in my day russell baker文章的中文翻译
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At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind
wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had
taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners
cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all
this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with
a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
"Where's Russell" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing
home.
"I'm Russell," I said.
She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future
and promptly dismissed it.
"Russell's only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet
from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a
view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a
stranger old enough to be her father.
Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral
today?" she asked.
It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. "What are you talking
about, for God's sake?" was the best reply I could manage.
"I'm being buried today," she declared briskly, as though announcing an
important social event.
"I'll phone you back," I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was
all right, although she wasn't all right, of course, and we all knew she
wasn't.
She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured
— but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny. I thought of a
doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It
showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion,
and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.
"I tell people exactly what's on my mind," she had been fond of boasting,
"whether they like it or not."
"It's not always good policy to tell people exactly what's on you mind," I
used to caution her.
"If they don't like it, that's too bad," was her customary reply, "because
that's the way I am."
And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind, determined
to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She had hurled
herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the run.
She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that
would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set
the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the
cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled
down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered
turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the
drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his
mind. She ran.
But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable.
As I sat by her bed, my impulse was to argue her back to reality. On my first
visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.
"Russell," I said.
"Russell's way out west," she advised me.
"No, I'm right here."
"Guess where I came from today?" was her response.
"Where?"
"All the way from New Jersey."
"No. You've been in the hospital for three days," I insisted.
So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that
medical men apply in such cases. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or
none at all. Then a surprise.
"When is your birthday?" he asked.
"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.
"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.
"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day."
"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor, "Who is Guy Fawkes?"
She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the
years:
"Please to remember the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes' failed
scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. "You
may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don't know any history," she
said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.
Then doctors diagnosed a hopeless senility or hardening of the arteries. I
thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the ferocity
with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the
weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought
her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken chains that
imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited
by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I
understood.
Three years earlier I had gone down from New York to Baltimore, where she
lived, for one of my infrequent visits and, afterwards, had written her with
some banal advice to look for the silver lining, to count her blessings instead
of burdening others with her miseries. I suppose what it really amounted to was
a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to
see her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out
of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age
and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good
pep talk to recharge a flagging spirit.
She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I
suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: "If I
seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but there's really nothing anyone can do
about it, because I'm just so very tired and lonely that I'll just go to sleep
and forget it." She was then seventy-eight.
Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the
fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to
argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along
with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at
her bedside she was radiant.
"Feeling good today," I said.
"Why shouldn't I feel good?" she asked. "Papa's going to take me up to
Baltimore on the boat today."
At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the
Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years.
William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the
future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. "The greatest country
on God's green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step
into my mother's time machine.
About her father, my grandfather, my mother's childhood and her people, I
knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood
and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs.
It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely
touched present interrogators for more than a moment.
Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my
own children, and children in general, and about the disconnection between
children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely
want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age
finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent
does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some
exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.
I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and
living the affluent life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I
thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed
the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.
"In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni and cheese, and we were glad to
get it."
"In my day we didn't have any television."
"In my day..."
"In my day..."
At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card,
and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of
unutterable resignation and said, "Tell me how it was in your day, Dad."
I was angry with him for that, but angrier with myself for having become one
of those ancient bores whose highly selective memories of the past become
transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but
must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about time. He looked upon the
time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and
being young, he was indifferent to the past.
As I hovered over my mother's bed listening for some signals from her
childhood, I realized that this same dispute had existed between her and me.
When she was young, with life ahead of her, I had been her future and resented
it. Instinctively, I wanted to break free, and cease being a creature defined by
her time. Well, I had finally done that, and then with my own children I had
seen my exciting future becoming their boring past.
These hopeless end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not
thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children
ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a
braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot
be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.
讲述了一个老年痴呆症母亲的故事
wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had
taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners
cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all
this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with
a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
"Where's Russell" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing
home.
"I'm Russell," I said.
She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future
and promptly dismissed it.
"Russell's only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet
from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a
view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a
stranger old enough to be her father.
Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral
today?" she asked.
It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. "What are you talking
about, for God's sake?" was the best reply I could manage.
"I'm being buried today," she declared briskly, as though announcing an
important social event.
"I'll phone you back," I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was
all right, although she wasn't all right, of course, and we all knew she
wasn't.
