徐和瑾老先生翻译的前四卷,总算看完了。后面还有三卷只能看另一独家译林出版社的集体翻译的版本。我感觉第五卷《女囚》好像比前几卷要容易读,但语感好像跟徐和瑾先生的翻译格调脱了节一样,是不是表面的理解容易了,却没有了普鲁斯特那种特有的冗长烦杂的意识流的晦涩难懂?本来难以理解的一定是非对象性的,非对象性的一定是最难以把握的,越想澄明它,它越是躲进晦暗中,这是我读《追忆》最有价值的感悟。
不懂法文,还是读不了原著,只好买了一套Andreas Mayor和Terece Kilmartin合作的英文译著《In search of lost time》。以前看原著,即使几本英语文学名著,大都在中译本的对照下,心血来潮看几页原文,但毕竟英文不是母语,看起来总是觉得费力见效慢。现在心态变了,读书没了功利,反而感觉轻松坦然,哪怕读一页,再费神也不觉得了,更重要的是,英语应该比汉语更能理解阐明普鲁斯特的语境了。
试比较一下译林出版社的第五卷《女囚》P71第三段“我就是这么回答她的……我们身边的亲人了。”这一整段的文字,其英译如下:
Such was my answer; amid the sensual expressions,others will be recognised that were peculiar to my grand-mother and my mother. For, little by little, I was beginning to resemble all my relations: my father who-in avery different fashion from myself, no doubt, for if things repeat themselves, it is with great variations-took so keen an interest in the weather; and not my father only,but, more and more; my: aunt Leonie. Otherwise Albertine could not but have been a reason for my going out,so as not to leave her on her own, beyond my control.Although every day I found an excuse in some particular indisposition, what made me so often remain in bed was a person-not Albertine, not a person I loved but a person with more power over me than any beloved-who had transmigrated into me, a person despotic to the point of sliencing at times my jealous suspicions or at least of preventing me from going to verify whether they had any foundation, and that person was my aunt Leonie--my aunt Leonie, who was entirely steeped in piety and with whom I could have sworn that i had not a single point in common, I who was so passionately fond of pleasure, apparently worlds apart from that maniac who had never known any pleasure in her life and lay telling her beads all day long, I who suffered from my inability to actualise literary career whereas she had been the one person in the family who could never understand that reading was anything other than a means of whiling away the time, of“amusing oneself”which made it, even at Eastertide, permissible on Sundays, when every serious occupation is forbidden in order that the whole day may be hallowed by prayer. And as if it were not enough that i should bear anexaggerated resemblance to my father, to the extent of not being satisfied like him with-consulting the barometer, but becoming an animated barometer myself, as if it were not enough that I should allow myself to be ordered by my aunt leonie to stay at home and watch the weather, from my bedroom window or even from my bed, here I was talking now to Albertine, at one moment as the child that I had been at Combray used to talk to my mother, at another as my grandmother used to talk to me. When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells,asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image,we recast them' in an original 'creation .Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and, beyond these, the past of my parents 'and relations, blended with my impure love for Albertine the tender charm of an affection at once filial and maternal. We have to give hospitality, at a certainage in our lives, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.
读中文翻译的,对于理解普鲁斯特想要表达的,却在英文中用不同的语境更阐明了其意欲表达的哲学含义。
普鲁斯特在这里,通过他与阿尔贝蒂那的爱情,回忆起他与父亲,特别是莱奥妮姨妈的亲情关系,来说明他的日常生活与他姨妈的生活方式的区别,阐明她本真生活的意义。就这一点,普鲁斯特的语境开放,能写一篇哲学论文。
比较中译本和英译本,看明白过后,就知道为什么一定要读原著,或其它外文译著,而中文译著最好当作参考资料,因为它是我的母语。我说的只代表我自己啊,别误会哦!
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