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Excerpt:MARCEL PROUST from AXEL'S CASTLE
2012/11/14 22:24:28瀏覽277|回應0|推薦5

ExcerptMARCEL PROUST from AXEL'S CASTLE

"The Parnassians, for their part, take the thing just as it is and put it before us and consequently they arc deficient in mystery: they deprive the mind of the delicious joy of believing that it is creating. To name an object is to do away with the three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem which is derived from the satisfaction of guessing little by little: to suggest it, to evoke it that is what charms the imagination.
(
那些帕納塞斯詩人把事物本身放在我們面前,結果他們欠缺神秘:他們剝奪了心智相信自己在進行創造時的甜美悅樂。把一件事物指名道出,就會奪去詩歌的四分之三的享受,因為這享受是來自逐點逐點的猜想:去暗示它,去召喚它——這就是想像的魔力。)
——Stéphane Mallarmé

約莫 2 年多前,找到了 Edmund Wilson 的《阿克瑟爾的城堡》...
(請詳舊文 http://blog.udn.com/le14nov/3909652 )
最近重讀這本文學評論經典,真正感受到作者 Edmund Wilson,同時也是普林斯頓大學同學史考特·費茲傑羅 (Scott Fitzgerald) 的知心好友,確實有其過人之處,沒有繁複的理論架構、艱澀的學術用詞,而是直接從普魯斯特的作品及生平之中扎扎實實地演繹出一篇精彩的文章。


書名阿克瑟爾的城堡 AXEL'S CASTLE

作者埃德蒙威爾遜 Wilson, Edmund
譯者黃念欣

Excerpt
MARCEL PROUST is the first important novelist to apply the principles of Symbolism in fiction (
普魯斯特是首位把象徵主義原理應用於小說的重要作家。), Proust had assimilated a great variety of writers from Ruskin to Dostoevsky, and he had acquired a remarkable technical virtuosity; but, born in 1871, he had been young in the eighties and nineties, when Symbolism was in the air, and the peculiar methods and form of his great novel certainly owed much to Symbolist theory. I have said that the influence on the Symbolists of Wagner was as considerable as that of any writer of books, and it is significant of Proust's conception of his art that he should have been in the habit of speaking of his "themes." His enormous novel, "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," is, in fact, a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the ordinary sense. The shifting images of the Symbolist poet, with their "multiplied associations," are here characters, situations, places, vivid moments, obsessive emotions, recurrent patterns of behavior. (他的巨著《追憶似水年華》基本上是以交響曲式的結構而非一般的敘述方式寫成的。象徵詩人的意象變換與多重聯想,在這裡變成了人物、處境、地點、鮮明的時刻、執迷的情感以及重複出現的行為模式。)

As I have said, we have been submerged through these volumes and for most tastes, have been submerged far too long in the reveries of adolescence. (
如前所述,我們已經在這些小說的深處,一個少年的幻想曲中浸沉了很久——就某些人的品味來說,甚至會覺得太久了一點。) But people who have stuck in the "Jeunes Filles en Fleur" and thus know only the subjective Proust must acquire a false idea of what his genius is like. We are now to be violently thrown forward into the life of the world outside. The contrast between, on the one hand, the dreams, the broodings and the repinings of the neurasthenic hero, as we get them for such long stretches, and, on the other, the rich and lively social scenes, dramatized by so powerful an imagination, is one of the most curious features of the book. (一方面,小說的確長篇累牘地徘徊於神經衰弱的主人公的夢幻、沉思和滿腹牢騷中;另一方面,書中又充滿了上流社會豐富而生動的生活場面,並以強勁的想像力被戲劇化。這並存的兩個世界成為這部小說最奇異的特色之一。)
These latter scenes, indeed, contain so much broad humor and so much extravagant satire that, appearing in a modern French novel, they amaze us. (
後一種場景充滿各種廣博的幽默與繁多的諷刺就當代法國小說而言實在令人驚異)

