西南大学本科生课程论文
论文题目： 评析The American Scholar
课程名称： 翻译批评
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专 业： 英语
班 级： 2012级英语2班
学 号： ***************
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2015 年 12 月 26 日
西南大学外国语学院制
The American Scholar
①None is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that should be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the cond age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.② The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence aris a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creatio
n, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wi spirit: henceforth it is ttled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into the worship of his statue. Instantly, ③the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who t out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote the books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well ud; abud, among the worst. What is the right u? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never e a book that to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and make a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active es absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. ④In its esnce it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they―let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are t in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes; genius creates. Whatever talent may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but no yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own n of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own er, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and lf-recovery, and fatal disrvice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must―when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining―we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the vers of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the m
ost modern joy―with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caud by the abstraction of all time from their vers. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surpri, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies clo to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppo some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never e.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. ⑤I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative re
ading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every ntence is doubly significant, and the n of our author is as broad as the world. We then e, what is always true, that, as the er’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part―only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.
Of cour, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wi man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office―to teach elements. But they can only highly rve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, t the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. ⑥Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never counter
vail the least ntence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
译文
论美国学者
①万事皆无极致。正如没有气泵能够抽出绝对之真空，任何大师都无法免受习俗之束缚，不受时空之桎梏，创作出体现纯粹思想之书。此书要能在方方面面都对同代、下代，乃至后代的后代产生相同的影响。但据发现，一个时代书写一个时代的书，一代人最多为下一代写书。②因此，历年经久之书在当代并不受用。
