2013年8月31日 星期六

In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden


Auden 這首名詩 In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden 其實也不難懂. 請特別注意它的標點符號 尤其冒號和分號. 這些是原作者的思想

它是有漢譯的. 不過如果這都讀不懂. 漢文可能更不容易懂.....

concupiscence, moiety,

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

  by W. H. Auden
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
     to the critique of a whole epoch
   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
     who knew it was never enough but
   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
     so many plausible young futures
   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
     of problems like relatives gathered
   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
     and shades that still waited to enter
   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
     to go back to the earth in London,
   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
     who think they can be cured by killing
   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
     all he did was to remember
   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
     like a poetry lesson till sooner
   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
     how rich life had been and how silly,
   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
     a set mask of rectitude or an 
   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
     the fall of princes, the collapse of
   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
     of State be broken and prevented
   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
     to the stinking fosse where the injured
   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
     clung to his utterance and features,
   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
     to us he is no more a person
   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
     the proud can still be proud but find it
   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
     and extends, till the tired in even
   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
     some hearth where freedom is excluded,
   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 
     so many long-forgotten objects
   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
     little noises we dared not laugh at,
   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
     the unequal moieties fractured
   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 
the smaller possesses but can only use
     for arid disputes, would give back to
   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 
   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543#sthash.DqljstP9.dpuf


In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

  by W. H. Auden
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
     to the critique of a whole epoch
   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
     who knew it was never enough but
   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
     so many plausible young futures
   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
     of problems like relatives gathered
   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
     and shades that still waited to enter
   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
     to go back to the earth in London,
   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
     who think they can be cured by killing
   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
     all he did was to remember
   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
     like a poetry lesson till sooner
   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
     how rich life had been and how silly,
   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
     a set mask of rectitude or an 
   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
     the fall of princes, the collapse of
   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
     of State be broken and prevented
   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
     to the stinking fosse where the injured
   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
     clung to his utterance and features,
   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
     to us he is no more a person
   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
     the proud can still be proud but find it
   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
     and extends, till the tired in even
   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
     some hearth where freedom is excluded,
   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 
     so many long-forgotten objects
   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
     little noises we dared not laugh at,
   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
     the unequal moieties fractured
   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 
the smaller possesses but can only use
     for arid disputes, would give back to
   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 
   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543#sthash.LEqgHqO0.dpuf

 
In Memory of Sigmund Freud- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543‎In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden.



In Memory of Sigmund Freud - Modernism Lab Essays
modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/.../In_Memory_of_Sigmund_Freud‎W.H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939) reflects on the similarities between psychoanalysis and the work of the poet and attempts to adapt the ...


In Memory of Sigmund Freud

by Sam Alexander
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939) reflects on the similarities between psychoanalysis and the work of the poet and attempts to adapt the traditional elegy to a world in which violent and impersonal death on a massive scale had become an inescapable reality. Freud died, in fact, in the same month in which Hitler invaded Poland, and the poem that Auden wrote in response to this atrocity already suggests the psychoanalytic inheritance of a poet who differed from his modernist forebears in his readiness to use Freud’s ideas without irony. In the famous final stanza of "September 1, 1939," the poet claims that we are all composed “Of Eros and of dust.”[1]



W.H. Auden in 1939. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1113173.
The Freud elegy begins, “When there are so many we shall have to mourn…,” and the first four stanzas confront the difficulty of writing an elegy in an age of mass death.[2] As he does in his elegy to William Butler Yeats (“You were silly like us”), Auden makes the very commonness of Freud’s life and death into a reason to praise him. Like those others who “were doing us some good,” Freud’s desire was only to do more work, but this was not to be: “his wish was denied him,” as Auden puts it, using wordplay to pit Freud’s earliest explanation of dreams as wish-fulfillments against the reality of death that he confronted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Like his fellow doers of good, Freud “closed his eyes / upon that last picture, common to us all, / of problems like relatives gathered” (13-15). Like the word "wish" in the preceding lines, this analogy has deeper resonance given the subject of the elegy. Most of the problems that Freud tried to solve involved relatives and their role in the psychic lives of his patients: the vehicle here hints at the tenor.


In these lines as elsewhere in the poem, a deliberately simple style—the conversational syllabic meter inspired by the experiments of Marianne Moore[3] —belies nuances that demand interpretation, much as the manifest content of a dream, for Freud, both hints at and disguises its latent meaning. And Auden may well have intended this comparison or something like it. Reading carefully through The Interpretation of Dreams, as Auden clearly has, one cannot help being struck with Freud’s admiration for the poetic artifice of the dream-work: its ability to condense meaning, to pun, to yoke ideas with the finesse of a metaphysical poet. As Auden points out near the end of the Freud elegy, the aim of analysis is to transfer this poetic power, which the superego (stemming from childhood, the “smaller” part of life) uses only for evasive purposes of disguise and self-punishment, to the “larger” adult ego:
… He would unite
the unequal moieties…
would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother’s richness and feeling… (94-97)
The analogy between poetry and psychoanalysis as liberators of “wit” is the central theme of the poem, and it emerges most explicitly when Auden compares the analytical method of telling “the unhappy Present to recite the Past” to a “poetry lesson” (34-35). Also telling in this regard are the metaphors Auden uses to describe the remnants of the past that form the content of this recitation—the “problems” which we have already seen compared to relatives, and which are subsequently called “the fauna of the night," and then “shades that … waited to enter / the bright circle of his recognition” (18, 19-20). The image of fauna entering a "circle of recognition" recalls Yeats’s circus animals. More explicitly, in calling these animals "shades," Auden represents the heroic recovery of the past with a motif dear to the modernists, especially Ezra Pound: the nekyia, or descent to the underworld, that Pound links in the first Canto to his own descent into literary tradition. There is a specific echo of Canto I (in which the revived Tiresias’s first words are “Stand from the fosse”)[4] in a stanza that ostensibly links Freud to Dante:
… he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
to the stinking fosse where the injured
lead the ugly life of the rejected …
This conception of the poet’s task as one of recovering the past through a descent to a nocturnal underworld also echoes the end of Auden’s Yeats elegy, in which he commands (in a gentle parody of “Under Ben Bulben”), “Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night"-- and again (more faintly) Yeats's own "Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in which the move from abstract forms to real suffering is also represented as a descent: “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” And the comparison of repressed wishes to the shades of the underworld is particularly appropriate in an elegy on Freud, who used the very same analogy in The Interpretation of Dreams,  writing that repressed wishes "are not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades in the Odyssey, which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had tasted blood."[5]

Sigmund Freud and dog in his study, by Hilda Doolittle. Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Bibliographic Record Number: 39002035067041.


