27届韩素音翻译大赛

admin管理员组

文章数量:1531412

2024年6月14日发(作者：)

“CATTI杯”第二十七届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛英译汉、汉译英竞赛原文

来源： 中国译协网

“CATTI杯”第二十七届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛

英译汉竞赛原文：

The Posteverything Generation

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American

colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other

jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just

waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty

much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too

busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan

Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look

anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.

According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it

post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution

of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even

at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it

arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to

come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued

me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to

the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so

post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today,

of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.

In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby

boom, at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary

critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war

and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and

opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant

our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have

been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand

a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning

the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education

to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.

On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions,

volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately

priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true

postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to

present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a

story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came

before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,”

he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even

revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che

Geuvera tee-shirt.

Jameson calls it “Pastiche” – “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means

an author speaking in a style that is not his own – borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all

meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so

many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated

revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the

post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichés of social change and moral outrage – a

perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our

lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language – the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s

what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?

How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by

not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the

internet, with websites like . It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in

chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and

peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the

generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it – as an incubator of radical social change – is coming to an end. To our generation

the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia

Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from

another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the revolution,

the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s – it is just not as

visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are

not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that

behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are

just putting it in our own words.

本文标签： 竞赛中国翻译来源