom, and had brought into fashion in Europe a concern for cleanliness that did not seem as yet, some centuries later, to have reached China. Though my own compound thankfully suffered no plague that summer, there was one case of typhoid, one severe case of dysentery, along with plenty of the common everyday variety, and my personal bodyguard had advanced tuberculosis. TB was so common that little attention was paid to it. Probably everybody in Yenan had dysentery, but the Chinese seemed usually not much bothered by it.

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RMK: Proper nouns in Wade-Giles system to Pinyin

Po Ku – Bo Gu;  k’ang – kang;  Shensi – Shaanxi; Yenan – Yan’an