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2024年4月21日发(作者：)

09级第12周英语专业翻译练习及答案

一．英译汉：

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray

Before the Curtain

As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and

looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey

of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love

and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and

fiddling; there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking

pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (

other

quacks, plague take them!)

bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and

poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their

pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry

one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they

come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before

he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas.

The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and

crying, “How are you?”

A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort,

will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people’s hilarity. An episode

of humour or kindness touches and amuses him here and there—a pretty child

looking at a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her

and chooses her fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his

bone with the honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general

impression is one more melancholy than mirthful. When you come home you sit

down in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply

yourself to your books or your business.

I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of “Vanity Fair.”

Some people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their

servants and families: very likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise,

and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in

for half an hour, and look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some

dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life,

and some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and

some light comic business; the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery and

brilliantly illuminated with the Author’s own candles.

What more has the Manager of the Performance to say?— To acknowledge

the kindness with which it has been received in all the principal towns of England

through which the Show has passed, and where it has been most favourably

noticed by the respected conductors of the public Press, and by the Nobility and

Gentry. He is proud to think that his Puppets have given satisfaction to the very

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