Meryl Streep - 2010 Barnard College Commencement Speech

Meryl Streep - Barnard College Commencement Speech 2010
Thank you, all. Thank you, President Spar, Ms. Golden, President Tilghman, Members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, proud swelling parents and family, and gorgeous class of 2010. If you are all really, really lucky, and if you continue to work super hard, and you remember your thank you notes and everybody’s name; and you follow through on every task that’s asked of you and also somehow anticipate problems before they even arise and you somehow sidestep disaster and score big. If you get great scores on your LSATS, or MSATS, or ERSATS or whatever. And you get into your dream grad school or internship which leads to a super job with a paycheck commensurate with responsibilities of leadership or if you somehow get that documentary on a shoe-string budget and it gets accepted at Sundance and maybe it wins Sundance and then you go on to be nominated for an Oscar and then you win the Oscar. Or if that money-making website that you designed with your friends somehow suddenly attracts investors and advertisers and becomes the go-to site for whatever it is you’re selling, blogging, sharing, or net-casting and success shinning, hoped-for but never really anticipated success comes your way I guarantee you someone you know or love come to you and say, “Will you address the graduates at my college?” And you’ll say “Yeah sure, when is it? May 2010? 2010? Yeah sure, that’s months away and then the nightmare begins. The nightmare we’ve all had and I assure you, you’ll continue to have even after graduation, 40 years after graduation. About a week before the due date, you wake up in the middle of the night, “Huh, I have a paper due and I haven’t done the reading, Oh my god!”
If you have been touched by the success fairy, people think you know why. People think success breeds enlightenment and you are duty bound to spread it around like manure, fertilize those young minds, let them in on the secret, what is it that you know that no one else knows, the self examination begins, one looks inward, one opens an interior door. Cobwebs, black, the lights bulbs burned out, the airless dank refrigerator of an insanely over-scheduled, unexamined life that usually just gets take-out. Where is my writer friend, Anna Quindlen when I need her? On another book tour.
Hello I’m Meryl Streep, and today, Class of 2010 and I am really, I am very honored, and humbled to be asked to pass on tips and inspiration to you for achieving success in this next part of your lives. President Spar, when I consider the other distinguished medal recipients and venerable Board of Trustees, the many accomplished faculty and family members, people who’ve actually done things, produced things, while I have pretended to do things, I can think about 3,800 people who should have been on this list before me and you know since my success has depended wholly on putting things over on people. So I’m not sure parents think I’m that great a role model anyway.


Empathy is at the heart of the actor’s art. And in high school, another form of acting took hold of me. I wanted to learn how to be appealing. So I studied the character I imagined I wanted to be that of the generically pretty high school girl. I researched her deeply, that is to say shallowly, in Vogue, in Seventeen, and in Mademoiselle Magazines. I tried to imitate her hair, her lipstick, her lashes, the clothes of the lithesome, beautiful and generically appealing high school girls that I saw in those pages. I ate an apple a day, period. I peroxided my hair, ironed it straight. I demanded brand name clothes, my mother shut me down on that one. But I did, I worked harder on this characterization really than anyone I think I’ve ever done since. I worked on my giggle, I lightened it. Because I like it when it went, kind of “ehuh” and the end, “eheeh” “ehaeaahaha” because I thought it sounded child like, and cute. This was all about appealing to boys and at the same time being accepted by the girls, a very tricky negotiation.
Often success in one area precludes succeeding in the other. And along with all my other exterior choices, I worked on my, what actors call, my interior adjustment. I adjusted my natural temperament which tends to be slightly bossy, a little opinionated, loud, a little loud, full of pronouncements and high spirits, and I willfully cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy, natural sort of sweetness, even shyness if you will, which was very, very, very effective on the boys. But the girls didn’t buy it. They didn’t like me; they sniffed it out, the acting. And they were probably right, but I was committed, this was absolutely not a cynical exercise, this was a vestigial survival courtship skill I was developing. And I reached a point senior year, when my adjustment felt like me, I had actually convinced myself that I was this person and she, me, pretty, talented, but not stuck-up. You know, a girl who laughed a lot at every stupid thing every boy said and who lowered her eyes at the right moment and deferred, who learned to defer when the boys took over the conversation, I really remember this so clearly and I could tell it was working, I was much less annoying to the guys than I had been, they liked me better and I like that, this was conscious but it was at the same time motivated and fully-felt this was real, real acting.

回复：12楼
哈哈哈。。

meryl在讲诉她在片中的角色的感受，和对以往和现在社会的评价。很抱歉的是只知道个大概意思，楼上几位有这个精力贴英文，为什么不贴中文呢.其实不贴进来的人会更多不是吗！毕竟是中国的贴吧。

中文部分翻译可以去MS中文论坛看下：http://www.merylstreep.com.cn/thread-1450-1-1.html，但也只是部分。
另外，贴英文很容易，国外网站复制黏贴一下就OK，贴中文哪是那么容易的。中英文都要够好，而且翻译起来也是很费时费力的事。偶尔有些梅党会贡献下翻译版，可是毕竟太耗时费力了。

it could be my commencement address.