the merely very good课文翻译及原文

the merely very good课文翻译及

原文

The Merely Very Good

第八单元仅仅不错

Jeremy Bernstein

杰里米·伯恩斯坦

Early in 1981 I received an invitation to give a lecture at a writers' conference that was being held someplace on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, just across from New Jersey. I don't remember the exact location, but a study of the map convinces me that it was probably New Hope. My first inclination was to say no. There were several reasons. I was living in New York City and teaching full time. My weekends were precious and the idea of getting up before dawn on a Saturday, renting a car, and driving across the entire state of New Jersey to deliver a lecture was repellent. As I recall, the honorarium offered would have barely covered the expense. Furthermore, a subject had been suggested for my lecture that, in truth, no longer interested me. Since I both wrote and did physics, I had often been asked to discuss the connection, if any, between these two activities. When this first came up, I

felt obligated to say something, but after twenty years, about the only thing that I felt like saying was that both physics and writing, especially if one wanted to do them well, were extremely difficult.

早在1981年，我收到过一份请柬是邀请我在一个作家年会上做讲座，这次会议会在在宾夕法尼亚州特拉华河沿岸过新泽西不远的某个地方召开。确切的地点我已记不太清了，但仔细查看地图后我觉得应该是在新望市。我一开始的意向是拒绝它。拒绝的理由有很多。首先我在纽约居住，并担负着一份全职的教学工作，周末对我来说是很宝贵的。一想到要在周六天不亮的时候就要起床，然后还得租车，并且驾车穿越整个新泽西州去会议上做个讲座，实在是烦得很。我回想起这场讲座所付的酬金几乎还不足以支付我这段行程所需的这些花费。此外，它建议我讲的主题实际上我已经没有什么兴趣了。我在写作的同时又从事物理学研究，因此人们经常让我去讨论这两者之间的联系。在这个议题第一次提出的时候，我觉得还有必要谈一谈。但二十年过去了，我现在唯一想说的就是搞物理学和搞写作都是极其困难的事，尤其是在你想将这两者做得尽善尽美的时候。

The conference seemed to be centered on poetry, and one of the things that came to mind was an anecdote that Robert Oppenheimer used to tell about himself. Since Oppenheimer will play a significant role in what follows, I will elaborate. After Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, he was

awarded a fellowship to study in Europe. Following a very unhappy time in England, where he seems to have had a sort of nervous breakdown, he went to Germany to get his Ph.D. 这个大会的中心议题似乎在诗歌上，由此我想起罗伯特·奥本海默过去讲述的关于他自己的一件事。因为奥本海默下面的故事中会扮演一个重要的角色，我会比较详细地去讲述他。奥本海默在1925年从哈佛毕业以后，被授予研究员的资格到欧洲继续学习。在英国时他似乎有些神经衰弱的症状，在那里度过了一段不怎么愉快的经历之后，他转去德国攻读博士学位。

He studied with the distinguished German theoretical physicist Max Born in Gottingen and took his degree there in 1927 at the age of twenty-three. Born's recollections of Oppenheimer, which were published posthumously in 1975, were not sympathetic. Oppenheimer, he wrote, "was a man of great talent and I was conscious of his superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble. In my ordinary seminar on quantum mechanics, he used to interrupt the speaker, whoever it was, not excluding myself, and to step to the blackboard, taking the chalk and declaring: 'this can be done much better in the following manner.'" In fact, it got so bad that Oppenheimer's fellow students in the seminar petitioned Born to put a stop to it.