高英第二册Lesson 5 - The Sad Young Man(4)

第三版《高级英语(第2册)》课文中英文对照

8 Soon they found their imitators among the non-intellectuals. As it became more and more fashionable throughout the country for young persons to defy the law and the conventions and to add their own little matchsticks to the conflagration of "flaming youth", it was Greenwich Village that fanned the flames. "Bohemian" living became a fad. Each town had its "fast" set which prided itself on its unconventionality , although in reality this self-conscious unconventionality was rapidly becoming a standard feature of the country club class -- and its less affluent imitators --throughout the nation. Before long the movement had be-come officially recognized by the pulpit (which denounced it), by the movies and magazines (which made it attractively naughty while pretending to denounce it), and by advertising (which obliquely encouraged it by 'selling everything from cigarettes to automobiles with the implied promise that their owners would be rendered sexually irresistible). Younger brothers and sisters of the war generation, who had been playing with marbles and dolls during the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry, and who had suffered no real disillusionment or sense of loss, now began to imitate the manners of their elders and play with the toys of vulgar rebellion. Their parents were shocked, but before long they found themselves and their friends adopting the new gaiety. By the middle of the decade, the "wild party" had become as

第三版《高级英语(第2册)》课文中英文对照

commonplace a factor in American life as the flapper, the Model T, or the Dutch Colonial home in Floral Heights.

很快，知识分子阶层以外的人便也开始仿效他们了。在全国各地，青年人蔑视法律和一切传统习惯，为“燃烧着的青年”的大火添柴加油越来越成为时髦之举，而煽起这场大火的正是格林威治村。“波希米亚”生活方式已成为人们追求的时尚，每个城镇都有一群“生活放荡者”，他们为自己的反传统行为感到自豪。可实际上，这种有意识的反传统行为正迅速在全国范围内成为乡村俱乐部的富人们以及一些不那么富有的效仿者所共有的一个基本特征。没过多久，这场运动便得到了教会、电影杂志以及广告商们的正式承认：教会方面是通过谴责的方式对它予以承认；电影杂志则是一方面假意对它进行谴责，一方面又将它描写得放荡胡闹而又引人人胜；广告商们更是间接地对这场运动起了推波助澜的作用，因为他们不论是推销香烟还是推销汽车一类的商品时都在暗示说，这种商品将使买主具有不可抗拒的性感。在贝洛森林战役和蒂耶里堡战役正在进行之时，参战青年的小弟弟小妹妹们还在家里玩着弹子游戏和洋娃娃，他们并没有体验到真正的幻想破灭或失落感，可现在竞也学起兄长们的样子，玩起群众性的反传统游戏来了。他们的父母先是大吃一惊，继而便发现自己以及自己的朋友们也都正在

第三版《高级英语(第2册)》课文中英文对照

接受这种时兴的快乐的生活方式了。及至二十年代中期，这种“放荡的狂欢会”便像摩登少女、T型汽车或弗拉洛花园的荷兰式房屋一样，成为美国生活中司空见惯的事物了。

9 Meanwhile, the true intellectuals were far from flattered. What they had wanted was an America more sensitive to art and culture, less avid for material gain, and less susceptible to standardization. Instead, their ideas had been generally ignored, while their behavior had contributed to that standardization by furnishing a pattern of Bohemianism that had become as conventionalized as a Rotary luncheon. As a result, their dissatisfaction with their native country, already acute upon their return from the war, now became even more intolerable. Flaming diatribes poured from their pens denouncing the materialism and what they considered to be the cultural boobery of our society. An important book rather grandiosely entitled Civilization in the United States, written by "thirty intellectuals" under the editorship of J. Harold Stearns, was the rallying point of sensitive persons disgusted with America. The burden of the volume was that the best minds in the country were being ignored, that art was unappreciated, and that big business had corrupted everything. Journalism was a mere adjunct to moneymaking, politics were corrupt and filled with incompetents and crooks, and American family life so devoted to making money and keeping up with the

第三版《高级英语(第2册)》课文中英文对照

Joneses that it had become joyless, patterned, hypocritical, and sexually inadequate. These defects would disappear if only creative art were allowed to show the way to better things, but since the country was blind and deaf to everything save the glint and ring of the dollar, there was little remedy for the sensitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where "they do things better." By the time Civilization in the United States was published (1921), most of its contributors had taken their own advice and were Wing abroad, and many more of the artistic and would-be artistic had followed suit.

其时，真正的知识分子对此现象远远谈不上满意。他们原本所希望的是使美国成为一个对艺术和文化更为敏感，对物质利益不那么贪求，对标准化观念不那么轻易接受的国家。然而，他们的这种思想完全没有受到人们注意，而他们的行为却由于提供了一种已变得如同“扶轮国际午餐会”一样常规化的“波希米亚式”的生活模式，反倒助长了这种标准化观念。结果，他们从战场上归来时本已十分强烈地对自己国家不满的情绪，现在就变得更加忍无可忍了。于是，他们的笔尖下便喷射出愤怒的火花，猛烈抨击着美国社会中的唯物质主义以及他们所称的文化市侩习气。由“三十位知识分子”合撰、哈罗德·斯特恩斯编辑出版的一部颇为庄重地题名为《美国的文明》的重要著作，汇集的便是一些憎恶美国的敏感人士的抨击性言论。这部著作的中心主题是：在美国，杰出人才得不到重视，艺术事业无人理

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