《吹牛的妙用》是闽籍女作家庐隐(1898-1934)的后期作品，选自她的《东京小品》(散文、短篇小说、杂文合集，1935 年版)。庐隐的杂文短小精悍、直爽坦率、笔锋锐利。吹牛往往是为了兜售“伪劣”。作者在半个多世纪以前以揶揄的口气所鞭挞的社会痼疾，今仍随处可见，知识界也不例外。
本文由曾在远东国际军事法庭担任英文翻译，并亲身经历过东京审判的中国当代著名翻译家张培基先生翻译，刊登于2003年第一期的《英语世界》杂志上。
吹牛一种夸大狂，在道德家看来，也许认为是“缺点”，可是，在处世接物上却是一种刮刮叫的妙用。假使你这一生缺少了吹牛的本领，别说好饭碗找不到，便连黄包车夫也不放你在眼里的。
Boasting is a kind of megalomania. Though moralists may call it a human failing, it does, however, serve extremely useful purposes in social intercourse. Without the capability for boasting, you will be looked down upon by even a rick-shaw puller, to say nothing of finding a good job.
西洋人究竟近乎白痴，什么事都只讲究脚踏实地去作，这样费力气的勾当，我们聪明的中国人简直连牙齿都要笑掉了。西洋人什么事都讲究按步就班的慢慢来，从来没有平地登天的捷径，而我们中国人专门走捷径，而走捷径的第一个法门就是善吹牛。
Because of their earnest and down-to-earth approach to work, westerners are, in the eyes of Chinese smarties, next door to idiotic. They are being laughed at by Chinese smarties for the tremendous amount of energy they put into their activities. While westerners go about whatever work they do methodically and patiently, never dreaming of reaching great heights in one step, we Chinese are always given to seeking a shortcut and regard the ability to boast as the master key to it.
吹牛是一件不可看轻的艺术，就如修辞学上不可缺少“张喻”一类的东西一样。像李太白什么“黄河之水天上来”，又是什么“白发三千丈”，这在修辞学上就叫作“张喻”，而在不懂修辞学的人看来，就觉得李太白在吹牛了。
Boasting is an essential art of life just as hyperbole is an indispensable rhetorical figure. The Tang poet Li Bai’s famous lines “The Yellow River comes from the sky” and “My white hair of thirty thousand feet” are examples of hyperbole , which, to those who know little about the art of rhetoric , may sound like a gross exaggeration on the part of the poet.
