最新Unit14Homeless课文翻译综合教程三

最新Unit14Homeless课文翻译综合教程三
Unit 14
Homeless
Anna Quindlen
1 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, although she’d b een 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 eyes brown-red in the flashbulb’s 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 yellow. 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 made 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 I’ve never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and I’ve always been a person with an overactive 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. I’m not simply talking about shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day or a mailing address to which the welfare people can send the check —although I know that all these are important for survival. I’m 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. There’s no place like it. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 sister’s floor, once told me, “painted blue.” 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 the bus terminal —the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain and lessen our own participation in it b y 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 or 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 homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything.
无家可归
安娜·昆德伦
1. 她的名字叫安，几年前的一月份，我们在港务局汽车站邂逅。

那时我正在做一个关于流浪者的专题。

她说我采访她纯粹是浪费时间；因为她只是路过这个汽车终点站而已，虽然她已经在这里待了不止两周了。

为了证明这是事实，她翻遍一个大购物袋，找出一个牛皮纸信封，最后展开了一张打印纸，取出了一些照片。

2. 这些照片上没有亲友，甚至没有在闪光灯下眼睛变成棕红色的狗或猫。

照片上是一栋房子。

这房子跟很多小镇上的千万栋房子没什么两样，既不在郊区，也不在城市，而是介于两者之间，墙板是铝制板的，四周围着铁丝网，狭窄的车道通向仅容一车的车库，还有一片后院。

房子是黄色的。

我翻看照片背面，想找到拍摄日期或姓名，但什么都没有。

无需讨论，我已知道她想表达什么，因为这也是我经常感同身受的。

她是想告诉我，她不是四处漂泊、孑然一身、无名无姓的人，虽然她的大包小包和她那件黑垢模糊了褶子的雨衣让我认为她是。

她拥有过一栋房子，至少从前曾经拥有过。

房子里面有窗帘，有沙发，有炉子，还有隔热垫。

你住的地方代表着你。

她是有名有姓有家的人。

3. 我从来都不擅长高屋建瓴地看问题、把握全局，我只是遗传了爱尔兰祖父的基因，一直是一个执着于乡土观念的人。

所以很自然的，对我而言，目前世界上最糟糕的事情莫过于有那么多人流离失所。

我指的不只是有一片遮风挡雨的屋檐，或者一日保证三餐，也不是一个可以收到福利救济支票的邮政地址——尽管我知道这一切对生存非常重要。

我说的是一个家，说的是许多年来浓缩在十字绣和法式线结绣品样板上的种种感觉。

4. 心之所在即为家。

没有任何一个地方可与家相比。

我热爱我的家，完全无关乎外观或位置。

我爱家里那些看似蠢笨的一切：热水器，塑料碗碟架，头上那片偶尔漏雨的屋顶。

然而，恰恰是那些蠢笨之物
使家成为家。

对我和家人来说，家代表着安定祥和、不受打扰的地方。

家就是我所生活的地方。

对于一个地方而言，还有比这更精彩的溢美之辞吗？这就是一切啊。

5. 然而在我的一生，以及我父母和祖父母的一生中，家却与我们渐行渐远。

曾几何时，我们生活的地方往往是我们工作的地方，是我们种植蔬果谷物的地方，甚至还是我们离开尘世后的葬身之所。

那个时代过去后，你居住的地方至少也是父母曾住过的地方，也是你年老体衰时与孩子共同生活的地方。

然后，突然之间，你住的地方变成了你会住三年的地方，直到
你迁往别处，然后再去另一个地方。

6. 所以我们面临着另一个处境：孩子们不懂“回自己房间”是什么意思，因为他们从未有过自己的房间；成年人幻想着能够有一面墙，刷上自己选择的颜色；老年人沦落到坐在公交车站的塑料椅上，皮肤在灯光的照射下显得惨白，从包里拿出自家房子的照片回忆过往。

家已不成家，只是房产而已。

7. 人们感到困惑不解的是，那些没有家的人为什么情愿在长凳上熬过夜晚或者蜷缩在门道里，也不愿住进救助站。

当然，有些人宁愿如此是由于他们有精神上的疾病，因为他们曾经被锁起来，所以决心不再重蹈覆辙。

另一些人是因为害怕在救助站遇到暴力和麻烦。

不过，有些人似乎想要一些救助站无法提供的东西，他们不愿妥协，不愿意为了一张小床、一碗燕麦粥，或者是用特殊的杀菌肥皂冲个澡而进救助站。

“一个房间，”一个带着孩子在姐姐家打地铺的女人曾经告诉我，“刷成蓝色。

”这就是关键所在；无关大小，无关位置，而是作为业主的自豪。

刷成蓝色。

8. 这是一个棘手的问题，一些有智慧和同情心的人正致力解决它。

但在我看来，总体而言，我们只是在做些无关痛痒的事，就好像它躺在人行道上或是坐在汽车站里，而我们只是绕道而行——它指的是问题，我是说。

把别人的痛苦转化成议题而非一群人，借此来减少自身的参与度，已经成为惯例了。

我们把形容词转换成名词：贫穷的，而不是穷人：无家可归的，而不是安，或住在箱子里的男人，或睡在地
铁轨道上的女人。

9. 有时我觉得，如果我们忘记大的方面而只专注于细节的话，情况可能会更好。

这儿有个缺少衣橱的女人。

那儿有个既没有镜子也没有墙来挂镜子的男人。

他们不是“一群无家可归的人”，他们是“一个个没有家的人”。

没有抽屉装勺子。

没有看外面的世界的窗户。

我的天，这就是一切。