英语俚语天天说 第27期:有其父必有其子like father, like son

 　　Sometimes a Chinese idiom has a perfect match in English, as I said in the previous column. And if you happen to know the English expression in question, translation becomes easy.

　　Then, of course, you don’t know if you should call it translation or something else, like, merely saying something in another way, albeit¹, this time in another language. Essentially², you see, that’s what translation is.

　　The Chinese expression“有其父必有其子”, for example, can be rendered into English in many ways, but seldom is a rendering³ better than the existing English expression of “like father, like son”.

　　Like father, like son, which means that a son behaves exactly like his father in some way, conveys precisely⁴ the same idea as the Chinese expression does.

　　Here is a media example in recent news.

　　Like father like son: Could a liberal Jew really consent to the circumcision of his newborn boy?

　　For Paul Sussman, the birth of his baby was both a joy and the start of a dilemma⁵.

　　For Jewish parents the world over it's a no-brainer, like the Chief Rabbi eating kosher and bears pooping in the woods – if you have a baby son, you get him circumcised. For me too, when our boy was just a dream of future fatherhood, there was no question in my mind that he would undergo the procedure, as I had done, and my father before me, and his father before him.

　　Even when Alicky, my wife, became pregnant and we saw those blurred⁶ images on the ultrasound screen, with the indeterminate grey smudge that, the scan operator assured us, was a nascent⁷ scrotum, circumcision remained a given.

　　Then, however, Ezra was born, and I held him in my arms and changed his nappy and stared at his foreskin – that tiny surge of flesh at the end of his willy – and suddenly the certainty evaporated. Could I really do this to my son? Subject him to what is, when faith and tradition are stripped away, a traumatic and, in the UK at least, medically unnecessary act.

1 albeit   

conj.即使；纵使；虽然

参考例句：

• Albeit fictional,she seemed to have resolved the problem.虽然是虚构的，但是在她看来好象是解决了问题。
• Albeit he has failed twice,he is not discouraged.虽然失败了两次，但他并没有气馁。

2 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

3 rendering   

n.表现，描写

参考例句：

• She gave a splendid rendering of Beethoven's piano sonata.她精彩地演奏了贝多芬的钢琴奏鸣曲。
• His narrative is a super rendering of dialect speech and idiom.他的叙述是方言和土语最成功的运用。

4 precisely   

adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地

参考例句：

• It's precisely that sort of slick sales-talk that I mistrust.我不相信的正是那种油腔滑调的推销宣传。
• The man adjusted very precisely.那个人调得很准。

5 dilemma   

n.困境，进退两难的局面

参考例句：

• I am on the horns of a dilemma about the matter.这件事使我进退两难。
• He was thrown into a dilemma.他陷入困境。

6 blurred   

v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离

参考例句：

• She suffered from dizziness and blurred vision. 她饱受头晕目眩之苦。
• Their lazy, blurred voices fell pleasantly on his ears. 他们那种慢吞吞、含糊不清的声音在他听起来却很悦耳。 来自《简明英汉词典》

7 nascent   

adj.初生的，发生中的

参考例句：

• That slim book showed the Chinese intelligentsia and the nascent working class.那本小册子讲述了中国的知识界和新兴的工人阶级。
• Despite a nascent democracy movement,there's little traction for direct suffrage.尽管有过一次新生的民主运动，但几乎不会带来直接选举。