父爱的尺度(翻译)

第二十届韩素音青年翻译奖赛参赛译文

中译英

《父爱的尺度》

郑庆祝

The Yardstick of Father’s Love (excerpt) In 1924, U.S. President John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) proposed the Father’s Day a nation-wide festival so as to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations". In 1972, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) officially signed the bill to designate the Father’s Day a festival, which later spread around the world gradually. Today, Chinese townsfolk, who always value parenthood education and emphasize father’s cultivation responsibility, accept the foreign festival imperceptibly.

The Chinese style of nuclear family nursing with only a single child is quite similar as that of running a company of unlimited liability; the parents have to assume unlimited responsibility for the future fate of their children. As the saying says, “If the children are not well-bred, it is the father's fault”. The children’s wisdom and stupidity, gain and loss, and merits and faults are related to education from the father. The father shall not only bear the joint responsibility for raising the children and for their moral education, but also be investigated the “leader’s responsibility

”by the society and other family members. Benefit of successful education to a single child cannot be anticipated, but the opportunity cost for failure of the education is one hundred percent. Therefore, the father is the good example—the “yardstick” of the children, which is quite hard to grasp.

Father is also called “Jia Yan”, which is used to refer to one’s own father modestly. The role of father’s love already has its accurate, specific and rational definition from the prospective of Chinese traditional culture, ethical code and custom. “A father should be respectable and a mother should be intimate”means that a father must retain the duly reverence and keep self-esteem so that he can win respect from his family members, and then maintain the dignity to be the primary responsibility bearer for conducting family education. “If the king is not honest, his ministers will go to other countries; if a father is not honest, his children will run away from home”, viz.the father should set himself a good example to his children; otherwise, he can neither hold together or cultivate his children, nor fulfill the disciplining responsibility of a father, and may even bring about falling out with his children

. A father should be strict, stern and serious, and a mother should be kind, thus, to be strict, stern and serious are necessary characters a father should possess. But some fathers misinterpret “strict, stern and serious”as educating children with sticks, or by beating and scolding. I get some inspiration from Dhyana that the purpose of beating and scolding is for spurring, reminding, giving advice and revealing, and the goal is to facilitate understanding and gain wisdom, while not to squelch, let alone to show the patriarchal power and prestige. Therefore, a competent father values more knowledge than his temper, and cherishes more wisdom than his superiority; he is the first teacher and spiritual guide of his children.

Parents without exception expect their children to become talents, and save no efforts to help their children in this regard. Influenced by the family, indeed, many children succeed their parents’ careers, adding glory to their ancestors and bringing benefits to their offspring, and turning themselves into the same kind of persons as their parents or the persons expected by their parents. But there are still a large number of people do not realize their parents’dream or do not reach their parents’expectation, and some of them even