uki是什么loving and hating new york 课文和翻译

2021年1月21日发(作者：英文译中文)
Loving and Hating New York

Thomas Griffith

1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-
shirts with a heart design proclaiming ―I
love New York,‖ are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York
City used to leave
the bragging to others, for bragging was ―bush‖ Being unique, the biggest and
the best, New York didn’t have to assert how special it was.

2 It isn’t the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the styles and sets the
trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with American taste as often as it is out of step with
American politics. Once it was the nation’s undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted
the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York
even prides itself on being a holdout from prevailing American trends, a place to escape Common
Denominator Land.

3 Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other cities have buildings
more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past twenty years. The giant
Manhattan television studios where Toscanini’s NBC Symphony once played now sit empty most
of the time, while sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live,
preempt the airways from California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood.
Vegas casinos routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspot in
Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the most
enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.
4 New York was never a good convention city
–
being regarded as unfriendly, unsafe,
overcrowded, and expensive
–
but it is making something of a comeback as a tourist attraction.
Even so, most Americans would probably rate New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington, or
Disneyland higher. A dozen other cities, including my hometown of Seattle, are widely considered
better cities to live in.

5 Why, then, do many Europeans call New York their favorite city? They take more readily than
do most Americans to its cosmopolitan complexities, its surviving, aloof, European standards, its
alien mixtures. Perhaps some of these Europeans are reassured by the sight, on the twin fashion
avenues of Madison and Fifth, of all those familiar international names
–
the jewelers, shoe stores,
and designer shops that exist to flatter and bilk the frivolous rich. But no; what most excites
Europeans is the city’s charged , nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism .

6 New York is about energy, contention, and striving. And since it contains its share of articulate
losers, it is also about mockery, the put-
down , the loser’s shrug (―whaddya gonna do?‖). It is
about constant battles for subway seats, for a cabdriver’s or a clerk’s

or a waiter’s attention, for a
foothold , a chance, a better address, a larger billing. To win in New York is to be uneasy; to lose
is to live in jostling proximity to the frustrated majority.

7 New York was never Mecca to me. And though I have lived there more than half my life, you
won’t find me wearing an ―I Love New York‖ T
-
shirt. But all in all, I can’, t think of many places
in the world I’d rather li, ve. It’, s not easy to define why.

8 Nature’s pleasures are much qualified in N, ew York, . You nev
er see a star-
filled sky; the city’s
bright glow arrogantly obscures the heavens. Sunsets can be spectacular: oranges and reds tinting
the sky over the Jersey meadows and gaudily reflected in a thousand windows on Manhattan’s
jagged skyline. Nature constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees
gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes. Central Park, which Frederick
Law Olmsted designed as lungs for the city’s poor, is in places grassless and filled with trash
, no
longer pristine yet lively with the noise and vivacity of people, largely youths, blacks, and Puerto
Ricans, enjoying themselves. On park benches sit older people, mostly white, looking displaced. It
has become less a tranquil park than an untidy carnival.
9 Not the glamour of the city, which never beckoned to me from a distance, but its opportunity
–

to practice the kind of journalism I wanted
–

drew me to New York. I wasn’t even sure how I’d
measure up against others who had been more soundly educated at Ivy League schools, or whether
I could compete against that tough local breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so highly
motivated and single-
minded, such as Alfred Kazin, who for diversion (for heaven’t sake!) played
Bach’s Unaccompanied Parti
tas on the violin.
10 A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal and marketable of one’s talents, still
draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always, the company of others fleeing
something constricting where they came from. Together these young share a freedom, a
community of inexpensive amusements, a casual living, and some rough times. It can’t be the
living conditions that appeal, for only fond memory will forgive the inconvenience, risk, and
squalor. Commercial Broadway may be inaccessible to them, but there is off- Broadway, and then
off-off-
Broadway. If painters disdain Madison Avenue’s plush art galleries, Madison Avenue
dealers set up shop in the grubby precincts of Soho. But the purity of a bohemian dedication can
be exaggerated. The artistic young inhabit the same Greenwich Village and its fringes in which the
experimentalists in the arts lived during the Depression, united by a world against them. But the
present generation is enough of a subculture to be a source of profitable boutiques and
coffeehouses. And it is not all that estranged.
11 Manhattan is an island cut off in most respects from mainland America, but in two areas it
remains dominant. It is the banking and the communications headquarters for America. In both
these roles it ratifies more than it creates. Wall Street will advance the millions to make a
Hollywood movie only if convinced that a bestselling title or a star name will ensure its success.
The networks’ news centers are here, and the largest book pu
blishers, and the biggest magazines
–

