好英语网特朗普，美国怪物
WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they used to be.
华盛顿——怪物已是今非昔比。
I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
我正在读课上布置的玛丽·雪莱的《弗兰肯斯坦》(Frankenstein)，这是个令人赞叹不已的怪物。他阅读歌德的《少年维特的烦恼》(The Sorrows of Young Werther)，为一个贫困家庭拾柴火，本是个有着优雅的心灵与和蔼可亲的气质的人物。但他的创造者维克多·弗兰肯斯坦抛弃了他，并拒绝给他造一个伴侣来缓解他的孤独。这个造物发现，人人都害怕和厌恶他这个缝合怪，他的黄色皮肤和眼睛，还有黑色的嘴唇。于是他开始心怀怨恨，向他的创造者和世界复仇。
“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
“放眼望去，到处都能看到幸福，只有我被无可挽回地排除在外，”他哀叹道。“我本来仁慈善良；是苦难把我变成恶魔。”
Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had “high thoughts of honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” of malignant deeds piled up.
全书结尾，他消失在北极，他沉思着，他曾经有过“崇高的荣誉感”，直到他“种种可怕的恶行”不断堆积。
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
雪莱的怪物和我们的怪物不一样，那个怪物有自我意识，也有理由进行破坏。他知道应当感到内疚，也知道何时离开舞台。而我们这个怪物的恶行源于纯粹的自恋精神病态——他拒绝离开舞台，也拒绝停止他卑鄙的谎言。
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.
唐纳德·特朗普从来没有想过，美国总统煽动叛乱这样的行为会削弱这个国家，腐蚀这个国家。这只是混乱之王又在为自己的头衔增光添彩。
We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.
周四晚上，我们听到了特朗普种种可怕的恶行。它们是如此超乎寻常、不可思议，以至于在某种程度上，这一切都还没有被充分理解。
The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!
众议院一·六事件委员会在黄金时间的听证会，重点不在于说明特朗普是个喋喋不休的小丑，误打误撞地当上了总统。它证明了特朗普是一个冷酷无情的怪物，很多人看完后会相信，他应该受到刑事指控并被关进监狱。把他关起来！
The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”
听证会清楚地表明特朗普对推翻政府这件事是非常认真的。特朗普说，如果迈克·彭斯——他曾经的哈巴狗——因为拒绝帮助特朗普非法保住总统职位而被吊死在国会山外的绞刑架上，那也没什么不行的。“也许我们支持者的想法是正确的，”他那天冷冷地说，并说他的副总统“活该”。
Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump aides to show that, despite his malevolent bleating, Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.
利兹·切尼巧妙地使用了特朗普前助手的话来表明尽管特朗普恶毒地抱怨，但他知道不存在足以改变选举结果的舞弊。
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
“我明确表示，我不同意说选举是被窃取的，也不同意发布这样的东西，我告诉总统，这是胡扯，”特朗普的司法部长威廉·巴尔说。
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
伊万卡·特朗普与父亲出现分歧，在一段录音证词中，她表示接受巴尔对现实的描述：“我尊重司法部长巴尔。所以我接受了他说的话。”
(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the prize for gall in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for sleazeballs to pay attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit over the sleazeball in the Oval.)
（她的丈夫贾里德·库什纳可以获得证词中的“胆大妄为奖”：他忙着为那些卑鄙无耻的人安排赦免，没有注意到特朗普的助手们是否因为椭圆形办公室的卑鄙小人而威胁要辞职。）
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
特朗普的数据专家直截了当地告诉他，他输了。马克·梅多斯说：“所以根本是无中生有。”
Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social media with the Big Lie.
特朗普只是无法忍受被贴上失败者的标签——这是他父亲最厌恶的词。他知道在社交媒体上很容易用“大谎言”来操纵人们，出于纯粹的自私和邪恶，他疯狂地颠覆选举。
It was fine with him if his followers broke the law and attacked the police and went to jail, while he praised their “love” from afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.
如果他的追随者们触犯法律，袭击警察，最后进了监狱，他也不会介意，他只是在远处赞美他们的“爱”。居然没有议员遇害，简直不可思议。
Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”
放眼望去，到处都能看到让你胆战心惊的东西。《弗兰肯斯坦》中的怪物并不是唯一一个抛弃“荣誉感”的人。
Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.
同样被怪物控制的俄罗斯正在入侵和摧毁一个与其接壤的民主国家，没有任何理由，只是因为弗拉基米尔·普京的狂妄自大。
In Uvalde, the unfathomable story unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
在尤瓦尔迪也发生了这样难以理解的事，由于一名指挥官担心警官们的安全，警察把营救学生的时间推迟了一个小时。
Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered. (Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his government position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his new private equity firm.)
贪婪的高尔夫球星参加了由沙特人赞助的巡回赛，尽管沙特王储曾下令肢解一名记者。（库什纳正在接受调查，以确定他是否利用自己在政府的地位，为自己新开的私募股权公司从沙特人那里获得了20亿美元的投资。）
As Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the committee, noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British. This time it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the democracy he swore to protect.
正如该委员会主席本尼·汤普森指出的，1814年国会大厦遭到袭击是英国人所为。这一次是由内部的敌人进行，由位居民主核心的人物怂恿，而这个人本来发誓捍卫民主。
“They did so at the encouragement of the president of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”
“他们这样做是在美国总统的鼓励之下，”汤普森谈到暴徒时说，“他们试图阻止权力移交，这是220年来未有的先例。”
It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
匪夷所思的是，特朗普只关心自己，却有这么多人仍然拥护他。周五，他很快就抛弃了伊万卡，表示她的意见不算数，因为她“没有参与查看或研究选举结果。她早就退出了。”
Let some conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly refuse to run them.
一些保守派人士把听证会贬低为“打瞌睡的节日”，这无关紧要。福克斯新闻断然拒绝报道它，这也没有关系。
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.
这场听证会令人着迷，讲述了凶残的“骄傲男孩”(Proud Boys)组织的恐怖故事，以及一个让玛丽·雪莱都能啧啧称奇的怪兽。收视率非常高，有近两千万人收看。
Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.
卡洛琳·爱德华兹是一名坚强的国会警察，她受到了脑震荡，眼睛被喷伤，然后站起来继续战斗。她描述了地狱般的情景。
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was carnage.”
“我踩到地上的血泊滑倒，”她回忆说。“你知道，我——我在搀扶正跌倒的人。我——你知道，我——那是一场浩劫。”
In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.
在他那篇反乌托邦就职演说中，特朗普承诺结束“美国浩劫”。相反，他是带来了一场浩劫。现在，他需要为自己的未遂政变负责——而且不仅仅是在舆论法庭上。