中国日报英译汉2006第一期至第十期.doc

Two Lives Both Henny and Shanti were born in 1908. The passage of the years from then until after the Second World War has been recounted for the most part in Shanti’s voice. Henny has been silent, or almost silent, throughout. By the summer of 1994, when I realized I wanted to write this book, she had been dead five years. I could not ask her about her family, her childhood, her schooldays, her work, her friends, the changing, atmosphere in Germany during the thirties, her flight to England, her experiences as an immigrant, the war and, in its aftermath, her search for her family. I could not ask her about Hans, about Shanti Uncle, about her mother and sister and brother. But even if she had been alive, it would had been difficult, in both senses of the word, to get her to talk about these things. Aunty Henny was an outgoing but reticent person. Even Shanti did not know what she thought of Hans. Even he did not know how she felt when she heard of the fate of her family. When he was in Berlin in the thirties, she and her family had had too much pride to talk at length about any sense of injury they felt about being excluded, gradually or suddenly, from the world they had grown up in and the country they had believed was theirs. Would I have succeeded in understanding something of what she felt? Would she have divulged anything? Would she have wanted me to write about it at all? Would I, in the interests of my book, have been able to discount or excuse the pain to her of probing these wounds? Would I deliberately have put our own relationship in jeopardy? I think it unlikely. And, as a result, this book would have been mainly about Shanti Uncle. I could not justly have called it Two Lives unless her voice played a role as strong as Uncle’s. And, had it not been for a fortuitous discovery long after her death in the attic of their house, hers would have been a supporting role. When Aunty Henny died in 1989, Shanti Uncle, in his grief, and reminded at eve