(2013-11-3，时间150分钟)

第一部分：英译汉 （50分）

Scene I

The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.

The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire escape is part of what we see—that is, the landing of it and steps descending from it.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building is flanked on both sides by dark, narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and the sinister latticework of neighbouring fire escapes. It is up and down these side alleys that exterior entrances and exits are made during the play. At the end of Tom’s opening commentary, the dark tenement wall slowly becomes transparent and reveals the interior of the groundfloor Wingfield apartment.

Nearest the audience is the living room, which also serves as a sleeping room for Laura, the sofa unfolding to make her bed. Just beyond, separated from the living room by a wide arch or second proscenium with transparent faded portieres (or second curtain), is the dining-room. In an old fashioned whatnot in the living room are seen scores of transparent glass animals. A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room, to the left of the archway. It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy’s First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say “I will be smiling forever.”

Also hanging on the wall, near the photograph, are a typewriter keyboard chart and a Gregg shorthand diagram. An upright type-writer on a small table stands beneath the charts.

The audience hears and sees the opening scene in the dining room through both the transparent fourth wall of the building and the transparent gauze portieres of the dining room arch. It is during this revealing scene that the fourth wall slowly ascends, out of sight. This transparent exterior wall is not brought down again until the very end of the play, during Tom’s final speech.

The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes.

Tom enters, dressed as a merchant sailor, and strolls across to the fire escape. There he stops and lights a cigarette. He addresses the audience.

Tom    Yes, I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class ofAmericawas matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

第二部分：汉译英 （50分）

人们除了惊叹别无选择。他还会回来吗？他可能已飞进了过去，掉到了旧石器时代茹毛饮血、满身长毛的野蛮人中间； 掉进了白垩纪海（Cretaceous Sea）的深渊；或者掉到了侏罗纪奇形怪状的蝴锡这种巨大的爬行动物中间。他可能现在还——如果我可以这样说的话——徘徊在蛇颈龙出没的缅粒岩（Oolitic）珊瑚礁上，或是三迭纪（Triassic Age）寂寞的盐海边。他又会不会朝前飞呢？飞进一个较近的时代，在那个时代里，人还是人，但我们自己时代的不解之谜找到了答案，令人厌烦的难题得到了解决。或者飞进了人类的成年期，因为我个人认为，在那个较近的时代里，实验软弱无力，理论支离破碎，人与人不和不容，它根本不是人类登峰造极的时代！我说的是我个人的看法。我知道—— 因为这个问题早在时间机器诞生之前我们就讨论过——他对人类的进步持悲观态度，并且把越积越高的文明看作是愚蠢的堆积，认为它最终必将倒下来压住它的创造者，把他们彻底毁灭。如果真是这样，我们还得若无其事地活下去。但对我来说，未来仍然是黑越越的，苍茫的，是一个巨大的未知数，只有偶然的几处被他那难忘故事所照亮。我聊以自慰的是，我这里有两朵奇异的白花——现已枯萎发黄，干瘪变脆——它们可以证明，即便在心智和体力消逝的时候，感激之情和相互的温存仍然活在人类的心中。