中大南方英语翻译题--在我们的世界.doc

南方学院公选课《文学理论》考察题 一，翻译（50分） In our world it has become more important than ever that we learn to read critically. The events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath have shown us – with a new urgency – the dangers of misunderstanding and inadequate education. It has become more important than ever that we understand the various voices crying from afar in other languages; and it is just as urgent that we understand the bewildering multitude of voices in our own culture. In order to make sense of our own present, we need to understand our own past. We need to look critically at the various documents, cultural, political, and religious, which furnish our identity, which tell us who we are, who we should be, and what we might become. As a black American scholar has recently said, “the challenge of mutual understanding among the world’s multifarious cultures will be the single greatest task that we face, after the failure of the world to feed itself.” It has become indisputably clear that the study of the humanities in general is no longer a luxury but a necessity, vital to our very survival as an enlightened civilization. We cannot form an articulate vision of our own moral, educational, and political values without some knowledge of where those values come from, the struggles in which they were forged, and the historical contexts which generated those struggles. To study the Bible, Plato, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or Roman Law, to study Jewish or African-American history, to examine the Qur’an（可兰经） and the long history of the Western world’s fraught engagement with Islam, is to study the sources of the conflicts and cultural tendencies which inform our present world. We cannot be good citizens – either of a particular country or of the world – by succumbing to the endless forces operating worldwide that encourage us to remain ignorant, to follow blindly, whether in the form of blind nationalism, blind religiosity, or blind chauvinism in all its ma