词汇提示

1.balloon 热气球

2.chasm 深坑

3.qualms 顾虑

4.merits 优点

5.demerits 缺点

6.hostages 人质

7.pitched 扔

8.abyss 严厉的

9.metaphor 隐喻

原文

Salman Rushdie: 'Life Under Threat' (1)

A hot-air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm, carrying several passengers.

A leak develops; the balloon starts losing height.

Good grief! The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety; the many must be sacrificed to save the one!

But who should live, who should die? And who could make such a choice?

In point of fact, debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms, for of course what I've described is the given situation of that evergreen favorite, the Balloon Debate, in which, as the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits of the well-known figures they have placed in disaster's mouth, the assembled company blithely accepts the faintly unpleasant idea that a human being's right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices -that we may be born equal but thereafter our lives weigh differently in the scales.

It's only make-believe, after all.

And while it may not be very nice, it does reflect how people actually think.

I have now spent over a thousand days in just such a balloon; but, alas, this isn't a game.

For most of these thousand days, my fellow-travelers included the Western hostages in Lebanon, and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq, Roger Cooper and lan Richter.

And I had to accept, and did accept, that for most of my countrymen and countrywomen,my plight counted for less than the others'.

In any choice between us, I'd have been the first to be pitched out of the basket and into the abyss.

'Our lives teach us who we are,' I wrote at the end of my essay 'In Food Faith'.

Some of the lessons have been harsh, and difficult to learn.

Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to redescribe it, to change the terms.

This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble, within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.

The bubble floats above and through the world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction.

For many people, I've ceased to be a human being.

I've become an issue, a bother, an 'affair'.

Bullet-proofed bubbles, like this one, are reality-proof, too.

Those who travel in them, like those who wear Tolkien's rings of invisibility, become wraith-like if they're not careful.

They get lost.

In this phantom space a man may become the bubble that encases him, and the none day - pop! - he's gone forever.

It's ridiculous - isn't it? - to have to say, but I am a human being, unjustly accused, unjustly embubbled.

Or is it I who am being ridiculous, as I call out from my bubble, I'm still trapped inhere, folks; somebody, please, get me out?

翻译

萨尔曼·拉什迪:《生命受到威胁》(1)

一个热气球载着几名乘客在一个无底的深渊上缓缓漂流。
泄漏发生了;气球开始失去高度。
好悲伤!受伤的气球只能载一名乘客到安全地带;为了救一个人，必须牺牲很多人!
但谁该活，谁该死?谁能做出这样的选择呢?
事实上，世界各地的辩论协会经常毫无疑问地做出这样的选择，因为我所描述的当然是常青树最受欢迎的气球辩论的特定情况，在这种情况下，演讲者争论他们放在灾难口中的知名人物的相对优点和缺点，聚集在一起的人们愉快地接受了一个有点令人不快的观点，即一个人的生存权是由他或她的美德或恶习而增加或减少的——我们可能生来平等，但此后我们的生活在天平上的分量就不同了。
毕竟，这只是幻想。
虽然这可能不太好，但它确实反映了人们的真实想法。
我在这样一个气球里已经度过了一千多天了;但是，唉，这不是一场游戏。
在这一千天的大部分时间里，我的同伴包括黎巴嫩的西方人质，以及被关押在伊朗和伊拉克的英国商人罗杰·库珀和伊恩·里希特。
我不得不承认，而且确实承认，对于我的大多数同胞来说，我的困境比其他人的要小。
在我们之间的任何一个选择中，我都会是第一个被扔出篮筐扔进深渊的人。
“我们的生活教会我们我们是谁，”我在我的文章《食物信仰》(In Food Faith)的结尾写道。
有些教训是残酷的，而且很难学到。
困在一个比喻里，我经常觉得有必要重新描述它，