(完整版)Unit7TheMonster课文翻译综合教程四

2021年1月21日发(作者：俞允文)

Unit 7

The Monster
Deems Taylor

1





He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body ― a sickly little
man.
His
nerves
were
bad.
He
had
skin
trouble.
It
was
agony
for
him
to
wear
anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
2





He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at
people, except in relation to himself. He believed himself to be one of the greatest
dramatists
in
the
world,
one
of
the
greatest
thinkers,
and
one
of
the
greatest
composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled
into
one.
He
was
one
of
the
most
exhausting
conversationalists
that
ever
lived.
Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether
he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What
he
thought and what
he
did.
3





He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from
anyone,
on
the
most
trivial
point,
was
enough
to
set
him
off
on
a
harangue
that
might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with
such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would
agree with him, for the sake of peace.
4





It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and
fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about
almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and
music;
and
in
support
of
these
theories
he
wrote
pamphlets,
letters,
books
...
thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only
wrote these things, and published them ― usually at somebody else’s expense ― but
he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends, and his family.
5





He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts,
he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the
East
to
end
his
days
as
a
Buddhist
monk.
Ten
minutes
later,
when
something
pleased him he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and
down off the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of
a pet dog, and could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a
Roman emperor shudder.
6





He
was almost
innocent
of
any
sense
of
responsibility.
He
was convinced
that

the
world
owed
him
a
living.
In
support
of
this
belief,
he
borrowed
money
from
everybody who was good for a loan ― men, women, friends, or strange
rs. He wrote
begging
letters
by
the
score,
sometimes
groveling
without
shame,
at
others
loftily
offering
his
intended
benefactor
the
privilege
of
contributing
to
his
support,
and
being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor.
7





What money he could lay his hand on he spent like an Indian rajah. No one will
ever know ― certainly he never knows ― how much money he owed. We do know
that his greatest benefactor gave him $$6,000 to pay the most pressing of his debts
in one city, and a year later had to give him $$16,000 to enable him to live in another
city without being thrown into jail for debt.
8





He
was
equally
unscrupulous
in
other
ways.
An
endless
procession
of
women
marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgiving
his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and
admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to
leave
her
first
husband
he
was
writing
to
a
friend
to
inquire
whether
he
could
suggest
some wealthy woman ― any wealthy woman ― whom he could marry for
her money.
9





He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who disagreed with
him
about
the
weather.
He
would
pull
endless
wires
in
order
to
meet
some
man
who admired his work
and was able and anxious to be of use to him ― and would
proceed to make a mortal enemy of him with some idiotic and wholly uncalled-for
exhibition
of
arrogance
and
bad manners.
A
character
in
one
of
his
operas was a
caricature
of
one
of
the
most
powerful
music
critics
of
his
day.
Not
content
with
burlesquing him, he invited the critic to his house and read him the libretto aloud in
front of his friends.
10





The
name
of
this
monster
was
Richard
Wagner.
Everything
I
have
said
about
him you can find on record
― in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of
people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography.
And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least.

11





Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all
the time, the joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a
great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now,
the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living. What if he did talk about
himself all the time? If he talked about himself for twenty-four hours every day for
the span of his life he would not have uttered half the number of words that other