On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamorfor success.
通过对密西西比河，尤其是对哈克费恩这一人物的描写，马克o吐温将自己想从那束缚着自己并常常令自己苦恼的生活步调中摆脱出来，从生活中的各种清规戒律以及为了事业成功而进行的艰苦挣扎中解放出来的愿望表达得淋漓尽致。
Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: "What a robustpeople, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges."
马克吐温认为，美国人的理想中缺少了一种成分。他说："我们只消偶尔地躺下来好好放松休息一下，保持锋棱利角，我们将有可能成为一个多么朝气蓬勃的民族，一个多么富有思想的民族啊!"
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12;
马克吐温的一生都笼罩在悲剧的阴影之中，自己的亲人一个接一个地去世：
his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis,Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter., Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub .
他的父亲在他十二岁那年死于肺炎，他的兄弟亨利在一次汽船爆炸事故中遇难;他的儿子朗顿才满十九个月即离开人世。他的大女儿苏茜死于脊膜炎;克莱门斯夫人在佛罗伦萨死于心脏病;而他的小女儿也因癫痫病的发作淹死在楼上的浴盆里。
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh.
这位曾令全世界欢笑的人自己却饱尝了人世的辛酸。
The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire.
他早期作品中的道德说教厚厚地包着一层幽默的外衣，现在幽默换成了辛辣的讽刺。
He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater.
对于美国军队在一个火山口上屠杀六百名菲律宾摩洛人的行为，他没有直接进行抨击，而是假装为之高唱赞歌。
In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make a better world.
在《神秘的陌生人》中，他指出人类应该抛弃宗教幻想，依靠自己而不是上帝的力量去创造一个更加美好的世界。
The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men's final release from earthly struggles:
他自己的最后一个幻想到后来似乎也破灭了。在晚年口述自传的时候，他以极端绝望的心情谈到人从尘世的苦难中的最终解脱：
they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing;
"他们从世界上消失了，在这个世界上他们无足轻重，无所成就;
where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed-a world which will lament them a day and for-get them forever.”
甚至他们的存在本身就是个错误，是个失败，是种愚蠢。这个世界上也没有留下丝毫能表明他们存在过的痕迹。这个世界赠给他们的只是一日的哀伤和永久的遗忘。"
(from National Geographic, Sept., 1975)
(摘自《国家地理》，1975年9月)