Трансформация фразеологизмов в англоязычной прессе и их перевод на русский язык

The wastepaper had been lashed into boulder-size bundles known as "sandwich bales," the kind that Colontonios guys collect and break open, in order to fish out the rotting garbage, which professionals call "organic." The smell was powerful, but Colontonio looked pleased to have brought me to the front lines of his business. The sandwich bales formed a wall of crushed cardboard boxes, each marked with a brand name -- d-CON mouse traps, Kit Kat candy -- packed layer upon layer, a geological record of modem New Jersey. More than half of it will end up in China. "We have become a country of purchasers, not manufacturers," Colontonio said.

(…)

Before lunch, Cheung had been meeting with yet another in a stampede of bankers. She and her husband were counting down the days until Thanksgiving, which they planned to spend with their children in America. “Both the kids, they don't really have feelings towards Chinese New Year's anymore. So I have to go back for Thanksgiving”, Cheung said. Her older son is in New York, where he is earning a master's degree in engineering at Columbia. The younger son attends a boarding school in California, and Cheung is determined that he will end up in the Ivy League. At one point during lunch, her assistant passed her a copy of a college recommendation that a teacher had recently written on her son's behalf. She fell silent to study it and then passed it back.

“His G.P.A. is 4.0 to 4.3,” she announced to the table. Then, with the pride of an autodidact, she added, “His head is full of American education. He needs to accept some Chinese education as well. Otherwise, he'll be out of balance.” The company's problems were no secret to her younger son, she said “We talk about how much the stock has dropped. He asks about it, and we discuss it. He'll say, `Hey, oil is realty cheap today!'”

Earlier in the week, Liu had heard from the boss of a neighboring factory, one of the world's largest makers of steel upping containers. It was shutting its plant. Like cardboard boxes, shipping containers were an early economic casualty. Property prices, consumer confidence, and auto sales were all slumping in China, and gallows humor was prevalent among factory owners: get into the pajama business, because before long everyone will be unemployed and spending their days at home.

The larger fact, however, was that the slowdown was also accelerating a change that Chinese leaders and economists had sought for years. They had come to believe that China relied too heavily on factories churning out low-quality exports, which fuel growth but also result in poor working conditions, environmental pollution, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor -- “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable”, as Premier Wen Jiabao said in March of2007. Chinese leaders wanted to ignite domestic consumption and use the new labor law to bring the sweatshop era to a close. For many factories in Dongguan, evolution will mean adapt or die. Local politicians prefer a more poetic image: “emptying the cage for the new birds”.

But the slowdown was also politically precarious: cut back too fast and unemployment could lead to political unrest. "So far, there haven't been large-scale layoffs," Jiang Ling, a vice-mayor of Dongguan, told me when I visited him at city hall. But when I walked out of the building that day four middle-aged women with tanned laborers' faces were clamoring, dashing through the topiaries toward the building's front door. When security guards pushed them back, they sat down in the shrubbery and refused to budge. The young guard tasked with shooing me away told me that the women were shouting for greater welfare provisions from city hall.

The question of what will become of Dongguan is difficult to separate from the question of what will become of Cheung. The city is home to thousands of factories that are based on an outmoded business model, rooted in cheap, unprotected labor and thin margins. China would not be what it is today without them, but it's not yet dear who among them is prepared to splash out of the primordial free market into a new age. Closing the income divide is no longer an abstraction: life expectancy in the poor province of Guizhou is now a decade shorter than it is in Beijing; a child born on the remote Qinghai Plateau is seven times more likely to die than a child born in the capital Even some of China's most energetic cheerleaders of the free market sense the passing of an era. In a recent article on Cheung Van, the magazine China Entrepreneur declared, “In Chinese society five years ago, maybe a company that had achieved success in business, while not being perfect in other respects, would have been tolerated and worshipped. But things have changed”.

I mentioned to Cheung and Liu that I had spent time the previous afternoon in the nearby village of Da Sheng, where many of their employees lived. The town square looked like a meeting of rival armies. Each worker was color-coded by location in the factory food chain: blue coveralls for production workers, orange smocks for power-plant staff, and mint-green uniforms for the handlers of wastepaper. A production worker told me that the rumor around the factory was that it might be bankrupt in a month or two. Cheung lowered her chopsticks for a moment. She seemed irritated. “It's very strange that an employee would say that,” she said. “These days, there are people out there who don't even have food to eat! But we haven't withheld any salaries. Nobody has gone unpaid.” She seemed less bothered by the rumor than by its implied allowance of failure, its apostasy. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Some people are living in such good fortune that they don't know what fortune is anymore.”

By the beginning of this year, Cheung's decision to halt construction and to repay loans ahead of schedule seemed to have improved the company's prospects. Mark Chang, of Merrill Lynch -- which has since been acquired by Bank of America -- told me in an e-mail mat the risk of failure “seems to be much lower now.” Chinese leaders were helping, too: the economy was souring so fast that they had decided not to let too many birds leave the cage at once. They have suspended mini-mum-wage increases and restored tax rebates to help some exporters, all aimed at preventing mass layoffs. On February 18th, Nine Dragons released a six-month financial summary that showed that its net profit had dropped 70.3 per cent compared with the same period in the previous year. Cheung said the company had faced a "bleak winter" but thanked government officials, banks, investors, and others for staying supportive. Nine Dragons, it seemed, had become "too big to fail," said Kary Sei, an analyst at ICEA Finance Holdings, in Hong Kong,

At one point during our lunch, I asked Cheung if she still hoped to be the world's largest cardboard-maker. She smiled, and answered, "I don't think it's my goal to be № 1 in the world. What matters to me most is this market" She gestured around her, at China. Outside the cafeteria, we could hear the sound of semitrucks on the rutted road leading to the factory. And from the window the red-and-white striped smokestack of the company's power plant was visible, towering above everything around it.

Fruit was served, and Cheung attacked a small pile of longans, pulling them from their skins, one at a time. Perhaps it was fatigue, but, as she ate, her usually impregnable optimism seemed muted. "I think the market is going down so fast that some won't be able to turn it around," she said. She went on, "This time is really different. Large and small are all affected. In the past, the big waves would only wash away the sand and leave the rocks. Now the waves are so big, even some racks are being washed away."

An audio interview with Evan Osnos

ANNALS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

HELLHOLE

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn't know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants -- in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate-students couldn't figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park”, one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later”. After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted -- but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts -- regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too -- revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just tor food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their body. We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn't have anything like a child's dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don't have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the "soul-destroying loneliness," as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we've learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement -- from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, "Den of Lions," recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle Last correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the name of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of 2 succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One we William Buckley; the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day - usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He bad a bottle tо urinate in and was allowed one five- to ten-minute trip each day so a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancй and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he rcalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There's nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind's gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the rime. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he'd made in fife, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

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