in my day課文翻譯
導語：在甲語和乙語中，“翻”是指的這兩種語言的轉換，即先把一句甲語轉換為一句乙語，然後再把一句乙語轉換為甲語；“譯”是指這兩種語言轉換的過程，把甲語轉換成乙語，在譯成當地語言的文字中，進而明白乙語的含義。以下是in my day課文翻譯的內容，希望能夠幫得到你們！
in my day課文翻譯
母親80歲時狠狠地摔了一跤，這是她最後一次摔得這麼嚴重。此後她的大腦便在時間長河中自在神遊。有時候她去參加了半個世紀前舉行的婚禮或葬禮。有時候又會沉浸在星期天下午為孩子們做晚餐的情景中，而這些孩子們現在已到了兩鬢斑白的年紀。而做這一切的時候她是臥在床上的，但她的思緒卻能穿越時空，在年代久遠的時間當中穿梭，其速度之快，之容易是自然科學無法企及的。
“拉塞爾在哪兒？”有一天我去養老院探望時她問道。
“我就是拉塞爾。”我說。
她凝視著體格高大的我，難以想象她的兒子會長這麼大，很快地否定了我的回答。
“拉塞爾只有這麼大。”她說著，將手抬起約離地兩英尺，手心向下比劃了一下。那時的她還是年輕的村婦，從後院可以看見蘋果園後面暮靄濛濛的弗吉尼亞群山，而我對她來說是一個年紀大得足可以做她父親的陌生人。
一天清晨，她給在紐約的我打電話，“你今天來參加我的葬禮嗎？”她問道。
這個難回答的問題使我睡意全無：
“看在上帝的份上！你在說什麼？這是我所能做出的最佳迴應。
“今天我就要下葬了。
”她輕快地說，就像在宣佈一項重大的社會事件。
“我會再打給你的。”說完我便結束通話了電話。而等我大會取得時候，她已經“正常”了。
儘管她實際上並不正常，當然我們都知道她不正常。
她一直是個體態嬌小的女人—矮個子，小骨架，體格纖細—但是現在，在醫院白色罩單下的她愈發顯得瘦小，令我想到有著大眼睛、目光犀利的玩偶。她身上總有那麼一股強悍勁兒。當她發表見解，迎接挑戰似地生氣地揚起下巴的時候就露出這股勁兒，而他總是那麼熱衷於發表言論。
“我想什麼就說什麼，”她總喜歡炫耀，
“不管他們喜不喜歡。”
“有什麼就說什麼不一定總是上策。”我曾經提醒過她。
“如果他們不喜歡，那就太糟糕了，”這是她慣有的回答，
“因為我就是這樣的人。”
她就是這樣一個令人敬畏的女人，想說什麼就說什麼，想做什麼就做什麼，一定要使對手屈從的女人。她以極大的熱情全身心地投入到生活中，這股熱情使她看上去總是在奔忙。她曾經手持斧子追趕雞群，決意要殺掉一隻做成晚餐；她鋪床時風風火火，擺飯桌時也匆匆忙忙。有一面的感恩節她燙傷得很嚴重。當時，她從地窖裡上來，手裡端著過節要吃的火雞，上樓時絆了一跤，滾下了樓梯，結果火雞裂開了，她跌坐在一堆雞內臟和滾燙的肉汁中。生活試驗場戰鬥，而勝利不屬於那些懶漢、膽小鬼和遊手好閒的人，也不屬於那些唯唯諾諾、不敢直言的人。她一生忙碌奔波。
如今不再忙碌了，一時間我竟不能接受這個不可避免的事實。當我坐在她床邊時，總是有種衝動想把她喚回現實。在我第一次去巴爾的摩醫院探望她時，她問我是誰。
“我是拉塞爾，”我說。
“拉塞爾去西部了。”他提醒我說。
“不，我就在這裡。”
她卻迴應道：“猜猜看今天我從哪兒來？”
“哪裡？”
“從新澤西來。”
“不對。你已經在醫院待了三天了。”我堅持說。
我們的談話就這樣持續到醫生進來對母親進行常規的問診時才結束。她回答得一塌糊塗，要麼答錯，要麼根本不答。接下來卻出人意料。
“你的生日是哪一天？”醫生問道。
“1897年11月5日。”她說。正確，完全正確。
“你是怎麼記得的？”醫生又問。
“因為我是在蓋伊·福克斯紀念日出生的。”
