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【英文译文】
I Have Five Letters on the Way (Excerpt)
摘要：现在还有人写信吗？这是电讯发达的年代。写信这种事儿像本时代很多事情一样严重萎缩。但是，我照样写信。
Is there anyone who still writes letters? This is an age of developed telecommunications. Like many other things of this age, writing letters is becoming less and less common. However, I still write letters.
April in the south was fine; I spent half an hour in writing five letters. I wrote on five topics and I hoped they would move northwards slowly, at the speed that aged people sip a cup of strong tea, like a streetcar in the 1940s gliding around the city at the dusk.
People in ancient times had to send extremely urgent letters by way of riding horses and changing them at courier stations which were filled with the horses' winded breath. Nowadays some things do not need to be rushed — for instance, an inconsequential message to five people that can be enclosed in envelopes, put in canvas bags and released slowly.
Sometimes I see a person receiving two calls at the same time. Such overstated business overwhelms me. The busiest person cannot read two letters at once. Just one line in a letter will consume the reader's attention. When one reads a letter, he or she must concentrate. This is where the nobility of letters lies.
Ten years ago, a friend sent me a typed letter from Japan. It read: "Now I can use typewriters!" I was skeptical about this letter. I turned it over and could not find a line of his handwriting. Even his signature was produced by the typewriter. I didn't feel as if I had received his letter. It had no traces of humanity and I didn't believe those black signs made by the cingulum.
My five leisurely letters have not reached the recipients' cities. Meanwhile something funny suddenly happened. I spent almost two hundred yuan on one phone call. The automatic system deducted the money from my account. My five letters are still on the way. I thought that this was completely ironic — a bottomless black humor.
Some people walk on feet and on hands as well, which is funny. Nevertheless, the feelings of the two ways of walking are different. I love to have letters traveling slowly on the roads.
