四川外语学院第七届“语言桥杯”翻译大赛获奖译文选登

参赛原文：

These aspects of her personality I came to know gradually over the coming months. What struck me first were the outward things, her animation and expressiveness. I couldn’t tell whether this was something she was born with, or whether the projection of emotion which she had learned as an actress had become second nature. When indignant, her eyes would flash fire, when happy she would laugh unrestrainedly like a child. I quickly changed my preconceived notions about the “inscrutableness” of Orientals. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

... She had not remarried because she had not found anyone for whom she could care enough and who would respect her independence.

Not, at least, till I came along. Our physical attraction was immediate and mutual. But more than that, we shared an identity of interests and found pleasure in each other’s company...

We sat in tea gardens amid flowering shrubs and fanciful pavilions and sipped green “Dragon Well” tea and cracked watermelon seeds. We wended through the City God Temple, with its many shops of marvelous handicrafts connected by a zigzag bridge around a lotus pond.

And we met in her flat with a few other Chinese friends and talked in low voices, with the radios turned on loud against possible eavesdroppers, about who had just been arrested, or what bookstores had been raided, or whether more revolutionaries had been executed, and what the news from the Liberated Areas was. Sometimes we could pick up Yen’an on my short-wave set.

She had no doubt about our compatibleness, and if our future was unsure, so was the future of everyone in China. Nor did my “foreignness” seem to present any problems. She had got used to my appearance, and recovered from the initial shock of seeing me in a raglan sleeve topcoat on finding, when I took it off, that I had shoulders after all. In fact she had become bemused to such an extent that she thought I was quite nice-looking. No one stared when we appeared in public together, nor did I, for some reason, attract the crowds which often trailed other foreigners, awestruck by their outlandish garb and, by Chinese standards, huge noses. Her family offered no objections whatever.

Absence of racial or religious prejudice is traditional in China. For two thousand years foreigners had been encouraged to settle in the Middle Kingdom and practice their religions and retain their customs. There was some talk among the rustics that all foreigners had red hair and blue eyes and walked without bending their knees. But those who had actually seen them knew better. None of her compatriots was shocked, though some perhaps wondered why she chose a foreigner when there was so many Chinese around.