This generous sympathy and understanding for even the monstrosities which humanity produces, and Proust's capacity for galvanizing these monstrosities into energetic life, are at the bottom of the extraordinary success of the tragicomic hero of Proust's Sodom, M. de Charlus. (即使對怪異、醜陋的事物亦有慷慨的同情與理解,普魯斯特總有能力使怪物也充滿生命力,這也是他筆下的索多姆的悲喜劇主人公夏呂斯先生的成功之處。) But Charlus surpasses Dickens and, as has been said, is almost comparable to Falstaff . In a letter in which Proust explains that he has borrowed certain traits of Charlus from a real person, he adds that the character in the book is, however, intended to be "much bigger," to "contain much more of humanity"; and it is one of the strange paradoxes of Proust's genius that he should have been able to create in a character so special a figure of heroic proportions. (普魯斯特在一封信中提到夏呂斯先生的一些行為來自真實的人物,但他指出書中人物比真實的更為宏大包含更多的人性。這也是普魯斯特天才的弔詭之處:他能夠把這樣怪異的人物打造成一個有著英雄般比例的形象。)

This episode with Albertine, upon which Proust put so much labor and which he intended for the climax of his book, has not been one of the most popular sections, and it is certainly one of the most trying to read. (
有關阿爾貝蒂娜的章節,是普魯斯特在書中花了很大的氣力去營造的高潮,卻不是最受歡迎的片段,而且肯定是讓人讀的最吃力的部份。) Albertine is seen in so many varying moods, made the subject of so many ideas, dissociated into so many different images, and her lover describes at such unconscionable length the writhings of his own sensibility, that we sometimes feel ourselves going under in the gray horizonless ocean of analysis and lose sight of the basic situation, of Proust's unwavering objective grasp of the characters of both the lovers which make the catastrophe inevitable. Furthermore, the episode of Albertine does not supply us with any of the things which we ordinarily expect from love affairs in novels: it is quite without tenderness, glamour or romance the relation between Albertine and her lover seems to involve neither idealism nor enjoyment. But this is also its peculiar strength: it is one of the most original studies of love in fiction and, in spite of the rather highly special conditions under which it is made to take place, we recognize in it an inescapable truth. And it ends by moving us in a curious way, precisely when Proust seems indifferently to have neglected all the customary apparatus for getting effects of pathos out of themes of love and death. (故事的結束以一種奇異的方式感動著我們,尤其當普魯斯特在愛情和死亡的主題上,似乎無動於衷地忽視所有慣常製造悲情效果的手法的時候。) The tragedy of Albertine is the tragedy of the little we know and the little we are able to care about those persons whom we know best and for whom we care most (阿爾貝蒂娜的悲劇就是我們對於所愛與所關心的人了解得太少,亦愛得太少而造成的悲劇); and the pages which tell how Albertine's lover forgot her after she was dead, by reason of their very departure from any other treatment of death that we remember in fiction, give us that impression of a bolder honesty, of a closer approach to reality, which we get only from deep and original genius. As in the case of Paul Valery's "Cimetiere Marin" so characteristic of our own time and such a curious contrast to Gray's "Country Churchyard" it is less the nostalgia for perished beauty and the pathos of wasted passions that move us than amazement at their obliteration. (讓我們感動的,不是對逝去的美的懷念,或者對虛擲的熱情的唏噓,而是對愛與美的徹底毀滅的驚奇。)

