2019年4月19日 星期五

暢銷書......Victor Hugo《巴黎聖母院》 Notre-Dame de Paris










Penguin Classics
Different editions of Victor Hugo's 19th-century classic NOTRE-DAME OF PARIS (also known as THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME) hold five of the top 10 slots on Amazon France.






Why Notre Dame matters, in one Victor Hugo passage
What Victor Hugo wrote to save Notre Dame when it was on the brink of destruction.
By Constance Grady@constancegrady Apr 15, 2019, 4:10pm EDT

Flames and smoke are seen billowing from the roof at Notre Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019, in Paris, France. Chesnot / Getty Images


Notre Dame is on fire, and its spire has fallen.
As of Monday afternoon, we don’t know for sure how the fire began or how extensive the damage is, but the world has responded to the news with an outcry of horror and grief. “Paris is beheaded,” one man told the New York Times as the spire fell.
If we lose Notre Dame, we’re not losing only a sacred space, and not only an art treasure. Notre Dame is a symbol of human accomplishment, and more than that, of social accomplishment. It’s not the work of any one person, but of generations upon generations of labor.
Work began on Notre Dame in 1180. It took 200 years to finish. And in the time since the cathedral was largely completed in 1260, it has survived war and weather and changing fashions. It survived the loss of its spire once before, in 1786, after the spire’s supporting structure was so weakened by centuries of weathering that restorers removed it and replaced it. It survived riots from the Huguenots. It survived the French Revolution. It survived Napoleon. It survived World War II.
Notre Dame represents the most beautiful things that we as human beings can make if we pour unimaginable amounts of labor and wealth and resources and time into the effort. It’s a pinnacle of a certain kind.
And so if Notre Dame is irrevocably damaged, it might be a good time to turn to one of the greatest celebrations of what the cathedral represents, which appears in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This description appears at the opening of Book Three of the novel, just after we meet Quasimodo the hunchback and Esmeralda the dancing girl, and it’s an evocation of what makes Notre Dame great:
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,— following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder. […]
All these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. […] The service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.
Hugo thinks of Notre Dame as a work of art authored by humanity itself, with no individual artist. It surpasses anything an individual can do and therefore becomes the best of what all of us can do.
But Hunchback isn’t just a celebration of what makes Notre Dame great. It’s a reminder that Notre Dame has been rebuilt before — and it can be again.
When Hugo was writing, Notre Dame was in a state of horrific disrepair. Its architecture was considered old-fashioned, it was largely neglected, and it was vandalized. Hugo ends the preface of Hunchback with the dark prediction that “the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.”
Instead, the church was saved. When The Hunchback of Notre Dame came out in 1831 and became a smash hit, popular attention turned back to the church. In 1844, the king ordered a restoration.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written to celebrate a landmark on the brink of death, and instead the novel succeeded in resurrecting it. Perhaps it is possible for a similar rebirth to happen again today.



2018年5月31日 星期四


Victor Hugo《巴黎聖母院》 Notre-Dame de Paris 一段

假設牛津的英譯本是對的。那麼,《巴黎聖母院》*的兩中國譯本和台灣的遠景的,第五卷第一章第一段的翻譯,各有數個錯誤。

*
  The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris), 1831.





---

,雨漸歇。昨晚重新看傳記,這是中共長春:時代文藝版(2002)
,很有意思,版權頁無譯者、原書名;說是100本名人簡傳叢刊,封面、書背都有英文錯字。
我看的是簡傳,然而要而不煩。"將軍" (國父)從來不用雨具,淋雨小事。Photograph of a rain-soaked Charles de Gaulle praying in the Cathedral of Notre Dame
"將軍"大反對英國入歐盟;臨終時法國人多數同意歐盟飛法國當頂導,沒關係。(昨天德法都跟英國呼喚胡布留歐盟......)
有意思的記載:1969年12月11:馬爾羅訪將軍,一番長談。馬爾羅在後來的出版物對這次談話,"從藝術的角度詳加描述,大加引申。"
又讀Payne寫的馬爾羅傳。40年代末傳主演講,預言共產黨專制將臨。引米開蘭基羅的雕塑{夜}中的"留言:遇專制,不要睜眼。

1969年12月11:馬爾羅訪將軍,一番長談。馬爾羅在後來的出版物對這次談話,"從藝術的角度詳加描述,大加引申。"

...The oaks beening felled for Hercules'  pyre. --Hugo

沒有留言:

網誌存檔