2015年翻译中级笔译辅导：莎士比亚

　　莎士比亚

　　对于任何英国人来说，谁是世界上最伟大的诗人和戏剧家似乎不存在任何争议，因为只有一个人能当之无愧：那就是莎士比亚。对于这位我们国家的伟大作家，每一个英国人都或多或少知道些关于他的事情。我们大家都是用出自啥事比的作品中的词语、短语和句子，这已经成为了说英语的人们的一部分共享的财富了。大多数时候我们可能没有意识到我们所使用的语言的来源，这就像是去一场《哈姆雷特》演出的老太太抱怨，“这里边怎么充满着尽所周知的俗语和?啊?”

　　相对于其他任何作家而言，莎士比亚也许是把丰富多彩的英语言运用地最好的一个，我们平常使用英语的词汇量在5000个左右，而在莎士比亚的作品中则有25000词汇量。对于任何外国人来说(甚至是英国人!)，也许学习丰富多彩的英语的 最好办法就是学习莎士比亚使用英语的方式。尽管距莎士比亚年代至今，英语使用的很多方面和很多英语词汇的含义都发生了改变，这种学习过程还是很值得的。(当然，不推荐初学者这样做)

　　让人有点难以理解的是，相对于其作品而言，我们对这位伟大的英国作家生平的了解竟然会这么少。我们知道莎士比亚是在1564年在SOA出生的，并于1616年在此地去世。我们几乎可以断定他参加了当地的文法学校，但是还是没有百分百的把握。我们知道他在1582年资SOA娶了AH，并于她有了三个孩子，一个男孩和两个女孩。我们还知道在伦敦创作占据了他生命大量时间，但是我们所知道的也只有这么多了。

　　当然，关于莎翁生平的了解重要的并不是他生活中的细节，而是他的作品，即他的戏剧和诗。很多年以来，一些学者老是向我们所知的少量的莎翁的生平事迹追加一些细节，另外一些批评家则把莎翁的戏剧理论化，以至于有时候，莎翁的诗歌似乎都要被这些大量评论给淹没了。

　　幸运的是，这没有可能发生。莎翁的诗歌和莎翁笔下的人物(MOHF和其他所有人物)长久以来就不仅仅只是受英国人的追捧，同时也受全世界各地的文学爱好者的追捧，而且在那些学者和评论家以及他们的作品被世人遗忘以后，更会如此。

　　翻译：

　　Shakespeare

　　For any Englishman, there can never be any discussion as to who is the world’s greatest poet and greatest dramatist. Only one name can possibly suggest itself to him: that of William Shakespeare. Every Englishman has some knowledge, however slight， of the work of our greatest writer. All of us use words, phrases and quotations from Shakespeare’s writings that have become part of the common property of the English-speaking people. Most of the time we are probably unaware of the source of the words we use, rather like the old lady who was taken to see a performance of Hamlet and complained that “it was full of well-known proverbs and quotations.”

　　Shakespeare, more perhaps than any other writer, made full use of the great sources of the English language. Most of us use about five thousand words in our normal employment of English; Shakespeare in his works used about twenty-five thousand! There is probably no better way for a foreigner (or an Englishman!) to appreciate the richness and variety of the English language than by studying the various ways in which Shakespeare used it. Such a study is well worth the effort (it is not, of course, recommended to beginners), even though some aspects of English usage, and the meaning of many words, have changed since Shakespeare’s day.

　　It is paradoxical that we should know comparatively little about the life of the greatest English author. We know that Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, and that he died there in 1616. He almost certainly attended the Grammar School in the town, but of this we cannot be sure. We know he was married there in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and that he had three children, a boy and two girls. We know that he spent much of his life in London writing his masterpieces. But this is almost all that we do know.

　　However, what is important about Shakespeare’s life is not its incidental details but its products, the plays and the poems. For many years scholars have been trying to add a few facts about Shakespeare’s life to the small number we already possess and for an equally long time critics have been theorizing about the plays. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that the poetry of Shakespeare will disappear beneath the great mass of comment that has been written upon it. Fortunately this is not likely to happen. Shakespeare’s poetry and Shakespeare’s people have long delighted not just the English but lovers of literature everywhere, and will continue to do so after the scholars and commentators and all their works have been forgotten.