Unit-14-Homeless课文翻译综合教程三

1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上专心-专注-专业专心-专注-专业精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上专心-专注-专业Unit 14 HomelessAnna Quindlen1 Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januarys ago. I was doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just passing through, alt

2、hough shed been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.2 They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eye

3、s brown-red in the flashbulbs light. They were pictures of a house. It was like a thousand houses in a hundred towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of backyard. The house was y

4、ellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need for discussion. I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had m

5、ade me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.3 Ive never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and Ive always been a person with an overa

6、ctive sense of place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. So it is natural that the thing that seems most wrong with the world to me right now is that there are so many people with no homes. Im not simply talking about shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day or a mailing address to wh

7、ich the welfare people can send the check although I know that all these are important for survival. Im talking about a home, about precisely those kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on samplers over the years.4 Home is where the heart is. Theres no place like it.

8、I love my home with a ferocity totally out of proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about: the hot-water heater, the plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is precisely those dumb things that make it what it is a place of

9、certainty, stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than that? That is everything.5 Yet it is something that we have been edging away from gradually during my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. There

10、 was a time when where you lived often was where you worked and where you grew the food you ate and even where you were buried. When that era passed, where you lived at least was where your parents had lived and where you would live with your children when you became enfeebled. Then, suddenly where

11、you lived was where you lived for three years, until you could move on to something else and something else again.6 And so we have come to something else again, to children who do not understand what it means to go to their rooms because they have never had a room, to men and women whose fantasy is

12、a wall they can paint a color of their own choosing, to old people reduced to sitting on molded plastic chairs, their skin blue-white in the lights of a bus station, who pull pictures of houses out of their bags. Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate.7 People find it curious that

13、those without homes would rather sleep sitting up on benches or huddled in doorways than go to shelters. Certainly some prefer to do so because they are emotionally ill, because they have been locked in before and they are damned if they will be locked in again. Others are afraid of the violence and

14、 trouble they may find there. But some seem to want something that is not available in shelters, and they will not compromise, not for a cot, or oatmeal, or a shower with special soap that kills the bugs. “One room,” a woman with a baby who was sleeping on her sisters floor, once told me, “painted b

15、lue.” That was the crux of it; not size or location, but pride of ownership. Painted blue.8 This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in

16、the bus terminal the problem, that is. It has been customary to take peoples pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box o

17、r the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.9 Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not the homeless. They are people who have no h

18、omes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything. 无家可归安娜昆德伦1.她的名字叫安，几年前的一月份，我们在港务局汽车站邂逅。那时我正在做一个关于流浪者的专题。她说我采访她纯粹是浪费时间；因为她只是路过这个汽车终点站而已，虽然她已经在这里待了不止两周了。为了证明这是事实，她翻遍一个大购物袋，找出一个牛皮纸信封，最后展开了一张打印纸，取出了一些照片。2.这些照片上没有亲友，甚至没有在闪光灯下眼睛变成棕红色的狗或猫。照片上是一栋房子。这房子

19、跟很多小镇上的千万栋房子没什么两样，既不在郊区，也不在城市，而是介于两者之间，墙板是铝制板的，四周围着铁丝网，狭窄的车道通向仅容一车的车库，还有一片后院。房子是黄色的。我翻看照片背面，想找到拍摄日期或姓名，但什么都没有。无需讨论，我已知道她想表达什么，因为这也是我经常感同身受的。她是想告诉我，她不是四处漂泊、孑然一身、无名无姓的人，虽然她的大包小包和她那件黑垢模糊了褶子的雨衣让我认为她是。她拥有过一栋房子，至少从前曾经拥有过。房子里面有窗帘，有沙发，有炉子，还有隔热垫。你住的地方代表着你。她是有名有姓有家的人。3.我从来都不擅长高屋建瓴地看问题、把握全局，我只是遗传了爱尔兰祖父的基因，一直是一

20、个执着于乡土观念的人。所以很自然的，对我而言，目前世界上最糟糕的事情莫过于有那么多人流离失所。我指的不只是有一片遮风挡雨的屋檐，或者一日保证三餐，也不是一个可以收到福利救济支票的邮政地址尽管我知道这一切对生存非常重要。我说的是一个家，说的是许多年来浓缩在十字绣和法式线结绣品样板上的种种感觉。4.心之所在即为家。没有任何一个地方可与家相比。我热爱我的家，完全无关乎外观或位置。我爱家里那些看似蠢笨的一切：热水器，塑料碗碟架，头上那片偶尔漏雨的屋顶。然而，恰恰是那些蠢笨之物使家成为家。对我和家人来说，家代表着安定祥和、不受打扰的地方。家就是我所生活的地方。对于一个地方而言，还有比这更精彩的溢美之辞吗？这就是一切啊。5.然而在我的一生，以及我父母和祖父母的一生中，家却与我们渐行渐远。曾几何时，我们生活的地方往往是我们工作的地方，是我们种植蔬果谷物的地方，甚至还是我们离开尘世后的葬身之所。那个时代过去后，你居住的地方至少也是父母曾住过的地方，也是你年老体衰时与孩子共同生活的地方。然后，突然之间，你住的地方变成了你会住三年的地方，直到你迁往别处，然后再去另一个地方。6.所以我们面临着另