hc： 這篇「為什麼讀經典？」的義大利原文，網路上可找到。時報出版公司放在網路上的，只是大部分（至少注解須加強），還有三頁多未包括在內 -- 後者多我要談的。
在本篇第11節，Calvino 這樣比喻：
For sake of my argument here, what distinguish a classic is perhaps only a kind of resonance we perceive emanating either an ancient or a modern work, but one which has its own place in a cultural continuum.
中文翻譯還不錯，不過我想，將resonance 翻譯成「回響」而非我喜歡的「共鳴」，將continuum翻譯成「連續體」而非我喜歡的「傳承」，有點「遺憾」。
在本篇第12節，Calvino 繼續發揮這比喻：
Perhaps the ideal would be to hear the present as a noise outside our window, warning us of the traffic jams and weather changes outside, while we continue to follow the discourse of the classics which resounds clearly and articulately inside our room.But it already an acchievement for most people to hear the claasics as a distant echo, outside the room which is pervaded by the present as if it were a television set on at full volume.
譯者漏了articulately 【able to express thoughts and feelings easily and clearly, or showing this quality:】，或許它與clearly意思有點重疊，不過，經典是這樣的「一種共鳴」，其論説理路清楚而又整然。
本篇第14節的一些小問題：
The facts remains that reading the classics seems to be at odds with our pace of life, which does not tolerate long stretches of time, or space for humanist otium;…
李譯：「閱讀經典似乎與我們的生活步調格格不入，我們的生活步調無法容忍我們長時間持續進行一項活動，也無法容忍人本主義的優閒（otium）空間；…….」
hc案；「人本主義的優閒（otium）空間」有誤，應是「人本主義者的」，（otium）是西方古典的一關鍵拉丁文，在文學上常用peace翻譯，所以 我想這是陶淵明的「心遠地自偏」，我或許會將它翻譯成「從容自得的餘地」。我對於複數 long stretches of time 的翻譯也不滿意。
接下來的一段，有些不過忠實的毛病（hc求全）。本書原著人名的翻譯通常只翻譯姓氏，名字省略。這在義大利人的行文會出問題，因為我們習慣的許多義大利名 人，都是名，非姓。所以本段之Giacomo Leopardi（1778-1937），作者在後文以Giacomo 稱之，翻譯都只好沿用Leopardi。它有一義大利文「我的”paternal ostello”」未翻譯，其實這應交待一下，Giacomo Leopardi 說，到「我老子的旅舍（城堡）」 K書去也！
***
筆記馬拉美、于斯曼、Kristeva
這幾周關於馬拉美和于斯曼、Kristeva等一些，謝謝瑞麟兄rl幫忙。我們有些小筆記、我將它們稍整理列出存檔。
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hc：「「那首馬拉美的詩 （原法文連著寫，吳老師一時疏忽，斷句錯誤。他後來解釋其押韻…….）
大陸翻譯為（『馬拉美詩全集』）：
為戴澤特所賦短章*
誇張啊! 你是否知道.
你曾在我的記憶裡昇騰奔逸.
今天. 在一部鐵的道德之書中.
變得難以裡喻:
【吳老師解釋某法國人說法：第一字hyperbole 意思為「超越」，我不太懂為什麼要如此解……此詩上周四要想同詩人楊澤談，他說這種詩無解……. rl指出：將vetu翻譯為「道德」是誤會。……】
*「戴澤特為" 于斯曼" 著之『傲世者』之主角（于斯曼. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 法國作家，所寫主要小說 集中體現了法國19世紀末期美學、宗教和學術發展的幾個相聯的階段。這本名著英文多翻譯為Against Nature （牛津大學和企鵝都有版本））：他孤傲，喜歡用清秀之字抄寫馬拉美等人之詩。為此，" 于斯曼"要求馬拉美專門為該小說寫首詩。所以此詩為馬拉美應" 于斯曼" 出版 『傲世者』所寫之詩，讓他以一首詩名震法國文壇。這似乎是文壇中很有名之軼事，我去年談日本人松岡先生討論日本之翻譯時，在稍後研究時聽 過......」」（hc根據『馬拉美詩全集』）之注改寫）我記得我約在1970在台灣的書刊中讀過馬拉美的詩Prose pour des Esseintes 散文詩（獻給德杰盛）之翻譯和解說。其實，台灣當時文風鼎盛.....
