J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

福斯特主席，哈佛公司和监察委员的各位成员，各位老师，自豪的家长们，以及，更重要的，毕业生们。

The first thing I would like to say is "thank you". No only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindors's reunion.

首先我想说的是“谢谢”。不仅仅是哈佛给了我非凡的荣耀，还有这几周以来我一想到这个演讲的地址所经受的恐惧和紧张使我减肥成功。实在是一个双赢的情况！现在我所要做的就是深呼吸几下，眯着眼睛看这个红色的横幅并且安慰自己在世界上最大的格兰芬多聚会上。

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distingguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

发表毕业演讲是一个巨大的责任；至少我在回想我自己的毕业典礼前是这么认为的。那天的演讲者是英国著名的哲学家Baroness Mary Warnock。对她演讲的回忆很大地帮助了我写这篇演讲稿，因为结果是我对她说的话一个字也不记得了。这个令人解脱的发现使我继续下去并不再担心可能无意中影响地你放弃在商业，法律或者政治上的大好前途，转而醉心于成为一个快乐的巫师。

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals - the first step to self-improvement.

你们看到了吗？如果你们在多年后仍记得这个快乐巫师的笑话，我还超越了Baroness Mary Warnock。可达到的目标 - 提高自我的第一步。

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

实际上，我曾为今天应该跟大家说些什么而绞尽脑汁。我曾问过自己，我希望我在我自己的毕业典礼上了解到什么，而我从那时起到现在的21年间，最重要的教训又是什么。

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

我想到了两个答案。当我们在这个精彩的一天聚在一起去庆祝你们学业的成功时，我决定告诉你们关于失败的益处。在你们站在那个往往被叫作“现实生活”的起点上时，我想去赞颂一下至关重要的想象力。

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but bear with me.

这些选择看起来可能不切实际或者自相矛盾，但是请容我先说完。

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

回想21岁刚刚毕业的自己，对于42岁的我来说已经成为一个有点不太舒服的经历。在我人生的前半部分，我一直挣扎在我自己的雄心壮志和最亲密的人对我的期望这个令人不安的平衡之间。

I was convinced that only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

我一直深信我唯一想做的事情，就是写小说。但是我的父母，两个人都出身于贫困的背景，并且都没有上过大学，他们认为我过度活跃的想象力是一个令人发笑的个人怪癖，它不能拿来支付贷款或者取得养老金。

I know the irony strikes like with the force of a cartoon anvil now, but...

我知道现在反讽就像用卡通铁砧去打你，但是...

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

他们希望我会取得一个职业学位；而我想去学习英国文学。在回忆里，达成了一个双方都不满意的折中办法，我改去学习现代语言。在我父母的汽车刚刚拐过道路尽头的角落时，我立刻抛下了德语转而奔向了古典文学的道路。

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

我不记得有告诉过父母我学习了古典文学；他们可能是在我毕业那天才第一次发现这件事。在地球上所有的学科之中，我想他们很难找到一门比希腊神话学更对事业成功没有帮助的学科的了。

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment your are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

另外，我想明确一点：我不会因为父母的观点而责备他们。埋怨父母给你指错方向是有一个期限的；当你成长到足够自己掌舵时，你就要自己承担责任了。尤其是，我不会因为父母希望我永不经历贫穷而指责他们。他们一直很穷，我曾经也一度贫穷，所以我很同意他们的看法，贫穷并不是一种高贵的经历。它带来恐惧、压力，有时还有绝望；它意味着无数细小的屈辱和苦难。靠自己的努力摆脱贫穷，确实是可以引以为豪的事情，但贫穷本身只对于傻瓜来说是浪漫的。

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

我在你们这个年纪最害怕的不是贫穷，而是失败。

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures. I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

我在你们这么大时，虽然缺乏在大学学习的干劲，花费很久的时间在咖啡店写故事而很少的时间在课堂。但我有一个通过考试的诀窍，它使我在这些年的生活和同龄人中不落下风。

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have 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.

我没有愚蠢地去假设因为你们年轻、有天赋并且受过良好的教育，所以你们没有经历过困难和心痛。才华和智慧也从不曾给任何人打过应对多舛的命运的预防针，我也没在任何时刻猜测过各位在这里享受平静的荣耀和满足的生活方式。

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted 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.

然而，你们从哈佛毕业的事实表明了你们不会很了解失败。你们也许极其渴望成功，所以非常害怕失败。事实上，你们关于失败的定义可能离普通人眼中的的成功并不相差甚远，毕竟你们在学业上已经腾飞到如此的高度了。

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，我们必须决定什么才算做自己的失败，如果你愿意的话世界是相当渴望给你一套标准的。所以我想很公平的讲，在我毕业仅仅七年后的日子里，我遭遇了一场史诗般规模的失败。极其短暂的婚姻破裂，我又失业成为了一个单亲妈妈，除了流浪汉，我可能是当代伦敦最穷的人。父母和我对自己的担心，如今都变成了现实，按任何惯常的标准来看，我都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 are 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，我不打算站在这儿告诉你们失败是有趣的。那个时期是我人生中的一段黑暗，我不知道它是否代表一种童话中仙子所经受的磨难。我也不知道这个下水道有多远，很长的一段时间里，在它尽头的任何光亮都是希望，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.

所以，为什么我要讨论失败的益处呢？只是因为失败意味着剥离掉不必要的东西。我开始不再伪装自己，不再是从前的那个我了，并开始将全身心的精力放在完成唯一对我重要的工作上。如果我真的在别的事情上成功了，我可能永远不会找到在一个我相信真正属于我的舞台上取得成功的决心。我获得了自由，因为我最担心的事情已经发生了，并且我还活着，我还有一个我喜爱的女儿，我还有一个老打字机和一个很大的想法。所以谷底成为了我重建我人生的坚实基础。

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 all - in which case, you fail by default.

你们可能永远不会像我这样规模的失败，但失败在人生中必然发生。人活在这世上不可能不会失败，除非你非常小心翼翼以至于像没活过一样——这样的话，默认为失败。

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned  no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

失败给予了我从未在通过考试中取得的一种内心的安全感。失败让我认清了自己，这是我不能从其他方式中学到的。我发现我拥有强烈的意志，以及比我想象得更多的自制力；我也明白了我拥有比红宝石还要真正珍贵的朋友。

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.