去年联合国中文日，刘慈欣做了个线上讲座，事先拿到基本稿，先机翻，后季翻，纯属娱乐。
机季复唧唧，都把“一粒尘埃”想当然翻成了 a speck of dust

当时我对 Sagan 的原话不熟。

刚才听 Lisa Kaltenegger 新书

她引用 Sagan 时，量词用的是 mote, 头皮一紧，赶紧查了一下……果然，他的原话是 a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 不过后面也用了 a lonely speck, 应该是出于修辞需要，一个词尽量不重复使用。
顺带又通读了一遍 Sagan 那几段名言。
泪目。
请看：

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers from our home planet. At Carl Sagan’s suggestion/insistence, as the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it was turned around for one last look at its home planet. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

Sagan had this to say:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.
All rights reserved including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

感动了，泪目了，照例，译出来吧

季译

再看一眼图上那个“小不点”吧。其实，“那里”正是“这里”，正是我们的家园。

正是我们所在。

你所爱的、你所认识的、你听说过的每个人，曾来到这个世上的人类每个成员，都在那里度过了一生。

一切悲喜苦乐，

无数自认拥有真理的精神信仰、思想体系、经济宏论，

每个猎食者每个觅食者，

每个勇者每个懦夫，

每个文明缔造者每个文明毁灭者，

每个君主每个农人，

每对年轻恋人，

每个为母为父者，

每个心怀希望的孩子、发明家、探索者，

每个卫道教师爷，

每个贪官污吏，

每个“万人迷”，

每个“无上领袖”，

历史上每个圣徒每个罪人，

一切的一切都由它承载，

由悬浮在一道阳光中的这粒尘埃承载。

宇宙大戏院，地球小戏台。

曾几何时，帝王将相一声令下，血流成河，胜者为王，在小不点上暂据一方，荣耀加身，不可一世。

从古至今，这粒像素上某一角的居民无休止地蹂躏另一隅的同类，动辄误解，相杀无情，疾之如仇。

我们的腔势，我们的自恃，我们是“天之骄子”的幻觉，被这粒不起眼的小光点一一戳破。

无垠的黑暗包覆着一粒孤尘，这就是我们的星球。

宇宙大而无当，我们微不足道，自作孽的厄运当前，似无外力将我们救拔。

能养育生命的已知世界，唯有地球。至少近期内，并无其他星球供人类移居。造访，或可行；定居，尚无门。

喜也好恶也罢，地球无二，在兹，立兹，当下别无选择。

人说探究天文者，谦恭坚毅而阔达。

小小寰球，远观如粟，人类却妄自尊大，

一小一大，对比强烈，更显痴昧荒唐。

待人以仁，

珍爱呵护我们唯一的家园–这个淡蓝色的小不点，

是我们共担的责任，

这，我认为，是这幅《太空思乡永别图》留给人类的最大启示。

卡尔·萨根，1994