1、最新Unit 1 Love of reading全新版大学英语综合教程五课文翻译Unit 1 Love of readingText A One Writers Beginnings1 I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. Shed read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when w
2、e were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. Shed read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with Cuckoo, and at night when Id got in my own bed. I must
3、 have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story. It was my ambition to have her read to me while I churned; once she granted my wish, but she read off my story before I brought her butter. She was an expressive re
4、ader. When she was reading Puss in Boots, for instance, it was impossible not to know that she distrusted all cats.2 It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet reg
5、ardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I
6、was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.3 Neither of my parents had come from homes that could afford to buy many books, but though it must have been something of a strain on his salary, as the youngest officer in a young insurance company, my father was all the while care
7、fully selecting and ordering away for what he and Mother thought we children should grow up with. They bought first for the future .4 Besides the bookcase in the living room, which was always called the library, there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand under windows in our dining room
8、. Here to help us grow up arguing around the dining room table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Comptons Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of Information, and later the Book of Knowledge. In the library, inside the bookcase were books I could soon begin on and I did,
9、reading them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom. My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him. The novels of her girlhood that had stayed on in her imagina
10、tion, besides those of Dickens and Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, were Jane Eyre, Trilby, The Woman in White, Green Mansions, King Solomons Mines. 5 To both my parents I owe my early acquaintance with a beloved Mark Twain. There was a full set of Mark Twain and a short set of Ring Lardner in our
11、bookcase, and those were the volumes that in time united us all, parents and children.6 Reading everything that stood before me was how I came upon a worn old book that had belonged to my father as a child. It was called Sanford and Merton. Is there anyone left who recognizes it, I wonder? It is the
12、 famous moral tale written by Thomas Day in the 1780s, but of him no mention is made on the title page of this book; here it is Sanford and Merton in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin. Here are the rich boy and the poor boy and Mr. Barlow, their teacher and interlocutor, in long discourses alt
13、ernating with dramatic scenes anger and rescue allotted to the rich and the poor respectively. It ends with not one but two morals, both engraved on rings: Do what you ought, come what may, and If we would be great, we must first learn to be good.7 This book was lacking its front cover, the back hel
14、d on by strips of pasted paper, now turned golden, in several layers, and the pages stained, flecked, and tattered around the edges; its garish illustrations had come unattached but were preserved, laid in. I had the feeling even in my heedless childhood that this was the only book my father as a li
15、ttle boy had had of his own. He had held onto it, and might have gone to sleep on its coverless face: he had lost his mother when he was seven. My father had never made any mention to his own children of the book, but he had brought it along with him from Ohio to our house and shelved it in our book
16、case.8 My mother had brought from West Virginia that set of Dickens: those books looked sad, too they had been through fire and water before I was born, she told me, and there they were, lined up as I later realized, waiting for me.9 I was presented, from as early as I can remember, with books of my
17、 own, which appeared on my birthday and Christmas morning. Indeed, my parents could not give me books enough. They must have sacrificed to give me on my sixth or seventh birthday it was after I became a reader for myself-the ten-volume set of Our Wonder World. These were beautifully made, heavy book
18、s I would lie down with on the floor in front of the dining room hearth, and more often than the rest volume 5, Every Childs Story Book, was under my eyes. There were the fairy tales Grimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; th
19、ere were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. They all carried their classic illustrations. I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and p
20、ictures I loved; very often The Yellow Dwarf was first choice, with Walter Cranes Yellow Dwarf in full color making his terrifying appearance flanked by turkeys. Now that volume is as worn and backless and hanging apart as my fathers poor Sanford and Merton. One measure of my love for Our Wonder Wor
21、ld was that for a long time I wondered if I would go through fire and water for it as my mother had done for Charles Dickens; and the only comfort was to think I could ask my mother to do it for me.10 I believe Im the only child I know of who grew up with this treasure in the house. I used to ask ot
22、hers, Did you have Our Wonder World? Id have to tell them The Book of Knowledge could not hold a candle to it.11 I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet.
