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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.
通過對密西西比河，尤其是對哈克費恩這一人物的描寫，馬克o吐溫將自己想從那束縛著自己并常常令自己苦惱的生活步調中擺脫出來，從生活中的各種清規戒律以及為了事業成功而進行的艱苦掙扎中解放出來的愿望表達得淋漓盡致。
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."
馬克吐溫認為，美國人的理想中缺少了一種成分。他說："我們只消偶爾地躺下來好好放松休息一下，保持鋒棱利角，我們將有可能成為一個多么朝氣蓬勃的民族，一個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;
馬克吐溫的一生都籠罩在悲劇的陰影之中，自己的親人一個接一個地去世：
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 .
他的父親在他十二歲那年死于肺炎，他的兄弟亨利在一次汽船爆炸事故中遇難;他的兒子朗頓才滿十九個月即離開人世。他的大女兒蘇茜死于脊膜炎;克萊門斯夫人在佛羅倫薩死于心臟病;而他的小女兒也因癲癇病的發作淹死在樓上的浴盆里。
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh.
這位曾令全世界歡笑的人自己卻飽嘗了人世的辛酸。
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說教厚厚地包著一層幽默的外衣，現在幽默換成了辛辣的諷刺。
He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater.
對于美國軍隊在一個火山口上屠殺六百名菲律賓摩洛人的行為，他沒有直接進行抨擊，而是假裝為之高唱贊歌。
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，他指出人類應該拋棄宗教幻想，依靠自己而不是上帝的力量去創造一個更加美好的世界。
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:
他自己的最后一個幻想到后來似乎也破滅了。在晚年口述自傳的時候，他以極端絕望的心情談到人從塵世的苦難中的最終解脫：
they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing;
"他們從世界上消失了，在這個世界上他們無足輕重，無所成就;
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.”
甚至他們的存在本身就是個錯誤，是個失敗，是種愚蠢。這個世界上也沒有留下絲毫能表明他們存在過的痕跡。這個世界贈給他們的只是一日的哀傷和永久的遺忘。"
(from National Geographic, Sept., 1975)
(摘自《國家地理》，1975年9月)
