Part 4 Mark Twain 马克吐温

Life experience



Mark Twain was born at Florida, Missouri, a little town in Mississippi.At the death of his father in 1847, Twain ,11 years old ,had left school to be an apprentice to a printer. Then a brief but glorious career as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot ended when the river was blockaded at the beginning of the Civil War. After a short term of soldiering as a Confederate volunteer, Twain went to Nevada, hoping to strike it rich in the silver fields. 马克吐温生在密苏里州，密西西比河边的一个小镇上。他 11岁就在印刷店里面当学徒，然后在密西西河上的一艘蒸 汽船做导航员，知道内战爆发，密西西河被封锁。作为南 方的志愿军，他短暂服役后，去了内华达州，在一个银矿 上，希望能发点财。

Then Twain and his family moved to Hartford. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces.Twain’s nostalgic recollections of his early boyhood in Hannibal stirred him to write his “boys’ book” The adventures of Tom Sawyer( 汤姆 · 索亚历险记 ) (1876) and its sequel, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn《哈克贝里· 费恩历险记》 (1884). His memories of his three years as a “cub” and master pilot on the Mississippi inspired the work Life on the Mississippi 《密西西比河上》(1883). 1876年至1884年，马克吐温发表了他的基本著作，怀 念男孩时代的《汤姆。索亚历险记》和它的续集《哈克 贝利。费恩历险记》，关于他早年导航员生活的《密西 西比河上》




In 1866, after six years as a miner, newspaper reporter, and lecturer, Twain went east responding to,he said,“a call to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous.” He took with him a reputation as “the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” and a lively imagination that had led him to turn many of his newspaper “reports” into burlesques(滑稽戏)and comic sketches(喜剧小品).The success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon(欧丽维 亚·兰登) in 1870. 经过六年的时间，他曾做过旷工，记者和演讲者，马克 吐温洗成自己为太平洋斜坡上未开化的的幽默家。他具 有丰富的想象力，把新闻报道编成滑稽戏，和戏剧小品。 写作上的成功也给他带来了可观的收入， 1866 年，与 Olivia Langdon 结婚。


In 1906 he began to record the details of much of the best and the worst of his life, portions of which appeared as his Autobiography 《自传》(1924), published posthumously (于死后)as was the collection entitled Letters from the Earth（地球来信） (1962), which contained the most despairing of his pronouncements and his last furious anger at the “damned human race.” 1906年开始，马克吐温开始记录下他生命中的细节， 包括好的和坏的，部分出版在1924年的《自传》中， 其他的在他死后以《地球来信》发表。信中包括许多 绝望的声明和对“该死的人类”的愤怒。

Fra Baidu bibliotek

His first attempt at novel writing was The Gilded Age 《镀金时代》(1873), on which he collaborated with the journalist and essayist Charles Dudley Warner(与 查尔斯·达德利·沃纳合写). The novel was a muddled failure, but it gave its name to the boom times, the post-Civil War age of unbridled individualism (放纵的个人主义)and speculation（投 机买卖）, which it satirized. 1873年，马克吐温和沃纳合作的《镀金时代》出版， 此书可算是一个失败，但它给战后的美国，起了一 个很好的名字。
---Mirror of America
马 克 吐 温 故 居
The Name of Mark Twain



Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens(萨缪 尔· 朗霍恩· 克莱门斯). "Mark Twain",is his pen name ,which means"watermark two"(水深两浔),was a call used by sailors on the Mississippi to warn shipmates that they were coming into shallow water. Mark Twain 是他的笔名，意思是 水深两浔，告诉水手们，前面是 浅滩。


The failure of his publishing firm and a series of bad financial investments brought him humiliation and bankruptcy, leading him to travel throughout the world on a lecture series to pay off his debts, a long and exhausting experience he recorded with barely disguised weariness in Following the Equator《赤道环行记》 (1897). 出版公司的失败和财务上的困难带来了破产和难堪， 马克吐温开始的环行世界的演讲来还债，在《赤道环 行记》1897一书中, 他记录了这次又长又筋疲力尽的行 程和毫不掩饰的厌倦。


While in New York, Twain was commissioned by a San Francisco paper to sail on a five-month voyage with a group of American tourists and report their confrontations with the cultural and religious shrines（圣地） of Europe and the Holy Land. Upon his return to America, Twain gathered his irreverent newspaper articles, revised and published them as Innocents Abroad 《傻子国外旅行记 》 (1869). Next came Roughing it《艰苦岁月》 (1872), a narrative of his original journey west. 1867年，在旧金山一家报纸的委托下，马克吐温及一 群美国的游客前往以色列，进行为期5个月的旅行，报 道。 回到美国后，他把自己写的一些新闻报道重新编排后， 出版《傻子国外旅行记》(1869). 1872年的 Roughing it <艰苦岁月>主要描写他在西部的旅程。




By the 1890s the amusement that had once typified his writing had been displaced by increasingly bitter attacks on the injustices of society and the folly of man. By the end of his life,the deaths of his wife and two daughters left him absolutely inconsolable. Some critics link these tragic events with the change of style in his later works, from an optimist and humorist(乐观的幽默大师) to an almost despairing determinist（悲观的决定论者）. 到了1890年代，曾经已幽默著称的马克吐温已不复存在， 他的作品更多的是对社会不公和人们愚昧的攻击。 在他生命的最后阶段，妻子和两个女儿的离世更他更加悲 痛。有的评论认为这些悲痛使得马克吐温从一个乐观的幽 默大师变成了一个悲观的决定论者。


When his mining schemes failed, he joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, exchanged his real name, Samuel L. Clemens, for a pseudonym, “Mark Twain,” and began his career as a frontier humorist. Because of “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,”《卡拉韦拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》(1865), he is known as the master of humorist all over the country. 银矿的计划失败后，他加入了弗吉尼亚的一个企业，并 用上了笔名 Mark Twain， 成了一名幽默作家。 1965年，《卡拉韦拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》的发表，马克吐 温一举成名。

By the time he came to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 《亚瑟王朝廷上的康涅狄格州美国人》 (1889), with its angry satire on royalty, religion, and the chivalric ideals(骑士理想)of Arthurian England（英格兰 亚瑟王), his work had become more serious and critical. 在他出版《 亚瑟王朝廷上的康涅狄格州美国人 》 时，该书讽刺了英国的皇室，宗教及骑士的理想主 义，马克吐温的作品变得严肃和具有批判性。