Proust has further, in a larger way, varied the color, tone and pace of his narrative to correspond to the various periods of the hero's life. To the shimmering reveries of boyhood succeed the chatter, the sociability and the vivacity of young manhood; and to these, with that extraordinary sunrise which brings to the hero, not the splendor of the morning, but the dawning of the realization of human corruption and cruelty, succeeds a nightmare of the passions, which at its climax, in the almost demoniacal scene where the Verdurins set Morel against Charlus, seems blasted with the dry breath of Hell It is characteristic of Proust that, though the vices he here deals with fascinated him and though he extracts from them a good deal of comedy, he should have given to this part of his novel the Scriptural title "Sodom and Gomorrah," and that he should make us feel that all the characters are damned. The grandmother and Swann are now dead. Bergotte dies; and at his death it is intimated, as it has already been intimated in connection with the composer Vinteuil, that only in artistic creation may we hope to find our compensation for the anarchy, the perversity, the sterility and the frustrations of the world. (
普魯斯特進一步大規模地利用敘述的顏色、調子和速度配合敘事者不同階段的人生。閃爍著微光的幻想的童年,由喋喋不休、熱愛交際和輕快活潑的青年階段所取代;但隨後的日出給主人公帶來的,卻不是早晨的壯麗,而是對人類墮落和殘酷的覺醒的黎明。接下來的是激情的噩夢,在維爾迪蘭促使莫利和夏呂斯對立的惡魔般的場面中達到高潮。至此,一切都被地獄的乾風完全摧毀。這是普魯斯特的特色,即使他在這裡處理的缺德惡行令他入迷,即使他從中提取出大量喜劇的成分,他卻要為這一章起一個與《聖經》相關的名稱索多瑪與蛾摩拉,令我們覺得所有人物皆罪有應得......只有在藝術創作中,我們才有可能為混亂無序、變態荒唐、徒勞無望和充滿挫敗的世界找到補償。)

Imaginatively and intellectually, Proust is prodigiously strong; and if we feel an element of decadence in his work, it may be primarily due to the decay of the society in which he lived and with which his novel exclusively deals the society of the dispossessed nobility and the fashionable and cultivated bourgeoisie, with their physicians and their artists, their servants and their parasites. (普魯斯特的想像力和思考都超乎常人的強大,而如果我們在他的作品中感受到頹廢,可能是因為他身處的社會已經在頹敗,而他的小說又剛巧完全取材於這個社會——破落的貴族,時髦而有教養的中產階級,以及他們的醫生、藝術家、僕役和寄生者。) We are always feeling with Proust as if we were reading about the end of something this seems, in fact, to be what he means us to feel: witness the implications of the bombardment of Paris during the War when Charlus is in the last stages of his disintegration. Not only do his hero and most of his other characters pass into mortal declines, but their world itself seems to be coming to an end. And it may be that Proust's strange poetry and brilliance are the last fires of a setting sun the last flare of the aesthetic idealism of the educated classes of the nineteenth century. (也許,普魯斯特奇特的詩意和精彩就是落日的餘暉——19 世紀知識階層的美學理想的最後光焰。) If Proust is more dramatic, more complete and more intense than Thackeray or Chekov or Edith Wharton or Anatole France, it may be because he comes at the close of an era and sums up the whole situation. Surely the lament over the impossibility of ideal romantic love which Proust is always chanting on a note which wavers between the tragic and the maudlin announces by its very falling into absurdity the break-up of a whole emotional idealism and its ultimate analysis and readjustment along lines which Proust's own researches, running curiously close to Freud, have been among the first to suggest. (最值得提出的是普魯斯特終日縈繞不離的,對不可能的浪漫理想愛情的悼念了。這種愁思在悲劇與自憐之間擺盪,最終變得荒謬,以致打破了整個情感的理想主義。這一點是相當接近佛洛伊德的。) "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" subsumes, in this respect, "The Great Gatsby," "The Sun Also Rises," "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," the sketches of Dorothy Parker, and how many contemporary European novels! Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture; and the little man with the sad appealing voice, the metaphysician's mind, the Saracen's beak, the ill-fitting dress-shirt and the great eyes that seem to see all about him like the many-faceted eyes of a fly, dominates the scene and plays host in the mansion where he is not long to be master. (普魯斯特可能是最後一位研究資本主義文化的歷史學家,其作品中的愛情、社會、知性、外交、文學和藝術皆令人心碎。而這位有著憂愁而動人的聲線、哲學家的頭腦、薩拉森人的鈎鼻、不合身的禮服和仿似蒼蠅複眼一樣看透一切的大眼睛的細小男子,主導著場景,扮演著大宅裡最後的主人的角色。)


Original text
http://www.archive.org/stream/axelscastle030404mbp/axelscastle030404mbp_djvu.txt


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