吳老師稍微解釋前四行之押韻
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rl之貢獻（hc稍微整理過）
「re: 那首馬拉美的詩
花了半小時把日前那首馬拉美的詩初譯如下：
Prose pour des Esseintes 散文詩（獻給德杰盛）
Hyperbole! de ma memoire 太扯了！憑我的記憶
Triomphalement ne sais-tu 你今日不能單獨
Te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire 得意揚揚地捧起
Dans un livre de fer vetu 鐵皮書裡的天書：
譯注：
1.天書易懂（此懂非彼懂），反倒是不知道鐵皮書的意涵
2 re: 吳老師解釋某法國人說法：第一字hyperbole 意思為「超越」，我不太懂為什麼要如此解……
不記得是在上代數函數曲線，或解析幾何，或者微積分時，聽過「超越曲線」這個專有名詞，所講授的不外乎圓錐曲線，雙曲線，螺旋曲線等等這堆「超越」一般人 理解能力的數學問題。原來hyper-字首就是表「超越、超過」的意思，所以，hyperbole當然屬於「超越」族群。它在數學上稱「雙曲線」，在修辭 學上稱「誇張表達法」。
敬請批評指正」
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hc按：hyperbole在修辭學上：A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
可參考 http://www.answers.com/hyperbole
日文: [名][U][C]《修辞学》誇張（法）.
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rl：但是書裡（『思考之危境』）吳老師斷句如下：
Hyperbole de ma mémoire,
Triomphalement,
Ne sais-tu te lever aujourd"hui,
Grimoire dans un livre de fer vêtu:
請注意標點符號與分行之差異/我認為更動原著並非好習慣
2011: (Hyperbole ! de ma mémoire
- Hyperbole ! de ma mémoire. Triomphalement ne sais-tu. Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire. Dans un livre de fer vêtu : ...)-------
hc 留言：
關於吳老師的翻譯，讓我想起Deming博士的穩健做法：他們--包括Tukey等人--總會將作品在專家圈內流通數年，之後再出版『思考之危境』。如果我們的講談會先辦，再出版，這樣或許可以提昇翻譯品質3%-5%。
不過，這在實務上很難。吳老師或許也還未善用google等搜索工具、這真的需要最基本的入門.... 。（上周四知道他已查出全集等等）
*****
Kristeva在『思考之危境』中（背誦並）指出，這首 Prose pour des Esseintes( 散文詩) 很不容易懂…….。不過，她有一篇談其自傳名為：”My Memory’s Hyperbole “ 翻譯可以參考下書：
羅亭『克里斯特瓦的師學研究』北京：中國社會科學出版社，2004
（hc評：這本書是博士論文【川大中文系】加工改寫的，可是並沒有什麼學術價值。或許可以為中國的博士之粗製感到悲哀……）
***** rl re: re: 譯馬拉美信
（hc按：這些是為了解I. Calvino用馬拉美之 total book之典所作的注）
我心中為〈每日一字〉之連結出現錯誤訊息而焦慮著。為今晨意外發現野百合幼苗（不計其數）已然竄出三、四公分而驚喜著。想到院子裡的野百合，想讚歎奇妙規律的大自然
因為上述心境，馬拉美的信簡片斷純屬第一印象之粗譯，茲將原文鈔錄如下：
Mon oeuvre est si bien préparé et hiérarchisé, représentant comme il le peut, l"Univers, que je n"aurais su, sans endommager quelqu"une de mes impressions étagées, rien en enlever.