23、They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting to school. 12 Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didnt hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isnt my mothers vo
24、ice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me
25、 through the reader-voice: I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers to read as listeners and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth , for me. Wh
26、ether I am right to trust so far I dont know. By now I dont know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.13 My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back
27、to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.作家起步时 我从两三岁起就知道，家中随便在哪个房间里，白天无论在什么时间，都可以念书或听人念书。母亲念书给我听。上午她都在那间大卧室里给我念，两人一起坐在她那把摇椅里，我们摇晃时，椅子发出有节奏的滴答声，好像有只唧唧鸣叫的蟋蟀在伴着读故事。冬日午后，她常在餐厅里烧着煤炭的炉火前给我念，布谷鸟自鸣钟发出“咕咕”声时，故事便结束了；晚上我在自己床上睡下后她也给我念。想必我是不让她有一刻清静。有时她在厨房里一边坐着搅制黄油一边给我念，故事情节就随着搅
28、制黄油发出的抽抽搭搭的声响不断展开。我的奢望是她念我来搅拌；有一次她满足了我的愿望，可是我要听的故事她念完了，她要的黄油我却还没弄好。她念起故事来富有表情。比如，她念穿靴子的猫时，你就没法不相信她对猫一概怀疑。 当我得知故事书原来是人写出来的，书本原来不是什么大自然的奇迹，不像草那样自生自长时，真是又震惊又失望。不过，姑且不论书本从何而来，我不记得自己有什么时候不爱书 书本本身、封面、装订、印着文字的书页，还有油墨味、那种沉甸甸的感觉，以及把书抱在怀里时那种将我征服、令我陶醉的感觉。还没识字，我就想读书了，一心想读所有的书。 我的父母都不是来自那种买得起许多书的家庭。然而，虽然买书准得花去他不
29、少薪金，作为一家成立不久的保险公司最年轻的职员，父亲一直在精心挑选、不断订购他和母亲认为儿童成长应读的书。他们购书首先是为了我们的前程。 除了客厅里有一向被称作“图书室”的书橱，餐厅的窗子下还有几张摆放百科全书的桌子和一个字典架。这里有伴随我们在餐桌旁争论着长大的韦氏大词典、哥伦比亚百科全书、康普顿插图百科全书、林肯资料文库，以及后来的知识库。“图书馆”书橱里的书没过多久我就能读了 我的确读了，全都读了，按着顺序，一排接着一排读，从最上面的书架一直读到最下面的书架。母亲读书最重要的不在获取信息。她是为了享受快乐而埋头读小说。她读狄更斯时的神情简直就像要跟他私奔似的。她少女时代读的小说印在了她心
30、头的，除了狄更斯、司各特和罗伯特?路易斯?斯蒂文森等人的作品之外，还有简爱、切尔比、白衣女士、绿厦和所罗门王的矿藏。 多亏了我的父母，我很早就接触了受人喜爱的马克?吐温。书橱里有一整套马克?吐温文集和一套不全的林?拉德纳作品集，这些书最终将父母和孩子联结在一起。 我一本接一本阅读摆在我面前的书，读着读着便发现一本又破又旧的书，是我父亲小时候的。书名是桑福徳与默顿。我不相信如今还有谁会记得这本书。那是托玛斯?戴在18世纪80年代撰写的一本著名的进行道德教育的故事书，可该书的扉页上并没有提及他；上面写的是桑福徳与默顿简易本，玛丽?戈多尔芬著。书中讲的是一个富孩子和一个穷孩子与他们老师巴洛先生之间的
31、冗长的谈话，其间穿插着戏剧性场面 分别写了富孩子和穷孩子如何发火、如何获救。书末讲的道德寓意不是一条，而是两条，都印在环形图案里：“不管发生什么，该做的就去做”，还有“想做伟人，必须先学会做个好人”。 这本书没了封面，封底用几条纸片粘牢，有好几层，如今都泛黄了，书页上污迹斑斑，边角处都破碎了；书中花哨的插图脱了页，但都保存良好，夹在书里。即使在少不更事的童年，我就觉得那是我父亲小时候拥有的惟一一本书。他一直珍藏着这本书，或许还枕着这本没了封面的书睡觉：他7岁时就没了母亲。我父亲从来没跟自己的孩子提起过这本书，但他从俄亥俄一路把它带到我们的家，把它放进我们的书橱。 母亲则从西弗吉尼亚带来了那套狄
32、更斯：那套书看上去也惨不忍睹 她告诉我，我还没出生，这些书就历经水火之灾，可现在它们还是整齐地排列在那儿 后来我意识到，是等着我去读。 从记事起我就收到给自己的书了，那是在生日时，还有圣诞节早晨。我父母真的是送给我再多的书都嫌不够。在我6岁或7岁生日时 那是在我自己能读书之后 他们送我一套10卷本的我们的神奇世界，为此，准是作了不少牺牲。那套书真漂亮，厚厚的，我总是带着它躺在餐厅壁炉前的地板上，读得最多的是第5卷：儿童故事。那都是些童话故事 格林的、安徒生的、英国童话、法国童话，“阿里巴巴和四十大盗”； 还有伊索寓言和列那狐的故事；还有神话和传奇故事，如罗宾汉、亚瑟王、圣乔治和龙，甚至还有历史故事圣女贞德；还有一部分天路历程，以及一长段格列佛游记。每篇故事都有精彩的插图。我早已让自己走进这些故事中去了，一翻就能翻到自己喜爱的故事和插图；黄肤色小矮人常常是我的首选，沃尔特?克莱恩绘的彩色插图中黄肤色小矮人看着令人害怕，他左右还有火鸡侍立。如今这册书已经跟父亲那本损坏的桑福徳与默顿一样，又破又旧，最后几页掉了，书页散了。有很长一段时间，我一直想自己能不能像母亲为查尔斯?狄更斯做的那样，为我们的神奇世界这套书赴汤蹈火，从这一点也可想见
