高级英语（上）第十五课文章以及翻译对照

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Lesson Fifteen

第十五课

The Beauty Industry by Aldous Huxley

美容用品业 作者：阿尔多斯·赫胥黎

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教材开场白处交待的文章结构：
P1-2 作者表述了欧美妇女注重美容的事实
P3-5 作者分析了形成现代社会对美貌狂热崇拜的原因
P6-7 作者指出从某种意义上来说，这种对外在美的追求能达到一定的目的
P8-10 作者笔锋一转，提出了什么是真正的美的问题，阐述了心灵美的重要性。
P11 在全文最后一段中作者提出了人类能够真正实现没得条件不是化妆品，而是社会制度。

        The one American industry unaffected by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump-about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are“official”,and can be accepted as being substantially true.Reading them, I was only surprised by the comparative smallness of the sums expended. From the prodigious number of advertisements of aids to beauty contained in the American magazines, I had imagined that the personal appearance business must stand high up among the champions of American industry-the equal, or only just less than the equal,of bootlegging and racketeering, movies and automobiles. Still, one hundred and fifty six million pounds a year is a tidy sum. Rather more than twice the revenue of India, if I remember rightly.
        美国工业中唯一未受经济大萧条影响的是美容用品业。美国妇女仍不断在她们的脸上和身体上花费与经济萧条到来之前同样多的钱--每周约 300 万英镑。这些事实与数字都是官方的，可认为大致属实。当读到这些时，我只为花费的数目相对较小而感到惊奇。从美国杂志上铺天盖地的化妆品广告来看，我原以为美容用品业一定居美国工业群雄之首相当于或仅次于贩卖私酒、敲诈勒索、电影和汽车业。虽然如此，每年1亿5600万英镑是一个相当不小的数目,如果我没有记错的话,超过印度年收入的两倍。
        I do not know what the European figures are. Much smaller undoubtedly. Europe is poor, and a face can cost as much in upkeep as aRollsRoyce. The most that the majority of European women can do is just to wash and hope for the best. Perhaps the soap will produce its loudly advertised effects; perhaps it will transform them into the likeness of those ravishing creatures who smile so rosily and creamily, so peachily and pearlily, from every hoarding. Perhaps, on the other hand,it maynot. In any case, the more costly experiments in beautification are still as much beyond most European means as are highpowered motor-cars and electric refrigerators. Even in Europe, howevermuch more is now spent on beauty than was ever spent in the past. Not quite so much more as in America, that is all. But, everywhere, the increase has been undoubtedly enormous.
        我不知道欧洲的数字是多少。毫无疑问是要小得多。欧洲很穷，而保养一张脸需要花费和保养一辆劳斯莱斯汽车的花费一样多。大多数欧洲妇女最多只能洗洗脸、心存美好希望罢了。也许香皂会产生广告中大肆宣扬的效果:也许能把她们变成像那些在每块广告牌上那些红润白嫩、艳如桃李、美若珠机微笑着的令人陶醉的女郎。另一方面,或许香皂不具这种效能。无论怎样,在花费更为昂贵的美容试验和大马力汽车及电冰箱一样都是欧洲人的经济能力所不及的。然而即使在欧洲,现在花在化妆品上的钱比过去任何时候都要多得多,只不过比起美国来要逊色一些罢了。但无论在任何地方,增长无疑是巨大的。
        The fact is significant. To what is it due? In part, I suppose, to a general increase in prosperity. The rich have always cultivated their personal appearance. The diffusion of wealth such as itis-now permits those of the poor who are less badly off than their fathers to do the same.
        这一事实意义重大。为什么会出现这种现象呢?我认为部分是由于财富的总体增长。有钱的人总是追求个人容貌的修饰。财富的分散--尽管程度并不大--使穷人中境况比其父辈稍好一些的人们也能够这样做。
        But this is, clearly, not the whole story. The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function (in the mathematical sense) of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hardly hit by the trade depression as any other business.But, as we have seen, they have not suffered. Women are retrenching on other things than their faces. The cult of beauty must therefore be symptomatic of changes that have taken place outside the economic sphere. Of what changes? Of the changes, I suggest, in the status of women; of the changes in our attitude towards “the merely physical.”
        但显然这并非事情的全部。现代对美貌的狂热崇拜并不只是财富的作用(从数学意义上看),因为如果是这样，那么美容用品业就会和其他企业一样受到贸易萧条同样程度的沉重打击。但是正如我们所见，它并未受到损失。女人们在美容之外的一切方面紧缩开支。因而对美貌的狂热崇拜必定表现了经济领域以外产生的变化。什么变化?我认为表现了妇女地位的变化,表现了我们对“单纯是肉体”的态度的变化。
        
        