Auden views Freud both as a liberator of unconscious memories and as politically liberating, but he makes clear that the social work of psychoanalysis, like poetry, must proceed at the level of the individual. It is interesting that like D.H. Lawrence, who also engaged directly with Freud, Auden was deeply troubled by the loss of individual identity and the ascendancy of large-scale epistemologies like statistics (as a poem like “The Unknown Citizen” makes clear). But unlike Lawrence, who faulted psychoanalysis for obscuring the irreducible difference of each individual in a general theory of psychic development (see Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious), Auden saw Freud as standing with the poets against  such homogenizing forms of knowledge. If Freud had succeeded, he writes, “the Generalised Life / would become impossible” (49-50). The social power of psychoanalysis for Auden seems paradoxically to lie in its self-restriction to the world of the individual (this is a particular version of Freud, a point to which I will return below). He makes this point in a 1934 essay entitled “Psychology and Art Today”: 
The task of psychology, or art for that matter, is not to tell people how to behave, but by drawing their attention to what the impersonal unconscious is trying to tell them, and by increasing their knowledge of good and evil, to render them better able to choose, to become increasingly morally responsible for their destiny. For this reason psychology is opposed to all generalizations. You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his immediate and particular needs may draw his own conclusions.[6]
The case can certainly be made that Freud’s oeuvre should be read as a series of parables, and Auden seems to point to one, the game of fort-da described in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when he refers in the Freud elegy to “games we had thought we must drop as we grew up, / little noises we dared not laugh at…” (85-86). In this poem and in the essay written three years earlier, Auden advances a theory of Freud’s work as an instructive mythology. He sets aside any notion of a general psychology that could explain human history, or of a normative developmental narrative that should be prescribed for the child to achieve a “correct” sexual organization.


There is, of course, a good deal of "generalization" in Freud, and there is more than a little prescriptivism. Auden, who  had complained in a 1929 journal entry that “[t]he trouble with Freud is that he accepts conventional morality as if it were the only one,"[7] was clearly aware of this side of Freud's work; however, part of what makes Auden's mode of elegy distinctive is the honesty with which he acknowledges and forgives the faults of his subject. Thus he addresses Yeats with what might seem in isolation to be a back-handed compliment: “…your gift survived it all: / The parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself."[8] The lines in which Auden recognizes and excuses Freud’s faults have become famous in their own right:
If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
clung to his utterance and features,
it was a protective coloration
for one who’d lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives … (61-69).
These lines reflect not only Auden’s generosity, but also the tempered and realistic attitude about the political potential of intellectual discourse that he would later say had been missing in “September 1, 1939” (which he called “incurably dishonest”).[9] Freud’s work—like poetry in the Yeats elegy—both does and does not “make things happen.” It can create a"climate" conducive to change, but not change itself, and despite this indirect social impact, it remains rigorously individual in its orientation. One has the sense that the "absurd" Freud for Auden is the Freud of cultural psychology, the Freud of the highly speculative works culminating in Moses and Monotheism.


The tension between the individual and the social marks the final stanza of the poem, which deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved;
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. (110-114)
One rational voice is dumb: here we are in the world of the individual, the single reasonable man who was able to liberate the repressed "impulses" of each patient through persistent recitation and analysis of the past. In allowing Eros a role in mourning Freud, however, I think Auden nods to Freud's importance for understanding human civilization as a whole. Eros is responsible for the most basic kind of community, Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents, because it instigates the formation of families. Later, however, civilization works to censor the sexual expression of Eros in order to submit it to the process of sublimation by which it comes to be used for higher ends (the building of cities): “[L]ove comes into opposition to the interests of civilization [and] civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions."[10]


While Freud distinguishes two historically separated relationships between civilization and love-- alliance and antagonism-- Auden splits love itself in two. On the one hand, there is Eros, the sublimated love responsible for the great cultural achievements (the building of cities). While the intuitive antithesis to Eros would be Thanatos, the death instinct that Freud claims startin in 1920 is the second great drive, Auden uses the end of his poem to draw a different distinction. To Eros he opposes what I take to be its antecedent: "anarchic Aphrodite," the polymorphously perverse libido that the earlier Freud of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1907) had treated as basic rather than aberrant (had treated, in fact, as the source of all mature love) in a destabilization of normative sexuality that would have appealed to Auden. These final lines, then, do more than make a useful distinction in terminology. They extract from Freud's work a kind of psychology that can accommodate both human civilization—significantly, one based on Eros rather than on aggression, a product of the death drive—and the anarchic complexity of individual sexuality.

  1. This theory of two primary instincts, love and death, which both struggle with and reinforce one another, is the most important of Freud’s theories for Auden. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had concluded that because it seeks quiescence, the dissipation of libidinal tension, the pleasure principle that dominates in sexual life ultimately serves the death drive. The similarity and proximity of love and death, one of the great topoi of Western literature, surfaces throughout Auden’s work. Even in the early ballad “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the clocks warn an infatuated lover, “Time watches from the shadow / And coughs when you would kiss” (27-28). Similar in this regard is Auden’s “Lullaby” (1937) which begins jarringly “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm…” Faithlessness serves metonymically here to remind us of the mortality that has resulted from original sin.
  2. All references to "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" are to W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage, 1991), pp. 273-276.
  3. For a brief discussion of meter in this poem in relation to Moore, see John Hollander, The Work of Poetry (Columbia UP, 1997), p. 255.
  4. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), p. 4, l. 62.
  5. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 282.
  6. In The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, vol 1.: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton UP, 1988), p. 103.
  7. Quoted in John Fuller, W.H. Auden, A Commentary (Princeton UP, 1998), p. 294.
  8. See stanza 2 of the Yeats elegy in the Collected Poems.
  9. Fuller, p. 292.
  10. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Norton, 1960), p. 58. Freud’s attitude to these restrictions is complex. He writes at one point that communities are “perfectly justified” in circumscribing the sexual life of children, since it is this external repression that (in the latency period) helps the process of sublimation to which he attributes human civilization. At the same time, however, he warns against “going to the length of actually disavowing” sexuality, and he makes clear, in a striking passage that would have appealed to Auden, the social dangers of overly strict sexual mores: “The requirement …. That there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice.” (60)


2013年8月27日 星期二

Vladimir Nabokov in Cambridge History of American Literature Vol. 7

如果你大約看得懂此影片 又稍微懂得Nabokov作品
BBC HD 2010 57:44 
Vladimir Nabokov: Life and Lolita - BBC Documentary 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnvvBL6set4

那麼剑桥美国文学史(第七卷):散文作品1940-1990年Vladimir Nabokov: Life ...介紹的Nabokov 就很有價值的.