and therefore the largest body of critics to appraise the films, the plays, the music, the books that
others have created. New York is a judging town, and often invokes standards that the rest of the
country deplores o
r ignores. A market for knowingness exists in New York that doesn’t exist for
knowledge.
12 The ad agencies are all here too, testing the markets and devising the catchy jingles that will
move millions from McDonald’s to Burger king, so that the ad agency’s ―creative director‖ can
lunch instead in Manhattan’s expense
-account French restaurants. The bankers and the admen.
The marketing specialists and a thousand well-
paid ancillary service people, really set the city’s
brittle tone
—
catering to a wide American public whose numbers must be respected but whose
tastes do not have to shared. The condescending view from the fiftieth floor of the city’s crowds
below cuts these people off from humanity. So does an attitude which sees the public only in
terms of large, malleable numbers
—
as impersonally as does the clattering subway turnstile
beneath the office towers.
13 I am surprised by the lack of cynicism, particularly among the younger ones, of those who
work in such fields. The television generation grew up in the insistent presence of hype, delights
in much of it, and has no scruples about practicing it. Men and woman do their jobs professionally,
and, like the pilots who from great heights bombed Hanoi, seem unmarked by it. They lead their
real lives elsewhere, in the Village bars they are indistinguishable in dress or behavior from
would-
be artists, actors, and writers. The boundaries of ―art for art’s sake‖ aren’t so rigid anymore;
art itself is less sharply defined, and those whose paintings don’t sell do il
lustrations; those who
can’ get acting jobs do commercials; those who are writing ambitious novels sustain themselves
on the magazines. Besides, serious art often feeds in the popular these days, changing it with fond
irony.
14 In time the newcomers find or from their won worlds; Manhatten is many such words, huddled
together but rarely interaction. I think this is what gives the city its sense of freedom. There are
enough like you, whatever you are. And it isn’t as necessary to know anything about an apart
ment
neighbor- or to worry about his judgment of you- as it is about someone with an adjoining yard. In
New York, like seeks like, and by economy of effort excludes the rest as stranger. This distancing,
this uncaring in ordinary encounters, has another side: in no other American city can the lonely be
as lonely.
15 So much more needs to be said. New Your is a wounded city, declining in its amenities .
Overloaded by its tax burdens. But it is not dying city; the streets are safer than they were five
years age; Broadway, which seemed to be succumbing to the tawdriness of its environment, is
astir again.
16 The trash-strewn streets, the unruly schools, the uneasy feeling or menace, the noise, the
brusqueness- all confirm outsiders in their conviction that they
wouldn’t live here if you gave
them the place. Yet show a New Yorker a splendid home in Dallas, or a swimming pool and
cabana in Beverly Hills, and he will be admiring but not envious. So much of well-to-do America
now lives antiseptically in enclaves, tranquil and luxurious, that shut out the world. Too static, the
New Yorker would say. Tell him about the vigor of your outdoor pleasures; he prefers the
unhealthy hassle and the vitality of urban life. He is hopelessly provincial. To him New York-
despite i
ts faults, which her will impatiently concede (―so what else is new?‖) —
is the spoiler of
all other American cities.