自恋的文化序言翻译

Preface to Culture of Narcissism Hardly more than a proclaimed “the American century”, American confidence has fallen to low ebb . Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well. In Europe, the growing strength of communist parties, the revival of fascist movements, and a wave of terrorism all testify, in different ways, to the weakness of established regimes and to the exhaustion of established tradition . Even Canada, long a bastion of stolid bourgeois dependability, now faces in the separatist movement in Quebec a threat to its very existence as a nation. The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it can not be attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeois, long ago lost the capacity to explain the events in the world of welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the Ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory can not explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempts to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offers no miracle cures for social problems. 《自恋的文化》序言 就在亨利.露西宣称当今为“美国人的时代”的二十五年之后，美国人的自信已然跌落谷底。那些刚梦想着统治世界的领导者对管理纽约感到绝望。越战失败，经济停滞，以及快速枯竭的自然资源使得一种悲观的情绪笼罩在高层领导头上，由于对领导人失去信心，这种情绪甚至在社会公众中蔓延。自信危机同样困扰着其他资本主义国家。在欧洲，共产党实力的不断扩大，法西斯运动的复兴，以及恐怖主义浪潮都用不同的方式证实了现有政权的虚弱和优良传统的丧失。即使是长久以来靠着中产阶级为堡垒的加拿大，目前也因魁北克分裂运动而威胁着国家存亡。 目前萎靡不振的国际局面显示出这种现象不能怪罪于美国人的失落情绪。资产阶级社会看起来在每一处都已经江郎才尽。它失去了能力和意志来面对要吞噬它的种种困难。资本主义的政治危机反映出一个西方文化的普遍性危机，这种普遍危机揭示了自身对于现在历史进程理解和屈从与理性方向的普遍绝望。作为资产阶级政治理论的自由主义早已经失去对发生在福利国家和跨国公司的事件进行解释的能力。但仍无政治理论可以取代它。自由主义在政治和学术上破产。一直为人提倡的科学，曾经使人们坚信自己，驱散了中世纪的黑暗。已经不再能为人们提供满意的解释来自圆其说。新古典主义经济理论不能很好地解释失业和通货膨胀为何同时出现。社会学开始退化，不能完成列出现在社会一般理论的宏图大愿。心理学难以挑战佛洛依德学说而是烦于测量的琐事。曾经夸大自己的自然科学已经匆匆宣布自己不能为社会问题提供神奇药方。 � This phrase is metaphoric. In translation we can use either a Chinese metaphor or a non-metaphoric expression. � In this long sentence, the subject is composed of three phrases, each containing an of phrase. If we also use three phrases as the subject of the sentence in our translation, we may have a long and clumsy Chinese sentence. Can we expand the three English phrases into three short clauses? Besides, in the remaining part of the sentence, weakness and exhaustion are nouns, but do they have to be translated into nouns?