第27届韩素音翻译大赛译文参考(英译中).doc

The Posteverything Generation“后”一切的一代I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. Thats pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blas college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.我从来没有指望通过上文学理论课来了解我们这一代人的特征，或美国大学不断变化的景象。 这门课实际是这样的，你和其他面容疲惫的大二学生一起坐在房间后面，他们身穿紧身牛仔裤和印有俏皮话的T恤，戴着黑框眼镜和超大的复古耳机，等课堂的结束后，你就会情绪高涨地在去吃午餐的路上边走边听威尔克的音乐。 我差不多就是这样上课的：一边听什么结构主义、形式主义、性别理论和后殖民主义的话题，一边用我的iPod搜好听的音乐， 也没时间去理会伊坦弗洛美提出的资本主义压迫下的父权社会是什么样的。但当我们开始研究后现代主义时，一些观念引起了我的共鸣，让我提起精神，重新审视这个看似冷漠的大学生活。According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that its impossible. The difficulty is that it is so.post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism that its sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.根据我的课本，从定义的角度来说，后现代主义是很难定义的。我们所面临的困难是它太“后”了。它的定义消极地否定了先于它的自然主义、浪漫主义和疯狂的现主义革命-因此有时很难看清它到底指什么。它否认任何事物都可以很好地或甚至是完全解释出来。它是模仿性的、分离的、陌生的，并且有时会威胁到根本不理解它的传统主义者。虽然它出现在战后的西方国家，但迄今为止还没有一个合理的解释，后现代主义态度对国家和社会的未来到底意味什么。这个话题引起了我的好奇心，因为在充斥着空文理论的阶级下，后现代主义是一本打开的书，引诱着年轻人和充满好奇心的人。但我对它感兴趣还因为这个关于后现代主的问题- “后”一切运动如此紧谨慎地界定自己，如今却面临着更大的有关政治和流行文化的问题，而它所说的似乎正是我身边这些不顾一屑的朋友们。In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11.at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.作为一个大学生，我们也生活在一个非常“后”的时代：后冷战时代、后工业、后婴儿潮时期、后9.11时代文学评论家詹姆逊在他一篇著名的文章中提到了“后现代主义,或晚期资本主义的文化逻辑”，他甚至叫我们为“后文化人”。我们这一代人生活在世纪战争的末端和推翻文明的革命时期，专制的社会制度被推翻了，这使得我们比其他任何社会历史时期的人都有更多的特权和机会。我们这一时代能够成为实现任何目标的时代。And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.然而，我们会走上街头，在电视广播中说“我们在这儿，这就是我们想要的”吗？我们会把年轻的叛逆之旗挂在华盛顿商区，并说“我们不会离开，直到看到改变！我们的特权让我们更为广泛地接受教育，而教育和观念扩大了我们的视野，我们想要一个更好的世界，因为这是我们的权利”？似乎我们在做一些相反的事。我们在没有质疑合理性的情况下参与战争，我们签订不平等条约放弃公民自由，当最高法院使用布朗法案时时我们没作任何反应。On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobes worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “Its the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generations critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.在校园里，我们在情愿书上签名，加入各种组织，把自己名字添加到各种邮件通讯录中，捐力所能及的钱，做一个小时的家教志愿者，为乳腺癌和全球变暖贡献力量。可是我们代表什么呢？就像真正的后现代一代那样，我们无法编制出丰富的政治抱负，无法在公共舞台上展示出我们股无形和革命性的特征，也没有哲学。我们没有方向或主题，结构或意义，我们只是在否定先前的东西。阿尔戈尔 曾经说过：“自我陶醉和虚无主义真正定义了后现代主义”，他似乎是在呼吁整整一代人批判自己。我们只是被我们之前的一切所定义，因此就像乏味的模仿秀一样。我们是穿切格瓦拉T恤的一代。Jameson calls it “Pastiche” “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichs of social change and moral outrage a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language the language of a society that expects us to agitate because thats what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?詹姆逊称之为“模仿”-“带着语言的面具，说着空头语言”。在文学中，这意味着一个作家用不是他本身风格的语言说话-借用外界的声音，并且一直使用直到它失去所有的意义，而混乱就是现实的生活。这是一个模仿的模仿，并且被重新设想了很多次，原有的模式也不再相关或不再能辨认出来。这是批量生产的个人主义，是一场预期的革命。这就是为什么后现代主义缺乏凝聚力，为什么它似乎缺乏目的和方向。对我们后一切的一代人来说，模仿是使用和重用旧社会的变化和道德愤怒的陈词滥调，快速增长的非营利组织和救济基金是敷衍了事的造反。我们生过在面具之下，说着一些空话来表达我们的思想-这个这会希望我们去引发骚动，因为这就是年强人该做的事。但是我们如何反抗期待、怀念革命的那一代呢？How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We dont. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like . It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.我们如何去反叛有时候比我们更想闹革命的父母？我们不反叛，不反叛就是我们的反叛。我们带着抗议和到的愤怒的口罩，但是我们真正的精力并没在学业上，而是在互联网上。这是一个在聊天室交流思想和受挫感的快速发展时代，为了稳健和平的变革而游行示威：我们是学生在达富尔地区采取行动的一代；我们是摇滚选票的一代；我们是发起写信活动和建立公共利益团体的一代；是使用替代能源的一代。College as America once knew it as an incubator of radical social change is coming to an end. To our generation the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities