And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
我可能会受到诱惑，去羡慕那样生活的人。但我不认为他们做的噩梦会比我更少。选择生活在狭窄的空间，可以给自己带来恐惧感，导致一种心理上的恐旷症。我认为不愿展开想象的人会看到更多的怪兽，他们往往感到更害怕。
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
更甚的是，那些选择不去同情的人，可能会激活真正的怪兽。因为尽管我们自己没有犯下罪恶，但我们却通过我们自己的冷漠与之勾结。
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
我18岁开始从古典文学中汲取许多知识，到学习结束时，我对其中的一个问题当时并不完全理解，那就是希腊作家普鲁塔克所说：我们内心获得的，将改变外在的现实。
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
那是一个惊人的论断，在我们生活的每一天里被无数次证实。它指明我们与外部世界有无法脱离的联系，我们以自身的存在接触着他人的生命。
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
但是，哈佛大学的2008届毕业生们，你们多少人有可能去触及他人的生命？你们的智慧，你们努力工作的能力，以及你们所受到的教育，给予你们独特的地位和责任。甚至你们的国籍也让你们与众不同，你们绝大部分人属于这个世界上唯一的超级大国。你们表决的方式，你们生活的方式，你们抗议的方式，你们给政府带来的压力，具有超乎寻常的影响力。这是你们的特权，也是你们的责任。
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
如果你选择利用自己的地位和影响，去为那些没有发言权的人发出声音；如果你选择不仅与强者为伍，还同情帮扶弱者；如果你会设身处地为不如你的人着想，那么你的存在，将不仅是你家人的骄傲，更是无数因为你的帮助而改变命运的许许多多人的骄傲。我们不需要改变世界的魔法，我们自己的内心就有这种力量：那就是我们一直在梦想，让这个世界变得更美好。
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
我的演讲要接近尾声了。对你们，我有最后一个希望，也是我21岁时就有的。毕业那天坐在我身边的朋友们现在是我终生的至交，他们是我孩子的教父母，是在我遇到麻烦时愿意伸出援手，在我用他们的名字给《哈利·波特》中的“食死徒”起名而不会起诉我的朋友。我们在毕业典礼时坐在了一起，因为我们关系亲密，拥有共同的永远无法再来的经历，当然，也因为假想要是我们中的任何人竞选首相，那照片将是极为宝贵的关系证明。
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
所以今天我可以给你们的，没有比拥有知己更好的祝福了。明天，我希望即使你们不记得我说的任何一个字，你们还能记得另一位古罗马哲学家塞内加的一句至理名言。我当年没有顺着事业的阶梯向上攀爬，转而与他在古典文学的殿堂相遇，他的古老智慧给了我人生的启迪：
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
生活就像故事一样：不在乎长短，而在于质量，这才是最重要的。
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
我祝愿你们都有美好的生活。
I wish you all very good lives.
非常感谢大家。
Thank you very much.
J.K.罗琳（1965年7月31日—?），生于英国的格洛斯特郡的Chipping Sodbury医院。《哈利·波特》系列小说作者，是历史上第一个收入超过10亿美元的作家。
2008年6月5日，《哈利·波特》作者J.K.罗琳应邀在哈佛大学毕业典礼上演讲。虽然J.K.罗琳现在很有钱，是英国仅次于女皇的最富有的女人，但是她曾经有一段非常艰辛的日子，30岁了，还差点流落街头。她这次演讲主要谈的，就是自己从这段经历中学到的东西。
