(1). Books and Arts; Book Review;Revolution in Egypt;Square eyes
文艺;书评;埃及的革命;广场上的旁观者
(2). Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. By Ahdaf Soueif.
开罗:我的城市,我们的革命。作者:AHDAF SOUEIF。
(3). 1:So her view of the revolution may never dominate the new textbooks now being prepared in Egypt.
2:The bearded men who will most likely dictate what is in them, however, cannot entirely ignore what she recorded during the initial 18 days that felled the tyrant and his cronies.
3:Well- observed details have an unmistakable ring of truth and revisionist historians ignore them at their peril.
1:所以她对革命的看法决不可能成为埃及正在准备的新教科书的主要观点。
2:那些大胡子的男人很可能把自己的意志印作教材,但AHDAF SOUEIF记录下了推倒暴君及其死党的最初十八天,他们没法完全忽略这些记录。
3:清晰的细节意味着明白无误的真相,修正主义的历史学家却忽略细节,结果使得真相可能模糊不清。
(4). 1: She captures the deep contempt of the youths for the old rulers, quoting a teenage acquaintance as saying of the Mubarak men: “Before they open their mouths they’re liars; they breathe lies.”
2: And she records imaginative chants of revolutionaries marching through hard-up districts of the city trying to win allies by warning the residents: “Prices up and no one cares / Next you’ll sell your bed and chairs.”
1:她留意到了年轻人对旧统治者深深的蔑视。作者有个熟人不到二十岁,她引用了此人评论穆巴拉克份子的话:“他们说谎不用开口,因为他们呼吸的都是谎言”。
2:当革命者游行经过开罗贫穷社区的时候,为了赢得支持,他们提醒那些居民:“物价上涨没人管,你马上就要连床和桌椅板凳都卖掉了”,作者记录下了这些充满想象力的口号。
(5). The most successful passages juxtapose the personal and the political. The narrative of street fighting is interleaved with personal memories of a previous age: here the house of a beloved aunt, there the studio where she acted in a television drama. The reader gets a visceral sense of the dislocation the revolutionaries felt in their own city.
此书最成功的地方在于把私人生活与政治事件联系起来。在叙述巷战的那段,作者插叙了一些自己过去生活的回忆:某处是至爱的姑妈家,某处是她曾经拍电视剧的摄影棚。对埃及的混乱,读者能发自内心地与革命者感同身受。
(6). There is little clever analysis in the book, but that hardly matters. In years to come it will be a reminder to liberals—now once again in the opposition following the recent election victory of Egypt’s Islamists—of their most glorious hour. It should serve as a heartening reminder of what they are capable of achieving when united and courageous.
本书没有什么精彩的分析,但瑕不掩瑜。多年之后——以及现在(近期埃及的伊斯兰主义者赢得选举,抗议之声再起)——本书都能使自由主义者回想起他们最光荣的时刻。这是本振奋人心的书,它提醒人们只要团结并勇敢,就有能力得到自己追求的东西。