剑桥美国文学史(第七卷):散文作品1940-1990年

2013年8月25日 星期日

Bat by D. H. Lawrence

Bat

By D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

 
At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding ...

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno ...

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
"The swallows are flying so late!"

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!
 一些史地的注解.
 http://hcplace.blogspot.tw/2008/12/florence.html

2013年8月24日 星期六

Christopher Isherwood 1904-86


Christopher Isherwood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was a British novelist. Contents. 1 Early life and work; 2 Life in the United States ...

Don Bachardy

Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American ...

Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 short novel by Christopher Isherwood ...

這篇在 Christopher Isherwood 作品中沒有特別地位. 不過因為有卞先生的翻譯讀過罷了.
他和W. H. Auden 合著的訪戰爭中的中國一書據說很好. 1970年代還有修改版......




紫羅蘭姑娘  Prater Violet   衣修午德  C. Isherwood

這翻譯本從1980的工人出版社
到2000的 卞之琳譯文集上冊

現在很容易找到
衣修午德親口告訴卞之琳 書中角色導演之本尊為 Berthold Viertel
衣修午德 推薦的 可能是 Back Wikipedia article "Henry Green"
主要作者 Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-
書名/作者 Prater violet : a novel / by Christopher Isherwood
出版項 Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2001
版本項 1st University of Minnesota Press ed

Originally published: New York : Random House, c1945

國科會補助人文及社會科學研究圖書計畫 (2768332)

紫羅蘭姑娘


《紫羅蘭姑娘》是英國著名作家克里斯托弗 衣修午德的作品,是西歐現代主義文學的名家佳作,卞之琳先生將之翻譯,為中國讀者提供認識西歐文學的資料。《紫 羅蘭姑娘》這一個書名多少是一種假裝,正如紫羅蘭成了賣花女的名字。名為一事,故事為另一事。一個表演風流的維也納的小歌劇,由一位奧國藝術家導演,在英 國拍影片,就在奧國納粹發難登台的那些最風流的日子。片子行將采用原戲的名稱——《紫羅蘭姑娘》。

卞之琳 (1910-2000.12.4)中國著名詩人、翻譯家、文學研究家。曾用筆名季陵,祖籍江蘇溧水,1910年生于江蘇海門。1933年畢業于北平 北京大學英文系,曾任北京大學西語系教授(1949-1952)。卞之琳一生翻譯了大量世界名著,譯著包括《莎士比亞悲劇四種》、《窄門》、《浪子回家 集》、《紫羅蘭姑娘》、《英國詩選》等。此外,他還創作了《雕蟲紀歷1933—1958》、《十年詩草1930-1939》等詩作,以及《莎士比亞悲劇論 痕》、《布萊希特戲劇印象記》等一批重要著作。2000年1月,卞之琳獲得了首屆“中國詩人獎──終生成就獎”。


克里斯托弗‧衣修午德的小說《紫羅蘭姑娘》英文原本初版在 1945年10月,我的中譯本1947年2月在上海文化生活出版社出版(稍有節略的譯文1946 年先在上海《文藝復興》雜志上發表過),距今已經三十五六年了。從前讀過這個譯本的朋友們願意重見到它,出版社借到一本讀了,也願意重印它。現在就據原文 校對修訂了一遍,交出付排。

譯本原有我寫的序文。作者對它還滿意o(他接到我寄給他看的序文英文稿後,回信說︰“如果譯文跟你的序文一樣好,那麼我就不能再求更好了”。)但是三十多年過去了,譯本新版問世,我自然有責任在書前再另外說幾句話。

20 世紀30年代到40年代變化很大,50年代以來又有了新的變化。就衣修午德說,也是如此。《紫羅蘭姑娘》出版將近10年後,才又陸續出版了小說《黃昏 的世界》(1954)、《單人》(1964)、《河畔的相會》(1967)等和三本自傳性著作。小說內容多寫同性愛和印度吠檀多宗教哲學。他自己在回憶錄 式的著作里把30年代反法西斯的進步政治動機都加以否定。但是衣修午德,在30年代和奧頓以及另外一批左傾過的同代作家一樣,因為客觀真實、歷史事實在那 里,要否定自己過去作品的意義和作用,還是不能由自己後來的主觀願望否定得了。就以《紫羅蘭姑娘》而論,盡管經過了作者多少年沉默,經過了第二次世界大 戰,它的基本精神還是和他在30年代的一致。

《紫羅蘭姑娘》基本上還是像30年代的衣修午德小說。當然,其中就有 些30年代中期以前西方知識分子還少有的幻滅感與憂郁感,他們還沒有清醒感受到的兩難 處境。尤其是其中染上了一層30年代結束以前西方很少流行的印度哲學的色彩。而這點所引起的我寫原序當時的一些反應,也就使我在序文里寫了一些“玄”話或 者廢話。但是序文的主要內容似乎還沒有什麼大錯,雖然我自己也早已不同于三十多年前的自己了。

如今我把小說正文校 讀一遍(我自己的著譯出書後向來再懶得通讀一遍,現在我還是第一次據原文校讀一全本譯書),像過去讀過而近年來又找去重讀的一位小說藝 術家朋友一樣,還是很能欣賞其中表現的小說創作藝術。中心人物柏格曼形象鮮明、生動;他是當時中、小資產階級出身的有才華的藝術家的典型而具有個性;通過 他表現了當時具有進步傾向而未能擺脫既定身份的知識分子的典型尷尬境地。不僅中心人物,不僅也作為小說人物兼故事講述者的“衣修午德”,有點自我嘲弄的, 十分逼真,周圍人物,也都躍然紙上。衣修午德能用三筆兩筆、三言兩語,描寫出一個人物。三四十年代間曾有人說過,他在人物塑造方面是英國狄更斯以後的第一 人,寄予極大的期望(不容諱言,後來這種期望是落空了)。例如季米特洛夫的形象,在法庭上,只有幾句話,一個手勢,就活生生地“站起來”了。其他許多配角 也都被寫得聞其聲如見其人。衣修午德在全書中著墨不多就能把西方攝影場生活寫得十分酣暢,淋灕盡致,同時又從容不迫,還可以借人物發議論,抒情。文筆明 淨,一點也不拖泥帶水。

Prater Violet is Christopher Isherwood's fictional first person account of film-making. The Prater is a large park and amusement park in Vienna, a city important to characters in the novel for several reasons. Though Isherwood broke onto the literary scene as a novelist, he eventually worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. In this novel, Isherwood comments on life, art, commercialization of art, and Nazism.

