孤云独去闲4 The only sour note in all the songs of joy over this phenomenon has come from some parents and conservative religious leaders who say Rowling advocates witchcraft. reading of the books has been challenged in 25 school districts in at least 17 states, and the books have been banned in schools in Kansas and Colorado. But that's nothing new, says Michael Patrick Hearn, a children's book scholar and editor of The Annotated Wizard, of Oz. "Any kind of magic is considered evil by some people," he says. "The Wizard of Oz was attacked by fundamentalists in the mid-1980s."
4在对“哈利波特”现象的一路欢歌中，出现的唯一一个不和谐音符来自干一些父母和保守的宗教领袖。他们认为罗琳在宣扬巫术。至少在17个州的25所学校校区内，阅读《哈利波特》受到了质疑，而在堪萨斯州和科罗拉多州的学校里，《哈利波特》系列丛书则被明令禁止。但是作为儿童图书专家和《绿野仙踪》的编辑，迈克尔·帕特里克·赫恩觉得这并不奇怪。“无论何种魔法都会被有些人视为邪恶，”他说，“《绿野仙踪》就曾经在80年代中期遭到正统派基督教徒们的抨击。” 5 But perhaps the most curious thing about the Potter phenomenon, especially given that it is all about books, is that almost no one has taken the time to say how good— or bad—these books are. The other day my 11-year-old daughter asked me if I thought Harry Potter was a classic. I gave her, I'm afraid, one of those adult-sounding answers when I said, "Time will tell." This was not an outright lie. There's no telling which books will survive from one generation to the next. But the fact is, I was hedging. What my daughter really wanted to know was how well J. K. Rowling stacks up against the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson or Madeleine L'Engle.
5但是对于“哈利波特”现象最让人感到好奇的事情可能是几乎没有人会花时间去讨论这些书有多好或者多糟，尤其是当这些评论仅仅涉及书本身的时候。有一天，11岁的女儿问我是否认为《哈利波特》是经典之作，我给出了一个恐怕听起来十分成人化的回答，“时间会证明一切的。”这不能算是一个彻头彻尾的谎言，因为谁也没有办法预测有哪一本书能够代代相传。但事实上，我在闪烁其词。我女儿真正想知道的是：与罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森和马德琳·英格这一类人相比较，罗琳到底有多棒。
6 I could have told her that I thought they were beautifully crafted works of entertainment, the literary equivalent of Steven Spielberg. I could also have told her I thought the Potter books were derivative. They share so many elements with so many children's classics that sometimes it seems as though Rowling had assembled her novels from a kit. However, these novels amount to, much more than just the sum of their parts. The crucial aspect of their appeal is that they can be read by children and adults with equal pleasure. Only the best authors—and they can be as different as Dr. Seuss and Philip Pullman" and, yes, J.|K. Rowling—can pull that off.
6我本可以告诉她我认为这些书是精心构思的通俗作品，是堪比史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格之电影的文学作品。本来我还可以告诉她我认为《哈利波特》系列丛书没有什么新意，它们与众多儿童经典作品有太多相似之处，所以有时候会给读者一种感觉，仿佛罗琳组装编织了这些故事。但是，这些故事绝对不仅仅是各个部分的简单相加。它们如此受欢迎的关键之处就在于无论是大人还是小孩都能够从阅读中获得乐趣。只有最好的作家——他们能够与苏斯博士和菲利普·普尔曼，当然还有罗琳一样与众不同——才能够做到这一点。
