阮一峰的网络日志

索尔仁尼琴在哈佛大学的演讲

前不久，有网友在“读书公园”论坛上，贴出了诺贝尔文学奖得主索尔仁尼琴1978年在哈佛大学毕业典礼上的演讲。

那篇演讲是关于西方国家的社会问题的。我觉得讲得很好。就把有些段落译成了中文。

下面就是我的译文，英语全文请看这里。

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Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness… however… the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression…”

每个公民都有权获得必要的自由和物质，它们至少在数量和质量上应该能够保证理论上获得幸福的可能。......但是......追求更多物质、更好生活的欲望和斗争，在许多西方人脸上都打下了焦虑、甚至消沉的烙印。

Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense.

除了物质以外的其他东西，包括人类那些微妙和高尚的天性，都被排斥在政治和社会系统以外，就好像人类生活中从来不存在这些非物质的东西一样。

[in addition to the right to know] people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

除了知情权以外，人也应该拥有不知情权，后者的价值要大得多。它意味着我们高尚的灵魂不必被那些废话和空谈充斥。过度的信息对于一个过着充实生活的人来说，是一种不必要的负担。

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

我在共产主义社会中度过了一生，我可以告诉你们，没有任何客观公正的法律规范的社会是一个十分可怕的社会。但是，一个只有法律规范的社会对人类来说，也同样可怕。

(in a legalistic society) If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint.

在一个法权社会中，如果一个人是合法的，那么其他人对他就不能有更多的要求了，谈论他是否全部合理就没有意义了。在法权之外的自我控制和自我牺牲就变得很荒唐了。我们可能永远都看不到这种人的出现。

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot [be] unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.”“…we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

人道主义观点认为人应该生而快乐，如果这是正确的，那么人就不是为了死亡而出生的。因为我们注定要死，所以我们活在地球上的任务就一定是去寻找更多的精神追求。这种追求不可能是日常生活中无节制的享乐，也不可能是去设法追求物质财富并愉快的享受它们。它一定表现为完成某种永久和重要的使命，只有这样，一个人的生命才能变成某种精神成长的经历，才能在死去时成为一个比出生时更好的人类......我们一定要有一种更宽广的眼界，追求一种生命的新高度，在那里我们的物质生活不会像中世纪那样贫乏，但是更重要的是，在那里我们的精神生活不会像现代社会中那样受践踏。

Posted by Ruan YiFeng at June 27, 2005 07:06 AM | 返回首页