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        Women,it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hitherto reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. They have the right, if not to beless virtuous than their grandmothers, at any rate to look less virtuous. The British Matron, not long since a creature of austere and even terrifying aspect, now does her best to achieve and perennially preserve the appearance of what her predecessor would have described as a Lost Woman. She often succeeds. But we are not shocked-at any rate, not morally shocked. Aesthetically shocked-yes;we may sometimes be that. But morally, no. We concede that the Matron is morally justified in being preoccupied with her personal appearance. This concession depends on another of a more generalnature-a concession to the Body, with a large B, to the Manichaean principle of evil. For we have now come to admit that the body hasits rights. And not only rights-duties, actually duties. It has, for example, a duty to do the best it can for itself in the way of strength and beauty.Christian-ascetic ideas no longer trouble us. We demandjustice for the body as well as for the soul. Hence, among otherthings, the fortunes made by facecream manufacturers and beautyspecialists, by the vendors of rubber reducing belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
        很显然，妇女比过去自由了，不仅在完成迄今为止由男性完成的，一般而论并不值得羡慕的社会职能交自由了,而且也在运用更令人愉快的女性的具有吸引力的特权上比较自由了。如果不比他们的祖母更不贤惠，至少可以有权利看起来不那么贤惠。英国的主妇们不久前还是神色严厉甚至可怕的人物,现在也在尽一切努力获得并常年保持她的前辈会称作为荡妇的外表。她常能做到这点。但我们并不感到震惊,至少在道德上没有震惊。审美上受到震惊--是的,有时是这样,但道德上没有。我们做出让步,承认主妇们专注于个人容貌在道德上是正当的,这一让步是基于另一个性质更为一般的让步,即对肉体的让步,这个词用大写的 B,是对摩尼教说之邪恶的让步,因为我们现在已经承认了肉体具有自己的权利。而且不仅是权利--还有责任.具体的责任。例如它有责任在力与美方面尽其所能地使自己得到满足。基督教的禁欲主义思想不再令我们不安，我们要求灵魂以及肉体都能得到公正的对待。因此其结果之一便是雪花膏生产者和美容专家、橡胶减肥带及按摩器贩子、护发液专利权的获得者和保持腹部线条指导书籍的作者们大发其财。
        What are the practical results of this modern cult of beauty? The exercises and the massage, the health motors and the skin foods to what have they led? Are women more beautiful than they were? Do they get something for the enormous expenditure of energy, time, and money demanded of them by the beauty-cult? These are questions which it is difficult to answer. For the facts seem to contradict themselves. The campaign for more physical beauty seems to be both a tremendous success and a lamentable failure. It depends on how you look at the results.
        现代对美貌的狂热崇拜造成的具体结果是什么?锻炼与按摩、健身器材和护肤用品一-它们造成了什么结果?女人们比过去漂亮了吗?对美貌的崇拜使她们花去了大量的精力,时间和金钱，她们从中获得了些什么吗?这些都是很难回答的问题，因为事实似乎互相矛盾。这个为取得更大的外表美的运动很乎既是巨大的成功也是可悲的失败，全看你如何看待其结果。
        It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past.“Old ladies”are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone of the future will be golden, curly and cherry-lipped, neatankled and slender.The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indistinguishable,at future picture shows, from the Portrait of the Artist's Daughter. This desirable consummation will be due in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for more beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article.Still,itis a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakeable for the real thing. The apparatus for mimicking the symptomsof health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be226
beautifulas beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her fentures, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits?
        从更多的女人比过去更能长久地保持年轻的外能这一点上看,这是一个成功,“老太太”已经很少见了。我们很可以相信，几年后她们并绝过。满头白发，满脸被纹，才胶曲背,两颊深陷会被看作是中世纪的旧时尚。未来的干瘪老大婆将有赛曲的全发，樱桃红后，匀称的脚球、苗条的身材。在未来的画展上，艺术家母亲的画像与艺术家女儿的画像将变得几乎难以分辨,这一令人满意的结果一部分会是山于有了护肤用品和石蜡注射、整容外科、泥浴、化妆品，另外也是由于更合理的生活方式造成的健康状态的改善，丑陋是疾病的难状之一,美则是健康的象征。争取更多关丽的运动就是争取更健康的运动,就这点而言,是值样赞诉的,并且在一定程度上是真正获得了成功，人工模仿出来的象征健康的美本质上就比真货质量差,些而模仿技术高超有时足以乱真，用以仿造健康状态的设备现在每一个中等客裕的人都可以买得起;取得有关真正健康的考法方面的知识也在不断增加，并且无疑体将被所有人采用。当那个幸福时刻来临之时，是否每个女人都会很美丽--有或者没有无论有没有整容和化妆品的帮助,至少和她五官的未来面貌用样美丽吗?
        The answer is emphatically: No. For real beauty is as much an affair ofthe inner as of the outer self. The beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter ofshape, of colour, of surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking slime-it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely. Their shape, their colour, their surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows through. And conversely,there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly.
        回答是确切的:不是。真正的美,内在与外表同样重要。细瓷罐的美在于外形、色彩、表面质地。罐子可能是空的,也可能为蛤妹盘踞，装满了蜂蜜或义臭义粘的液依，而这一切都不影响瓷耀的美与且。但女人是有生命的，因而她的美不仅仅是外表美。人这种容器受其精神内涵之性质的影响。我看到过一些女人，如果用光器鉴赏家的标准来街量，她们可爱得迷人。她们的外形、色彩、表面质地都完美无缺。然而她们却不美，因为这可爱的花瓶不是空空如也便是充满了某种腐坏的东西。精神空虚或灵魂丑恶进过外表显露出来。相反，有种心灵的光芒可以把纯唯美主义者们认为有缺陷或简直是豆陆的外形变得美好。

