J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

[1] President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

• Fringe benefit 附加福利
• Overseer ['əʊvəsɪə]监督人

[2] The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

• Nausea ['nɔːziə] 恶心，反胃
• Commencement [kə'mensmənt] 开始，毕业典礼
• Squint [skwɪnt] 眯着眼看

张先生的翻译：首先，我得说声感谢。不仅因为哈佛给我如此殊荣，更因为想到要做这个毕业演讲而饱受数周以来的恐惧和恶心已经让我减了个肥。双赢啊真是！现在我只需要深呼吸，瞥一眼这些横幅，我就能坚信，自己正处在在世界上最大的格兰芬多大聚会里。

[3] Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

• Inadvertently [ˌɪnəd'vɜːtəntli] 非故意地
• giddy ['ɡɪdi] 头晕的，轻浮的

张先生的翻译：发表一场毕业演讲是个重任；至少直到我回想起我毕业那会儿的场景时我都是这么认为的。那天的毕业演讲者是英国著名的玛丽·沃诺克男爵夫人。回想她的演讲对我写这篇演讲稿真的是帮助巨大，因为我发现我早已经记不起她讲过的每一个字。这个发现让我释然，让我可以无所畏惧地写起来，一点儿也不担心我会无意中影响到你们，从而放弃光明的企业、法律或者政治方面的职业机会，而脑袋一热成为了一个快乐的小巫师。

[4] You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

[5] Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

• Wrack [ræk] 生理或心理地折磨

[6] I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

[7] These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

• quixotic [kwɪk'sɒtɪk] 愚侠的，不切实际的
• paradoxical [ˌpærə'dɒksɪkl] 悖论的，似是而非的

[8] Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

[9] I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

• quirk [kwɜːk] 怪癖
• anvil ['ænvɪl] 砧板

[10] So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

• Ditch [dɪtʃ] 丢弃
• Scuttle ['skʌtl] 疾走，快跑

[11] I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

[12] I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

• Expiry [ɪk'spaɪəri] 过期，逾期
• Ennobling [ɪ'nəʊbl] 使……杰出的
• Entail [ɪn'teɪl] 使必须，带来
• petty ['peti] 琐碎的，无关紧要的

张先生的翻译：我想附带着说清楚一点，就是我的父母有他们那样的想法，我一点儿都不埋怨。抱怨父母给你指错方向这种事情，是有期限的。当你已经长大到可以自己把握方向的时候，重任可就在你身上了。不但如此，我更不能因为父母希望我不再遭受贫穷而指摘他们。他们自己穷过，我也因此跟着穷过，而且我特别认同父母的一点，就是贫穷并不是什么可以令人高贵的经历。贫穷往往蕴含着恐惧，压力，有时候甚至还包含抑郁。贫穷意味着成千上万个无关生死的屈辱和艰难。靠自己的努力爬出贫穷的漩涡，绝对是一件值得为自己骄傲的事情，而只有蠢人们才会给贫穷罩上浪漫的外衣。

[13] What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

[14] At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

• Knack [næk] 技巧，诀窍

[15] I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

• Caprice [kə'priːs] 异想天开，反复无常
• unruffled [ʌn'rʌfld] 平静的，一帆风顺的
• contentment [kən'tentmənt] 满足

[16] However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

张先生的翻译：然而，你们将要从哈佛毕业这个事实就在告诉我们，你们跟失败可不算是老朋友。你们对失败的恐惧可能更像是对成功的渴求。讲真，你们对失败的认知可能跟寻常人对成功的定义，相差无几，毕竟，你们已经是人中翘楚了。

[17] Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

• epic ['epɪk] 史诗般的
• imploded [ɪm'pləʊd] 崩溃，瓦解

[18] Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

[19] So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

• rock bottom 最低点

张先生的翻译：所以，我为什么要谈失败的好处呢？就因为失败意味着剥离那些无关紧要的东西。我不再假装一些我其实并不是的东西，然后开始把我所有的精力投入到对我来说唯一重要的工作当中。如果我真的曾经在一些事情上小有所成，我可能还找不到这种要在我坚信我所属于的领域里达成所望的决心。我就此超然了，因为我已经认清了最大的恐惧，而我还活着，而我还有自己深爱的女儿，而我还有一台有了念头的打字机和一个棒棒的点子。因此，人生的谷底，就变成了我续写人生的基石。

