birth简单

(46) By the date of his birth Europe was witnessing the passing of the religious drama, and the creation of new forms under the incentive of classical tragedy and comedy.

(46) 到他出生时，欧洲正在见证宗教剧的消亡，以及在古典悲剧和喜剧的激励下新的戏剧形式的诞生。

Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy Pay Office — a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens’s mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dickens’s birth, his mother’s father was caught stealing and fled to Europe, never to return. The family’s increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as “the young gentleman.” His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father’s imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens’s greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction.

狄更斯出生于英格兰南部海岸的朴次茅斯。他的父亲是英国海军军饷处的一名职员——一个体面的职位，但社会地位不高。他的祖父母分别是管家和女管家，因为当过仆人，地位更低，狄更斯后来隐瞒了他们的出身。据说狄更斯的母亲出身于一个更体面的家庭。然而在狄更斯出生前两年，他的外祖父因偷窃被抓，逃往欧洲大陆，再也没有回来。家境日益贫困，迫使狄更斯在12岁时辍学，到沃伦鞋油作坊——一家鞋油厂——做工，在那里其他做工的男孩嘲笑他是“小绅士”。后来他的父亲因负债入狱。父亲入狱的屈辱和他在鞋油厂做工的经历成了狄更斯最大的创伤，也成了他最深的秘密。他甚至无法向妻子吐露这些事，尽管它们构成了他小说中未被承认的基础。

The birth of predatory journals wasn’t far behind.

掠夺性期刊随之诞生。

“Nature gave us lips to conceal our teeth,” ran one popular Victorian saying, alluding to the fact that before the birth of proper dentistry, mouths were often in a shocking state of hygiene.

维多利亚时代流行的一句俗语说：“大自然给了我们嘴唇来遮住牙齿。”这暗指在正规牙科诞生之前，人们口腔的卫生状况往往糟糕得惊人。

It took place on many different planes: between Napoleon’s French army and the angry inhabitants; between the British, ever keen to exacerbate the emperor’s difficulties, and the marshals sent from Paris to try to keep them in check; between new forces of science and meritocracy and old ones of conservatism and birth.

这场斗争在许多不同层面上展开：拿破仑的法国军队与愤怒的当地居民之间；一心想加剧皇帝困境的英国人与从巴黎派来试图遏制他们的元帅们之间；科学与任人唯贤的新势力和保守主义与门第出身的旧势力之间。