unitaviewofmountains课文翻译综合教程四

1、Unit 4A View of MountainsJonathan Schell1. On August 9, 1945, the day the atomic bombwas dropped on Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata, a photographer serving in the Japanese army, was dispatched to the destroyed city. The hundred or so pictures he took the next day constitutethe fullest photographic record

2、of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the camera s lens in thefirst day after the bombing. It was therefore left to Yamahata to record, methodically and, as it happens, with a great and simple artistry- theeffects on a humanpopulation of a

3、nuclear weapononly hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahata s pictures show corpses charred in the peculiar wayin which a nuclear fireball charsits victims. They have been burned by light-tech nically speaking, by the“thermal pulse " 一 and their bodies areoften branded with the patterns o

4、f their clothes, whose colors absorb lightin different degrees. One photograph shows a horse twisted under the cart ithad been pulling. Another shows a heap of something that once had been a human being hanging over a ledge into a ditch. A third shows a girl who has somehow survived unwounded standi

5、ng in the open mouth of a bomb shelter and smiling an unearthly smile, shocking us with the sight of ordinary life,whichotherwise seems to have been left behind for good in the scenes we are witnessing. Stretching into the distance on all sides are fields of rubbledotted with fires, and, in the back

6、ground, a view of mountains. We can seethe mountains because the city is gone. That absence, even more than wreckage,contains the heart of the matter. The true measure of the event lies not inwhat remains but in all that has disappeared.2. It took a few seconds for the United States to destroy Nagas

7、aki with theworld s second atomic bomb, but it took fifty years for Yamahata s picturesof the event to makethe journey back from Nagasaki to the United States. Theywere shown for the first time in this country in 1995, at the InternationalCenter for Photography in New York. Arriving a half-century l

8、ate, they arestill news. The photographs display the fate of a single city, but their meaningis universal, since, in our age of nuclear arms, what happened to Nagasakican, in a flash, happen to any city in the world. In the photographs, Nagasaki comes into its own. Nagasaki has always been in the sh

9、adow of Hiroshima, asif the human imagination had stumbled to exhaustion in the wreckage of thefirst ruined city without reaching even the outskirts of the second. Yet thebombing of Nagasaki is in certain respects the fitter symbol of the nucleardanger that still hangs over us. It is proof that, hav

10、ing once used nuclearweapons, wecan use them again. It introduces the idea of a series the series that, with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons remaining in existence, continues to threaten everyone. (The unpredictable, open-ended character ofthe series is suggested by the fact that the second bom

11、b originally was tobe dropped on the city of Kokura, which was spared Nagasaki s fate only because bad weather protected it from view.) Each picture therefore seemednot so muchan image of something that happened a half-century ago as a window cut intothe wall of the photography center showing what s

12、oon could easily happen toNewYork. Wherever the exhibit might travel, moreover, the view of threatened future from these “windows” would be roughly accurate, since, although every intact city is different from every other, all cities that suffer nuclear destruction will look much the same.3. Yamahat

13、a s pictures afford a glimpse of the end of the world. Yet in ourday, when the challenge is not just to apprehend the nuclear peril but to seize a God-given opportunity to dispel it once and for all, we seem to need, inaddition, some other picture to counterpoise against ruined Nagasaki oneshowing n

14、ot what we would lose through our failure but what we would gain byour success. What might that picture be, though? How do you show the opposite of the end of the world? Should it be Nagasaki, intact and alive, before thebombwas dropped or perhaps the spared city of Kokura? Should it be a child, or

15、a mother and child, or perhaps the Earth itself? None seems adequate, forhow can we give a definite form to that which can assumeinfinite forms, namely, the lives of all human beings, now and in the future? Imagination, faced with either the end of the world or its continuation, must remain incomple

16、te. Only action can satisfy.4. Once, the arrival in the world of new generations took care of itself.Now, they can come into existence only if, through an act of faith and collective will, we ensure their right to exist. Performing that act is the greatest of the responsibilities of the generations

17、now alive. The gift oftime is the gift of life, forever, if we know how to receive it.望远山乔纳森谢尔1 1945 年 8 月 9 日，一颗原子弹投向长崎。当天，在日军中服役的摄影师山端庸介被派遣到这座已遭毁灭的城市。他第二天拍摄的百来张照片可谓现存最完整的核毁灭威力的影像记录。此前3 天也遭遇毁灭的广岛在轰炸的第一天基本没被相机拍摄下来。山端碰巧有条不紊地用伟大而简洁的艺术手法记录下了核武器爆炸后仅仅数小时对人类的影响。山端的部分照片展示了被核火球以其独特的方式烧焦了的尸体。他们是被光烧焦的用专业术语来说，

18、他们是被“热脉冲”烧焦的尸体通常都烙上了衣服的图案，因为不同的颜色吸光程度不同。一张照片拍下了一匹身形扭曲的马儿蜷缩在它拉的大车下面。另一张显示了一堆悬挂在突出物上面伸进沟渠的东西，看得出这也是一个人的遗骸。第 3 张照片中有个小女孩站在防空洞入口处，不知何故她虽经历劫难却毫发无伤。她脸上露出诡异的笑容，令人震撼。如果不是这张照片，在我们现在见证的场景中，原先的日常生活已一去不返。大片茫茫的废墟瓦砾一直伸向远方，残火零落其间，而这片景象的背景则是绵延的大山。我们能遥望远山，正因为整个城市已化为焦土。城市的灰飞烟灭比断壁残垣更能说明问题的核心本质。这一事件的真正效应不在于城市还剩下什么，而在于消

19、失的一切。2 美国使用世界上第 2 颗原子弹将长崎夷为平地仅仅用了几秒钟，然而，山端拍摄这一事件的照片从长崎辗转回到美国却用了 50 年之久。照片第一次在美国展出是在 1995 年，展出地点是纽约国际摄影中心。迟到了半个世纪，这些照片仍然带有新闻效应。这些照片展示的是单个城市的命运，但却带有普遍意义，因为在我们这个核武器时代，发生在长崎身上的灾难也可能在转瞬之间发生在世界任何一个城市身上。通过这些照片，长崎为自己正名。它一直存在于广岛的阴影中，因为似乎人类的想象力到达广岛这第一个被毁灭的城市的废墟之后便裹足不前、消失殆尽了，以至于连长崎的边缘都到达不了。然而，长崎的灭顶之灾在某些方面恰恰是笼罩在我们头顶上的核威胁阴云的更有力的象征。它证明人类一旦大开核武器杀戒，就会重蹈覆辙。它带来了系列破坏的概念，就是说，有成千上万的核武器持续存在，我们每个人都有可能受到威胁。 （ 第 2 颗原子弹原定是投向小仓的，只是后来因为天气恶劣，空