Structure

Written in one continuous, expressive breath Prater Violet follows Isherwood's involvement in the creation of an eponymous film. Much of the novel records the remarks of film industry workers and Isherwood's conversations with a brilliant Austrian film director, Friedrich Bergmann. Only at the conclusion of the novel does Isherwood significantly separate his voice from dialogue to provide a deeper philosophic commentary on his frustration with life. He asks, "What makes you go on living? Why don't you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?" (154).

Plot introduction

Set in pre-World War II era England, both Nazism and filmmaking are on the rise. Characters in Prater Violet are used to personify various aspects of the enigmatic creative process. Isherwood also uses his characters to express the varying views about Hitler, mainly the alarming measure of indifference prevalent during the 1930s.

Characters in Prater Violet

The main character, Isherwood himself, is a moderately successful author of fiction. He is a detailed observer of the filmmaking process and the gathering war. Eventually Isherwood confronts his rather passive role in life with frustration.
He finds his only consolation to be dramatic personalities in his life such as Friedrich Bergmann. Bergmann is a loquacious and hand-talking muse for Isherwood. Just as Isherwood translates Bergmann's poor English into film script, Isherwood comes to understand the true horror of Nazism through Bergmann's fear for family in Austria.
As Hitler lays the foundation for war, movie executives such as Mr. Chatsworth stress over the timely production of the film Prater Violet. Ashmeade (whom we are led to believe is Isherwood's first meaningless lover) and Dorothy (the secretary) both fade into a cast of minor characters who fail to comprehend the truth of life.
The only exception to this monochrome cast is Lawrence Dwight, the chief film editor of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. Dwight sees life as a quest for efficiency through establishing patterns. He represents Nazi ideology in life and art.

Major themes

Efficiency. Art. the Creative Process. Film-as-art. Film-as-entertainment. Nazism. Love.

Based on Isherwood's real-life film work

Prater Violet is based on Isherwood's experience as a screenwriter for the British Gaumont film Little Friend (1934), directed by Berthold Viertel and starring Nova Pilbeam. (Source: Author's diaries and memoirs)

紐約時報戲劇Prater Violet評論


THEATER REVIEW; An Isherwood Story, In His Words and Spirit


By PETER MARKS
Published: December 5, 1998, Saturday
Few novels of late have made the transition to the stage as gracefully as ''Prater Violet,'' Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical account of his exploits in the British film industry of the 1930's. In an endearing production at the Salon Theater, the director Will Pomerantz, who also adapted the book, stays true to Isherwood's spirit. The result is an evening of theater with bags of English charm.
The play, performed by six hard-working cast members assuming a total of 42 roles, could hardly be more faithful to the nimble work by Isherwood, who also wrote ''Berlin Stories,'' on which ''Cabaret'' is based. The dialogue and narration in ''Prater Violet'' are lifted virtually verbatim from the 127-page novella, a chronicle of the making of a silly movie musical in 1933 by a high-principled Austrian Jew named Friedrich Bergmann, who takes on Isherwood as a neophyte screenwriter.
The author's refined command of language and clinical powers of observation have eased Mr. Pomerantz's burden. The characters, down to the smallest bit parts, are zesty creations that fill out the genially ironic plot, one that initially seems as frivolous as the sappy talkie, also called ''Prater Violet,'' that they are filming on a back lot in London. (A prater is a town square where public festivals occur.)
But as the relationship deepens between Bergmann (Dylan Green), worried about the growing power of the Nazis, and Isherwood (Kameron Steele), worried about the well-being of his new-found friend, so does the play. What begins as rather rarefied English drollery ends as a contemplation on the meaning of companionship.
Mr. Pomerantz has a way with the period. Aided by Troy Hourie's sets and Lap-Chi Chu's lighting (and a cast that also plays stage crew), the director puts a minimum of resources to maximum advantage; the film studio, for instance, is brought to life by a few rolling flats, movie cameras and the hustle of the actors playing gaffers, editors and film stars.
The narrator for the unspectacular events of this gentle piece -- the tensest moment comes when a newspaper headline announces turmoil in far-off Vienna, where Bergmann's wife and daughter remain -- is Mr. Steele, a young actor whose unflappable gentility makes him an appealing guide. As Bergmann, Mr. Green is poignantly anxious and avuncular; there's a magnetism that goes with the bluster.
The other actors -- Frank Dowd, Laura Kachergus, John McAdams and Ashok Sinha -- do nicely by many of the myriad supporting roles. Mr. McAdams is particularly good as a nihilistic film cutter on the movie set, and it's fun to watch Ms. Kachergus quick-change her way through a dozen roles. Still, Mr. Pomerantz could have used another actor or two, because his players are simply unsuited to some of the parts. Ms. Kachergus, for example, is much too young for Isherwood's mother, and Mr. Dowd, though swell as a studio executive, is unconvincing as an old vet of a movie actor.
The play, too, drags in spots, especially in an overlong first act, but this is a minor shortcoming. ''Prater Violet,'' which runs through tomorrow, affords another enjoyable view from Isherwood's perspective.

PRATER VIOLET
Adapted and directed by Will Pomerantz; based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood; sets by Troy Hourie; lighting by Lap-Chi Chu; costumes by Mattie Ullrich; sound by Miles Green and Mr. Pomerantz. Presented by the Culture Project, in association with Difference Engine. At the Salon, 432 East 91st Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Kameron Steele (Christopher Isherwood), Dylan Green (Friedrich Bergmann), Frank Dowd, Laura Kachergus, John McAdams and Ashok Sinha (ensemble).

Lord David Cecil 及其作品/The Yellow Book



 Lord David Cecil 1902-1986  身世不錯婚姻幸福 著作頗豐很有人緣的牛津大學老師......

David Cecil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cecil
David Cecil may refer to: David Cecil (courtier) (c.1460–?1540), MP for Stamford 1504–1523; David Cecil, 3rd Earl of Exeter (c.1600-1643), 17th Century British ...


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BBC - Desert Island Discs - Castaway : Lord David Cecil

BBC 保留一段1969年2月的訪談.  不瞞你說. 我只聽懂一半---還看過一點他的資料呢......
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/castaway/8ffa00ac#p009y1br

Lord David Cecil

Lord David Cecil
There is only a short clip of this programme. Why?
Broadcast

First broadcast: 星期一 03 2月 1969

Man of letters, Biographer, Teacher
Roy Plomley's castaway is writer and critic Lord David Cecil.


