m and begged for his life.In order to thoroughly convince them of his submission he had kept knocking his head on the ground until he had raised a big, ugly lump on it.But at least the Long Hairs had not killed him.Elaborating on the technique of feeding invading armies, old Wang's father had even gone a step farther and opened a kitchen to provide them with food.As a result the Long Hairs had become especially fond of him and he, in turn, had made a great deal of money.When they were finally defeated, he managed to get away from them, became wealthy in his own right, and finally settled down in Wu town.Thus, in a sense, Yao-tsung's plan of protecting the populace with a single feast was not nearly so farsighted as the strategem that Old Wang's father had employed.

这里莱尔将“其父”、“乃父”翻译成王翁的父亲（Old Wang's father），显然是不对的。如果他的父亲“逮长毛败，以术逃归，渐为富室”，那么他本人应该是一个富家公子，至少也衣食无忧，而不可能如小说一开始即说明的那样是一个“家之阍人”——看门人，这和他的身份明显不符。这里的“其父”无疑是指耀宗的父亲，——小说在耀宗出场时有一句介绍：“耀宗金氏，居左邻，拥巨资。”另外，在上述引文之前还有一段话也非常有助于我们的理解：“不知耀宗固不论山贼海盗白帽赤巾，皆谓之长毛；故秃先生所言，耀宗亦弗解。‘来时当须备饭。我家厅事小，拟借张睢阳庙庭飨其半。彼辈既得饭，其出示安民耶。’耀宗禀性鲁，而箪食壶浆以迎王师之术，则有家训。”耀宗要用请客吃饭的方式来对付长毛是从他父亲那里学来的，所谓“有家训”，下面讲他父亲四十年前遭遇真正长毛的故事，是顺理成章的。

在莱尔之后，再次将《怀旧》译成英文的是英国汉学家蓝诗玲（Julia Lovell），她的译文发表于2009年出版的《阿Q 正传和其他故事：鲁迅小说全集》（The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China：The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun）。与莱尔的译文相比，蓝诗玲的译文更加流畅，也更加准确。仍以上面所引两段文字为例，蓝氏的翻译是：

（1）I knew that, having failed to generate a son by the age of twenty, Yaozong had hurriedly acquired three concubines.It was around this time that my teacher became a staunch defender of Mencius's dictum that there were three ways of betraying a parent—of which dying without descendants was the vilest—and promptly invested thirty-one pieces of gold in a wife for himself.His excessive respect for Yaozong was presumably down to the younger man's virtuosic show of filial virtue.

（2）Wang had told me that Yaozong's father had met the Long Hairs：he had flung himself on to the ground and begged for his life, knocking