第十七届“上译”杯翻译竞赛原文
由上海翻译家协会和上海译文出版社共同承办，以推进我国翻译事业的繁荣发展、发现和培养翻译新人为宗旨的翻译竞赛成功举办十六届后，已成为翻译界知名赛事。本届“上译”杯翻译竞赛特设两个语种——英语和西班牙语。具体参赛规则如下：
一、本届竞赛为英语、西班牙语翻译竞赛。
二、参赛者年龄：45周岁以下（1975年1月1日后出生）。
三、原文将刊登于2020年第3期（2020年6月出版）的《外国文艺》杂志及微信公众号（微信搜索“上海译文外国文艺”）、上海译文出版社微信公众号（微信搜索“上海译文”）、上海翻译家协会网站www.sta.org.cn及微信公众号（微信搜索“上海翻译家协会”）。
四、本届翻译竞赛评选委员会由各大高校、出版社的专家学者组成。
五、本届比赛采用网络参赛方式。英语组选手请将译作发送到engflaa@yiwen.com.cn，西班牙语组请发送到tcflaa@yiwen.com.cn。请于邮件标题中写明：“上译”杯翻译竞赛+姓名。注意附件中须包括两个WORD格式文件：译文和个人信息（标题采用三号黑体，正文五号宋体），请将两个文件分别命名为“姓名+译文”及“姓名+个人信息”。译文中请不要添加任何与译者个人身份信息相关的文字或符号，否则译文无效；个人信息中请写明姓名、性别、出生年月日、工作学习单位及家庭住址、联系电话、E-MAIL地址。
六、参赛译文必须独立完成，合译、抄袭或请他人校订过的译文均属无效。
七、决赛截稿日期为2020年8月10日24:00。
八、 为鼓励更多的翻译爱好者参与比赛，提高翻译水平，两个语种各设一等奖1名（证书及价值6000元的奖金和奖品），二等奖2名（证书及价值3000元的奖金和奖品），三等奖3名（证书及价值2000元的奖金和奖品），优胜奖20名（证书及价值300元的奖品），此外还设优秀组织奖1名（价值5000元的奖金和奖品）。各奖项在没有合格译文的情况下将作相应空缺。获奖证书及奖品务必及时领取，两年内未领者视为自动放弃。
九、《外国文艺》将于2020年第6期（2020年12月出版）公布评选结果并刊登优秀译文，竞赛结果将同时在《外国文艺》杂志、上海译文出版社、上海翻译家协会的微信等公众平台上公布。
十、以上条款的解释权归上海译文出版社所有。
第十七届“上译”杯翻译竞赛原文
（英语组）
Don’t Come Any Closer（excerpt）
Jill Lepore
When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for predictions; they prayed; they yowled. They closed their eyes; they covered their ears. They wept in the street. They read alarming almanacs: “Certain it is, books frighted them terribly.”The government, keen to contain the panic, attempted“to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People,”according to Daniel Defoe, in “A Journal of the Plague Year” , a history that he wrote in tandem with an advice manual called “Due Preparations for the Plague” , in 1722, a year when people feared that the disease might leap across the English Channel again, after having journeyed from the Middle East to Marseille and points north on a merchant ship. Defoe hoped that his books would be useful “both to us and to posterity, though we should be spared from that portion of this bitter cup.”That bitter cup has come out of its cupboard.
In 1665, the skittish fled to the country, and alike the wise, and those who tarried had reason for remorse: by the time they decided to leave, “there was hardly a Horse to be bought or hired in the whole City,” Defoe recounted, and, in the event, the gates had been shut, and all were trapped. Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst: having failed to heed warnings to provision, they sent their poor servants out for supplies. “This Necessity of going out of our Houses to buy Provisions, was in a great Measure the Ruin of the whole City,” Defoe wrote. One in five Londoners died, notwithstanding the precautions taken by merchants. The butcher refused to hand the cook a cut of meat; she had to take it off the hook herself. And he wouldn’t touch her money; she had to drop her coins into a bucket of vinegar. Bear that in mind when you run out of Purell.
“Sorrow and sadness sat upon every Face,” Defoe wrote. The government’s stricture on the publication of terrifying books proved pointless, there being plenty of terror to be read on the streets. You could read the weekly bills of mortality, or count the bodies as they piled up in the lanes. You could read the orders published by the mayor: “If any Person shall have visited any Man known to be infected of the Plague, or entered willingly into any known infected House, being not allowed: The House wherein he inhabiteth shall be shut up.” And you could read the signs on the doors of those infected houses, guarded by watchmen, each door marked by a foot-long red cross, above which was to be printed, in letters big enough to be read at a distance, “Lord, Have Mercy Upon Us.”
