林肯《葛底斯堡演说》的两个中译本 解伯昌 专家介绍：上海外国语大学资深教授，深受学生欢迎的高级阅读和翻译老师 英语政治演说文体的一个基本特征是通俗易懂，不管是学者、教授，还是平民、文盲一听就懂。政治演说大都逻辑严 密，语言精炼，简明扼要，短促有力，有鼓动性，有感召力。有的演说使用排比、对仗等手段，使语言有音乐的节奏，有艺术的魅力。在诸多政治演说中，美国已故总统亚伯拉罕·林肯1863年在葛底斯堡的演说可以算得上是精品中的精品。一百多年来，在美国，甚至在全世界广为流传，真可为传世佳作。我国有些学者早就把这篇演说译成中文，可是笔者发现就正式出版的书刊里林肯演说的中译本大都不能体现原文的语言和文体风格。这里笔者把原文和两个中译本抄录于下。 Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (on Nov.19,1863) Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of the war. We have come to dedicate a portion of the field as the final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But , in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here, to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall. under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
