Foreword

序

One morning in 1905, or the 31st year of the reign of tEmperor Guangxu of Qing Dynasty, two brothers set out by boat from their hometown Boa-ah, a mountain hamlet in Fujian province on the southern coast of China, for the port city of Xiamen, some sixty miles away.  The boys were full of excitement and chatter, especially the younger one. Yutang  was ten years old, and today, he was taking leave of his hometown and going with his borther to study in Xiamen. They were sons of Pastor Lin Zhicheng, who was born in the poor village of Wulisha. Pastor Lin was sending his sons to free missionary schools in Xiamen.

清朝光绪31年，也就是1905年的清晨，兄弟二人离开了他们的家乡宝峨（Boa-ah)，中国南部沿海省份福建的一个小山村，搭船前往六十英里外的港口城市厦门。他们滔滔不绝，兴奋不已，尤其是其中年幼的一个。语堂年方十岁，他正离开家乡和哥哥前往厦门求学。他们是牧师林至诚的儿子。林至诚出生在贫穷的五里沙村。他要把自己的儿子送到厦门免费的教会学校里读书。

The pastor was not a follower of convention, so the boys did not wear queues. Yutang  was a little guy, deeply tanned, with a prominent forehead, a pair of sparkling eyes, and a narrow chin. Six miles later, when the skiff came to xiaoli, the boys changed to a five-sail junk, and sailed toward zhangzhou on west river. There were paddy fields and farm houses on either side of the river, and tall mountains stood behind them, clad in grey-purplish hues. Yutang thought it inexpressibly beautiful. After a days journey, the junk tied up against the bank under some bamboo trees. Yutang was told to lie down, cover himself with a blanket and go to sleep.

林牧师并不是个恪守传统的人，所以男孩们都没有留长辫。语堂个头不高，肤色深褐，前额突出，有双闪闪发光的眼睛和窄窄的下巴。船行六英里，到了孝澧后，他们由小渔船登上了五帆舢板，继续沿西江前往漳州。西江两岸，稻田成茵，农舍散布，高山如黛耸立在他们的身后。景色之美，令语堂感到难以描述。几日后，小舢板靠岸拴在了竹子上。按照吩咐，语堂要盖条毯子躺下睡觉。

But sleep was the last thing on the boy's mind. The boatman sitting at the junk's was sucking his pipe, and between gulps of bitter tea, telling stories about the empress Dowager Cexi, who ruled the court today, having put the emperor guagnxu under house arrest for supporting the reformers at the palace. Another junk was tied up on the opposite bank, brightly lit by lanterns. A soft breeze wafted sounds of merrymaking and music from a lute across the water. Oh, what a beautiful scene! Yutang thought. I must remmeber this evening  well, so that the sights and sounds will always be fresh in my mind when I recall this night, however old I might be.

然而此刻在少年的心里，睡觉是最不情愿的事情了。船工正坐在一边吸着他的旱烟，一边讲述着把支持维新派的光绪皇帝软禁在宫，眼下正统治着朝廷的慈禧太后的故事，不时地喝上几口浓茶。对岸也泊着一艘舢板，船上灯笼闪亮。夜风轻轻的飘荡，水面上传来欢乐的喧闹和琵琶的奏鸣。哦，多迷人的景色！我一定要把这个夜晚牢牢的记在心里，这样将来不论我多老，一想起今夜，这些迷人的景色和美妙的声音都会活生生的出现在我的脑海里。语堂心里想着。

At the thought of going to the school in xiamen, his heart leapt with anticipation. He often went to watch the sunset behind the tall mountains which completely surrounded the hamlet. The mountain peaks were always shrouded in clouds. How did a person get out of this deep valley, he wondered. What was the world like outside? To the north there was a crack in one of the peaks, let there, it was said, when a fairy stubbed his toe on a rock. The world was so big that it boggled his mind. Two years ago, his father told him the first airplane had a successful test flight.. "I've read everything I could lay my hands on about the airplane", his father said, "but I have never seen one, and I don't know whether I should believe it." his father also told him that the best university in the world were the university of berlin in Germany, and oxford university in England. "you must study hard, young man," his father often said, sitting beside the boy's bed at night, turning up the oil lamp and smoking his pipe. "study hard, so that you can go to one of those universities. Acquire an education and become a famous man."

想到了要到厦门上学，他的心里便充满了期望。他经常跑去看日落，看太阳落在那些把小山村团团包围的群山的背后。那些山峰总是被包裹在灿烂的云霞之中。别人是怎么能够走出这深深的山谷的呢，他有点困惑。外面的世界会是什么样的呢？在北面的一座山峰上有道裂缝，据说那是一个仙女的脚趾蹭了一下留下来的。世界这么大，让他有点不敢面对。两年前，他的父亲告诉他第一家飞机成功的进行了一次试飞。“我度过我能找到的所有的有关这架飞机的报道，”他的父亲说，“但我从来没有见过飞机，我也不知道我是否该相信它。”他的父亲经常对他说世界上最好的大学是德国的柏林大学和英国的牛津大学。“你一定要用功学习，小伙子，”他父亲常常坐在他的床边，点亮油灯，吸着烟管这样的教导他。“刻苦学习，将来才能到这些大学读书，接受教育，成为一个名人。”

（名人的童年就是不一样，我小的时候可是一片懵懂，只知道笑和哭，根本没有什么关于世界什么样的深刻思考和困惑。我老爸更是平常，从来没有跟我说过出名之类的话，倒是我的一个堂姐高考落榜，自己在家痛苦的复习过一段时间，她经常对我说，你一定好好学习，你名字里的wen可是闻名世界的wen啊，但这些对我的影响多大呢？那个闻字也只在我的名字里偶尔出现过几次。）

My father often repeated this story to me. As I sat in his study, surrounded by bookshelves of his works, I knew that grandfather's words were the inspiration of his life. In his 80 years, my father wrote and translated more than 50 books and became a world-renowned author. The new york times said at the time of his death, "Lin Yutang had no peer as an interpreter to western minds of the customs, aspirations, fears and thought of his people." father was a novelist, essayist, philosopher, philologist and lexicographer. He also invented a chinese typewriter. "but he was more,” wrote Prof. Nelson I. Wu of Washington University of St. Louis, Missouri. “He was a total man, stubbornly going his own way through the criticism of lesser minds to become a universial genius.”