Reading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically. In the eighteenth century, ships’ captains arriving at port pledged that they had disinfected their ships by swearing on Bibles that had been dipped in seawater. During tuberculosis scares, public libraries fumigated books by sealing them in steel vats filled with formaldehyde gas. These days, you can find out how to disinfect books on a librarians’thread on Reddit. Your best bet appears to be either denatured-alcohol swipes or kitchen disinfectant in a mist-spray bottle, although if you stick books in a little oven and heat them to a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit there’s a bonus: you also kill bedbugs. (“Doesn’t harm the books!”) Or, as has happened during the coronavirus closures, libraries can shut their doors, and bookstores, too.
But, of course, books are also a salve and a consolation. In the long centuries during which the plague ravaged Europe, the quarantined, if they were lucky enough to have books, read them. If not, and if they were well enough, they told stories. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, from the fourteenth century, seven women and three men take turns telling stories for ten days while hiding from the Black Death—that “last Pestilentiall mortality universally hurtfull to all that beheld it”—a plague so infamous that Boccaccio begged his readers not to put down his book as too hideous to hold: “I desire it may not be so dreadfull to you, to hinder your further proceeding in reading.”
The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man” £¬in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute.
But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also—in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague—an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite.
Stories about plagues run the gamut from “Oedipus Rex” to “Angels in America” .“You are the plague,” a blind man tells Oedipus. “It’s 1986 and there’s a plague, friends younger than me are dead, and I’m only thirty,” a Tony Kushner character says. There are plagues here and plagues there, from Thebes to New York, horrible and ghastly, but never one plague everywhere, until Mary Shelley decided to write a follow-up to “Frankenstein”.
“The Last Man” ,which is set in the twenty-first century, is the first major novel to imagine the extinction of the human race by way of a global pandemic. Shelley published it at the age of twenty-nine, after nearly everyone she loved had died, leaving her, as she put it, “the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me.” The book’s narrator begins as a poor and uneducated English shepherd: primitive man, violent and lawless, even monstrous. Cultivated by a nobleman and awakened to learning—“An earnest love of knowledge……caused me to pass days and nights in reading and study”—he is elevated by the Enlightenment and becomes a scholar, a defender of liberty, a republican, and a citizen of the world.
If, in “Frankenstein”, Shelley imagined the creation of a man by the stitching together of body parts, in “The Last Man” she imagined the dismemberment of civilization. Death by death, country by country, the human race descends, rung by rung, down a ladder it had once built, and climbed. Shelley’s narrator, the erstwhile shepherd, bears witness to the destruction and abandonment of all the “adornments of humanity” that had adorned his own naked self: law, religion, the arts, science, liberal government (“The nations are no longer!”), freedom, commerce, literature, music, theatre, industry, transportation, communication, agriculture. “Our minds, late spread abroad through countless spheres and endless combinations of thought, now retrenched themselves behind this wall of flesh, eager to preserve its well-being only.” As the pestilence lays waste to the planet, those few who survive are reduced to warring tribes, until only one man, our narrator, is left, shepherd once more. Wandering amid the ruins of Rome, he enters the home of a writer and finds a manuscript on his writing table: “It contained a learned disquisition on the Italian language.” The last book is a study of language, humanity’s first adornment. And what does our narrator do, alone in the world? “I also will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?” He calls it “The History of the Last Man” ,and dedicates it to the dead. It will have no readers. Except, of course, the readers of Shelley’s book.
The structure of the modern plague novel, all the way to Stephen King’s “The Stand” and beyond, is a series of variations on “A Journal of the Plague Year” (a story set within the walls of a quarantine) and “The Last Man” (a story set among a ragged band of survivors). Within those two structures, though, the scope for storytelling is vast, and so is the scope for moralism, historical argument, and philosophical reflection. Every plague novel is a parable.
Albert Camus once defined the novel as the place where the human being is abandoned to other human beings. The plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings. Unlike other species of apocalyptic fiction, where the enemy can be chemicals or volcanoes or earthquakes or alien invaders, the enemy here is other humans: the touch of other humans, the breath of other humans, and, very often—in the competition for diminishing resources—the mere existence of other humans.
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