北京大学英语专业2013年硕考试题.doc

北京大学英语专业2014年硕考试题 专业技能部分，英译汉是罗马尼亚哲学家E. M. Cioran的Some Blind Alleys: A Letter（Richard Howard为英译者）节选。Drained by his fecundity, a phantom who has worn out his shadow, the man of letters diminishes with each word he writes. Only his vanity is inexhaustible; if it were psychological, it would have limits; those of the self. But it is cosmic or demonic: it submerges him. His work obsesses him; he continually alludes to it, as if, on our planet, there were nothing outside himself which deserved attention or curiosity...???Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method. Before him, the writer, content to be tangent to events, was more modest: plying his trade in a limited sector, he followed his own nose and kept it clean. Nothing of the journalist about him, at most he was interested in the anecdotic aspect of certain solitudes: his indiscretion was ineffectual.???With our braggart, things change. None of the subjects which intrigued his times escaped his sarcasm, his half-knowledge, his craving for controversy, his universal vulgarity. In Voltaire, everything was impure except his style. Profoundly superficial, without any sensibility for the intrinsic, for the interest reality offers in itself, he inaugurated in letters our ideological gossip. His mania for chatter, for indoctrinating, his porters-lodge wisdom, were to make him the prototype, the model of the littérateur. Since he said everything about himself, and since he exploited to the last drop the resources of his nature, he no longer troubles us: we read him and move on. On the other hand, in the case of a Pascal we feel sure he has not told us all there is to say; even when he irritates us, he is never, for us an author.???To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? To publish ones taints in order to amuse or exasperate! A barbarism with respect to our