She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured
— but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny. I thought of a
doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It
showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion,
and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.
"I tell people exactly what's on my mind," she had been fond of boasting,
"whether they like it or not."
"It's not always good policy to tell people exactly what's on you mind," I
used to caution her.
"If they don't like it, that's too bad," was her customary reply, "because
that's the way I am."
And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind, determined
to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She had hurled
herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the run.
She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that
would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set
the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the
cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled
down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered
turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the
drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his
mind. She ran.
But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable.
As I sat by her bed, my impulse was to argue her back to reality. On my first
visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.
"Russell," I said.
"Russell's way out west," she advised me.
"No, I'm right here."
"Guess where I came from today?" was her response.
"Where?"
"All the way from New Jersey."
"No. You've been in the hospital for three days," I insisted.
So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that
medical men apply in such cases. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or
none at all. Then a surprise.
"When is your birthday?" he asked.
"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.
"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.
"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day."
"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor, "Who is Guy Fawkes?"
She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the
years:
"Please to remember the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes' failed
scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. "You
may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don't know any history," she
said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.
Then doctors diagnosed a hopeless senility or hardening of the arteries. I
thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the ferocity
with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the
weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought
her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken chains that
imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited
by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I
understood.
Three years earlier I had gone down from New York to Baltimore, where she
lived, for one of my infrequent visits and, afterwards, had written her with
some banal advice to look for the silver lining, to count her blessings instead
of burdening others with her miseries. I suppose what it really amounted to was
a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to
see her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out
of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age
and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good
pep talk to recharge a flagging spirit.
She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I
suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: "If I
seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but there's really nothing anyone can do
about it, because I'm just so very tired and lonely that I'll just go to sleep
and forget it." She was then seventy-eight.
Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the
fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to
argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along
with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at
her bedside she was radiant.
"Feeling good today," I said.
"Why shouldn't I feel good?" she asked. "Papa's going to take me up to
Baltimore on the boat today."
At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the
Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years.
William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the
future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. "The greatest country
on God's green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step
into my mother's time machine.
About her father, my grandfather, my mother's childhood and her people, I
knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood
and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs.
It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely
touched present interrogators for more than a moment.
Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my
own children, and children in general, and about the disconnection between
children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely
want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age
finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent
does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some
exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.
I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and
living the affluent life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I
thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed
the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.
"In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni and cheese, and we were glad to
get it."
"In my day we didn't have any television."
"In my day..."
"In my day..."
At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card,
and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of
unutterable resignation and said, "Tell me how it was in your day, Dad."
I was angry with him for that, but angrier with myself for having become one
of those ancient bores whose highly selective memories of the past become
transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but
must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about time. He looked upon the
time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and
being young, he was indifferent to the past.
As I hovered over my mother's bed listening for some signals from her
childhood, I realized that this same dispute had existed between her and me.
When she was young, with life ahead of her, I had been her future and resented
it. Instinctively, I wanted to break free, and cease being a creature defined by
her time. Well, I had finally done that, and then with my own children I had
seen my exciting future becoming their boring past.
These hopeless end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not
thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children
ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a
braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot
be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.
讲述了一个老年痴呆症母亲的故事
追问
请问有具体的文章中文翻译么
追答
简要给你译一下：八十大寿以后我母亲就躺在了病床上，脑子也糊涂起来。她问我儿子在哪，还说他儿子只有一点大。有天早上她甚至打给我问我能不能来参加她的葬礼。在医院的床单下，她看起来是那样弱小，这和我记忆中坚强的母亲大相径庭。母亲很直率，医生过来问她别的她不记得，却能记住自己的生日，还怪医生不懂历史。她以前写信给我，常说自己孤独，现在不了。那天她很开心，说她的父亲要带她坐船。我试着把她拉回现实，但不奏效。我对她和父辈年轻时的事情知道很少，我想起来我自己的孩子们，在听我讲过去的事情时也觉得不耐烦。我也曾是我母亲的希望，但年轻时我只想自由，现在我的未来就成为孩子们无聊的过去了。对我母亲临终前的探视使我想到，我们都来自过去，生命是一条久远的人性拉起的绳索，从不以一段从摇篮到坟墓的旅程而告终。
请采纳，祝好！
【来自英语牛人团】
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