Unit-14-Homeless課文翻譯綜合教程三

1、精選優(yōu)質(zhì)文檔-傾情為你奉上精選優(yōu)質(zhì)文檔-傾情為你奉上專心-專注-專業(yè)專心-專注-專業(yè)精選優(yōu)質(zhì)文檔-傾情為你奉上專心-專注-專業(yè)Unit 14 HomelessAnna Quindlen1 Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januarys ago. I was doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just passing through, alt

2、hough shed been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.2 They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eye

3、s brown-red in the flashbulbs light. They were pictures of a house. It was like a thousand houses in a hundred towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of backyard. The house was y

4、ellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need for discussion. I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had m

5、ade me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.3 Ive never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and Ive always been a person with an overa

6、ctive sense of place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. So it is natural that the thing that seems most wrong with the world to me right now is that there are so many people with no homes. Im not simply talking about shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day or a mailing address to wh

7、ich the welfare people can send the check although I know that all these are important for survival. Im talking about a home, about precisely those kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on samplers over the years.4 Home is where the heart is. Theres no place like it.

8、I love my home with a ferocity totally out of proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about: the hot-water heater, the plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is precisely those dumb things that make it what it is a place of

9、certainty, stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than that? That is everything.5 Yet it is something that we have been edging away from gradually during my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. There

10、 was a time when where you lived often was where you worked and where you grew the food you ate and even where you were buried. When that era passed, where you lived at least was where your parents had lived and where you would live with your children when you became enfeebled. Then, suddenly where

11、you lived was where you lived for three years, until you could move on to something else and something else again.6 And so we have come to something else again, to children who do not understand what it means to go to their rooms because they have never had a room, to men and women whose fantasy is

12、a wall they can paint a color of their own choosing, to old people reduced to sitting on molded plastic chairs, their skin blue-white in the lights of a bus station, who pull pictures of houses out of their bags. Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate.7 People find it curious that

13、those without homes would rather sleep sitting up on benches or huddled in doorways than go to shelters. Certainly some prefer to do so because they are emotionally ill, because they have been locked in before and they are damned if they will be locked in again. Others are afraid of the violence and

14、 trouble they may find there. But some seem to want something that is not available in shelters, and they will not compromise, not for a cot, or oatmeal, or a shower with special soap that kills the bugs. “One room,” a woman with a baby who was sleeping on her sisters floor, once told me, “painted b

15、lue.” That was the crux of it; not size or location, but pride of ownership. Painted blue.8 This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in

16、the bus terminal the problem, that is. It has been customary to take peoples pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box o

17、r the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.9 Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not the homeless. They are people who have no h

18、omes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything. 無家可歸安娜昆德倫1.她的名字叫安，幾年前的一月份，我們在港務(wù)局汽車站邂逅。那時我正在做一個關(guān)于流浪者的專題。她說我采訪她純粹是浪費時間；因為她只是路過這個汽車終點站而已，雖然她已經(jīng)在這里待了不止兩周了。為了證明這是事實，她翻遍一個大購物袋，找出一個牛皮紙信封，最后展開了一張打印紙，取出了一些照片。2.這些照片上沒有親友，甚至沒有在閃光燈下眼睛變成棕紅色的狗或貓。照片上是一棟房子。這房子

19、跟很多小鎮(zhèn)上的千萬棟房子沒什么兩樣，既不在郊區(qū)，也不在城市，而是介于兩者之間，墻板是鋁制板的，四周圍著鐵絲網(wǎng)，狹窄的車道通向僅容一車的車庫，還有一片后院。房子是黃色的。我翻看照片背面，想找到拍攝日期或姓名，但什么都沒有。無需討論，我已知道她想表達什么，因為這也是我經(jīng)常感同身受的。她是想告訴我，她不是四處漂泊、孑然一身、無名無姓的人，雖然她的大包小包和她那件黑垢模糊了褶子的雨衣讓我認為她是。她擁有過一棟房子，至少從前曾經(jīng)擁有過。房子里面有窗簾，有沙發(fā)，有爐子，還有隔熱墊。你住的地方代表著你。她是有名有姓有家的人。3.我從來都不擅長高屋建瓴地看問題、把握全局，我只是遺傳了愛爾蘭祖父的基因，一直是一

20、個執(zhí)著于鄉(xiāng)土觀念的人。所以很自然的，對我而言，目前世界上最糟糕的事情莫過于有那么多人流離失所。我指的不只是有一片遮風(fēng)擋雨的屋檐，或者一日保證三餐，也不是一個可以收到福利救濟支票的郵政地址盡管我知道這一切對生存非常重要。我說的是一個家，說的是許多年來濃縮在十字繡和法式線結(jié)繡品樣板上的種種感覺。4.心之所在即為家。沒有任何一個地方可與家相比。我熱愛我的家，完全無關(guān)乎外觀或位置。我愛家里那些看似蠢笨的一切：熱水器，塑料碗碟架，頭上那片偶爾漏雨的屋頂。然而，恰恰是那些蠢笨之物使家成為家。對我和家人來說，家代表著安定祥和、不受打擾的地方。家就是我所生活的地方。對于一個地方而言，還有比這更精彩的溢美之辭嗎？這就是一切啊。5.然而在我的一生，以及我父母和祖父母的一生中，家卻與我們漸行漸遠。曾幾何時，我們生活的地方往往是我們工作的地方，是我們種植蔬果谷物的地方，甚至還是我們離開塵世后的葬身之所。那個時代過去后，你居住的地方至少也是父母曾住過的地方，也是你年老體衰時與孩子共同生活的地方。然后，突然之間，你住的地方變成了你會住三年的地方，直到你遷往別處，然后再去另一個地方。6.所以我們面臨著另