 我的父亲经常向我反复诉说这个故事。当我坐在他的书房，四周被放满了他的著作的书架包围的时候，我明白祖父的话曾经是他生活的鞭策。在八十岁的时候，父亲已经创作和翻译了50本书，并成了一个世界闻名的作家。纽约时报在他去世的时候报道说，“林语堂在向西方人的诠释他的人民的风俗习惯，理想追求，担忧恐惧和所思所想方面举世无双，无与伦比。”父亲是个小说家，散文家，哲学家，语言学家和字典编纂者。他甚至还发明了一种中文打字机。“但是他的贡献不止这些”，位于美国密苏里州圣路易斯的华盛顿大学的Nelson I Wu教授写道“他是一个彻头彻尾的人，他不顾少数人的批评，执着的坚持自己的道路，并成了一个世界级的天才。”

Father was born in 1895, the fifth of six sons of Lin Zhicheng. The Presbyterian pastor, a self-taught man, communicated to his children a passionate zest for all that was new and modern from the west, and decided that his sons must learn English and receive western educations. With the help of one of his brothers and a loan, Yutang attended St. John’s University in Shanghai. The main emphasis was on English. Yutang also studied theology, because he wanted to be a pastor like his father. But after extensive reading in science, he began to have doubts about Christian dogma, and changed his major to philosophy.

父亲生于1895年，是祖父林至诚六个孩子中的老五。作为长老会的牧师，一个自学成才的人，祖父将他对所有西方西方新颖先进事物的一腔热忱传递给了他的孩子们，他认定他的孩子们必须学习英语并接受西方式的教育。在贷款和他的一个兄弟的帮助下，语堂加入了上海的圣约翰大学学习。该校的主要强调英语学习。语堂也学习了神学，因为他希望和他的父亲一样成为一名牧师。然而在阅读了大量的自然科学知识后，他开始对基督教的教义产生了怀疑，并把专业转到了哲学。

When he graduated from st. John’s in 1916, Yutang accepted a teaching post at Qinghua college in Beijing. Here, he found himself surrounded by Chinese history, and he realized how small the confines of his Christian education had been. He knew that joshua’s trumpet blew down the walls of Jericho, but did not know the folktale of meng jiangnu, whose tears for her lost husband at the great wall caused a section of the wall to collapse and expose his dead body. Determined to make up his inadequacy, Yutang haunted bookstores, asking shopkeepers what were the most important books to read, because he was too ashamed to ask others.

1916年自圣约翰大学毕业后，语堂在北京的清华大学接受了一份教学工作。在清华，他发现他被中国的历史所包围，并且认识到他所受的基督教式教育的局限是多么的狭隘。他知道约书亚德号角摧毁了耶利哥市的城墙，却不知道孟姜女的眼泪也曾经使一段长城崩塌，暴露出她因修长城死去的丈夫的尸骨。语堂决心弥补自己知识的不足，他留恋在各个书店之间，因为羞于向别人请教，他只好向店员咨询那些才是最重要的书籍。

When he was not reading, Yutang tried to devise a better method for looking up characters in a Chinese dictionary than the prevailing Kangxi method, the bane of scholars and students alike. At the age of 23, he published “an index system for Chinese characters” for which Cai Yuanpei, chancellor of National University of Peking (Beida), wrote a preface. The work attracted the attention of scholars and was a catalyst for change. But Yutang was already dissatisfied with his method, and he continued throughout his life to work on improvements. These were finally incorporated in his monumental Chinese-English dictionary published when he was 77 years old.

不读书的时候，语堂就尝试设计一种更省事在汉语字典里查找汉字的方法，因为那时流行的康熙汉字系统无论对学者还是对学生都是一种负担。23岁时，他发表了 由国立北平大学校长蔡元培作序的“汉字索引系统”一书。该书吸引了许多学者的注意并成了变革的催化剂。但是语堂早已不再满足于他自己的方法，他毕生都在探寻改进。这些工作最终加入了他在77岁时出版的汉英词典中。

Yutang taught at Qinghua for three years, then qualified to study in America. He received a half-scholarship to major in modern languages at Harvard graduate school of arts and sciences. In 1919, he married liao cuifeng from xiamen, and took his bride with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the end of the year, his stipend stopped coming, and he had not enough money to get his master’s degree at Harvard.

语堂在清华教了三年书，后来获得了赴美国留学的资格。他收到了哈佛文理研究生院的现代语言专业的半奖。1919年，他和生于厦门的廖翠凤结婚，并把他的新娘带到了马塞诸塞州的剑桥。然而在这一年年底的时候，他的生活补助却停止了，他没有足够的钱来维持他在哈佛的研究生学习。

（呵呵，天才如林语堂也拿得是半奖啊，而且还中途断流，好可怜，不知道是不是因为得了C的原因，^O^,我已经得了一个C了，：P）