望洋兴叹翻译loving_and_hating_new_york_课文和翻译

2021年1月21日发(作者：whatever什么意思)
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
ther
e 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
never 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 publishers, 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 or 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;