 ******

The Yellow Book

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The Yellow Book, with a cover illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
The Yellow Book, published in London from 1894 to 1897 by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland,[1] was a quarterly literary periodical (priced at 5s.) that lent its name to the "Yellow Nineties".
It was a leading journal of the British 1890s; to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence, the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings. Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor,[2] and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with illicit French fiction of the period. He obtained works by such artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer. The literary content was no less distinguished; authors who contributed were: Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, "Baron Corvo", Ernest Dowson, George Gissing, Sir Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Mew, Arthur Symons, H. G. Wells, William Butler Yeats.
Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salomé and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors. Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love. This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley. Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their lascivious content. It is not clear, however, whether Dorian Gray is the direct source for the review's title. Soon after Wilde was arrested in April 1895 Beardsley was dismissed as the periodical's art editor, his post taken over by the publisher, John Lane, assisted by another artist, Patten Wilson. Although critics have contended that the quality of its contents declined after Beardsley left and that The Yellow Book became a vehicle for promoting the work of Lane's authors, a remarkably high standard in both art and literature was maintained until the periodical ceased publication in the spring of 1897. A notable feature was the inclusion of work by women writers and illustrators,[3] among them Ella D'Arcy and Ethel Colburn Mayne (both also served as Harland's subeditors), George Egerton, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Ada Leverson, Netta and Nellie Syrett, and Ethel Reed.
Perhaps indicative of The Yellow Book's past significance in literary circles of its day is a reference to it in a fictional piece thirty-three years after it ceased publication. American author Willa Cather noted its presence in the personal library of one of her characters in the short story, "Double Birthday", noting that it had lost its "power to seduce and stimulate".
The Yellow Book differed from other periodicals in that it was issued clothbound, made a strict distinction between the literary and art contents (only in one or two instances were these connected), did not include serial fiction, and contained no advertisements except publishers' lists.

2013年8月17日 星期六

Much Ado About Who: Is It Really Shakespeare?

光讀這篇就可知道紐約時報的中文網站了不起.....

Much Ado About Who: Is It Really Shakespeare?

For nearly two centuries, scholars have debated whether some 325 lines in the 1602 quarto edition of Thomas Kyd’s play “The Spanish Tragedy” were, in fact, written by Shakespeare.
Last year, the British scholar Brian Vickers used computer analysis to argue that the so-called Additional Passages were by Shakespeare, a claim hailed by some as the latest triumph of high-tech Elizabethan text mining.
But now, a professor at the University of Texas says he has found something closer to definitive proof using a more old-fashioned method: analyzing Shakespeare’s messy handwriting.
In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.
“What we’ve got here isn’t bad writing, but bad handwriting,” Mr. Bruster said in a telephone interview.
Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor. In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author.
This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick.
“We don’t have any absolute proof, but this is as close as you can get,” said Eric Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an editor, with Jonathan Bate, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the complete Shakespeare.
“I think we can now say with some authority that, yes, this is Shakespeare,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “It has his fingerprints all over it.”
Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. Bate are including “The Spanish Tragedy” in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new edition of Shakespeare’s collaboratively authored plays, to be published in November.
If embraced by the broader world of Shakespeareans, the Additional Passages would become the first largely undisputed new addition to the canon since Shakespeare’s contributions to “Edward III” — another play that some have attributed to Kyd — began appearing in scholarly editions in the mid-1990s.
Acceptance is by no means assured. Tiffany Stern, a professor of early modern drama at Oxford University, praised the empirical rigor of Mr. Bruster’s paper, but said that some new attributions were driven less by solid evidence than by publishers’ desire to offer “more Shakespeare” than their rivals.
“The arguments for ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ are better than for most” putative Shakespeare collaborations, Ms. Stern said. “But I think we’re going a bit Shakespeare-attribution crazy and shoving a lot of stuff in that maybe shouldn’t be there.”
Elizabethan theater was intensely collaborative, with playwrights often punching up old plays or working with other dramatists to cobble together new ones, in the manner of Hollywood script doctors. The 1602 Additional Passages to “The Spanish Tragedy,” inserted more than a decade after Kyd wrote the original, updated the bloody revenge play with a bit of psychological realism, which had become fashionable. (It is not known whether Kyd, who died in 1594, ever met Shakespeare.)
The idea that Shakespeare may have written the Additional Passages — which include a “Hamlet”-like scene of a grief-maddened father discoursing on the death of his son — was first broached in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But that claim remained a distinctly minority position well into the 20th century, even as scholars began using sophisticated computer software to detect subtle linguistic patterns that seemed to link the passages to Shakespeare’s other work.
Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.
Mr. Bruster turned to perhaps the most literal source of authority: Shakespeare’s own pen.
In his paper, Mr. Bruster identifies 24 broad spelling patterns — including shortened past tenses (like “blest” for “blessed”) and single medial consonants (like “sorow” instead of “sorrow”) — that occur both in the Additional Passages, for which no known manuscript survives, and the Shakespeare handwriting sample in the British Library. He also cites nine textual “corruptions” (like “creuie” instead of “creuic,” modernized as “crevice”) that he believes can be explained as misreadings of Shakespeare’s handwriting.
These irregularities, considered individually, are not necessarily unique to Shakespeare. But taken together, Mr. Bruster argues, they strongly suggest that the Additional Passages were set in type from pages written, in the most literal sense, by Shakespeare.
“What I’m getting at is the DNA of Shakespeare’s words themselves, the way he formed those words with his pen on the page,” he said.
A printer’s misreading, Mr. Bruster argues, may also explain a particularly clumsy and nongrammatical stretch in the Additional Passages.
Mr. Bruster once counted himself among the many scholars who have thought the passage in the quarto was simply too poorly written to be Shakespeare. “But once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line,” Mr. Bruster said. “It’s actually a gorgeous passage.”
Finding some of Shakespeare’s lines embedded in another writer’s plays may not carry the frisson of announcing the discovery of a previously unknown poem entirely by Shakespeare. But Mr. Bruster’s paper reflects current scholarly interest in Shakespeare as a playwright who frequently collaborated with others — including, Mr. Vickers has controversially argued, on plays we think of as coming solely from his own pen.
“Shakespeare wasn’t a solitary genius, flying above everyone else,” Mr. Vickers said. “He was a working man of the theater. If his company needed a new play, he’d get together with someone else and get it done.”

