河海大学出版社研究生英语学生用书课文翻译.docVIP

Unit 11 The Iks The small tribe of Iks, formerly nomadic hunters and gatherers in the mountain valleys of northern Uganda, have become celebrities, literary symbols for the ultimate fate of disheartened, heartless mankind at large. Two disastrously conclusive things happened to them: the government decided to have a national park, so they were compelled by law to give up hunting in the valleys and become farmers on poor hillside soil, and then they were visited for two years by an anthropologist who detested them and wrote a book about them. 小部落伊克人，曾经在乌干达北部山谷里过着狩猎和采集的游牧民族生活，已变成名人，总体来说，成了最终命运沮丧的、无情的人的人文象征。两件具有灾难性、决定性意义的事情发生在他们身上。政府决定建一座国家公园，所以他们依法被迫放弃在山谷里的狩猎生活，而变成贫瘠的山坡地里的农民。之后，一个憎恶他们的人类学家访问了他们两年，并写了一本关于他们的书。 The message of the book is that the Iks have transformed themselves into an irreversibly disagreeable collection of unattached, brutish creatures, totally selfish and loveless, in response to the dismantling of their traditional culture. Moreover, this is what the rest of us are like in our inner selves, and we will all turn into Iks when the structure of our society comes all unhinged. 书的主旨是说，伊克人已经将自己变成了无药可救的不友善的人渣，是独立的、野兽般的生物，完全的自私无情。这是对他们分崩离析的传统文化所做出的反应。此外，这也是我们内在本性的模样。当我们的社会结构全部瓦解时，我们都将变成伊克人。 The argument rests, of course, on certain assumptions about the core of human beings, and is necessarily speculative. You have to agree in advance that man is fundamentally a bad lot , out for himself alone , displaying such graces as affection and compassion only as learned habits . If you take this view, the story of the Iks can be used to confirm it. These people seem to be living together, clustered in small, dense villages, but they are really solitary, unrelated individuals with no evident use for each other. They talk, but only to make ill-tempered demands and cold refusals. They share nothing. They never sing. They turn the children out to forage as soon as they can walk, and desert the elders to starve whenever they can, and the foraging children snatch food fr