研究生英语系列教材下unit5原文+翻译

Unit5 An Alpine Divorce

1.John Bodman was a man who was always at one extreme or the other. This probably would have mattered little had he not married a wife whose nature was an exact duplicate of his own. 1约翰?伯德曼是一个常常走极端的人。这本来应该没什么，但可惜，他妻子的性格整个儿是他的翻版。

2.Doubtless there exists in this world precisely the right woman for any given man to marry and vice versa; but when you consider that one human being has the opportunity of being acquainted with only a few hundred people, and out of the few hundred that there are but a dozen or less whom one knows intimately, and out of the dozen, one or two close friends at most, it will easily be seen, when we remember the number of millions who inhabit this world, that probably, since the Earth was created, the right man has never yet met the right woman. The mathematical chances are all against such a meeting, and this is the reason that divorce courts exist. Marriage at best is but a compromise, and if two people happen to be united who are of an uncompromising nature there is bound to be trouble.

2毋庸置疑，对于任何一个男人，这世上总会有一个相当合适的女人能和他成家，反之亦然。但是如果你考虑一下:每个人仅有机会结识几百个人而已，在这几百个人之中熟知的只有那么干几人甚至更少，在这十几个人之中又最多只有一两个知心朋友;别忘了，居住在这世上的人有多少个百万，因此显而易见:自地球存在以来，这合适的男人极有可能从来就没有遇到过他那个合适的女人。。从概率上来讲，这样相遇的机会微乎其微，这也正是离婚法庭存在的原因。婚姻充其量不过是一种妥协，而如果恰好两个个性上互不妥协的人结合了，那就肯定会有麻烦。

3.In the lives of these two young people there was no middle distance. The result was bound to be either love or hate, and in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Bodman it was hate of the most bitter and egotistical kind.

3对于两个这样的年轻人来说，生活没有什么中间点，其结局注定要么是爱，要么是恨，而就伯德曼夫妇而言，他们到头来有的是那种最刻骨、最傲慢的恨。

4.In some parts of the world, incompatibility of temper is considered a just cause for obtaining

a divorce, but in England no such subtle distinction is made, and so until the wife became criminal, or the man became both criminal and cruel, these two were linked together by a bond that only death could sever.' Nothing can be worse than this state of things, and the matter was only made the more hopeless by the fact that Mrs. Bodman lived a blameless life, while her husband was no worse than the majority of men. Perhaps, however, that statement held only up to a certain point, for John Bodman had reached a state of mind in which he resolved to get rid of his wife at all hazards. If he had been a poor man he would probably have deserted her, but he was rich, and a man cannot freely leave a prospering business because his domestic life happens not to be happy.

4在这世界上的某些地方，夫妻性情不合就能够成为离婚的正当理由，但是在英格兰，并没有如此微妙的区分，所以除非妻子犯罪，或丈夫犯罪并且为人残暴，否则两者的婚姻关系将一直维系下去，直至死神将他们分开。没有什么比这种事情更糟糕的了，而更令人绝望的是伯德曼太太为人无可厚非，而她丈夫也并不比一般男人差。然而，也许上面的表述只能说在某种程度上是正确的，因为约翰?伯德曼已经忍无可忍，下定决心不管付出什么代价也要摆脱他的妻子。如果他是个穷人，也许他会抛弃她，但是他很富有，而一个人不能因为家庭生活碰巧不幸就轻易放弃一份蒸蒸日上的事业。

5.When a man's mind dwells too much on one subject, no one can tell just how far he will go.