英语原文

　　Yo-Yo Ma has been part of the global music community almost all his life. He has released 80 albums and won 30 Grammy awards.
　　Yo-Yo: I think I was given up as having no musical talent. People think of musical talent as just one thing. I think it's something far more complex and there are far more ways to get into something then just sort of you have it or you don't have it. I think I have no talent on the violin, just as I have a very low level of talent on the piano. I love the piano I wish I could play the piano better.
　　Interviewer: Are you serious though?
　　Yo-Yo: I'm absolutely serious.
　　Yo-Yo Ma's older sister Yo Chung was the first prodigy in the family. She excelled at the violin and the piano. Even at age four, Yo-Yo knew he didn't want to follow in her footsteps.
　　Yo-Yo: I only remember that there was no chair low enough for me to sit on. So I sat on my first, my first cello lesson on three Paris telephone books.
　　Yo-Yo promised his parents that he would stick to the cello. What he didn't stick to was the well-worn career path of a classical musician. Chinese folk music, blue grass, tango and modern experimental music are just some of the fields he's explored throughout his career. Yo-Yo makes it a point on his busy touring schedules and he performs 70 or 80 times a year to teach.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: That's the same thing. How would you like to do it in a way that actually physically, emotionally, psychically tells us this is something really special?
Marina Ma gave her son the Chinese name Yo-Yo which means friend and showed him how to use his cello to reach out to others.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: Absolutely, I think my mother was a really deeply musical person and she had a beautiful voice. My mother would probably look at the whole thing and say, "Well, how does it affect me?" You know? "How does it move, how does it speak to me? Does it sing to me?" And those things are very, very important components.
　　As he grew older, Yo-Yo's prodigious talent gave him access to the best cello teachers in the world. Violinist Issac Stern personally arranged for the child star to study in New York's Julliard School of Music under famed cellist Leonard Rose. By the time Yo-Yo was 11 or 12 the maestro said the young virtuoso possessed one of the greatest techniques of all time. It didn't hurt that he also had a phenomenal photographic memory for music.
Looking back however Yo-Yo believed he didn't always learn his most valuable lessons at the conservatory.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: I had a teacher in college who said to me, "Yo-Yo, you're a very talented cellist. If only you knew what you were doing. You haven't found your sound. I'll give you 11 years." I thought, "What is this? I was kind of in my late teens and what's this guy talking about?"
　　Interviewer: "You haven't found your sound"?
　　Yo-Yo Ma: Yeah, "You haven't found your sound." What does that mean?
　　Interviewer: What does that mean?
　　Yo-Yo Ma: So I didn't know what he meant. Now every year I'd send him a postcard from some place and say I just played with Seiji Ozawa still looking for my sound. What I realized years later of course is in the meantime I got married, had children and all the things that go with learning about love, generosity, giving, accepting, it changes your sound. And I think what he was talking and learning about composers that I didn't understand and then you understand and then "Oh this is what Tchaikovsky is about. This is what they went through for how many days during the war." This is what happened. And so all the travelling experience matched with the people that were composing from those places in certain time periods these things would filter down. That changes your sound.
　　Yo-Yo Ma was seven when his family emigrated to America and he stepped into the spotlight almost from the start. In 1962, he and his sister Yo Chung played at a benefit concert in front of President John Kennedy and his wife Jackie. Leonard Bernstein was Master of Ceremonies. Two years later the children gave a recital at Carnegie Hall. These days Yo-Yo Ma's married with two kids of his own and while he's happy to show himself in front of the camera he shield's his family from publicity.
　　Interviewer: Now I know that you're a very private man who lives a very public life. How have you managed to strike a balance with that?
　　Yo-Yo Ma: One of the great challenges because a musician like me nobody would want me to stay in town for long. Because, "Don't you have somewhere to go tomorrow? Where to next?" So in fact by design my work is away from my family and we work really, really hard at it. And this is I think in some ways it's great to have reasonable and possible goals. So if the goal is balance and we know it's possible and you keep working at it occasionally... it's it happens and the effort in itself is communicative.
　　I've had a lot of trouble with my name. I used to call collect various friends and they used to go, "Who's calling?" "It's Yo-Yo." "Listen," and the operator would say, "Look I have no time for jokes what's your last name?" "Ma." You know it's like a constant source of amusement for my friends.
　　Interviewer: You like where you are now though in your ripe middle age of 44 years.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: Oh great middle age.
　　Interviewer: You seem like a contented man.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: Oh well I'm talking to you.
　　Interviewer: Life has taken you along to a good place now.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: Um, I think so. I feel incredibly lucky. I feel unbelievably fortunate in having had so many people in my life and I think most of all my immediate family that are just have been so wonderful continue to be and you know it's growing my children are growing and becoming more and more individuals and it's fantastic.
　　Ma loves to shake up the notion of what it means to be a classical musician even if it means using a plastic hotel room key on a priceless instrument.
　　A featured soloist on the soundtrack for Ang Lee's movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which blends western orchestration with traditional eastern instruments. The movie darted to number one when it was released in Asian markets at the start of the summer and an eclectic collaboration with vocalist Bobby McFerrin titled "Hush" went gold but also raised a few eyebrows.
　　Interviewer: All your unusual artistic projects that you've done with Bobby McFerrin and Tango and the Appalachian inspired music, and your critics have called you everything from gimmicky to that you're doing it for sport. One particularly cruel critic at the New York Times called you, said that you were slumming.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: How could one not be interested in the tradition of fiddling that has come down from Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland through Canada...you know through Appalachia down to Texas? How can one not be interested in seeing that there are communities of people who played fiddle music who without conservatory training and these songs and music is passed down generation through generation orally, people get really excited by it, how is that not a celebration of life?
　　Part of Yo-Yo's interest in music outside of the western classical tradition stems from his anthropology studies at Harvard University. And in the mid-1970s his studies took him to the Kalahari Desert.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: That was one of the most affecting, truthful things that I have ever done in my life. There's hardly a week goes by that I am not thinking about that.
　　Interviewer: Why?
　　Yo-Yo Ma: I'll tell you why. It's almost like everything that we see in our society in terms of the expressive art to whatever was contained in what I saw there. The whole village would get together and for the whole night they would, women would sit down around the fire and clap their hands and the men would go and various people who would have the ability would go into a trance. It was their most complex social ritual; religion, medicine, music, dance, community. It was all there in one thing and the next day of course I asked questions to many of the people I says, "Why do you do it?" And the best answer was that, "Because it gives us meaning."
　　Yo-Yo Ma strives to create music which helps us to interpret of what it means to be human, music which speaks a language of shared experience.
　　Yo-Yo Ma: I think a professional musician or the way I would define that is that the mental and physical discipline of getting to a certain space or a world that I can represent. That's the thing I think can give value to our lives because for a short while we actually went on a trip and you come back with a different perspective on yourself and the present and your world. My job is to try and do the utmost to represent whatever that thing is. Whatever I can imagine that thing to be and to say, "OK let's go there together. Let's share that moment. Let's make this moment in your very busy life important so that afterwards we can refer back to this and say, yes we were there. There is a fellowship. There is a community brought together by sound."

