Chinese Practice
同歸於盡(tong2 gui1 yu2 jin4)
end in mutual destruction; to take somebody down with you
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
照片:維基共享資源
Benjamin Franklin, in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, wrote, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin didn’t invent the turn of phrase. It appears in a 1716 play named The Cobbler of Preston by Christopher Bullock, in which we find the line “‘Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.” Although it might be, on the surface, a flippant observation, linking something as momentous as death with something as mundane and yet obnoxious to most as taxes, the central idea is there: that some things in life are just unavoidable, and come to us all.
The Tang dynasty poet and prose writer Du Guji, a pioneer of the Chinese Prose Movement, wrote a nostalgic piece reminiscing about loved ones that had died too early, and pondered on the meaning of life. He compared Peng Zu, the legendary figure of Taoism who was believed to have lived 800 years, with those who had died young, well before their time. Despite the vast difference in their respective life spans, death came to them in the end, as it does to us all. That being the case, it is perhaps not something to be feared, nor lamented. It is a fact of life. Which brings us back to taxes.
The Chinese idiom 同歸於盡, literally meaning “we all come to an end,” derives from this short text, but it has since taken on a different meaning, less the fatalistic idea that death comes to us all, more the idea that an action will lead to mutual destruction, that in doing so an actor will take someone down with them. Whatever, nobody gets out of here alive.
(Paul Cooper, Taipei Times)
英文練習
Death and taxes;
to take somebody down with you
美國開國元勳班傑明‧富蘭克林在一七八九年寫給法國友人尚-巴提斯‧勒華的信中寫道:「在這世上,沒有任何事可說是確定的,除了死亡和賦稅之外。」但這個片語並不是富蘭克林發明的。這句話更早也出現在一七一六年克里斯多福‧布拉克所作的《普列斯敦的鞋匠》一劇,其中有一句話說道:「除了死亡和賦稅以外,不可能確定任何事。」雖然乍看之下它可能是把像死亡這樣重大且令人畏懼的事,和賦稅這種極世俗且可憎的事連在一起,但它的中心思想是:有些事就是沒辦法避免,每一個人都得面對。
唐代古文運動先驅獨孤及寫了一篇傷感的〈祭吏部元郎中文〉,追憶早逝的摯友,並反思生命的意義。他將彭祖這位據說活了八百歲的道家傳奇長壽人物,與早逝者相對比。儘管兩者的壽命有巨大差距,死亡畢竟還是都降臨在他們身上了,如同降臨在我們所有人之上。如果是這樣的話,或許死亡並非令人或害怕和悲嘆的。這是生命中的事實。這將我們帶回到賦稅。
成語「同歸於盡」字面上的意思是「我們都來到一個盡頭」,即出自這篇短文,但後來的意義變得有些不同,較沒有死亡降臨每個人的意涵,而比較是指某種行為會導致互相毀滅,如果一個行為者這麼做,會把別人也一起拖下水,沒有人可以活著逃出來。
(台北時報編譯林俐凱譯)
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