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        There are numerous forms of psychological ugliness. There is an ugliness of stupidity, for example, of unawareness (distressingly common among pretty women). An ugliness also of greed, of lasciviousness,of avarice. All the deadly sins, indeed, have their own peculiar negation of beauty. On the pretty faces of those especially who are trying to have a continuous“good time," one sees very often a kind of bored sullenness that ruins all their charm. I remember in particular two young American girls I once met in North Africa. From the porcelain specialist's point of view, they were beautiful. But the sullen boredom of which I have spoken was so deeply stamped into their fresh faces,their gait and gestures expressed so weary a listlessness, that it was unbearable to look at them, These exquisite creatures were positively repulsive.
        心理上的丑陋有多种形式。例如愚蠢，无自知之明(在漂亮女人中此形象普避得令人苦恼)，还有漂荡、贪斐。一切遭天遣的大罪都以其奇特的方式捅坏美，在那些漂亮的脸蛋上，特别是在那些企图不停“享乐”的人的脸蛋上,常常可以看到一种厌倦的，阴沉的神情,破杯了她们的魅力。我特别清晰地记得我曾在北非遇见的两个年轻的美国女郎，从瓷器专家的观点来看，她们是美丽的。但我上面谈到的那种用沉厌倦的神情如此深深地刻在了她们年轻的脸上,她们的步态和姿势表现出如此的无聊与无精打采,看着她们真让人受不了。这些高雅的人物的确令人厌恶。
        Still commoner and no less repellent is the hardness which spoils so many pretty faces. Often, it is true, this air of hardness is due not to psychological causes, but to the contemporary habit of overpainting. In Paris, where this over painting is most pronounced, many women have ceased to look human at all. Whitewashed and ruddled, they seem to be wearing masks. One must look closely to discover the soft and living face beneath. But often the face is not soft, often it turns out to be imperfectly alive. The hardness and deadness are from within. They are the outward and visible signs of some emotional or instinctive disharmony, accepted as a chronic condition of being. We do not need a Freudian to tell us that this disharmony is often of a sexual nature.
        更为常见的而且同样使人反感的是损害了许多漂亮面孔的冷漠表情。诚然,这一冷酷的表情有时不是出于心理上的原因,而是当代面部过度化妆的习惯引起的。在这种过度化妆非常呈著的巴黎，许多妇女已经根本不像是人了，刷白涂红了以后,她们像戴上了面具。你必须仔细看才能看出浓妆下柔软的有生命的面孔。但是那脸常常并不柔款，常常会发现它不完全充满了生命力。那冷酷与木然是从内心发出的，是某种感情成本能上存在的不和造的外在可见流象，被视作生存本身的慢性病疾，不需任何弟洛伊德式的心理分析家来告我们,此种不和谐常常与性问题有关。
        So long as such disharmonies continue to exist, so long as there is good reason for sullen boredom, so long as human beings allow themselves to be possessed and hagridden by monomaniacal vices, the cult of beauty is destined to be ineffectual. Successful in prolonging the appearance of youth, or realizing or simulating the symptoms of health, the campaign inspired by this cult remains fundamentally a failure. Its operations do not touch the deepest source of beauty-the experiencing soul. It is not by improving skin foods and point rollers, by cheapening health motors and electrical hair-removers, that the human race will be made beautiful; it is not even by improving health. All men and women will be beautiful only when the social arrangements give to every one of them an opportunity to live completely and harmoniously,when there is no environmental incentive and no hereditary tendency towards monomaniacal vice. In other words, all men and women will never be beautiful. But there might easily be fewer ugly human beings in the world than there are at present. We must be content with moderate hopes.
        只要这种不和谐继续存在下去。只要有阴沉厌倦的理由,只要人类允许自己沉溺于罪恶之中为其纠缠困扰,那么对美貌的狂热崇拜便注定会是徒劳的。这一崇拜所激起的这场运动虽能成功地延迟外貌的衰老或使人获得或模仿出象征健壮的美来，但从根本上仍是失败的。它的作用未能触及美的追求的源泉--感受中的灵魂。人类不能通过改遵护肤品和卷发器成通过降低健身器和电动除毛器的价格使自己更美起来，甚至也能通过增进健康来实现。所有男女只有在社会一切妄排使他们每个人都能得到机会过完整和谐的生活时能是美的,只有在没有环境刺激没有遗传因素使他们沉溺于罪恶之中时才能是美的。换句话说,所有的男女永远不会是美的。但是很可能世界上会比现在要少些丑陋的人，我们不能有过高的希望。