注释：

prodigy n. 天才，神童
follow in one's footsteps: 步某人的后尘
cello n. 大提琴
Blue Grass: 这种田园风味的音乐形式二战后崛起，起源于二十世纪初的美国弦乐音乐，集古典乐、爵士乐和怨曲于一身。马友友与小提琴家马克·奥康纳（Mark O'Connor）和低音大提琴家埃德加·迈耶（Edgar Meyer）推出了Blue Grass专辑 "Appalachia Waltz"，不仅大获好评，也推动了这种音乐潮流。
makes a point: 立论，证明论点
Julliard School of Music: 朱莉亚音乐学院，位于美国曼哈顿的林肯表演艺术中心（Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts），世界最著名的音乐、舞蹈和戏剧学院，1946年由音乐艺术学院（Institute of Musical Art）和朱莉亚研究院（the Juilliard Graduate School）合并而得名。
virtuoso n. （艺术）大师，名家；（尤指）音乐演奏名手
conservatory n. 音乐学校
recital n. 独奏
Carnegie Hall: 卡奈基音乐厅，1891年建于纽约，由著名建筑设计师安德鲁·卡奈基（Andrew carnegie）设计。卡奈基音乐厅被世界演奏艺术家及乐迷公认是全世界最伟大的音乐厅，马勒、伯恩斯坦等著名音乐家都在这里演奏过。
Yo-Yo: 这里接线员将"友友"误解为一种线轴玩具"yo-yo"（溜溜球）。
contented a. 满足的
shake up: 使想法等经历剧变
orchestration n. 管弦乐作曲法
eclectic a. （建筑、艺术、装饰等）不拘一格的，起源于广泛的历史风格的
collaboration n. 协作，通敌
vocalist n. 声乐家，歌手
gimmicky a. 巧妙手法的
slumming a. 贫民区的
fiddling a. 无足轻重的，微不足道的
anthropology n. 人类学
Kalahari Desert 喀拉哈里沙漠（南部非洲沙漠高原）