“蓋伊·福克斯”醫生問道，“誰是蓋伊·福克斯？”
她以一首歌謠回答了醫生，這首歌謠這些年來我聽她反覆地吟唱過好多遍。
“請將11月5日銘記於心，火藥陰謀粉碎於那日。我有充分的理由認為，絕不應該忘掉火藥陰謀。”
然後，她便盯著這個年輕醫生，他竟對1605年蓋伊·福克斯妄圖用一桶火藥講詹姆斯一世趕下王位最終失敗的歷史一無所知。
“也許你知道很多醫學知識，但你顯然對歷史一無
所知，”她說。她把醫生的想法完全說出來之後，就在此拋下我們去神遊了。
之後醫生診斷出他患有不可治癒的衰老症或是血管硬化。
我卻認為並不這麼簡單。這是多年來，她把自己用來與生活作鬥爭的強悍逐漸化為一腔怒火，憤怒自己因上了年紀而身體虛弱、生活無趣以及缺少關愛。而今，自從這次重重地摔了一跤後，他彷彿打碎了那根將她禁錮在令他厭倦的生活中的鎖鏈，並重新回到了她被愛被需要的那個年代。
淺淺地，我開始明白了。
三年前，我偶爾從紐約到她居住的巴爾的摩去看她。又一次探望之後，我給她寫了封信，信裡是勸人的套話，鼓勵她樂觀些，多看自己幸福的一面，而不是用她的苦惱為他人徒增負擔。我猜想這封信對她來說無異於是一種威脅，威脅她如果在我探望期間表現的不夠高興，我便不會經常去探望她—孩子們總是能寫出此類信件。這封信是出於一種孩子氣的信仰，認為父母具有永恆的力量；同時也是出於一種天真的想法，我以為衰老與虛弱可以通過意志力去克服，而她也只需幾句鼓舞就可以重新振作起來。
她以一種不同尋常地輕鬆歡快的語氣回了信。我猜想，這是她在努力補救自己做法的一種表示。在提到我的探望時，她寫道：“如果有時候你見到我不快樂，那麼我的確是不快樂的。不過對此誰都無能為力，因為我只是太累了，太孤獨了，我只有睡一覺，把這些全忘了。”
那年她78歲。
三年後的今天，在這重重的一跤後，他已經忘記了那些疲憊和孤獨，重新找回了快樂。我很快便停止了對她的勸說，不再試圖把她拉回到我以為的“現實”中來，並且盡力同她一起踏上那些神奇的旅行，回到那些過去的歲月當中。一天，我來到她床邊時發現他容光煥發。
“今天挺精神的嘛。”我說。
“為什麼不呢？”她反問，
“今天爸爸要帶我坐船去巴爾的摩。”
那時的她還是個小女孩，站在碼頭，和他的父親一起等候著切薩皮克灣的汽輪—她的父親已經去世61年了。那時，威廉·霍華德·塔夫特正在白宮執政，美國還是一個年輕的國家，展現在它面前是一片光明燦爛的前景。
“上帝賦予的綠色星球上最偉大的國家”—若我能進入母親的時間機器，或許就能聽到外祖父這樣說。
關於他的父親也就是我的外祖父，我母親的童年以及她家人，我幾乎一無所知。那個曾經存在並已逝去的世界儘管與我血肉相連，我對它的瞭解不會比對埃及法老的世界瞭解得多。此時，想讓母親告訴我也是在做無用功。她思想的軌跡很少觸及眼前的問話人，即使觸及也是稍縱即逝。
坐在她床邊，始終無法與她溝通。我想著我自己的孩子，想著那阻礙父母與孩子之間互相瞭解的斷層。在自己成為父母之前很少有孩子想知道自己的.父母是什麼樣的，當逐漸增長的年齡激起他們的好奇心時，父母已經不在了，沒有人可以告訴他們什麼。如果父母真的揭開一點帷幕透露一點點的話，也常常是講述過去日子如何艱辛的故事，而結果就是震住孩子們。
我曾為自己這樣做過而後悔。那時20世紀60年代初，我的孩子還小，生活衣食無憂。當我想到他們的童年這樣愜意而我的卻那麼清苦，我就感到煩憂，於是養成了將過去的苦日子搬出來給他們說教的習慣。
“在我們那個年代，晚飯只有通心粉和乳酪就很高興了。”
“我們那時候連電視都沒有。”
“在我們那個年代...”
