The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas is a profound short story written by Ursula Le Guin in 1974. It almost serves as a thought experiment challenging English Literature students to consider whether or not a basic sense of right or wrong exists without social training. Since I first encountered this story in high school, the moral message embedded in the text has never left me. I was actually surprised when I reread the text in preparation for translation, at how much of the story I did not remember. Ursula Le Guin goes into a great deal of detail when describing the city of Omelas and its summer festival that is underway at the beginning of the story. But the portion that I remembered clearly doesn’t occur until the end of the story. I chose to translate Omelas because I remembered the story being relatively short and having a very concise message.

In the story Omelas is a utopian city where the citizens never know suffering. At first this seems impossible, until the author introduces the reason why every citizen of Omelas is able to be free from suffering of any kind. All of the hatred and negative forces in Omelas are directed at one little child who is locked away in a closet of a basement of one of the city’s great buildings.

I chose to not translate the entire story due to the seeming impossibility given my level of Chinese. But instead I chose portions of the text which represented the parts of the story that has left the greatest impression on me. The opening portion of the short story I felt was necessary to expose the reader to the utopian status of the city of Omelas. After the opening paragraph Le Guin goes into lengthy descriptions of the citizens, festivals, and city characteristics of Omelas. This middle portion provides the reader with a certain experience while reading the text, but it is not necessary to the core of the story, therefore it is not translated. In the last portion of the short story Le Guin introduces the child that is locked in the basement. I chose to translate this entire portion to the end because it is the portion of the short story that the reader remembers.

No translator is free from taking an artistic license, I therefore admit to this up front. While I tried to remain true to the English word order and sentence progression, even when it disagreed from the logic of the Chinese language, I was not always successful. And due to the fact that I have not translated the entire text, perhaps I am guilty of taking too much artistic license.

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Reading the Translation

The portions of the story have been divided up into logical blocks that allow the reader (and translator) to go between the English and Chinese without having to deal with memorizing large blocks of text. After a section there may be a double dash (--) indicating that a portion of the original story has been skipped. Each section contains the original text of the short story followed by my Chinese translation. In order to spare the reader from flipping between pages I have formatted the document so that both parts of each section are on the same page, even when this sacrifices the “wholesome” look of the document. At the end, a copy of the complete short story is included in the original English.

Omelas Translation
The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas
By: Ursula Le Guin
些人从奥马拉斯离开

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, The Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance.

与钟声让燕子飞涨的喧嚣，夏节来到奥马拉斯，有明光的塔在海边。在港里；小船有闪亮地旗帜在船索上。在红色屋顶和有画墙壁房屋下的街头，与旧生苔的花园之间，树木下的途径，通过很大的公园和公共建筑物，游行动议了。有些街道是端庄的：老人们穿淡紫色和灰色的长袍，工动师傅，宁静快乐的妇女和她们的孩子交谈，他们走。有些街道更闹，音乐是更快的，人民走路跳舞，游行是一种舞蹈。

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

欢乐！怎么描述欢乐？怎么描述奥马拉斯的公民？

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. －｛Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves.｝－ But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians.

他们不是简单的民间，虽然他们很高兴。但我们不常说高高兴兴的话。所有的微笑已经成了过时的。－－但没有国王。他们不用剑，或者保持奴隶。他们不是野蛮人。我不知道他们社会的规则和法律，但我怀疑不多。因为他们没有君主制和奴役，所以他们也没有证券交易所，广告，秘密警察和核轰炸。然而，我再说，他们不是简单的民间，或乏味空想人

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No？ Then let me describe one more thing.

你相信吗？你接受不接受节，市，喜悦？不？让我多描述一点儿。

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as the cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.

在一个美丽奥马拉斯公共建筑物的地下室或者在一个宽敞私人住宅的地下室，还有一个房间。有一个锁着的门，也没有窗户。在之间裂缝板光轻松地渗漏从某窗口地窖里。在小房间的角落有几个恶臭的拖把占在生锈水桶的旁边。地板是有点儿潮湿，通常是这样的。房间大约三步长两步宽：可能是扫帚壁橱或废弃的工具房。房间中有一个坐着的孩子。它可能是一个男孩还是女孩。

It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody everybody comes, except that sometimes - the child has no understanding of time or interval - sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there.

它看出来大约六岁，但实际上它是近十岁。它是鲁钝的。可能是天生缺陷或者通过恐惧，营养不良和忽视。它挖鼻子偶尔摩脚趾和生殖器，也驼背地坐着最远从那两个水桶和拖把。它害怕。它认为水桶和拖把太可怕了。关了眼睛，但知道拖把还站在那里;也知道门已被锁定;也没有人要来。门总是锁定；并没有来，但有的时候－儿童不理解时间或者时间间隔－门可怕地摇开了，一几个人在。

One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people next door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good.” They never answer.

其中一个人可能踢小儿童使它站立起来。另外人不近来小儿童，只有害怕，厌恶的眼睛看不起它。食碗和水壶都匆忙填补的，门被锁了，眼睛也消失了。隔壁的人从来没有说话，但不总是生活在工具室，并能记住阳光，也能记母亲的声音的孩子有时说“我会好了”，"请释放我了。我会好了。“ 他们从来不回答。

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others merely know it is there. They all know that is has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

全体的奥马拉斯人民都知道。一些人已经看到它，别人只是知道它是存在的。他们都知道需要是它在那边。有些人了解为什么，有些没了解。但他们都明白，他们的幸福，美丽的城市，柔情的友谊，子女的健康，智慧的学者，他们的技能人员，甚至丰富的收获和善意天气的天空，完全取决于对这个孩子的可恶的苦难。

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

现在，你相信吗？他们是不是更真？但有还有一件事要告诉，这是非常令人难以置信。

At times one of the adolescent girls and boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down the village streets, between the houses with the yellow lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west, or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that is does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

有的时去看看儿童的青春期男孩和女孩不回家哭或怒，事实上不回家。有的时侯也有更老的男人还是女人沉寂一两天，然后离家出走。这些人走到街上自己出去。他们一直步行，步行出奥马拉斯城，通过美丽的大门。他们一直通过走奥马拉斯的农田。每一个单独走，男女，轻老。夜幕降临了；旅客必须通过村的街道，中间黄色灯光在窗户的房子，并到黑暗的田。他们自己去西边或者北边，到山区。他们继续走。他们离开奥马拉斯，进出黑暗中，他们不会回来。那个地方是不能描述的。有可能是不存在的。但是他们似乎知道他们走到哪，些人从奥马拉斯离开。

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Original English
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
By: Ursula K LeGuin - from The Wind's Twelve Quarters 1974

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: This is what swells the hears of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I don't think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden flute.

People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope..." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

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