Mallarmé: Ses purs ongles (Sonnet en yx)
- [ 翻譯此頁 ]Enfin, comme il se pourrait toutefois que, rythmé par le hamac [Hängematte; . ... mon œuvre est si bien préparé et hiérarchisé, représentant comme il peut ...我的作品情節安排和層次條理都十分妥善，應有盡有，（像）宇宙（一樣），我所有既成的感受絲毫未減、未除，超出我不知道的。（Mon oeuvre est si bien prepare et hierarchisé, représentant comme il le peut, l’Univers, que je n’aurais su, sans endommager quelqu"une de mes impressions etagées, rien en enlever.）
le simple acte d’écrire installe l’hysterie dans ma tête
寫作的簡單行為令我歇斯底里（le simple acte d’ecrire installe l’hysterie dans ma tete）
tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre
世間所有都是為書而存在（tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir a un livre）
Why Read the Classics?
Let us begin with a few suggested definitions.
1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading….”
This at least happens among those who consider themselves “very well read.” It does not hold good for young people at the age when they first encounter the world, and the classics as a part of that world.
The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, we need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.
Hands up, anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Thucydides! And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are more often talked about than read. In France they begin to read Balzac in school, and judging by the number of copies in circulation, one may suppose that they go on reading him even after that, but if a Gallup poll were taken in Italy, I’m afraid that Balzac would come in practically last. Dickens fans in Italy form a tiny elite; as soon as its members meet, they begin to chatter about characters and episodes as if they were discussing people and things of their own acquaintance. Years ago, while teaching in America, Michel Butor got fed up with being asked about Emile Zola, whom he had never read, so he made up his mind to read the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle. He found it was completely different from what he had thought: a fabulous mythological and cosmogonical family tree, which he went on to describe in a wonderful essay.
In other words, to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth. Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavor and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates (or ought to appreciate) many more details and levels and meanings. We may therefore attempt the next definition:
2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty—all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us. The definition we can give is therefore this:
3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing.
Hence, whether we use the verb “read” or the verb “reread” is of little importance. Indeed, we may say:
4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
Definition 4 may be considered a corollary of this next one:
6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Whereas definition 5 depends on a more specific formula, such as this:
7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).
All this is true both of the ancient and of the modern classics. If I read the Odyssey I read Homer’s text, but I cannot forget all that the adventures of Ulysses have come to mean in the course of the centuries, and I cannot help wondering if these meanings were implicit in the text, or whether they are incrustations or distortions or expansions. When reading Kafka, I cannot avoid approving or rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective “Kafkaesque,” which one is likely to hear every quarter of an hour, applied indiscriminately. If I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, I cannot help thinking how these characters have continued to be reincarnated right down to our own day.
The reading of a classic ought to give us a surprise or two vis-à-vis the notion that we had of it. For this reason I can never sufficiently highly recommend the direct reading of the text itself, leaving aside the critical biography, commentaries, and interpretations as much as possible. Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite. There is a very widespread topsyturviness of values whereby the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say, and, indeed, can say only if left to speak for itself without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text does. We may conclude that:
8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. From all this we may derive a definition of this type:
9) The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.
Naturally, this only happens when a classic really works as such—that is, when it establishes a personal rapport with the reader. If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love. Except at school. And school should enable you to know, either well or badly, a certain number of classics among which—or in reference to which—you can then choose your classics. School is obliged to give you the instruments needed to make a choice, but the choices that count are those that occur outside and after school.
It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book. I know an excellent art historian, an extraordinarily well-read man, who out of all the books there are has focused his special love on the Pickwick Papers; at every opportunity he comes up with some quip from Dickens’s book, and connects each and every event in life with some Pickwickian episode. Little by little he himself, and true philosophy, and the universe, have taken on the shape and form of the Pickwick Papers by a process of complete identification. In this way we arrive at a very lofty and demanding notion of what a classic is:
10) We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the “total book,” as Mallarmé conceived of it.
