Put on an extra man什么意思？翻译笔记2

be upwardly mobile 做人就做人上人

choreographed 精心安排的

creamy shoulder 香肩

flatly refuse 坚定地拒绝

get carried away 忘乎所以（太兴奋或投入以至于失态）

it is all grist to your mill 对你百利无一害

rosy （皮肤，面色）红润/红彤彤

shaggy-dog story or tale(rambling and pointless) 这故事又臭又长

smooth operator 能靠口才获利的人（老油条/小滑头/调情高手/渣男/伶牙俐齿）

tangy 酸甜味，酸香味（柠檬，醋等等）

tarring and feathering 一种酷刑，给人身上涂满焦油，粘上羽毛

tip the scales/balance 打破僵局/扭转乾坤/起决定性作用

“Go away,” I croaked, flecking everyone near me with light foam.

“走开，”我嘶吼，溅了别人一身唾沫星子。

Why then, you may ask, did I cling to her? If you could but see her, you would not need to ask. One look at her expensive hair, her costly eyes, her exorbitant skin, her overpriced torse, her bankrupting legs, and you would understand. You would cry, even as I, “Hang the expense! I got to have this dame!”

你也许要问，那为什么还要赖上她呢？如果你见过她，就无需多问。看一眼她值钱的头发，下了血本的眼睛，贵到离谱的皮肤，近乎天价的身子，逼人破产的双腿，你就会明白。你会大喊，我会跟你一起喊：“别管钱了，必须得到这个女人！”

But being a worshiper of beauty, I could not resist her. She had so much beauty to worship that I almost had to put on an extra man. Her symmetry, the architecture of her limbs, the melody of her movements, her planes and hollows, her peaks and valleys—all this was more than I could withstand. I was mad for her the moment I saw her.

但作为美的信徒，我无法抵御她的诱惑。我瞻仰她的美，只恨自己少生了一双眼睛。她匀称的五官、修长的四肢、婀娜多姿的体态、凹凸有致的身材，都远非我能承受。只一面，我便为她痴狂。

Physically, he was not an imposing man. He was little and bent. Only a few white hairs remained on his lumpy cranium. His eyes were beady, his nose was overlong, his thin lips curved downward in a perpetual sneer. His ancient blue serge suit gleamed dully, like the sides of a hearse.

外表上看，他根本不起眼。他是个驼背的小块头。几缕白发可怜地留在他坑坑洼洼的颅骨上。他小眼睛，长鼻子，干瘪的嘴唇下垂，永远带着一丝冷笑。他蓝色的古董哔叽西服闪着幽光，活像一辆灵车。

Pearl had an idea. “Why don’t you say something like this? In times of reconstruction we need a construction man.”

“And in times of retrenchment we need a trencherman.”

珠儿有主意了：“不如说，在重建时期，我们需要建筑商。”

“而在紧缩时期，我们需要*缩头乌龟。”

* Trencherman是“大胃王”的意思。但若直译，就没有幽默的意谓了。这是妥协的译法。

Stalin and Roosevelt had an argument about whose bodyguards were more loyal and ordered them to jump out of the window on the fifteenth floor. Roosevelt’s bodyguard flatly refused to jump, saying, “I’m thinking about the future of my family.” Stalin’s bodyguard, however, jumped out of the window and fell to his death. Roosevelt was taken aback.

“Tell me, why did your man do that?” he asked.

Stalin lit his pipe and replied:

“He was thinking about the future of his family, too.”

斯大林和罗斯福争论谁的保镖更忠诚，于是分别命令他们从十五楼的窗户跳下去。罗斯福的保镖坚定地拒绝，说：“我要为家人的未来考虑。”斯大林的保镖却一跃而下，当场摔死。罗斯福大为震惊。

“告诉我，你的保镖为什么会跳下去？”他问。

斯大林点燃烟斗，说：

“他也要为家人的未来考虑。”

Translating these kinds of circulating jokes means matching the pattern made by the interplay of presupposition and meaning that constitutes the points, and then rewriting all the rest to suit.

在这类流传下来的笑话中，预设和内涵相辅相成，共同构成笑点，形成笑话的模式。翻译就是要（在目标语言中）找到对应的模式，再改写剩下的部分，使之连贯。

…what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we-consciously or nonconsciously—were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom—the product of deep-set predictions. We can no more experience the world “prediction and expectation free” than we could surf without a wave.

……我们的经验不是简单地反映当下世界所告知的内容，而是反映我们——有意或无意地——期待世界所告知的内容。其结果之一就是，我们从未简单地看到事物的“真实存在”，剥离于个人的预期，孤立于过去的经验。相反，全部人类经验都包含了部分的幻觉——即深层预测的产物。我们无法经验“不含预测和期待”的世界，就像无风不起浪。

I wondered whether a couple's survival could depend on whether their individual stories of what love ideally should be were close enough to the stories of the actual relationship they were in. For example, if someone wants to live a romantic fairy tale, but finds herself actually living a war story, she is likely to be dissatisfied. Others prefer the war story, and would feel bored out of their minds in the romantic fairy tale.

我在思考，恋人关系的维系，可能取决于两人的理想恋爱故事，与他们关系的实际情况是否足够接近。例如，如果某人渴望一段浪漫的爱情童话，却发现自己活在战争故事中，她就可能心生不满。另一些人则更喜欢战争故事，当身处浪漫的爱情童话中，就会感到索然无味。

But a clean separation of fact from fiction simply isn't possible in the context of personal relationships, because we shape the facts of a relationship to conform to our personal fictions.

在亲密关系中，“事实”几乎不可能与“想象”划一条清晰的界线，因为我们塑造关系的事实，使其符合我们的个人想象。