刚刚读了公众"经济学人赏析"的推送，里面提到一个句子:

A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower.

这段话--“登峰造极的难度”--给许多英语学习者造成了困扰。在各路“专家”解读之后，造成了更多的困扰 -- 如果说不是误导的话。

这段话的完整段落是GRE阅读 -- 全文在网上也可以找到的，讨论Thomas Hardy的小说:

In Hardy‘s novels, various impulses were sacrificed to each other inevitably and often. Inevitably, because Hardy did not care in the way that novelists such as Line Flaubert or James cared, and therefore took paths of least resistance. Thus, one impulse often surrendered to a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromise, simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower.

In this instance, the new impulse was at least an energetic one, and thus its indulgence did not result in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous, risky, and highly energizing impulse in favor of what was for him the fatally relaxing impulse to classify and schematize abstractly. When a relaxing impulse was indulged, the style—that sure index of an author‘s literary worth—was certain to become verbose.

1.碰到这样的句子不头疼是不正常的。

2. 我们会“不明觉厉”, 但是不是说我们读不懂的东西都“高冷，够牛X". 好的英文是不会让读者猜来猜去啰里八嗦的 -- 当然这篇文章放在GRE里是很合适，是由考察学术和语文能力。

3. 如果你不是研究翻译的，不要纠结于“这句话怎么翻?" “理解”比“翻译”重要，有些东西真的是“只可意会”.

4. Above is merely my two cents.

今天和你分享的是如何读懂这样的句子。

“读懂”在这里的意思是说，你大概知道这段话想说的是什么，其他的细节内容要根据上下文和理解自行补脑。

除了Quora和WordReference, 同样类型的网站我以前也推荐过english.stackexchange.com

其中一位网友Phenry的回答可以帮助我们学习如何分析(parsing)这样的句子:

One way to get at the structure of a tortured sentence like this is by temporarily ignoring the content of noun phrases and verb phrases and treating them like generic content blocks, so "connective tissue" like conjunctions and prepositions are easier to spot. I'll try to describe my thought process in real time, so to speak, so you can see what I'm doing.

A stretch of text like "reality a light that never was might" comes close to being pure word salad on the first read-through, so I just stroll along without even trying to interpret it until I get to "might give way abruptly." This appears to be a good candidate for our predicate, so let's start parsing here. Abstracting away some of the more complex material that precedes the verb gives us:

A desire to [do something] might give way abruptly to [something else].

Reading a little further, we come across the word "desire" again. Excellent! One desire might give way to another desire. Okay. We can do this. Unfortunately, instead of getting a "to" after the second desire, we get this weird parenthetical crap. We know there will almost surely be a "to" eventually, so let's skip ahead until we find it... ah, there it is: it's a desire to record something. After a couple more adverbs, we find out what that "something" is: the structure and texture of a flower. This gives us:

A desire to [do something] might give way abruptly to the desire ... to record ... the structure and texture of a flower.

So now we know basically what's happening here: the subject of our analysis (Thomas Hardy, apparently) is prone to start doing one thing, only to suddenly shift gears and start talking about flowers. Now we just fill in the blanks:

- What does Hardy start out doing before he moves on to flowers? He "throw[s] over reality a light that never was." This is achingly pretentious, but it seems to mean that Hardy has a different way of looking at things.

- "on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist": This is a parenthetical dropped uneasily into the middle of the sentence, which really just says that Hardy is both a novelist and a scientist.

- "exactly and concretely": These are just adverbs, describing the care with which Hardy records the details of the flower.

So now we know: Hardy, who was both a novelist and a scientist, tends to be impulsive in his writing, and is prone to shifting abruptly from poetic descriptions of reality to prosaic, technical examinations of minutiae.

通过这种分解句子，再填充细节的分析，让我们至少可以知道作者想表达什么样的意图. 不要被限定性的修饰所迷惑。

在这个例子中就是:

A desire to throw a light (that never was) might give way to the desire (on the part of what we might call a "novelist-scientist") to record.

来自赵周老师《这样读书就够了》里的“拆书方法" Read-Interpretation-Appropriation

再进一步，理解这样的句子，我们需要的是把这种描述联系到我们所熟悉的场景、现象或者例子。

在这个例子中我们大概可以恶俗的不靠谱的理解为:

一直想写一部《三体》, 却忍不住写成了《XX的三种体位》.

网友user3847举了这样的🌰:

Consider this statement which conveys the essence of the GRE sentence: 'Women are most attractive at a distance'. A man's fuzzy vision of a woman at a distance 'throws a positive light' on the attractiveness of the woman. This view may change abruptly at closer range when the man's vision detects faults in the woman's figure, legs, nose and dyed hair.

Substituting 'flower' for 'woman', picture a romantic poet/scientist rhapsodizing over the beauty of a flower (at distance). Then picture the same poet putting on his scientist's hat at close range as he records the uglier details of the flower's real structure, stripped of the cosmetic effects of distance.

男女之间、恋爱关系基本上可以帮助我们解读所有的事.

最后，网友SrJoven把这句话“翻译”成了“当代口语版”：

I can bore you with details about something irrelevant, but ... Oh, look! A flower! Let's describe it in detail!

有时候需要认真，较真。有时候需要的是不求甚解。总之还是那句话: 别迷信砖家, 别被忽悠。取其精华, 谦虚学习.

晚安。

ERICZENGLISH