第四篇阅读，考研时五个题目错四个，心中甚是不服。从昨到今，细心研读，终于承认是水平问题。既已读懂，试作意译。
《以子为荣而因之为累》者，詹妮弗之文，既见报端，骤惹群议。璋瓦之喜，人之大伦，天性使然，人所必历，然耶？詹氏曰，“天伦之乐”，“乐”者为何？昼夜行乐，其乐弥薄；乐之为乐，转瞬即殁，神龙潜渊，觅之难得。哀哀父母，累岁劬劳，既滋寸草，乐见其茂。 乐自忧生，忧乐相成，塞翁失马，未关其情。
母子合照屡据报刊之显位，殆非一日。题中之义，不言自明。大体则有，定体则无，亦涉螟蛉、寡母、重身之女，无不娟然静好，嫣然浅笑。
世风若是，民心向此，既育翻悔，殆近杀戮。父母鲜言多子之苦；无嗣恒为亲邻共讥。由是观之，方见世议之不公。盖不幸皆因香火不续耶？
然报章者，如《美国周刊》、《环球人物》，悖实甚巨。考据可知，多子未若无子乐也，而寡母之不乐尤甚。想其夙夜匪懈、炊织不怠、劳怨独任、靠傍俱无，“乐”自何出？
偏听报章者寡矣，然望文生羡，慨膝下虚空而暗伤者当不乏其人，人同此心，庶几略近詹氏之心。
附，原文：It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter – nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight.”
The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive – and newly single – mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.
In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing ? It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the children. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.
Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No sh**, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
It’s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it’s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting “ the Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
发表于 2011-3-20 21:41
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