UnitA French Fourth课文翻译综合教程四

Unit 6

A French Fourth

Charles Trueheart

1Along about this time every year, as Independence Day approaches, I pull an old American flag out of a bottom drawer where it is folded away －folded in a square, I admit, not the regulation triangle. I’ve had it a long time and have always flown it outside on July 4. Here in Paris it hangs from

a fourth-floor balcony visible from the street. I’ve never seen anyone look up, but in my mind’s eye an

American tourist may notice it and smile, and a French passerby may be reminded of the date and the occasion that prompt its appearance. I hope so.

2For my expatriated family, too, the flag is meaningful, in part because we don’t do anything else to celebrate the Fourth. People don’t have barbecues in Paris apartments, and most other Americans I know who have settled here suppress such outward signs of their heritage －or they go back home for the summer to refuel.

3Our children think the flag-hanging is a cool thing, and I like it because it gives us a few moments of family Q&A about our citizenship. My wife and I have been away from the United States for nine years, and our children are eleven and nine, so American history is mostly something they have learned －or haven’t learned －from their parents. July 4 is one of the times when the American in me feels a twinge of unease about the great lacunae in our children’s understanding of who they are and is prompted to try to fill the gaps. It’s als o a time, one among many, when my thoughts turn more generally to the costs and benefits of raising children in a foreign culture.

4Louise and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school, and most of their friends are French. They move from language to language, seldom mixing them up, without effort or even awareness. This is a wonderful thing, of course. And our physical separation from our native land is not much of an issue. My wife and I are grateful every day for all that our children are not exposed to. American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of the society we hold at a distance.

5Naturally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being American and to try to convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do from afar, and the distance seems more than just a matter of miles. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them must seem like Aesop’s (or La Fontaine’s) fables, myths with no fixed place in space or time. Still, connections can be made, lessons learned.

6Last summer we spent a week with my brother and his family, who live in Concord, Massachusetts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them a glimpse of the American Revolution. We happened to run across a reenactment of the skirmish that launched the war, with everyone dressed up in three-cornered hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our