【精品】全新版大学英语5(第二版)课文翻译

Prison Studies

1 Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those

who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth

grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

狱中学习

今天，许多在什么地方直接听我讲话的人，或在电视上听我讲话的人，或读过我写的东西

的人，都会以为我上学远不止只读到8年级。这一印象完全归之于我在监狱里的学习。

2 It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me

feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any

conversation he was in, and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up

had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words

that might as well have been in Chinese[2 … the words that might as well have been

in Chinese: … it would have made no difference if the English words had been in

Chinese, because I didn’t have the slightest knowledge of either.]2. When I just

skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book

said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only

book-reading motions. Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I

had received the motivation that I did.

其实这事要从查尔斯顿监狱说起，一开始宾比就让我对他的知识渊博羡慕不已。宾比总是

主宰谈话话题，我总想效仿他。可是，我随便打开一本书，几乎没有一个句子不是少则一两个字，

多则差不多所有的字都不认识。我只好跳过这些字，结果自然是对书上说的几乎一无所知了。因

此，我被解送到诺福克拘留所时，读书还只是为了摆摆样子而已。要不是我真的获得了学习动力，

我恐怕没多久就会连读书的样子也懒得去摆了。

3 I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to

learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my

penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas

together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils

from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

我认识到，最要紧的是得到一本字典好认字学字。幸好我还认识到得好好练习写字。说来

悲伤，我写字都不能写得齐整成行。这两个想法促使我向诺福克拘留所学校要了字典，还有本子

和笔。

4 I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn.

Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

整整两天，我把字典一页页翻了个遍，不知该怎么学。我压根儿没想过会有那么多字。我

不知道自己需要学哪些字。最后，总得有所行动吧，我便开始抄写。

5 In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet

everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

我写字又慢又费劲，而且歪歪斜斜，但我在本子上抄写下了第一页上包括标点在内的所有

印刷符号。

6 I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.