2024年3月9日发(作者：)

新视野大学英语读写教程第四册第四单元B篇原文和翻译

篇一：新视野大学英语读写教程第四册第二单元A篇原文和翻译

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Charlie Chaplin

He was born in a poor area of south London. He wore his mother’s old red

stockings cut down for ankle socks. His mother was temporarily declared mad.

Dickens might have created Charlie Chaplin’s childhood. But only Charle Chaplin

could have created the great comic character of “ the Tramp “, the little man in

rags who gave his creator permanent fame. Other countries — France, Italy, Spain,

even Japan and Korea — have provided more applause (and profit) where Chaplin

is concerned than the land of his birth. Chaplin quit Britain for good in 1913 when

he journeyed to America with a group of performers to do his comedy act on the

stage where talent scouts recruited him to work for Mack Sennett, the king of

Hollywood comedy films. Sad to say, many English people in the 1920’s and

1930’s thought Chaplin’s Tramp a bit, well, “ crude “. Certainly middle-class

audiences did; the working-class audiences were more likely to clap for a character

who revolted against authority, using his wicked little cane to trip it up, or aiming

the heel of his boot for a well-placed kick at its broad rear. All the same, Chaplin’s

comic beggar didn’t seem all that English or even working class. English tramps

didn’t sport tiny moustaches, huge pants or tail coats: European leaders and

Italian waiters wore things like that. Then again, the Tramp’s quick eye for a pretty

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girl had a coarse way about it that was considered, well, not quite nice by English

audiences — that’s how foreigners behaved, wasn’t it? But for over half of his

screen career, Chaplin had no screen voice to confirm his British nationality. Indeed,

it was a headache for Chaplin when he could no longer resist the talking movies

and had to find “the right voice” for his Tramp. He postponed that day as long as

possible: in Modern Times in 1936, the first film in which he was heard as a singing

waiter, he made up a nonsense language which sounded like no known nationality.

He later said he imagined the Tramp to be a college-educated gentleman who’d

come down in the world. But if he’d been able to speak with an educated accent

in those early short comedy movies, it’s doubtful if he would have achieved world

fame. And the English would have been sure to find it “odd”. No one was certain

whether Chaplin did it on purpose but this helped to bring about his huge success.

He was an immensely talented man, determined to a degree unusual even in the

ranks of Hollywood stars. His huge fame gave him the freedom — and, more

importantly, the money — to be his own master. He already had the urge to

explore and extend a talent he discovered in himself as he went along. “It can’t

be me. Is that possible? How extraordinary,” is how he greeted the first sight of

himself as the Tramp on the screen. But that shock roused his imagination. Chaplin

didn’t have his jokes written into a script in advance; he was the kind of comic

who used his physical senses to invent his art as he went along.

feless objects especially helped Chaplin make “contact” with himself as an

artist. He turned them into other kinds of objects. Thus, a broken alarm clock in the

movie The Pawnbroker became a “sick” patient undergoing surgery; boots were

boiled in his film The Gold Rush and their soles eaten with salt and pepper like

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