Lesson 73 The record-holder 纪录保持者

叶凝云

原文

    Children who play truant from school are unimaginative. A quiet day's fishing, or eight hours in a cinema seeing the same film over and over again, is usually as far as they get. They have all been put to shame by a boy who, while playing truant, travelled 1,600 miles. He hitchhiked to Dover and, towards evening, went into a boat to find somewhere to sleep. When he woke up next morning, he discovered that the boat had, in the meantime, travelled to Calais. No one noticed the boy as he crept off. From there, he hitchhiked to Paris in a lorry. The driver gave him a few biscuits and a cup of coffee and left him just outside the city. The next car the boy stopped did not take him into the centre of Paris as he hoped it would, but to Perpignan on the French-Spanish border. There he was picked up by a policeman and sent back to England by the local authorities. He has surely set up a record for the thousands of children who dream of evading school.

New words and expressions 生词和短语

record-holder  纪录保持者
truant  n. 逃学的孩子
unimaginative  adj. 缺乏想像力的
shame  n. 惭愧，羞耻
hitchhike  v. 搭便车旅行

meantime  n. 其间
lorry  n. 卡车
border  n. 边界
evade  v. 逃避，逃离

参考译文

    逃学的孩子们都缺乏想像力。他们通常能够做到的，至多也就是安静地钓上一天鱼，或在电影院里坐上8个小时，一遍遍地看同一部电影。而有那么一个小男孩，他在逃学期间旅行了1,600英里，从而使上述所有逃学的孩子们都相形见绌了。他搭便车到了多佛，天快黑时钻进了一条船，想找个地方睡觉。第二天早上他醒来时，发现船在这段时间已经到了加。当男孩从船里爬出来时，谁也没有发现他。从那里他又搭上卡车到了巴黎。司机给了他几块饼干和一杯咖啡，就把他丢在了城外。男孩截住的第二辆车并没有如他所愿将他再到巴黎市区，而是将他载到了法国与西班牙的边境城市——佩皮尼昂。不幸的是，在那里他被警察找到了，被当地政府遣送回了英格兰。在千千万万梦想着逃学的孩子当中，他可是创下了一个“不朽的记录”。