Unit 5 The Tapestry of Friendship课文翻译综合教程四

Unit 5The Tapestry of FriendshipEllen Goodman1 It was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. Therewas no big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any cosmic conclusions.2Yet she found Claudia Weill’s film Girlfriend gentle and affecting.Slowly, it panned across the tapestry of friendship –showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two young women.3 When it was over, she thought about the movies she had seen this year–Julia，The Turning Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks.4 This wasn’t just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vérité.For once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one definition of friendship to another.5 Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had alwaysbeen male – a world of sidekicks and “partners” of Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids. There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments –as if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.6 Well, that duality must have been mortally wounded in some shootout atthe You’re OK, I’m OK Corral. Now, on the screen, they were at least aware of the subtle distinction between men and women as buddies and friends.7About 150 years ago, Coleridge had written, “A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.”8 Well, she thought, on the whole, men had buddies, while women had friends.Buddies bonded, but friends loved. Buddies faced adversity together, butfriends faced each other. There was something palpably different in the way they spent their time. Buddies seemed to “do” things together; friends simply “were” toge ther.9 Buddies came linked, like accessories, to one activity or another. Peoplehave golf buddies and business buddies, college buddies and club buddies. Men often keep their buddies in these categories, while women keep a special category for friends.10 A man once told her that men weren’t real buddies until they had been“through the wars” together – corporate or athletic or military. They had to soldier together, he said. Women, on the other hand, didn’t count themselves as friends until they had shared three loathsome confidences.11 Buddies hang tough together; friends hang onto each other.12It probably had something to do with pride. You don’t show off to a friend;you show need. Buddies try to keep the worst from each other; friends confess it.13 A friend of hers once telephoned her lover, just to find out if he washome. She hung up without a hello when he picked up the phone. Later, wretched with embarrassment, the friend moaned, “Can you believe me A thirty-five-year-old lawyer, making a chic ken call” Together they laughed and made it better.14 Buddies seek approval. But friends seek acceptance.15 She knew so many men who had been trained in restraint, afraid of eachother’s judgment or awkward with each other’s affection. She wasn’t sure which. Like buddies in the movies, they would die for each other, but never hug each other.16 She had reread Babbitt recently, that extraordinary catalogue of malegrievances. The only relationship that gave meaning to the claustrophobic life of George Babbitt had been with Paul Riesling. But not once in the tragedy of their lives had one been able to say to the other: You make a difference.17 Even now men shocked her at times with their description of friendship.Does this one have a best friend “Why, of c ourse, we see each other every February.” Does that one call his most intimate pal long distance “Why, certainly, whenever there’s a real reason.” Do those two old chums ever have dinner together “You mean alone Without our wives”18 Yet, things were chang ing. The ideal of intimacy wasn’t this parallelplaymate, this teammate, this trenchmate. Not even in Hollywood. In the double standard of friendship, for once the female version was becoming accepted as the general ideal.19 After all, a buddy is a fine life-companion. But one’s friends, asSantayana once wrote, “are that part of the race with which one can be human.”友谊面面观埃伦·古德曼1 从多方面看来，这是一部不足挂齿的小制作电影。