JK.Rowling演讲稿(3)

自己编辑的,版权未有,希望能帮助更多喜欢学习英语的同学。

never known hardship or heartache. 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. 我不想愚蠢地假设，因为你们年轻、有天

份，并且受过良好的教育，就从来没有遇到困难或心碎的时刻。拥有才华和智慧，从来不会

使人对命运的反复无常有所准备；我也不会假设大家坐在这里冷静地满足于自身的优越感。

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 academically. 相反，你们是哈佛毕业生的这个事实，意味着你们并不很了解失败。你们也许极其渴望成功，

所以非常害怕失败。说实话，你们眼中的失败，很可能就是普通人眼中的成功，毕竟你们在

学业上已经达到很高的高度了。 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 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. 最终，我们所有人都必须自己决定什么算作失败，但如果

你愿意，世界是相当渴望给你一套标准的。所以我想很公平的讲，从任何传统的标准看，在

我毕业仅 仅七年后的日子里，我的失败达到了史诗般空前的规模：短命的婚姻闪电般地破

裂，我又失业成了一个艰难的单身母亲。除了流浪汉，我是当代英国最穷的人之一， 真的

一无所有。当年父母和我自己对未来的担忧，现在都变成了现实。按照惯常的标准来看，我

也是我所知道的最失败的人。 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 how far the tunnel

extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. 现在，我

不打算站在这里告诉你们，失败是有趣的。那段日子是我生命中的黑暗岁月，我不知道它是

否代表童话故事里需要历经的磨难，更不知道自己还要在黑暗中走多久。很长一段时间里，

前面留给我的只是希望，而不是现实。 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. 那么为什么我要谈论失败的好处呢？因为失败意味着剥离掉那些不必要

的东西。我因此不再伪装自己、远离自我，而重新开始把所有精力放在对我最重要的事 情

上。如果不是没有在其他领域成功过，我可能就不会找到，在一个我确信真正属于的舞台上

取得成功的决心。我获得了自由，因为最害怕的虽然已经发生了，但我 还活着，我仍然有

一个我深爱的女儿，我还有一个旧打字机和一个很大的想法。所以困境的谷底，成为我重建

生活的坚实基础。

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