in my day课文翻译

in my day课文翻译

　　导语：在甲语和乙语中，“翻”是指的这两种语言的转换，即先把一句甲语转换为一句乙语，然后再把一句乙语转换为甲语；“译”是指这两种语言转换的过程，把甲语转换成乙语，在译成当地语言的文字中，进而明白乙语的含义。以下是in my day课文翻译的内容，希望能够帮得到你们！

　　in my day课文翻译

　　母亲80岁时狠狠地摔了一跤，这是她最后一次摔得这么严重。此后她的大脑便在时间长河中自在神游。有时候她去参加了半个世纪前举行的婚礼或葬礼。有时候又会沉浸在星期天下午为孩子们做晚餐的情景中，而这些孩子们现在已到了两鬓斑白的年纪。而做这一切的时候她是卧在床上的，但她的思绪却能穿越时空，在年代久远的时间当中穿梭，其速度之快，之容易是自然科学无法企及的。

　　“拉塞尔在哪儿？”有一天我去养老院探望时她问道。

　　“我就是拉塞尔。”我说。

　　她凝视着体格高大的我，难以想象她的儿子会长这么大，很快地否定了我的回答。

　　“拉塞尔只有这么大。”她说着，将手抬起约离地两英尺，手心向下比划了一下。那时的她还是年轻的村妇，从后院可以看见苹果园后面暮霭蒙蒙的弗吉尼亚群山，而我对她来说是一个年纪大得足可以做她父亲的陌生人。

　　一天清晨，她给在纽约的我打电话，“你今天来参加我的葬礼吗？”她问道。

　　这个难回答的问题使我睡意全无：

　　“看在上帝的份上！你在说什么？这是我所能做出的最佳回应。

　　“今天我就要下葬了。

　　”她轻快地说，就像在宣布一项重大的社会事件。

　　“我会再打给你的。”说完我便挂断了电话。而等我大会取得时候，她已经“正常”了。

　　尽管她实际上并不正常，当然我们都知道她不正常。

　　她一直是个体态娇小的女人—矮个子，小骨架，体格纤细—但是现在，在医院白色罩单下的她愈发显得瘦小，令我想到有着大眼睛、目光犀利的玩偶。她身上总有那么一股强悍劲儿。当她发表见解，迎接挑战似地生气地扬起下巴的'时候就露出这股劲儿，而他总是那么热衷于发表言论。

　　“我想什么就说什么，”她总喜欢炫耀，

　　“不管他们喜不喜欢。”

　　“有什么就说什么不一定总是上策。”我曾经提醒过她。

　　“如果他们不喜欢，那就太糟糕了，”这是她惯有的回答，

　　“因为我就是这样的人。”

　　她就是这样一个令人敬畏的女人，想说什么就说什么，想做什么就做什么，一定要使对手屈从的女人。她以极大的热情全身心地投入到生活中，这股热情使她看上去总是在奔忙。她曾经手持斧子追赶鸡群，决意要杀掉一只做成晚餐；她铺床时风风火火，摆饭桌时也匆匆忙忙。有一面的感恩节她烫伤得很严重。当时，她从地窖里上来，手里端着过节要吃的火鸡，上楼时绊了一跤，滚下了楼梯，结果火鸡裂开了，她跌坐在一堆鸡内脏和滚烫的肉汁中。生活试验场战斗，而胜利不属于那些懒汉、胆小鬼和游手好闲的人，也不属于那些唯唯诺诺、不敢直言的人。她一生忙碌奔波。

　　如今不再忙碌了，一时间我竟不能接受这个不可避免的事实。当我坐在她床边时，总是有种冲动想把她唤回现实。在我第一次去巴尔的摩医院探望她时，她问我是谁。

　　“我是拉塞尔，”我说。

　　“拉塞尔去西部了。”他提醒我说。

　　“不，我就在这里。”

　　她却回应道：“猜猜看今天我从哪儿来？”

　　“哪里？”

　　“从新泽西来。”

　　“不对。你已经在医院待了三天了。”我坚持说。

　　我们的谈话就这样持续到医生进来对母亲进行常规的问诊时才结束。她回答得一塌糊涂，要么答错，要么根本不答。接下来却出人意料。

　　“你的生日是哪一天？”医生问道。

　　“1897年11月5日。”她说。正确，完全正确。

　　“你是怎么记得的？”医生又问。

　　“因为我是在盖伊·福克斯纪念日出生的。”

　　“盖伊·福克斯”医生问道，“谁是盖伊·福克斯？”

