英汉英语美文：A Tranquil Star 恬静的星辰

once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far from here, lived a peaceful star, which moved peacefully in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of peaceful planets about which we have not a thing to report. this star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. we have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning i had a hot bath, everest is enormous. it’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

很久以前，在离这里相当遥远的宇宙里某个地方，住着一颗平静的星星，在浩瀚的天空静静地行走着。这颗星星被一群我们叫不出名的行星包围着。它很大，也很热，还非常重：这给记者的报道工作开始造成了麻烦。我们用“遥远，”“很大，”“很热，”“难以计算，”形容过下面的事物：澳大利亚很遥远，大象很大，房子更大，今天早晨我冲了个很热的热水澡，喜马拉雅山庞大无比。显然我们使用的词典里的词语远远满足不了我们想形容的事物。

if this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, of impoverishing the narrative. for a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. it’s a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and as long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it’s human. it doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us. until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. the sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting “very” numerous objects, and, with little imagination, “million” was coined. a while later, with even less imagination, “billion” was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.

如果必须要写这篇故事，我们必须要有勇气剔除易于激发我们想入非非的所有形容词：这些词会使叙述贫瘠无力，起到相反的效果。因为我们人类的语言不适合论述星辰，否则会显得可笑，就如同某些人想用羽毛去犁地一样。语言和我们与生俱来的，适合描述和我们人类一般大小和持久存在的物体；它拥有我们的四维，它有人性。它没有逾越我们感知的事物告知我们事情。就在两三百年前，小指的是疥疮上的螨虫；没有更小的东西了，结果呢，也就没有形容词来形容小了。大海和天空都很大，事实上，它们同样大小；火是热的。到了十九世纪，人们才感到有必要将 “很”这一词引进到日常语言中来，以便计算无数的物体，时机一到，“百万”这一词便没费吹灰之力，应运而生了。不久，也没费多大的劲，“十亿”一词也被造了出来，也没有介意这个词的精确含义，因为这个词今天在不同的国家里有着不同的价值取向。

not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times as high as a high tower is a very high tower? nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like “immense,” “colossal,” “extraordinary”: to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is “many” times as big and heavy as our earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. there is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten, but then this would not be a story in the sense in which it wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.

对于形容词最高级形式，人们也没有走得太远：多高的塔算非常高的塔呢？像“巨大的，”“庞大的，”“非凡的，”这些形容词，我们也不能希望从伪装的最高级性用词那里得到帮助：叙述我们想在这里叙述的事情，这些形容词很不适宜，我们不抱有希望，因为星星从开天辟地起就比太阳大十倍，而太阳比我们居住的地球大并且重“许多”倍，其体积远远超出了地球，致使我们想破了脑袋也描述不出它的体积到底有多大。诚然，有许多娴雅和优美的语言，远比十个字母表的力量要大得多，但在某种意义上说这不是人们想要讲述的故事；就是说，寓言可以产生共鸣，我们每个人在读寓言的时候都能够隐约看到他自己的和人类的影子。