高英课首翻译

Lesson Eight A Lesson in Living

This excerpt from Maya Angelou’s novel “I know Why the Caged Birds Sings”, This autobiographical novel recalls some events experienced in her childhood and youth which proved to be of great influence to her later career and how she grew into a woman of distinction.

The novel was published in 1970, a year when the 1960’s stormy black movement for civil rights had just subsided. It was on this times background that the novel was written. It reflects the awakening of the political consciousness of the blacks and the upsurge of the civil rights movement.

Though, the text tells a story of a black girl. It represents an important fact that the blacks have come to realize their own talent, wisdom, and strength. The use of autobiographical makes the text full of human touch.

Lesson 9 The Trouble with Television

Lesson 12 Why I Write

This essay was written in 1946, but it takes for its historical background the years between late 1920’s and early 1930’s, when the Capit alism world was undergoing the great depression. The great depression was closely followed by the rampancy of Fascist in Europe and the outbreak of world war 2nd. In the turbulent years, what people concerned themselves with was the current political situation, the reality and development of the objective world.

Orwell thinks that while writing, the author should combine political contents and its aesthetic forms into an organic wholeness, so as to make political writing into an art. He was against the ways in which modernist writer blindly probe into the inner world of Characters.

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Lesson one

Joseph Heller is the well-known master of black humor in present-day America. The text is an excerpt from his second novel “Something Happened”. Black humor is characteristic of a dramatic and biting satire on what is to be satirized by placing it into painful, morbid or somewhat funny and unreasonable events. It expresses no sympathy for man’s pain but regard it as absurdity and helplessness. In the text, the author describes the facts that everyone in the company finds himself in danger and is afraid of each other, the salesmen obey submissively and complain a lot and have to take great pressure in work for fame and gain; the Market Research Department resort to

deception and carries out deceptive propaganda against conscience; the first person “I” is near the age of retirement and so complete bored of work and in despair of future as well as the life itself. Through the depiction of their absurd and tedious actions and painful mental state, the author lands the satire on the capacity of big company to destroy human nature and an the tragic sacrifice of human dignity for fame and gain.

Lesson two

“Eveline” is an short story from James Joyce’s Dubliners which was written in 1905. Published in 1919, this collection is composed of 15short stories. All the stories have been rearranged painstakingly by the author who regarded Dublin as one person in the order of haps in the childhood, experiences in the youth, plights in the adulthood and political, religious, and social life of Dublin around which each short stories unfolds separately. The theme which goals throw the whole book is paralysis in the life of Dublin. The same theme combines the 15 short stories in to one organic whole. Eveline, the heroine of the tent led exactly such a passive helpless paralytic life. She was ordered about at the store and at home she lived hard and tied fingered life with her brutal father, but she was too timid to get rid of all this to create a new life with her lover.