The Road Not Taken
未选择的路

The Road Not Taken is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 as the first poem in the collection Mountain Interval . Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of The Road Not Taken . The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together. However, Frost later expressed chagrin that most audiences took the poem more seriously than he had intended; in particular, Thomas took it seriously and personally, and it provided the last straw in Thomas's decision to enlist in World War I.
《未选择的路》是诗人罗伯特·弗罗斯特1916年发表的诗集《山的间隔》中的第一首。1912年至1915年期间弗罗斯特旅居英国，结交了作家爱德华·托马斯。两人关系日益亲密，常常结伴散步。1915年弗罗斯特返回新罕布什尔州，他寄给托马斯一份未发表的《未选择的路》，意在善意调侃托马斯的犹豫不决，尤其是两人散步时托马斯常常在选择路线上徘徊踟蹰。后来，诗人表示，大多数读者对待这首诗的态度比他的本意更严肃，这让他颇感懊悔，特别是托马斯本人。托马斯将这首歌很严肃地用在自己身上，并因此下定决心应征入伍，参加一战。

The poem, besides being among the best known, is also one of the most misunderstood. The final lines “I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference” are often cited as emblematic of America's individualist spirit of adventure, in a reading that assumes they are to be taken literally. But whatever difference the choice might have made, it was not made on the basis of a discerned difference between the two paths that opened up before the traveler. The speaker admits in the second and third stanzas that both paths may be equally worn and equally leaf-covered, and it is only in his future recollection that he will call one of the two roads, the one he took, “less traveled by.”
这首诗一方面众人皆知，另一方面也是历来被误读最多的诗篇之一。诗的最后一行“而我选择了人迹更少的一条/从此决定了我一生的道路”，从字面意思看，常被认为象征美国个人主义的冒险精神。不管不同的选择带来的结果如何不同，路本身的不同在行人眼里却不是选择的根据。在第二和第三节，诗人表示两条路都草叶萋萋，都鲜有行人涉足，但是只有在未来某日的追忆中，当年他在两条路中选择的那条才会成为“人迹更少”的路。