　　她以一首歌谣回答了医生，这首歌谣这些年来我听她反复地吟唱过好多遍。

　　“请将11月5日铭记于心，火药阴谋粉碎于那日。我有充分的理由认为，绝不应该忘掉火药阴谋。”

　　然后，她便盯着这个年轻医生，他竟对1605年盖伊·福克斯妄图用一桶火药讲詹姆斯一世赶下王位最终失败的历史一无所知。

　　“也许你知道很多医学知识，但你显然对历史一无

　　所知，”她说。她把医生的想法完全说出来之后，就在此抛下我们去神游了。

　　之后医生诊断出他患有不可治愈的衰老症或是血管硬化。

　　我却认为并不这么简单。这是多年来，她把自己用来与生活作斗争的强悍逐渐化为一腔怒火，愤怒自己因上了年纪而身体虚弱、生活无趣以及缺少关爱。而今，自从这次重重地摔了一跤后，他仿佛打碎了那根将她禁锢在令他厌倦的生活中的锁链，并重新回到了她被爱被需要的那个年代。

　　浅浅地，我开始明白了。

　　三年前，我偶尔从纽约到她居住的巴尔的摩去看她。又一次探望之后，我给她写了封信，信里是劝人的套话，鼓励她乐观些，多看自己幸福的一面，而不是用她的苦恼为他人徒增负担。我猜想这封信对她来说无异于是一种威胁，威胁她如果在我探望期间表现的不够高兴，我便不会经常去探望她—孩子们总是能写出此类信件。这封信是出于一种孩子气的信仰，认为父母具有永恒的力量；同时也是出于一种天真的想法，我以为衰老与虚弱可以通过意志力去克服，而她也只需几句鼓舞就可以重新振作起来。

　　她以一种不同寻常地轻松欢快的语气回了信。我猜想，这是她在努力补救自己做法的一种表示。在提到我的探望时，她写道：“如果有时候你见到我不快乐，那么我的确是不快乐的。不过对此谁都无能为力，因为我只是太累了，太孤独了，我只有睡一觉，把这些全忘了。”

　　那年她78岁。

　　三年后的今天，在这重重的一跤后，他已经忘记了那些疲惫和孤独，重新找回了快乐。我很快便停止了对她的劝说，不再试图把她拉回到我以为的“现实”中来，并且尽力同她一起踏上那些神奇的旅行，回到那些过去的岁月当中。一天，我来到她床边时发现他容光焕发。

　　“今天挺精神的嘛。”我说。

　　“为什么不呢？”她反问，

　　“今天爸爸要带我坐船去巴尔的摩。”

　　那时的她还是个小女孩，站在码头，和他的父亲一起等候着切萨皮克湾的汽轮—她的父亲已经去世61年了。那时，威廉·霍华德·塔夫特正在白宫执政，美国还是一个年轻的国家，展现在它面前是一片光明灿烂的前景。

　　“上帝赋予的绿色星球上最伟大的国家”—若我能进入母亲的时间机器，或许就能听到外祖父这样说。

　　关于他的父亲也就是我的外祖父，我母亲的童年以及她家人，我几乎一无所知。那个曾经存在并已逝去的世界尽管与我血肉相连，我对它的了解不会比对埃及法老的世界了解得多。此时，想让母亲告诉我也是在做无用功。她思想的轨迹很少触及眼前的问话人，即使触及也是稍纵即逝。

　　坐在她床边，始终无法与她沟通。我想着我自己的孩子，想着那阻碍父母与孩子之间互相了解的断层。在自己成为父母之前很少有孩子想知道自己的父母是什么样的，当逐渐增长的年龄激起他们的好奇心时，父母已经不在了，没有人可以告诉他们什么。如果父母真的揭开一点帷幕透露一点点的话，也常常是讲述过去日子如何艰辛的故事，而结果就是震住孩子们。

　　我曾为自己这样做过而后悔。那时20世纪60年代初，我的孩子还小，生活衣食无忧。当我想到他们的童年这样惬意而我的却那么清苦，我就感到烦忧，于是养成了将过去的苦日子搬出来给他们说教的习惯。

　　“在我们那个年代，晚饭只有通心粉和奶酪就很高兴了。”

　　“我们那时候连电视都没有。”

　　“在我们那个年代...”

　　“在我们那个年代...”

