大学英语第三册UNIT5全文翻译对照
端午节怎么放假-夫妻笑话故事
Writing Three Thank-You Letters
Alex
Haley
1 It was 1943, during World War II,
and I was a young U. S. coastguardsman. My ship,
the
USS Murzim, had been under way for several
days. Most of her holds contained thousands of
cartons of canned or dried foods. The other
holds were loaded with five-hundred-pound bombs
packed delicately in padded racks. Our
destination was a big base on the island of Tulagi
in the
South Pacific.
写三封感谢信
亚利克斯·黑利
那是在二战期间的1943年，我是个年轻的美国海
岸警卫队队员。我们的船，美国军
舰军市一号已出海多日。多数船舱装着成千上万箱罐装或风干的食品。
其余的船舱装着不
少五百磅重的炸弹，都小心翼翼地放在垫过的架子上。我们的目的地是南太平洋图拉吉
岛
上一个规模很大的基地。
2 I was one of the
Murzim's several cooks and, quite the same as for
folk ashore, this
Thanksgiving morning had
seen us busily preparing a traditional dinner
featuring roast turkey.
我是军市一号上的一个厨师，跟岸上
的人一样，那个感恩节的上午，我们忙着在准备
一道以烤火鸡为主的传统菜肴。
3 Well, as any cook knows, it's a lot of
hard work to cook and serve a big meal, and clean
up
and put everything away. But finally,
around sundown, we finished at last.
当厨师
的都知道，要烹制一顿大餐，摆上桌，再刷洗、收拾干净，是件辛苦的事。不
过，等到太阳快下山时，我
们总算全都收拾停当了。
4 I decided first to go
out on the Murzim's afterdeck for a breath of open
air. I made my way
out there, breathing in
great, deep draughts while walking slowly about,
still wearing my white
cook's hat.
我想
先去后甲板透透气。我信步走去，一边深深呼吸着空气，一边慢慢地踱着步，头
上仍戴着那顶白色的厨师
帽。
5 I got to thinking about
Thanksgiving, of the Pilgrims, Indians, wild
turkeys, pumpkins, corn
on the cob, and the
rest.
我开始思索起感恩节这个节日来，想着清教徒前辈移民、印第安人、野火鸡、南瓜、
玉米棒等等。
6 Yet my mind seemed to be in
quest of something else -- some way that I could
personally
apply to the close of Thanksgiving.
It must have taken me a half hour to sense that
maybe some
key to an answer could result from
reversing the word
verbal direction,
可我脑子里似乎还在搜索着别的事什么――某种我能够赋予这一节日以个人意义的
方式。
大概过了半个小时左右我才意识到，问题的关键也许在于把Thanksgiving这个字前后
颠倒一
下――那样一来至少文字好懂了：Giving thanks。
7
Giving thanks -- as in praying, thanking God, I
thought. Yes, of course. Certainly.
表达谢意――就如在祈祷时感谢上帝那样，我暗想。对啊，是这样，当然是这样。
8
Yet my mind continued turning the idea over.
可我脑子里仍一直盘桓着这事。
9 After a while, like
a dawn's brightening, a further answer did come --
that there were
people to thank, people who
had done so much for me that I could never
possibly repay them.
The embarrassing truth
was I'd always just accepted what they'd done,
taken all of it for granted.
Not one time had
I ever bothered to express to any of them so much
as a simple, sincere
you.
过了片刻，如同晨曦初现，
一个更清晰的念头终于涌现脑际――要感谢他人，那些赐
我以诸多恩惠，我根本无以回报的人们。令我深
感不安的实际情形是，我向来对他们所做
的一切受之泰然，认为是理所应当。我一次也没想过要对他们中
的任何一位真心诚意地说
一句简单的谢谢。
10 At least
seven people had been particularly and lastingly
helpful to me. I realized,
swallowing hard,
that about half of them had since died -- so they
were forever beyond any
possible expression of
gratitude from me. The more I thought about it,
the more ashamed I
became. Then I pictured the
three who were still alive and, within minutes, I
was down in my
cabin.
