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168楼
发表于 2012-4-7 20:44
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test:“若拿纳博科夫与辜鸿铭相比,何人的英文水准较高?”
The comparison would not be entirely meaningful, because 辜鸿铭's English was on a much lower plane than Nabokov's.
Take a look at 辜鸿铭's famous article "Uncivilized United States" and see why this is so.
http://www.qingchao.net/lishi/manyimeidi/
辜鸿铭的整篇文章语言上没有闪光点。有时用词啰嗦:
The British people as a nation is a nation with a civilization
有时文法不通:
The great Soldier-Gentleman of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after he had, with his sharp sword, cast the "devil of cruelty" out of old feudal Japan——just in the same way as the British "Unknown Warrior," whom they lately buried in Westminster Abbey in England, has now cast the "devil" called Furor Teutonicus out of feudal Germany——was on his death-bed, he sent for his grandson Iemitsu and said to him, "You are the man who one day will have to govern an empire...."
很明显,这儿应为"When the great Soldier-Gentleman of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, ... was on his death-bed, he sent for his grandson Iemitsu and ..."
有时莫名其妙:
By a real poem I mean a poem which is all poetry and nothing but poetry;
有时纯粹无知:
Indeed, as I have said, the only poem I know written by an American poet which can truly be called a real poem and can therefore become the spiritual asset of a nation, is Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee."
母语是西班牙语的George Santayana写的下面一段英文,与辜鸿铭的比较,高下立判:
"Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him." |
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