英译中作品：   

On one wall of most of the rooms in a modern house hangs a picture whose subject and composition can be changed instantaneously whenever we wish. Yet it is a meticulously exact rendering of the domestic interior it portrays. Walk a few steps and the softly-gleaming bowl of fruit on the sideboard is replaced by a garden landscape, framed by an open French window with roses and lupines radiant in sunlight. But it is a strange picture, for we ourselves are moving about in it: we can eat that fruit and can walk in a copy of the garden.

如今，很多人会在家中会挂上这样一幅画：它能准确无误地表现室内的陈设布局，而画中的主题又能够随心变化。轻移几步，橱柜上色泽诱人的果盘，转瞬间成为了花团锦簇的园林，我们仿佛站在法式落地窗前，玩赏园中娇艳欲滴的玫瑰和灿烂生辉的羽扇豆。同时，这幅画又奇特非常，因为我们自己也是画中的一部分，时而吃着柜上的水果，时而徜徉在姹紫嫣红之中，颇有“卷帘人在画图中”的感慨。

The mirror world is essentially an irrational one. What lies behind us is assembled before our eyes; we gaze critically at a face we shall never be able to see. This awkward world of objects which we fall over and knock into, which have to be lifted and dragged about for cleaning, becomes a serene, polished mirror-world of the ideal home, or at worst, a scene of casually elegant disorder. In this untroubled other world, live, one feels, creatures of a dream world, who can appear and disappear silently; our other ideal selves, untouched by emotion or human weakness.

这就是镜中的世界，生动清晰却没有理性。我们在镜中窥探身后的景物，还用挑剔的眼光审视自己的面容。在现实世界中，凌乱的摆设、成堆的物什，常让我们跌跌撞撞，恼火不已。而在镜中，这一切竟然变得如此温存恬静、明亮光洁，让一切矛盾与冲突霎时消弭于无形；或者，这也是漫不经心的优雅、后现代式的美感。这是一个如梦似幻的理想世界，人们轻轻地来，又轻轻地走。仿佛间，我好似寻了到另一个自己：平静如水，超然物外，一任花开花落、云卷云舒。

But all this is foolish whimsical speculation. A mirror is merely a piece of clear glass coated with mercury. Dentists stick it into the mouth to examine tooth decay and men scrape the beard from their chin with its assistance. A car mirror warns of the following lorry and a dressing-table looking-glass reveals the texture and curve of a lipstick. The shop-lifter is detected, the sea surface scanned from within a submarine, the line of a skirt hem adjusted: all with the aid of this utilitarian device. But even in its most practical applications, the mirror can suggest the fundamental or the infinite. The misting of its glass is evidence that life still exists; when mounted in a telescope such glass can gather the faintest light from outer space so that the scientist can analyze factually what lies beyond his remotest imagination. The modern magician is well aware of the uncanny power of reflecting glass in causing people and objects to materialize and vanish merely by a shift of light. In the night-coated train window we survey our fellow-passengers unobserved and make disagreeable unexpected encounters with a repellent creature which with a shock we suddenly recognize as ourselves.

但所有这些都只是异想天开罢了。镜子不过是一块镀了水银的玻璃而已。牙医施诊、男人剃须，座驾的后视镜，在在处处都有镜子的身影；还有，梳妆镜里风情绽放的红唇，商场里的无处遁形的小偷，潜水艇船员巡视着海面，我们修剪裙子的下摆……镜子让生活充满了便利。但在这些最现实的应用中，镜子却隐约透露出道的奥妙。水汽附着时，玻璃在迷蒙间昭示了生命的存续；太空望远镜积聚起宇宙最微弱的光线，让科学家窥探浩瀚的星云；魔术师更是将玻璃的反射功能运用得出神入化，只需轻移光线便可物换人移。当夜幕降临时，火车上的我们透过车窗饶有兴趣地看着旅伴，而不必担心被察觉。当然，我们永远摆脱不了的，是镜子中那张最熟悉的脸——我们自己。

Curve your mirror by a fraction and it acquires a sinister malice. The normally-proportioned human being becomes a grotesque, leering from the gently molded surface, an obese rolling monstrosity or a hideous stalk nine feet high. Bodies enlarge and legs compress: a balloon-like head surmounts a squashed body ending in massive pillar-shaped legs. A spoon of mirror-brightness reflects an inverted turnip face while chromium-plated taps specialize in perversions, all of them hideous.

