2014年考研英語翻譯

Part C

Directions:

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. (46)It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.

Beethoven’s importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention. (47)By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.

This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven’s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics. (48)Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extremeintensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society. (49)Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.

Beethoven’s music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Erotica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word. (50)One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

答案解析

Part C

46. 這就是為什么當我們嘗試用語言來描述音樂時，我們能做的只是清楚地表達對音樂的反應，卻不能領會音樂的精髓。

47. 據(jù)大家所說，貝多芬是個思想自由而且有勇氣的人，而且我發(fā)現(xiàn)勇氣是理解他作品的必要因素，更不用說演奏他的作品了。

48. 貝多芬表演時習慣把音量提至頂點，然后驟然轉到柔和的節(jié)拍，這是他前輩的音樂家很少有的習慣。

49. 尤其重要的是他對自由的看法，在他看來這和個人的權利和責任有關，而且還他倡導思想自由和個人言論自由。

50. 人們會將貝多芬的很多作品解釋為——痛苦是難免的，但是與痛苦抗爭的勇氣則是生命意義的所在。