基德劇作《西班牙悲劇》部分段落或為莎翁手筆

德克薩斯大學的教授道格拉斯·布拉斯特稱,他發現了不同的拼寫模式,能強有力地證明道托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》中有一部分出自莎士比亞之手。
Marsha Miller
德克薩斯大學的教授道格拉斯·布拉斯特稱,他發現了不同的拼寫模式,能強有力地證明道托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》中有一部分出自莎士比亞之手。Douglas Bruster, a University of Texas professor, has identified various spelling patterns that he says strongly suggest that part of Thomas Kyd’s “ Spanish Tragedy” was written by Shakespeare.
將近兩個世紀以來,學界一直在爭論,托馬斯·基德(Thomas Kyd)的劇作《西班牙悲劇》(The Spanish Tragedy)1602年的四開本版本里,是否有325行出自莎士比亞(Shakespeare)之手。
去年,英國學者布萊恩·維克斯(Brian Vickers)依據計算機分析提出觀點認為,這些所謂的「增補段落」的確是莎翁作品。這一論點得到了一些人的讚許,被譽為利用高科技考據英格蘭伊麗莎白一世時期文本的一大最新突破。
  • 檢視大圖 這份莎士比亞手稿中的一些線索,帶來了一項新發現,即他寫了托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》中的一部分。
    The British Library Board
    這份莎士比亞手稿中的一些線索,帶來了一項新發現,即他寫了托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》中的一部分。
  • 檢視大圖 托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》。
    Culture Club/Getty Images
    托馬斯·基德的劇作《西班牙悲劇》。

不過目前,德克薩斯大學(University of Texas)的一名教授稱,他作出的發現更接近確鑿證據,靠的卻是更為老派的辦法:分析莎士比亞潦草的筆跡。
在期刊《札記與問答》(Notes and Queries)9月號即將發表的一篇長僅四頁、言簡意賅的論文里,道格拉斯·布拉斯特(Douglas Bruster)提出,「增補段落」中的多處異常特徵——包括令一些質疑者感到遠遜於莎翁水準的彆扭台詞——或許可以解釋為印刷作坊對莎士比亞手跡的誤 讀。
「我們發現,這些地方並非作者寫作水平低下,而是糟糕的書法所致,」布拉斯特在電話採訪中說道。
判斷作品出自莎翁手筆,這是一項艱苦的探索。1996年, 計算機文本分析領域的先行者唐納德·福士特(Donald Foster)引來了各家報紙頭條的關注,因為他宣稱,莎士比亞創作了伊麗莎白時代一首生僻的詩歌《葬禮輓歌》(A Funeral Elegy),結果卻是在六年後悄無聲息地撤回了他的論點,因為維克斯等人的分析已將該作品和別的作者聯繫了起來。
這回,一些享有盛譽的學術版本編輯強烈地認為,布拉斯特慎重而有理有據的推論,加上維克斯等人之前的研究工作,能將這些段落的作者身份確定為莎翁本人。
「我們並無絕對意義上的證明,但現有這些已是最接近確證的 了,」內華達大學雷諾分校(University of Nevada, Reno)的教授埃里克·拉斯穆森說。他和喬納森·貝特(Jonathan Bate)同為英國皇家莎士比亞劇團(Royal Shakespeare Company)版莎翁作品全集的編輯。
「我認為,現在可以比較權威地表示:是的,這的確是莎士比亞的手筆,」拉斯穆森說。「莎士比亞的特徵在其中隨處可見。」
拉斯穆森和貝特打算將《西班牙悲劇》引入皇家莎士比亞劇團新版的莎士比亞合著劇作集,該版本計劃於11月面世。
如果能得到更廣大的莎士比亞研究者群體的接受,這些「增補段落」將成為多年來對莎翁正典首次廣受認可的增訂。上一次的增訂還是在1990年代中期,當時莎士比亞為《愛德華三世》(Edward III)創作的部分開始在學術類版本中出現(該劇也被一些學者歸於基德名下)。
不過,該論點並沒有十足把握得到普遍認同。牛津大學 (Oxford University)早期現代戲劇教授蒂法妮·斯特恩(Tiffany Stern)對布拉斯特論文實事求是的嚴謹性表示稱讚,但她也表示,某些增補莎翁名下作品的舉動不完全是基於確鑿證據,而是受到了出版商的慾望的驅使,他 們希望比競爭對手推出「更多莎士比亞作品」。
「就論據而言,《西班牙悲劇》要強於大多數其他疑似莎翁合著作品,」斯特恩說。「不過我還是認為,我們將各種作品歸於莎士比亞,有些熱情過度了,或許我們把很多不該納入其中的東西都一股腦地堆在了莎翁名下。」
伊麗莎白一世時期的戲劇界有很強的協同創作風氣,當時的編 劇時常將老劇翻新,或是同他人一道寫作,湊出新點子來,就像今天的好萊塢劇本寫手一樣。1602年版《西班牙悲劇》的「增補段落」添加於基德創作原劇十餘 年之後,它給這部血腥的復仇劇增添了現實主義內心戲的成分,這在當時變得相當流行。(目前尚不知1594年去世的基德是否曾與莎士比亞謀面。)
莎士比亞有可能創作了「增補段落」——其中包括一段《哈姆 雷特》(Hamlet)式的場景,由一位因悲致狂的父親講述其子之死——這種想法在1833年由塞繆爾·泰勒·柯勒律治(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)首先提到。但一直到20世紀,它還只是一種十分小眾的觀點,儘管學者那時已經開始用精密的計算機軟件來識別細微的語言模式,並似乎發 現這段文字和莎士比亞其他作品之間存在聯繫。
布拉斯特稱,他自己也曾一度質疑這個觀點,直到他讀了維克斯2012年的論文。這篇文章里展示了卷帙浩繁的歷史旁證,與之並列的是反作弊軟件發掘出的語言模式。
布拉斯特則專註於可能是最名副其實的權威證據:莎士比亞的親筆手跡。
在他的論文里,布拉斯特指出,有24種主要的拼寫特性—— 包括過去式縮短(如用「blest」而非「blessed」)和音節間的輔音字母單寫(如寫成「sorow」而非「sorrow」)——既出現於原稿已散 佚的「增補段落」,又出現於大英圖書館(British Library)收藏的莎士比亞手稿。他還點出九處文本「訛誤」(如寫成「creuie」而非正確的「creuic」,現代拼寫為「crevice」), 並認為它們可以解釋成誤讀莎士比亞原稿字跡的後果。
單看每一處異常文本,都不能說是莎翁特色。但布拉斯特論述道,綜合觀之,它們就很有力地啟示我們,所謂「增補段落」可能不僅僅是莎士比亞「寫作」的,更是直接由莎士比亞親手「書寫」的文稿付印而成。
「我正在一步步發現的,是莎士比亞語言文字中的DNA,是他本人把這些文字用筆寫在紙頁上的方式。」
布拉斯特還提出,印刷匠的誤讀或許也能解釋「增補段落」里一些特別笨拙而不合語法規則的段落。
很多學者認為四開版基德劇作中的增補段落水平太低、不可能出自莎士比亞,布拉斯特也曾是持此觀點的學者之一。「可你一旦意識到,恰恰是莎士比亞親筆手跡導致了誤讀,這些段落就不再是拙劣的句子了,」布拉斯特說。「它實乃神筆。」
找出莎士比亞鑲嵌在他人劇作中的台詞,比起宣稱發現一整首 前所未知的莎士比亞詩作,造成的轟動要小得多。不過布拉斯特的文章仍然反映出,當前學界對莎士比亞作為一名經常與人合作的劇作家這種身份抱有濃厚興趣。按 照維克斯曾經引發爭議的說法,這當中也包括我們一直以為是他獨自創作的劇本。
「莎士比亞不是一個高處不勝寒的孤僻天才,」維克斯說道。「他是劇場里的實幹家。如果他的劇團需要一出新戲,他會很樂意找人一道完成。」
翻譯:馬驄

