读《江城》学点英文

RiverTown读书笔记...

十月读书群会读何伟的中国三部曲，因为十一我要去土耳其玩，提前把这River Town读完了，写一篇读书笔记分享给大家。

1. 有关作者Peter Hessler （何伟）

1969年出生的美国作家，记者
2000年加入The New Yorker, 2000-2007年负责报道中国
出了4本书，三部曲：River Town (2001), Oracle Bones (2006), Country Driving (2011)。2013年出版了文集Strange Stones.

2. River Town 《江城》如作者在Author’s Note中所说：

This isn’t a book about China. It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time, and my hope has been to capture the richness of both the moment and the place.

Rather than aninquiry into a source or a destination, this is an account of what it was to spend two years in the heart of the great river’s current.

注意这里的inquiry是“offical investigation”的意思。

我们就当作是看一个老外在1996-1998年的中国游记就好了。因为内容简单，语言也是plain English，我们可以读的快一些 — 甚至不用读！利用跑步走路等车上厕所的时间听一听audiobook就好了（听完回头再翻一下书）。

在这个过程中我们可以学习一些于中国有关的事物的表达，学习一下作者的写作手法，顺便积累一些单词 — 尤其是那些“很容易读懂，但是自己很难写出来”的地方。

3. 学点英文例如刚开始就有一段讲到了长征：

It was the sixtieth anniversary of the Long March, the six-thousand-mile trek that the Red Army had made during the most critical part of the civil war, when the Kuomintang was on the verge ofdestroying Mao Zedong’s forces. Against all oddsthe Communists had marched to safety, over the mountains and deserts of western China, and from Yan’an they had steadily built their strength until at last their revolution carried the nation, driving the Kuomintang to Taiwan.

这段话读起来很容易，但是要让我们写的话恐怕就要啰嗦很多。这里的trek就把“跋山涉水”那个场面体现了出来，随后是两个地道的表达on the verge of, against all odds。最后的两个小词和carry和drive我们可能就想不到可以这样用。

我们在读书学英文的时候要想这么几个问题：

这段话写得好不好？好在哪？
如果让我写的话我会怎么写？
这段话中有没有值得“偷”的地方来让自己的表达更地道？
这段话中有没有值得“占为己有”的地方，以后写到xxx话题的时候可以用上？

再来看这段写军训的：

At the start of the year, the freshmen had military training. Each class formed a regiment, boys and girls together, and People’s Liberation Army soldiers came to teach them how to salute, goose-step, execute turns, and stand at attention. During their military training they also learned songs — that seemed to be a way to make Communism fun. Our students were always singing patriotic songs for one organization or another.

这里我们就学到了“踢正步” (goose-step) 和 “站军姿” (stand at attention) 的地道表达。

此外我们可以学到一些翻译，看看他是怎么介绍我们中国的，例如：

二胡

Erhu means “two strings”—that is all. It is a simple name for a simple musical instrument: a cylindrical wooden sound box covered by python skin and topped by an upright handle with two strings stretched taut along its length. It looks something like a crude two-stringed violin. But that pair of strings has a rich soulful range and the erhu, played well, makes haunting music.

鲁迅先生的话：“记性好的，大概都被厚重的苦痛压死了；只有记性坏的，适者生存，还能欣然活着。”

It was similar to what the Chinese writer Lu Xun once remarked: “People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on.

我们能从他的视角学到一些好玩的地方，例如对“读莎士比亚学语法”，这位在普林斯顿英语专业，毕业后在哈佛读语言和文学的他这样说：

It was recommended that we use literature to introduce important grammatical points, but this was an idea I didn’t like. I knew that I was an uninspired teacher of the language’s technical aspects, and I also knew that Shakespeare is an even worse grammar instructor than me. And I had studied literature for too long to use it as a segue to the present perfect tense.

想通过读莎士比亚来学习语法的朋友可能会失望了，真的不适合。他那时候的语法和我们现在的语法还是有一些不同的，他的作品中出现过以下这样的表达：