如何读懂这个句子
刚刚读了公众"经济学人赏析"的推送，里面提到一个句子:
A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower.
这段话--“登峰造极的难度”--给许多英语学习者造成了困扰。在各路“专家”解读之后，造成了更多的困扰 -- 如果说不是误导的话。惊蛰节气
这段话的完整段落是GRE阅读 -- 全文在网上也可以找到的，讨论Thomas Hardy的小说:
In Hardy‘s novels, various impuls were sacrificed to each other inevitably and often. Inevitably, becau Hardy did not care in the way that novelists such as Line Flaubert or James cared, and therefore took paths of least resistance. Thus, one impul often surrendered to a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromi, simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower.
In this instance, the new impul was at least an energetic one, and thus its indulgence did not result in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous, risky, and highly energizing impul in favor of what was for him the fatally relaxing impul to classify and schematize abstractly. When a relaxing impul was indulged, the style—that sure index of an author‘s literary worth—was certain to become verbo.
1.碰到这样的句子不头疼是不正常的。
你那么美2. 我们会“不明觉厉”, 但是不是说我们读不懂的东西都“高冷，够牛X". 好的英文是不会让读者猜来猜去啰里八嗦的 -- 当然这篇文章放在GRE里是很合适，是由考察学术和语文能力。
3. 如果你不是研究翻译的，不要纠结于“这句话怎么翻?" “理解”比“翻译”重要，有些东西真的是“只可意会”.
4. Above is merely my two cents.
今天和你分享的是如何读懂这样的句子。
纸帽子的做法
“读懂”在这里的意思是说，你大概知道这段话想说的是什么，其他的细节内容要根据上下文和理解自行补脑。
除了Quora和WordReference, 同样类型的网站我以前也推荐过
预备党员全年总结其中一位网友Phenry的回答可以帮助我们学习如何分析(parsing)这样的句子:
不喝酒的说说
One way to get at the structure of a tortured ntence like this is by temporarily ignoring the content of noun phras and verb phras and treating them like generic content blocks, so "connective tissue" like conjunctions and prepositions are easier to spot. I'll try to describe my thought process in real time, so to speak, so you can e what I'm doing.
遴选面试真题及答案
A stretch of text like "reality a light that never was might" comes clo to being pure word salad on the first read-through, so I just stroll along without even trying to interpret it until I get to "might give way abruptly." This appears to be a good candidate for our predicate, so let's start parsing here. Abstracting away some of the more complex material that precedes the verb gives us:
A desire to [do something] might give way abruptly to [something el].
神奇宝贝怎么画
Reading a little further, we come across the word "desire" again. Excellent! One desire might give way to another desire. Okay. We can do this. Unfortunately, instead of getting a "to" after the cond desire, we get this weird parenthetical crap. We know there will almost surely be a "to" eventually, so let's skip ahead until we ah, there it is: it's a desire to record something. After a couple more adverbs, we find out what that "something" is: the structure and texture of a flower. This gives us:
A desire to 如何点评作文[do something] might give way abruptly to the desire ... to record ... the structure and texture of a flower.
So now we know basically what's happening here: the subject of our analysis (Thomas Hardy, apparently) is prone to start doing one thing, only to suddenly shift gears and start talking about flowers. Now we just fill in the blanks:
