Thomas Mann died in Zürich, Switzerland on this day in 1955 (aged 80).
“Death was a blessing, so great, so deep that we can fathom it only at those moments, like this one now, when we are reprieved from it. It was the return home from long, unspeakably painful wanderings, the correction of a great error, the loosening of tormenting chains, the removal of barriers---it set a horrible accident to rights again.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature. It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor. In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel. With an introduction by T. J. Reed, and translated by John E. Woods.
2005
初讀《歷史學家的三堂小說課》
【談小說的書由學外文的來翻譯就一定比較好嗎?以《歷史學家的三堂小說課》為例。】
[原書名:SAVAGE REPRISALS : Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks〈by Gay, Peter〉]
台灣版:彼得‧蓋伊/著 《歷史學家的三堂小說課》(Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Ma dame Bovary, Buddenbrooks (2002))劉森堯譯,台北:立緒,2004年
日本版: 小説から歴史へ―ディケンズ、フロベール、トーマス・マン
金子 幸男【訳】,東京:岩波書店 (2004-09-28出版)
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台灣版和日本版都未將原書名:SAVAGE REPRISALS翻譯出來,也沒解釋原題目之意思—其實在第一、二、三章之內文都舉出各作家之「怒」之創作之「報復」意圖。介紹文中談到「細緻之報復」,可是不敢用,所以各取書名之別名。這方面,日本較老實,台灣版花招---如果硬要讓Peter Gay說教,實際五堂「課」,因為「序曲」和「結語」都自成一「課」。還有未翻譯的參考資料來源和索引。
彼得‧蓋伊的著作都值得一讀。不過劉森堯先生的譯文雖然通順,有問題的可能百處以上。(我是在http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0393325091/002-7097857-0210450?
)讀和用字search-inside--尤其「序曲」和「結語」問題可能特別多,因為它們牽涉到「歷史-科學-哲學……」等學問。台北立緒出版社的翻譯品質很不穩定,因人而異。
我舉些有問題之例子:篇章名翻譯就有問題。
日本沒問題:
1章 怒れるアナーキスト―『荒涼館』におけるチャールズ・ディケンズ
2章 恐怖症に挑む解剖学者―『ボヴァリー夫人』におけるギュスターヴ・フロベール
3章 反抗的な名門市民―『ブッデンブローク家の人々』におけるトーマス・マン
台灣本副標題分別為:
2章 恐怖症に挑む解剖学者―『ボヴァリー夫人』におけるギュスターヴ・フロベール
3章 反抗的な名門市民―『ブッデンブローク家の人々』におけるトーマス・マン
台灣本副標題分別為:
狄更斯的《荒涼屋》、福樓拜的《包法利夫人》、湯馬斯曼的《布頓柏魯克世家》
用「的」翻譯「in」是錯誤的,因為原文為Charles Dickens in Bleak House 等等。
雖然改成類似『巴金在巴黎』的『狄更斯在《荒涼屋》』有點奇,但是習慣就好,因為大作家們作品多,其時間之跨度長,投入每部作品的「心」「力」都可能不同….
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翻譯為免加注結果弄成另外意思
「從柏拉圖的時代以至十九世紀初瑞士的教育改革者斐…….的時代」其中 educators漏掉,意思差很多(p.13)
"... the Victorians; it had been no news to the ancient Greeks and to educators in the centuries from Plato to Pestalozzi. A hundred years before Freud made a theory of it, Wordsworth had famously proclaimed that the Child is father of ..."
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第34頁:「這其中最精彩的莫過於對於柯魯克突然暴斃的描寫,這是一個畏瑣而卑鄙的專收破爛的小商人,有一天他突然倒斃在他的那堆破爛當中,這個特別的死亡方式未必能夠贏得讀者一掬同情之淚……」(. But none of these can rival the sudden exit of Krook, the coarse, mean- spirited owner of a wretched junkshop, who shuffles off his mortal coil by collapsing into dust. This particular death did not play on the reading public's love of a good cry but on its credulousness. Krook's end, Dickens expected his vast readership to believe, was.")
我自己學了英文: shuffles off his mortal coil 典出『哈姆雷特』,表示一命嗚呼。
對於將coarse, mean- spirited owner of a wretched junkshop翻譯成「一個畏瑣而卑鄙的專收破爛的小商人」不滿意。Junkshop日文解釋「(安物の)古物商」,不知道是否真為「破爛的東西」,其修飾詞 wretched翻譯成什麼?Krook是否真的死在破爛中(這是原文沒的)?
對於coarse和 mean-spirited 的翻譯也不解?
對於coarse和 mean-spirited 的翻譯也不解?
「未必能夠贏得讀者一掬同情之淚」?
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翻譯經常不理會原文的句號,將數句聯成一句。
許多名詞完全直譯、不加注,可能讓讀者不知所云。譬如說,第36頁的heart of hold和 Newgate novel(「新門小說」)【案:我印象中這是監獄之所在】。
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以下關於paradigm shifts之句有數處錯:翻譯成「他的圖例變動理論曾被相對論者評為不適」(p.207)
Even Thomas Kuhn, probably the twentieth century's most influential historian and philosopher of science, whose brave talk of paradigm shifts has been misappropriated by relativists, maintained that the external world is real, neither constructed nor invented.
其他哲學術語如什麼「理想主義」(案:通常稱為「唯心觀」? p.205)
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They have nothing in common except their severity with the devotees of Clio. The first holds that novelists and poets reach higher-which is to say deeper-truths, truths that historians, pedestrian, document- ridden fact grubbers that they are, can never even approach.
翻譯:「這兩個方法除了一樣對史詩與歷史女神克萊歐特別熱衷之外,並無共同之處……….」【p.206】
「史詩」不之來自何處?「特別熱衷」應為「特別熱衷者(們)」(devotees);原文severities with (嚴厲待之)漏譯…….
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漏譯:multiple(p.210)
The delightful stories a historian can tell, in Simon Schama's words, "dissolve the certainty of events into the multiple possibilities of alternative narrations." Such cheerfulness runs counter to the ..."
誤會:不知道為什麼"Objectivity is not neutrality." 翻譯為「客關性並不等於公正性」(p.215)
The American historian Thomas L. Haskell has put it trenchantly: "Objectivity is not neutrality." In fact, in the right hands, a certain way of looking ..."
翻譯成:「一般人會發生的對於一場戰役的錯誤觀念」(p.217)
Fabrice erring about the battlefield of Waterloo in Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme unfolds a confusing, almost incomprehensible scene of battle, typical of most battles; but it is through Fabrice's consciousness that ..."
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母親的妹妹
人名不全譯
112頁
on Page 88:
"... about the remedies that might serve him best. And his inner sparring points to what the celebrated French neurologist jean-Martin Charcot once called, in Freud's hearing, la chosegénitale, that most potent of all causes. Certainly, for Flaubert, the genital thing was ..."
on Page 83:
"... was doomed to live in despicable times. His letters, early and late, abounded in snide references to French culture when he was a schoolboy, and as a seasoned nov- elist he did not revise his opinion. He hated what he called in 1855, in a letter to his intimate ... Nor did he see much room for improvement. "I deny the literary renaissance you proclaim," he wrote to Maxime du Camp ... everywhere directed against poetry, against pure Art, the complete denial of the True gives me an appetite for suicide." When a more cheerful mood was upon him, which was rare, he ..."
紐約時報書評
Don't Get Mad, Write Novels
By David S. Reynolds
Published: August 4, 2002
SAVAGE REPRISALS
Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks.
By Peter Gay.
192 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Peter Gay, the prominent cultural historian, here does a skillful turn as a literary critic. Highlighting three landmark novels of the 1850-1910 period -- ''Bleak House,'' ''Madame Bovary'' and ''Buddenbrooks'' -- Gay explores fiction as ''a mirror held up to its world,'' albeit a mirror that throws ''imperfect reflections.'' This broad premise gives him plenty of room to ruminate about literature in relation to history and biography. Reading ''Savage Reprisals,'' one of the Norton Lecture Series books, is like sitting in a college lecture hall and listening to a seasoned professor perform scintillating riffs on masterworks and their contexts.
The book's title refers to the vindictiveness that drives these novels. Some of Gay's most provocative insights relate to the revenge motif. He points out that Charles Dickens, infuriated by a botched lawsuit that wasted his time in 1844, gets ''reprisal for injuries suffered -- and injuries imagined'' in ''Bleak House'' (1853), where he satirizes the British court system as vicious and stupid. Gay shows that Dickens's flawless heroines, like Esther Summerson in ''Bleak House'' or Agnes Wickfield in ''David Copperfield,'' are not to be dismissed as cloying paragons. Instead, they can be viewed as the imaginative creations of an author who had ''problematic relationships with women, starting with his mother.'' Dickens was scarred in childhood when his mother refused to allow him to quit a warehouse job and resume his education, a refusal, he later said, ''I never can forget.'' Devastated also by the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, Dickens assuaged his grief by fashioning idealized mother figures in his fiction.
Gustave Flaubert, too, used the novel to exorcise social and personal demons. The self-appointed scourge of middle-class mediocrity, he lamented to a friend, ''I feel against the stupidity of my epoch waves of hatred that choke me.'' His most memorable attack on bourgeois culture came in ''Madame Bovary'' (1857), his classic portrait of a bored housewife whose failure to find happiness in two adulterous affairs leads to her suicide. Here Gay navigates adroitly between history, biography and close reading. He notes that since divorce was banned in France during the period ''Madame Bovary'' was written, adultery was a ''perhaps necessary recourse for a restless husband or a neglected wife.'' He analyzes Emma Bovary with admirable subtlety. On the one hand, she embodies the provincial culture Flaubert detested. She is, in Gay's words, ''an instructive instance of the general inauthenticity, a small replica of her society at large.'' Still, as Gay shows, Flaubert deeply sympathized with her. Fleshing out the novelist's famous statement ''Madame Bovary, c'est moi,'' Gay informs us that Flaubert felt so close to his tortured heroine that he wept when writing and that he suffered two attacks of indigestion as he composed the scene in which she poisons herself.
Also hostile to bourgeois society, according to Gay, was Thomas Mann. Describing ''Buddenbrooks'' (1901), his novel about a family's decline over four generations, Mann spoke of ''the artist's sublime revenge on his experience.'' Gay demonstrates that in the novel Mann wreaks revenge on his well-heeled father, a senator and grain merchant, by excoriating capitalism. On a deeper level, Gay suggests, Mann in his fiction sought reprisal against repressive sexual conventions. Although married and the father of six, Mann wrestled with homosexual yearnings that surfaced most notably in ''Death in Venice,'' in which he portrays an aging man taken with a beautiful Polish boy. ''Buddenbrooks,'' Gay points out, is short on heterosexual love scenes and rife with homoerotic suggestions. For instance, the piano playing of the 8-year-old Hanno Buddenbrook is an orgy of sensual sound. Mann seems captivated not only by the music, which Gay calls the novel's ''harbinger and . . . agent of Eros,'' but also by the young musician, swept to orgasmic heights by his own playing.
Gay frames his readings with provocative theorizing about literature in its relation to human life and society. Well armed with solid biographical and historical facts, he is in a strong position to challenge the recently fashionable critical approach known as deconstruction or postmodernism. Assaulting the postmodern notion that ''there is no such thing as truth to begin with,'' that ''everything, a work of history as much as a novel, is only a text with its subtexts,'' he insists that novels reflect reality, though sometimes obliquely, and history represents a collective search for truth on the part of scholars who, despite disagreements, hope to establish ''a thoroughly well-informed accord on the past'': ''To put it bluntly, there may be history in fiction, but there should be no fiction in history.''
This argument is sound, though one has to consider the entire range of Gay's other books -- not just this slim one -- to find full support for it. In particular, his work on the Enlightenment and his multivolume study of the bourgeois experience stand as monuments of scrupulous scholarship. They lend credence to the notion that history, far from being merely a text or a subjective fabrication, is, at its best, a credible record of past people and events.
Because ''Savage Reprisals'' is literary criticism rather than history, it treads on more ambiguous territory than does Gay's previous work. Although Gay convincingly argues that his three authors ''have much to say to historians'' since they anchor their fiction in actual people and events, he also acknowledges that that they distort facts according to their passions and beliefs. His past books have revealed that bourgeois society was in many ways cultured and progressive. He balks, therefore, at his novelists' savage portraits of the bourgeois experience. For instance, he says ''Madame Bovary'' does ''a considerable injustice'' by caricaturing the French middle class as stupidly philistine; the novel is ''not a disinterested presentation of the evidence,'' and so its ''uses to the historian as historian are severely limited.'' Simultaneously fascinated and repelled by his authors' efforts as social commentators, he coins notably ambivalent epithets for them -- Dickens is an ''Angry Anarchist,'' Flaubert a ''Phobic Anatomist'' and Mann a ''Mutinous Patrician.''
A tapestry of contrasting shades, ''Savage Reprisals'' shares the complexity of its subjects. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in real time, often about real events. To some, this may seem obvious. To those appalled by trendy dismissals of historical scholarship, it is a bracing return to common sense.cts. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in r
現實主義的報復:歷史學家讀《荒涼山莊》《包法利夫人》《布登勃洛克一家》
作者: [美]彼得·蓋伊
出版社: 北京聯合出版公司
出品方: 新行思
原作名: Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks
出版年: 2023-5
頁數: 226
定價: CNY58.0
裝幀: 平裝
ISBN: 9787559665560
內容簡介 · · · · · ·
現實主義小說真的是在描寫“現實”嗎?
蓋伊在這本書中詳細解讀了三部偉大的現實主義小說:狄更斯的《荒涼山莊》、福樓拜的《包法利夫人》和湯瑪斯·曼的《布登勃洛克一家》。這位歷史學家認為,這三位作家通過小說對所處的社會和時代展開了報復。蓋伊在這本書中結合歷史研究和文學批評,分析了小說家、小說、歷史之間的關係。本書為文學愛好者和歷史研究者提供了結合兩種學科之優勢的小說閱讀方法,讓小說成為發現歷史真相的輔助媒介。
* 結合史實讀小說,知人論世測量文本“現實”含量
狄更斯、福樓拜、湯瑪斯·曼,這三位偉大小說家似乎都通過小說創作對所處的社會和時代展開了率意的報復。《荒涼山莊》《包法利夫人》《布登勃洛克一家》,這些小說中的故事有幾分真幾分假?解答此類問題恰恰是歷史學家的專長。作者運用大量歷史材料,測定了這些現實主義小說中的“現實”含量。
目錄 · · · · · ·
序言:超越現實原則
1. 憤怒的無政府主義者:狄更斯的《荒涼山莊》
2. 患有恐懼症的解剖師:福樓拜的 《包法利夫人》
3. 叛逆的貴族:湯瑪斯·曼的《布登勃洛克一家》
結語:小說的真相
引文出處
參考文獻簡述
致謝
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