至少有七个人对我有过不同寻常
、影响深远的帮助。令人难过的是，我意识到，他们
中有一半已经过世了――因此他们永远也无法接受我
的谢意了。我越想越感到羞愧。最后
我想到了仍健在的三位，几分钟后，我就回到了自己的舱房。
11 Sitting at a table with writing
paper and memories of things each had done, I
tried
composing genuine statements of
heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to my dad,
Simon A. Haley,
a professor at the old
Agricultural Mechanical Normal College in Pine
Bluff, Arkansas; to my
grandma, Cynthia
Palmer, back in our little hometown of Henning,
Tennessee; and to the Rev.
Lonual Nelson, my
grammar school principal, retired and living in
Ripley, six miles north of
Henning.
我坐在摊着信纸的桌旁，回想着他们各自对我所做的一切，试图用真挚的文字表达
我对他们的由衷的感激
之情：父亲西蒙·A·黑利，阿肯色州派因布拉夫那所古老的农业机
械师范学院的教授；住在田纳西州小
镇亨宁老家的外祖母辛西娅·帕尔默；以及我的文法
学校校长，退休后住在亨宁以北6英里处的里普利的
洛纽尔·纳尔逊牧师。
12 The texts of my letters
began something like, this Thanksgiving at sea, I
find my
thoughts upon how much you have done
for me, but I have never stopped and said to you
how
much I feel the need to thank you -- And
briefly I recalled for each of them specific acts
performed on my behalf.
我的信是这样开头的：
“出海在外度过的这个感恩节，令我回想起您为我做了那么
多事，但我从来没有对您说过
自己是多么想感谢您――”我简短回忆了各位为我所做的具
体事例。
13
For instance, something uppermost about my father
was how he had impressed upon me
from boyhood
to love books and reading. In fact, this graduated
into a family habit of
after-dinner quizzes at
the table about books read most recently and new
words learned. My love
of books never
diminished and later led me toward writing books
myself. So many times I have
felt a sadness
when exposed to modern children so immersed in the
electronic media that they
have little or no
awareness of the marvelous world to be discovered
in books.
例如，我父亲的最不同寻常之处在于，从我童年时代起，他就让我
深深意识到要热
爱书籍、热爱阅读。事实上，这一爱好渐渐变成一种家庭习惯，晚饭后大家围在餐桌旁互
相考查近日所读的书以及新学的单词。我对书籍的热爱从未减弱，日后还引导我自己撰文
著书。
多少次，当我看到如今的孩子们如此沉迷于电子媒体时，我不由深感悲哀，他们很
少，或者根本不了解书
中所能发现的神奇世界。
14 I reminded the
Reverend Nelson how each morning he would open our
little country
town's grammar school with a
prayer over his assembled students. I told him
that whatever
positive things I had done since
had been influenced at least in part by his
morning school
prayers.
我跟纳尔逊牧师提及他如
何每天清晨和集合在一起的学生做祷告，以此开始乡村小
学的一天。我告诉他，我后来所做的任何有意义
的事，都至少部分地是受了他那些学校晨
祷的影响。
15 In
the letter to my grandmother, I reminded her of a
dozen ways she used to teach me
how to tell
the truth, to share, and to be forgiving and
considerate of others. I thanked her for the
years of eating her good cooking, the equal of
which I had not found since. Finally, I thanked
her
simply for having sprinkled my life with
stardust.
在给外祖母的信中，我谈到了她用了种种方式教我讲真话，教我与人
分享，教我宽恕、
体谅他人。我感谢她多年来让我吃到她烧的美味菜肴，离开她后我从来没吃过那么可口
的
菜肴。最后，我感谢她，因为她在我的生命中撒下美妙的遐想。
16
Before I slept, my three letters went into our
ship's office mail sack. They got mailed when
we reached Tulagi Island.