But a classic can establish an equally strong rapport in terms of opposition and antithesis. Everything that Jean-Jacques Rousseau thinks and does is very dear to my heart, yet everything fills me with an irrepressible desire to contradict him, to criticize him, to quarrel with him. It is a question of personal antipathy on a temperamental level, on account of which I ought to have no choice but not to read him; and yet I cannot help numbering him among my authors. I will therefore say:
11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
I think I have no need to justify myself for using the word “classic” without making distinctions about age, style, or authority. What distinguishes the classic, in the argument I am making, may be only an echo effect that holds good both for an ancient work and for a modern one that has already achieved its place in a cultural continuum. We might say:
12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
At this point I can no longer put off the vital problem of how to relate the reading of the classics to the reading of all the other books that are anything but classics. It is a problem connected with such questions as, Why read the classics rather than concentrate on books that enable us to understand our own times more deeply? or, Where shall we find the time and peace of mind to read the classics, overwhelmed as we are by the avalanche of current events?
We can, of course, imagine some blessed soul who devotes his reading time exclusively to Lucretius, Lucian, Montaigne, Erasmus, Quevedo, Marlowe, the Discourse on Method, Wilhelm Meister, Coleridge, Ruskin, Proust, and Valéry, with a few forays in the direction of Murasaki or the Icelandic sagas. And all this without having to write reviews of the latest publications, or papers to compete for a university chair, or articles for magazines on tight deadlines. To keep up such a diet without any contamination, this blessed soul would have to abstain from reading the newspapers, and never be tempted by the latest novel or sociological investigation. But we have to see how far such rigor would be either justified or profitable. The latest news may well be banal or mortifying, but it nonetheless remains a point at which to stand and look both backward and forward. To be able to read the classics you have to know “from where” you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud. This, then, is the reason why the greatest “yield” from reading the classics will be obtained by someone who knows how to alternate them with the proper dose of current affairs. And this does not necessarily imply a state of imperturbable inner calm. It can also be the fruit of nervous impatience, of a huffing-and-puffing discontent of mind.
Maybe the ideal thing would be to hearken to current events as we do to the din outside the window that informs us about traffic jams and sudden changes in the weather, while we listen to the voice of the classics sounding clear and articulate inside the room. But it is already a lot for most people if the presence of the classics is perceived as a distant rumble far outside a room that is swamped by the trivia of the moment, as by a television at full blast. Let us therefore add:
13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
There remains the fact that reading the classics appears to clash with our rhythm of life, which no longer affords long periods of time or the spaciousness of humanistic leisure. It also contradicts the eclecticism of our culture, which would never be capable of compiling a catalog of things classical such as would suit our needs.
These latter conditions were fully realized in the case of Leopardi, given his solitary life in his father’s house (his “paterno ostello“), his cult of Greek and Latin antiquity, and the formidable library put at his disposal by his father, Monaldo. To which we may add the entire body of Italian literature and of French literature, with the exception of novels and the “latest thing out” in general, all of which were at least swept off into the sidelines, there to comfort the leisure of his sister Paolina (“your Stendhal,” he wrote her once). Even with his intense interest in science and history, he was often willing to rely on texts that were not entirely up-to-date, taking the habits of birds from Buffon, the mummies of Frederik Ruysch from Fontanelle, the voyage of Columbus from Robertson.
In these days a classical education like the young Leopardi’s is unthinkable; above all, Count Monaldo’s library has multiplied explosively. The ranks of the old titles have been decimated, while new ones have proliferated in all modern literatures and cultures. There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries.
Irealize that Leopardi is the only name I have cited from Italian literature—a result of the explosion of the library. Now I ought to rewrite the whole article to make it perfectly clear that the classics help us to understand who we are and where we stand, a purpose for which it is indispensable to compare Italians with foreigners and foreigners with Italians.
Then I ought to rewrite it yet again lest anyone believe that the classics ought to be read because they “serve any purpose” whatever. The only reason one can possibly adduce is that to read the classics is better than not to read the classics.
And if anyone objects that it is not worth taking so much trouble, then I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic, but will become one):
While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. “What good will it do you,” they asked, “to know this tune before you die?”
—translated by Patrick Creagh
English translation copyright © 1986 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
English translation copyright © 1986 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
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