“在我們那個年代...”
一天晚飯時，兒子的一張不盡如人意的成績單惹怒了我。正當我清清嗓子準備教訓他時，他卻直視著我，臉上帶著難以言喻的屈從的神情，說：“爸爸，請您告訴我，您那時候是怎樣的。”
我對他的行為很生氣，但我更氣憤的是我自己居然變成了一個令人討厭的老古董，專門挑過去的某些事情回憶，這些回憶顯然連孩子們也覺得不可信。他用一種令人不安眼光看待那些曾是我的未來的年代，我的未來便是他的過去，可因為年輕，他對過去不屑一顧。
當我徘徊在母親的床邊，接收著她從遙遠的童年發出的零星訊號。我意識到，同樣的分歧也曾存在於我和她之間。當她年輕時，生活展現在她面前，對於她而言，我就是她的未來，而我卻不以為然。我本能地想要掙脫，想要自由，希望我不再被她的時代所界定。我最後成功地做到了這一點，可從我自己的孩子身上，我看到我那振奮人心的未來正在變成他們乏味的過去。
經歷了母親最後日子裡的這些無望的探望，我後悔，不該那麼輕易拋棄往日的時光。每個人都來自過去，孩子們應當知道他們傳承了什麼，他們應該知道，生命是由過去到未來無數人的生命編織起來的一條人類共同的紐帶，他不可能被簡單定義為一個個體由生到死的生命過程。
in my day課文原文
At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
"Wheres Russell" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.
"Im Russell," I said.
She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.
"Russells only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.
Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral today?" she asked.
It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. "What are you talking about, for Gods sake?" was the best reply I could manage.
"Im being buried today," she declared briskly, as though announcing an important social event.
"Ill phone you back," I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was all right, although she wasnt all right, of course, and we all knew she wasnt.
She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured — but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny. I thought of a doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion, and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.
"I tell people exactly whats on my mind," she had been fond of boasting, "whether they like it or not."
"Its not always good policy to tell people exactly whats on you mind," I used to caution her.
"If they dont like it, thats too bad," was her customary reply, "because thats the way I am."
And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She had hurled herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the run.
She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind. She ran.
But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable. As I sat by her bed, my impulse was to argue her back to reality. On my first visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.
"Russell," I said.
"Russells way out west," she advised me.
"No, Im right here."
"Guess where I came from today?" was her response.
"Where?"
"All the way from New Jersey."
"No. Youve been in the hospital for three days," I insisted.
So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that medical men apply in such cases. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or none at all. Then a surprise.
"When is your birthday?" he asked.
"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.
"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.
"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day."
"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor, "Who is Guy Fawkes?"
She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the years:
"Please to remember the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes failed scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. "You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously dont know any history," she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.
Then doctors diagnosed a hopeless senility or hardening of the arteries. I thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the ferocity with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood.
Three years earlier I had gone down from New York to Baltimore, where she lived, for one of my infrequent visits and, afterwards, had written her with some banal advice to look for the silver lining, to count her blessings instead of burdening others with her miseries. I suppose what it really amounted to was a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to see her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good pep talk to recharge a flagging spirit.
She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: "If I seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but theres really nothing anyone can do about it, because Im just so very tired and lonely that Ill just go to sleep and forget it." She was then seventy-eight.
Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at her bedside she was radiant.
"Feeling good today," I said.
"Why shouldnt I feel good?" she asked. "Papas going to take me up to Baltimore on the boat today."
At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years. William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. "The greatest country on Gods green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step into my mothers time machine.
About her father, my grandfather, my mothers childhood and her people, I knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs. It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely touched present interrogators for more than a moment.
Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and children in general, and about the disconnection between children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.
I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and living the affluent life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.
"In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni and cheese, and we were glad to get it."
"In my day we didnt have any television."
"In my day..."
"In my day..."
At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card, and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of unutterable resignation and said, "Tell me how it was in your day, Dad."
I was angry with him for that, but angrier with myself for having become one of those ancient bores whose highly selective memories of the past become transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about time. He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.
As I hovered over my mothers bed listening for some signals from her childhood, I realized that this same dispute had existed between her and me. When she was young, with life ahead of her, I had been her future and resented it. Instinctively, I wanted to break free, and cease being a creature defined by her time. Well, I had finally done that, and then with my own children I had seen my exciting future becoming their boring past.
These hopeless end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.