睡觉前，我的这三封信都送进了船上的邮袋。我们抵达图拉吉岛后都寄了出去。
17
We unloaded cargo, reloaded with something else,
then again we put to sea in the
routine
familiar to us, and as the days became weeks, my
little personal experience receded.
Sometimes,
when we were at sea, a mail ship would rendezvous
and bring us mail from home,
which, of course,
we accorded topmost priority.
我们卸了货，又装了其它物品，随后我们按熟悉的常规，再次出海。 一天又一天，
一星期又一星期，我
个人的经历渐渐淡忘。我们在海上航行时，有时会与邮船会合，邮船
会带给我们家信，当然这是我们视为
最紧要的事情。
18 Every time the ship's
loudspeaker rasped, Mail call!two hundred-odd
shipmates came pounding up on deck and
clustered about the two seamen, standing by those
precious bulging gray sacks. They were
alternately pulling out fistfuls of letters and
barking
successive names of sailors who were,
in turn, shouting back
每当船上的喇叭响起：“大伙听好！
邮件点名！”200名左右的水兵就会冲上甲板，围
聚在那两个站在宝贵的鼓鼓囊囊的灰色邮袋旁的水手
周围。两人轮流取出一把信，大声念
收信水手的名字，叫到的人从人群当中挤出，一边应道：“来了，来
了！”
19 One --
and my reading of
their letters left me not only astonished but more
humbled than before.
一次“邮件点名”带给我外祖母，爸爸，以及纳尔逊牧师的回信――我读了信，既
震惊又深感卑微。
20 Rather than saying they would
forgive that I hadn't previously thanked them,
instead, for
Pete's sake, they were thanking
me -- for having remembered, for having considered
they had
done anything so exceptional.
他们没有说他们原谅我以前不曾感谢他们，相反，他们向我致谢，天哪，就因为我
记得，就因为我认为他
们做了不同寻常的事。
21 Always the college
professor, my dad had carefully avoided anything
he considered too
sentimental, so I knew how
moved he was to write me that, after having helped
educate many
young people, he now felt that
his best results included his own son.
身为大学教授的爸爸向来特别留意不使用任何过于感情化的文字，因此， 当他对我
写道，在教了许许多
多的年轻人之后，他认为自己最优秀的学生当中也包括自己的儿子时，
我知道他是多么地感动。
22 The Reverend Nelson wrote that his
decades as a
ended with schools undergoing
such swift changes that he had retired in self-
doubt. heard
more of what I had done wrong
than what I did right,
him welcome reassurance
that his career had been appreciated.
纳
尔逊牧师写道，他那平凡的传统校长的岁月随着学校里发生的如此迅猛的变化而
结束，他怀着自我怀疑的
心态退了休。“说我做得不对的远远多于说我做得对的，”
他写道，
接着说我的信给他带来了振奋人心的信心：自己的校长生涯还是有其价值的。
23 A glance at Grandma's familiar
handwriting brought back in a flash memories of
standing
alongside her white rocking chair,
watching her downsome letter to relatives.
Character by character, Grandma would slowly
accomplish one word, then the next, so that a
finished page would consume hours. I wept over
the page representing my Grandma's recent
hours invested in expressing her loving
gratefulness to me -- whom she used to diaper!
一看到外祖母那熟悉的笔迹，我顿时回想起往日站在她的白色摇椅旁看她给亲戚写
信的情景。外祖母一个字母一个字母地慢慢拼出一个词，接着是下一个词，因此写满一页
要花上几个小时
。捧着外祖母最近花费不少工夫对我表达了充满慈爱的谢意，我禁不住流
泪――从前是她给我换尿布的呀
。
24 Much later, retired from the
Coast Guard and trying to make a living as a
writer, I never
forgot how those three
about longing in secret for more of their
fellows to express appreciation for their efforts.
许多年后，我从海岸警卫队退役，试着靠写作为生，我一直不曾忘记那三封“感谢”
信是如何使我认识到，大凡人都暗自期望着有更多的人对自己的努力表达谢意。