We were afforded time to freshen, and then given the expected tourof the artichoke fields, the acres of experimental cotton, the long hut where the women on looms powered by the village generator mass-produce the ancestral patterns, the small huts where the old men carve from capybara, jaguar, and centipede, to be sold at airport souvenir shops a thousand miles away. Such an industry, the taller priest explained in his epicene Catalan, is of course less than ideal, since the zoomorphs thus manufactured are acknowledged by the hand that whittles them to have lost their sacred animistic purpose. We are in transition here. These old men--his gesture flicked across the bent, partly shaved heads--can create only these forms, which their fathers seriously confused with living creatures. The next generation, he hoped, would be quite free of the old shadows and produce wood carvings expressive of both their own individual genius and the beauty of the common weal. Whether such figures would be popular in the airport shops remained to be seen. We advance here by trial and error, he said; we do not disdain half-meeasures. Only in our ultimate goals are we doctrinaire.
These goals, it did not need to be said, were liberty, equality, fraternity; worker control of the means of production; freedom from oppression, subtle or overt.
上文中的Only in our ultimate goals are we doctrinaire,总觉得译起来有点蹩扭。拙译是:不达终极目标决不空谈理论。不知各位有何高见?
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Meunique