念奴娇·赤壁怀古(英文版)

念奴娇·赤壁怀古

苏轼

大江东去，浪淘尽，
千古风流人物。
故垒西边，人道是，
三国周郎赤壁。
乱石穿空，
惊涛拍岸，
卷起千堆雪。
江山如画，
一时多少豪杰！
遥想公瑾当年，
小乔初嫁了，
雄姿英发。
羽扇纶巾，
谈笑间，樯橹灰飞烟灭。
故国神游，
多情应笑我，
早生华发。
人生如梦，
一樽还酹江月。

East flows the Great river and its waves
Sweep away a thousand noble heroes' lives
Here,west of the old fort, so people say,
Brave Sir Zhou Yu stood while battle raged
Tumbled rocks split the scudding clouds apart,
And heavy waves come crashing to the shore,
Fed by a thousand drifts of melting snow,
Mountains and river paint a vivid scene
From that now far-off time of chivalry
Among so many heroes in those years
I am recall Sir Zhou, who had just wed Fair Lady Qiao
Holding a marshal's staff
And wearing his blacks sash about his neck
He laughed aloud above the battle's smoke
And flames, the tangled masts and clashing oars
Now fires are out, why do the ancient ghosts
Stir in my mind, and swim throuth my white head?
Life passes quickly like a morning dream
So I salute the River and the Moon.

（译者：Roger Mason）

The art of living

The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go. For life is a paradox: it enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their eventual relinquish. The rabbis of old put it this way: a man comes to this world with his fist clenched, but when he dies his hand is open.

Surely we should hold fast to our life. For it is wondrous and full of a beauty that breaks through every pore of God's own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we recognized this in our backward glance when we remember that what was, then suddenly realize that it was no more.

We remember a beauty that faded, a love that wanted. But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it flowered, that we failed to respond with love when it was tendered.

A recent experience re-taught me this truth. I was hospitalized following a severe heart attack and had been in attentive care for several days. It was not a pleasant place. One morning I had to have some additional test. The required machine was located in a building on the opposite end of hospital. I had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a gurney. As we emerged from our unit the sun light hit me. That is all there was to my experience. Just the light of sun. And yet how beautiful it was--how warming, how sparking, how brilliant. Then I looked to see if anyone else was relished the golden glow of the sun, but everyone was hurry to and fro, most with their eyes fixed on the ground. Then I remember how often I, too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day and preoccupied with petty and even mean concern to respond from that experience. It is really as commonplace as was the experience itself: life's gift is precious, but we are too heedless of them.

Here then is the first pole of life's paradoxical demand: Never too busy for the wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize each golden minute.


This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young, and thought that world is ours to demand, that whatever we desire with the full force of our passionate being can, nay, will be ours. Then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surely this truth dawns upon us.

At every stage of life, we sustain losses, and grow in the process. We begin our independent life only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We enter progression of schools, then we leave our fathers and mothers, and our childhood home. We get married and have children, then have to let them go. We confront the death of our parents and spouses. We face our gradual or not so gradual waning of our strength. And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggest, we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves as it was, all that we were or dreamed to be.