将镜子稍加弯曲，一抹邪恶的况味便自然而生。镜中的人面显得奇形怪状、双目狎睨而乖张。人们或被拉伸成九英尺的巨怪，或被压扁成肥硕的肉球；时而头大如斗，时而腰围扁平，时而腿粗如柱。在汤匙上，我们的脸庞如同倒栽的萝卜，而镀铬的水龙头则呈现出一个扭曲的世界，这一切都是如此地荒诞无稽。

And yet the water-mirror adds a strange beauty. Snow-peaked mountains clothed with forests and framed by a cloud-flecked sky rest on the dark waters of a lake. Even reflections of factories and warehouses have a tranquil graciousness, the drabness of industry washed away. Swans move through a colored kaleidoscope of quivering square, triangle and ellipse. They pass the restless fragments reassemble into a landscape so apparently real that we half-accept the myths of valleys and villages submerged as the result of a curse and lying forever unchanged below the surface. This water world we feel has its own silent inhabitants with their secret life, infinitely less troubled than our own.

然而，水面倒影却有着仙境般的美感。深色的湖面上映现白雪皑皑的山峰，蓊郁森林和蓝天白云成为了绝妙的点缀。即便是工厂和仓库的倒影，也似脱尽了工业的熏染而显得恬静可亲。高贵的天鹅悠然地划向波心，在静荡的湖面上漾起层层的涟漪，恬静的世界刹时成为了色彩缤纷的万花筒；待天鹅去远，纷乱的碎片重新凝聚。在这美丽的奇景下，是否暗藏着永世不变的、充满魔力的桃花源，人民们在这里神秘地生活，静默平淡、与世隔绝；陶然忘机、怡然忘忧。

To the superstitious the mirror has evil powers, punishing anyone who breaks it with years of ill luck. For the story-teller too the mirror has a strange magic. It is the wicked queen in Snow White who seeks the assurance of her cruelly truthful looking-glass. The Lady of Shalott may view the world only in her mirror; when she turns to see without its aid, the mirror cracks and her death is decreed. Alice steps into the looking-glass and finds herself in a surrealist universe full of frustrated intentions, shattering conflicts and a fantastic assortment of figures that later psycho-analysts might well have detected deep in the human psyche.

对迷信的人来说，镜子有着邪恶的力量。打碎镜子的人将在数年内厄运连连。在一些耳熟能详的故事里，镜子也有不可思议的魔力。《白雪公主》中的坏皇后常问镜子自己是不是天下第一美人。夏洛特姑娘被囚禁在孤岛上，只用一面镜子观看身后的世界。当她为了爱情而踏出城堡时，失手跌破了镜子，这一不祥的事件预示着她生命之花的凋零。艾丽斯走入了穿衣镜里的超现实世界，这里事事都与现实相反，各式各样的冲突连续不断。同时，爱丽丝的世界还云集着众多怪诞的人物，精神分析学家或许能从中挖掘人性的深邃。

It is surely the mystic who is most attracted by the mirror, that product of the interaction of silicate and quicksilver, of liquid sand and dancing of the interaction of silicate and quicksilver, of liquid sand and dancing metal. With its power of displaying a reality that has no tangible existence and of showing us our other self, silent and apparently with its own separate individuality, and mirror could symbolize the mystery of the universe. As we scan this unattainable world, we feel that if only in some way we could escape from material fact, could disengage ourselves from ourselves, we could step through yielding glass to the other unknown side of reality converging and other half-forgotten details of the physics we learned at school. Science has intervened again, explained away magic, fantasy, illusion and left us with angles of incidence, calculations of focal points and captured mercury.

最被镜子吸引的，莫过于神秘主义者了。虽然镜子只是硅酸盐和水银相互作用的产物（锡汞齐法是较为古老的制镜方法，由于水银有毒，该方法在19世纪就已停用），但它却拥有非凡的力量：这里存在着一个我们无法触及的世界，其中生活着一个静默却又个性鲜明的另一个自我，因此镜子象征着宇宙的神秘。假如我们摆脱物质的负累，放下沉重的我执，那么我们或可通过镜子这道门户，到达另一个真实未知的境域。但此时，学校中习得的那点物理知识又开始蠢动，入射角、焦点计算、锡汞齐法制镜等“科学用语”开始解释一切，而魔幻、奇想之类美丽的错觉顿时消失净尽。