2013年8月12日 星期一

The Last Word by Matthew Arnold



每當他在要求嚴格學術標準的戰役中敗下陣來的時候,他就喜歡引Mathew Arnold的詩句:

     當勝利者光臨
     失陷的愚人城堡時,
     就讓他們在城牆邊
     找到你的屍首吧!…….. (4-5)

我只有一點評論。上首詩是Matthew Arnold(1822-1888) 著名的詩The Last Word之末段部分:

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!

我有點納悶的是為什麼第一行不引用?
城堡---fort堡壘 非城堡




The Last WordMatthew Arnold
(1822-1888)

Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast.
Thou thyself must break at last.

Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired: best be still.
They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee?
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and passed,
Hotly charged - and sank at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!

2013年8月8日 星期四

Bid to Honor Austen Is Not Universally Acknowledged

倫敦日誌

英鎊上的簡·奧斯汀遭遇傲慢與偏見

英國央行行長馬克·卡尼手捧10英鎊面額紙幣的設計圖,上面的圖像是作家簡·奧斯汀。然而網絡上卻掀起了反對運動。
Pool photo by Bloomberg
英國央行行長馬克·卡尼手捧10英鎊面額紙幣的設計圖,上面的圖像是作家簡·奧斯汀。然而網絡上卻掀起了反對運動。
倫敦——確保女性頭像繼續出現在英國紙幣上本是一場優雅的運動,而且,上個月英國人宣布將在10英鎊紙幣上用深受人們喜愛的小說家簡·奧斯汀(Jane Austen)取代查爾斯·達爾文(Charles Darwin),本應可以為這場運動畫上句號。
然而網絡上卻掀起了一場反對行動,對幾位知名女性進行網上騷擾,包括發出強姦和死亡威脅,事態發展到如此惡劣的程度,以至於Twitter不得不在本周末採取措施,加強其關於舉報污言穢語的全球政策。

幾位穿着特定歷史時期服飾的女性主義者發起了一場關於權力、性侵以及社交媒體時代言論自由邊界的全國性辯論。這期間,我們看到了不少的傲慢與偏見。
數月前,當意識到英國紙幣上可能很快就不再有女性形象後——當然,除了伊麗莎白二世女皇(Queen Elizabeth II)之外,「女性空間」(The Women』s Room)網站聯合創始人、博主卡羅琳·克利亞多-佩雷茲(Caroline Criado-Perez)發起了這場運動。這事看上去很緊急:4月,英國央行英格蘭銀行(Bank of England)宣布,英國紙幣上五位歷史人物中的唯一女性、社會改革家伊麗莎白·弗萊(Elizabeth Fry)的頭像將被溫斯頓·丘吉爾(Winston Churchill)所取代,一個毫無疑問的男性。
克利亞多-佩雷茲說,英國歷史上有這麼多著名女性,當然能至少再找到一位,將其頭像印到英國紙幣上。
擔心英國央行沒有靈感的克利亞多-佩雷茲還帶領一群倡導 者,裝扮成女性參政權倡導者埃米琳·潘克赫斯特(Emmeline Pankhurst)、小說家喬治·艾略特(George Eliot,原名瑪麗·安·伊萬斯[Mary Ann Evans])、以及在公元60年迎戰羅馬入侵者的凱爾特戰士布狄卡(Boadicea)。29歲的克利亞多-佩雷茲將支持其運動的超過3.5萬個簽名親 手送到位於倫敦的英國央行門口,並籌集到近2萬美元(約合12萬元人民幣)的捐款。如果「銀行的男性」(該銀行制定利率的九人委員會中沒有一名女性)無視 2010年《平等法》(Equality Act)中要求公共機構在做所有決定時都要謹記性別平等這一目標的規定,就將用這些捐款發起法律行動。
當時即將離任的英國央行行長默文·A·金(Mervyn A. King)總愛指出,有一名女性(女王)的頭像出現在了每一種紙幣和硬幣背面,但他似乎無暇顧及這場辯論。
然而,7月份,更年輕的加拿大人馬克·J·卡尼(Mark J. Carney)接替了默文·金的職位,卡尼是英國央行319年歷史上首位外籍行長。卡尼抓住了這個樹立形象的機會。
7月24日,卡尼說,銀行一直以來都想將一位女性歷史人物的頭像印到英鎊紙幣上,而且他宣布,奧斯汀的頭像將登上新版10英鎊紙幣。他還承諾將對紙幣選擇歷史人物頭像的全過程進行審核。
「對女性來說,這是偉大的一天,」克利亞多-佩雷茲回應道。
然而,就在同一天,在Twitter上,對克利亞多-佩雷茲的點滴謾罵,以每分鐘增加一條的速度演變成了威脅的洪流,其中包括粗魯的強姦和死亡威脅。從公眾人物到議會議員的其他幾名女性,也都成了Twitter用戶襲擊的目標。有三名女記者接到炸彈威脅。
「我要用槍托一次次地打你,直到你失去知覺。」一名Twitter用戶警告克利亞多-佩雷茲說,他還威脅說,「之後再燒死你。」
一名Twitter用戶對工黨(Labour Party)議員斯黛拉·克里希(Stella Creasy)說,「我要在明晚9點強姦你。我們是不是在你家附近見面?」
迄今為止,有兩名年齡分別為21和25歲的男子已因涉嫌騷擾而被捕。蘇格蘭場(Scotland Yard)的電子犯罪處正在調查Twitter上的攻擊帖,其中大部分攻擊帖是匿名網絡用戶發出的,也就是所謂的網絡惡棍(troll)。
在接到一封至少彙集了12.4萬個簽名的在線請願信之後, 受到壓力的Twitter於周六在其網站上宣布,它正在引入一個新的一次點擊按鈕,來報告每條帖子里的謾罵行為。這項新功能將幫助用戶,將他們引導至一個 在線論壇。公司還承諾,要分出更多人手來識別辱罵他人的帖子,還要更新Twitter的規定,明確聲明Twitter不會容忍粗言穢語的行為。
Twitter英國分部業務負責人托尼·王(Tony Wang)以個人名義發了一條道歉推文,「向在Twitter上遭受辱罵的女性致歉。」
他說,謾罵「在真實世界裡是不可接受的,在Twitter上也是不可接受的。我們能夠且將會採取更多措施來保護用戶,使他們免受辱罵」。
這場辯論突顯了一個基本的矛盾:科技讓女性倡導人士更容易受到男性至上主義者的辱罵,不過,它同時也強化了女性的權力。(克利亞多-佩雷茲在Change.org網站收集到了她想要的簽名,她在Twitter擁有超過2.46萬名關注)。
英國《衛報》(The Guardian)專欄作家塔尼婭·戈爾德(Tanya Gold)警告說,她反對邀請社交網絡網站來「為我們的辯論維持秩序」,她表示,「在Twitter上厭惡女性的人,應該為人所不齒,而不是被當成罪犯。」
卡尼和他在英格蘭銀行的同事也許鬆了一口氣,原因是他們發現,性別平等運動轉移了公眾注意力,讓他們暫時不再死盯着男性依然占絕對優勢的金融圈子。
不過,沒有幾個人會料到,奧斯汀可能會在無意之中成為女性主義者的一個象徵,這位作家最出名的作品可能要屬那些對19世紀愛情的沉思。
亞利桑那州立大學(Arizona State University)文學教授德沃尼·盧瑟(Devoney Looser)說,「她有廣受歡迎的魅力和多元化的政治吸引力。和埃米琳·潘克赫斯特等人不同,你更加難以從政治上定位奧斯汀。保守派和進步派都樂於接納她。」
翻譯:谷菁璐、張薇