[20] You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

张先生的翻译：你们可能从来没有像我失败得这么彻底过，但是人生在世，失败还是难免的。从不失败是不可能的，除非你活得如此战战兢兢以至于你干脆就等于是没活过——那样的话，你最初就是个失败。

[21] Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

• Ruby ['ruːbi] 红宝石

[22] The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

• adversity [əd'vɜːsəti] 逆境，困境

张先生的翻译：你从一个个挫折中变得越来越睿智，越来越强大，这个道理表示你在从此在你的生存能力当中获得安稳。你永远都不会真地了解自己，或者了解你的人际关系的真正力量，知道这两者在逆境中接受了检验。懂得这样的道理真的是个恩赐，因为这些道理都是我在痛苦中赢得的，而且它们比我曾经获得的任何证书都更有价值。

[23] So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

• Humility [hjuː'mɪləti] 谦逊，谦卑
• Vicissitude [vɪ'sɪsɪtjuːdz] 人生的盛衰，变迁

张先生的翻译：所以如果能有个时光机带我回到21岁，我会对自己说，一个人的幸福在于知道人生并不是一系列的成就取得的清单。你的证书，你的履历，并非你的人生，尽管你会遇到很多我这么大年纪甚至更大年纪还依然分不清它们的区别的人。人生艰难而复杂，完全不是我们能控制的了的，谦卑地知道这一点，才会让我们在人世沧桑当中生存下去。

[24] Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

• Fount [faʊnt] 源泉
• Revelatory [ˌrevə'leɪtəri] 启示性的
• Empathise ['empəθaɪz] 移情，使共鸣

[25] One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

[26] There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

[27] Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

• Exile ['eksaɪl] 放逐

[28] I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

• Exquisite [ɪk'skwɪzɪt] 精致细腻的

[29] And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

• Outspokenness 直言不讳，坦率

[30] Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

[31] Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

[32] And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

[33] Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

• Mobilise ['məʊbɪlɑɪz] 动员

[34] Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

[35] Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

[36] And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

- Peer [pɪə(r)] 窥视

[37] I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
- agoraphobia [ˌæɡərə'fəʊbiə] 陌生环境恐惧症，旷野恐惧症

[38] What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

• Collude [kə'luːd] 勾结
• apathy ['æpəθi] 冷漠

[39] One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

[40] That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

[41] But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

张先生的翻译：但是各位08届的哈佛毕业生们，你们又能如何更多地影响到人们的生活？你们的聪明才智，你们的奋斗能力，你们所获取的教育，给了你们独一无二的话语权，以及独一无二的责任。纵使你们的国籍有别，可是你们大部分人还是属于当今世界仅存的这个超级大国。你们投选票的方式，你们生活的方式，你们抗议的方式，乃至你们给政府施加的压力，都有一种远超国别的影响力。这是你们的特权，也是你们肩负的重担。

[42] If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to transform our world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

张先生的翻译：如果你们选择借助自己的话语权和影响力为那些无法发言的人发言；如果你选择不仅尊重权贵，也尊重平民；如果你坚持保有为弱势群体设身处地考虑的能力的话，那为你的存在喝彩的人，应该就不只有你骄傲的家人了，还有能千百万在你的帮助写改变了现状的黎民百姓。我们不需要魔法来改变世界，我们身上早已拥有巨大的力量：我们能够想象出更美好的世界。

[43] I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

[44] So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

张先生的翻译：所以今天，我最真诚地祝愿你们收获跟我一样的友谊。明天，我希望你们即便忘了今天我所讲的全部内容，你们还能记得塞内加的话——那也是当年我放弃更有职业前途的机会，转而探寻古代智慧的时候，在我奔向古典文学教室走廊的时候了解到的一位古罗马的智者，他说：人生如同讲故事，长短不重要，精彩，最重要。

[45] I wish you all very good lives.

[46] Thank-you very much.

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