　　一天晚饭时，儿子的一张不尽如人意的成绩单惹怒了我。正当我清清嗓子准备教训他时，他却直视着我，脸上带着难以言喻的屈从的神情，说：“爸爸，请您告诉我，您那时候是怎样的。”

　　我对他的行为很生气，但我更气愤的是我自己居然变成了一个令人讨厌的老古董，专门挑过去的某些事情回忆，这些回忆显然连孩子们也觉得不可信。他用一种令人不安眼光看待那些曾是我的未来的年代，我的未来便是他的过去，可因为年轻，他对过去不屑一顾。

　　当我徘徊在母亲的床边，接收着她从遥远的童年发出的零星信号。我意识到，同样的分歧也曾存在于我和她之间。当她年轻时，生活展现在她面前，对于她而言，我就是她的未来，而我却不以为然。我本能地想要挣脱，想要自由，希望我不再被她的时代所界定。我最后成功地做到了这一点，可从我自己的孩子身上，我看到我那振奋人心的未来正在变成他们乏味的过去。

　　经历了母亲最后日子里的这些无望的探望，我后悔，不该那么轻易抛弃往日的时光。每个人都来自过去，孩子们应当知道他们传承了什么，他们应该知道，生命是由过去到未来无数人的生命编织起来的一条人类共同的纽带，他不可能被简单定义为一个个体由生到死的生命过程。

　　in my day课文原文

　　At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

　　"Wheres Russell" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

　　"Im Russell," I said.

　　She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

　　"Russells only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

　　Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral today?" she asked.

　　It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. "What are you talking about, for Gods sake?" was the best reply I could manage.

　　"Im being buried today," she declared briskly, as though announcing an important social event.

　　"Ill phone you back," I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was all right, although she wasnt all right, of course, and we all knew she wasnt.

　　She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured — but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny. I thought of a doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion, and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.

　　"I tell people exactly whats on my mind," she had been fond of boasting, "whether they like it or not."

　　"Its not always good policy to tell people exactly whats on you mind," I used to caution her.

　　"If they dont like it, thats too bad," was her customary reply, "because thats the way I am."

　　And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She had hurled herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the run.

　　She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind. She ran.

　　But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable. As I sat by her bed, my impulse was to argue her back to reality. On my first visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.

　　"Russell," I said.

　　"Russells way out west," she advised me.

　　"No, Im right here."

　　"Guess where I came from today?" was her response.

　　"Where?"

　　"All the way from New Jersey."

　　"No. Youve been in the hospital for three days," I insisted.

　　So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that medical men apply in such cases. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or none at all. Then a surprise.

　　"When is your birthday?" he asked.

　　"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.

　　"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.

　　"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day."

　　"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor, "Who is Guy Fawkes?"

　　She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the years:

　　"Please to remember the Fifth of November,

　　Gunpowder treason and plot.

　　I see no reason why gunpowder treason

　　Should ever be forgot."

　　Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes failed scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. "You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously dont know any history," she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.

　　Then doctors diagnosed a hopeless senility or hardening of the arteries. I thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the ferocity with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood.

　　Three years earlier I had gone down from New York to Baltimore, where she lived, for one of my infrequent visits and, afterwards, had written her with some banal advice to look for the silver lining, to count her blessings instead of burdening others with her miseries. I suppose what it really amounted to was a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to see her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good pep talk to recharge a flagging spirit.

　　She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: "If I seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but theres really nothing anyone can do about it, because Im just so very tired and lonely that Ill just go to sleep and forget it." She was then seventy-eight.

　　Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at her bedside she was radiant.

　　"Feeling good today," I said.

　　"Why shouldnt I feel good?" she asked. "Papas going to take me up to Baltimore on the boat today."

　　At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years. William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. "The greatest country on Gods green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step into my mothers time machine.

　　About her father, my grandfather, my mothers childhood and her people, I knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs. It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely touched present interrogators for more than a moment.

　　Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and children in general, and about the disconnection between children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.

　　I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and living the affluent life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.

　　"In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni and cheese, and we were glad to get it."

　　"In my day we didnt have any television."

　　"In my day..."

　　"In my day..."

　　At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card, and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of unutterable resignation and said, "Tell me how it was in your day, Dad."

　　I was angry with him for that, but angrier with myself for having become one of those ancient bores whose highly selective memories of the past become transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about time. He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.

　　As I hovered over my mothers bed listening for some signals from her childhood, I realized that this same dispute had existed between her and me. When she was young, with life ahead of her, I had been her future and resented it. Instinctively, I wanted to break free, and cease being a creature defined by her time. Well, I had finally done that, and then with my own children I had seen my exciting future becoming their boring past.