London Journal

Bid to Honor Austen Is Not Universally Acknowledged

Instead, a countercampaign of online harassment, including threats of rape and death, against several high-profile women here turned so nasty that Twitter took steps this weekend to tighten its global policy on reporting abuse.

There has been plenty of pride, but also a good dose of prejudice, as a small band of feminists in period costumes has initiated a national debate about power, rape and the limits of free speech in the age of social media.

Caroline Criado-Perez, a blogger and co-founder of the Web site The Women’s Room, began her campaign months ago when she realized that soon there might be no women — except Queen Elizabeth II, of course — left on British bank notes. The issue seemed urgent: in April, the Bank of England had announced that the only woman currently featured among five historical figures, the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, would be replaced by Winston Churchill, indisputably male.

Surely, Ms. Criado-Perez argued, there were enough women of note in British history to find at least one more?

In case the bank lacked inspiration, she led a group of campaigners dressed up as the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, the novelist George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) and the Celtic warrior queen Boadicea, who fought Roman invaders in A.D. 60. Ms. Criado-Perez, 29, hand-delivered more than 35,000 signatures supporting her cause to the bank’s doorstep in London and collected nearly $20,000 in donations to mount a legal challenge should the “men of the bank” (there are no women on the nine-member committee that sets interest rates) ignore the 2010 Equality Act obliging public institutions to keep in mind the goal of gender equality in all matters that they decide.

The departing governor of the bank, Mervyn A. King, fond of pointing out that one woman, the queen, is on the back of every bill and coin, appeared to have little time for the debate.
But in July he was replaced by a younger man, a Canadian named Mark J. Carney, the first non-Briton to run the bank in its 319-year history. Mr. Carney seized the opportunity to make a gesture.

On July 24, Mr. Carney said that it had always been the bank’s intention to include another woman among the historical figures on the bank notes, and he announced that Austen would appear on future £10 notes. He also vowed to review the whole process of choosing historical figures for the notes.

A brilliant day for women,” Ms. Criado-Perez said in response.

But that same day on Twitter a trickle of abuse grew into a shower of crude rape and death threats against Ms. Criado-Perez at a rate of nearly one per minute. Several other women, from members of the public to members of Parliament, have also been the targets of Twitter attacks. Three female journalists received bomb threats.

“I’m going to pistol whip you over and over until you lose consciousness,” one Twitter user warned Ms. Criado-Perez, threatening to “then burn ur flesh.”

“I will rape you tomorrow at 9pm,” a Twitter user told Stella Creasy, a Labour Party legislator. “Shall we meet near your house?”

Two men, ages 21 and 25, have been arrested so far in connection with the harassment. Scotland Yard’s electronic-crime unit is investigating the Twitter attacks involving mostly anonymous Internet users, so-called trolls.

Twitter, under pressure after receiving an online petition with at least 124,000 signatures, announced Saturday on its site that it was introducing a new one-click button to report abuse on every post. The new feature will help users navigate their way to an online form. The company also pledged to dedicate more staff members to identifying abusive posts and is updating its rules, stating explicitly that it will not tolerate abuse.

Tony Wang, who runs Twitter’s British operation, posted a personal apology “to the women who have experienced abuse on Twitter.”

The abuse is “not acceptable in the real world, and it’s not acceptable on Twitter,” he said. He added, “There is more we can and will be doing to protect our users against abuse.”
The debate highlighted a basic tension: technology has made female campaigners more vulnerable to sexist abuse, but it has also empowered them. (Ms. Criado-Perez collected her signatures on Change.org and has more than 24,600 followers on Twitter.)
Tanya Gold, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian, warned against asking social networking sites to “police our debate,” suggesting that “misogynists on Twitter should be shamed rather than criminalized.”

Mr. Carney and his colleagues at the Bank of England may be relieved to find that the attention of equality campaigners has for now shifted the focus away from the still overwhelmingly male world of finance.

But few could have foreseen that Austen, a writer perhaps best known for her musings on 19th-century romance, might inadvertently become a feminist symbol.
“She has a wide popular and a varied political appeal,” said Devoney Looser, a professor of English at Arizona State University and an Austen specialist. “Unlike someone like Emmeline Pankhurst, it’s more difficult to slot Austen politically. She’s embraced by conservatives and progressives both.”