英译汉教程第四次作业

But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, or Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person—Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy—but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun around. The other side of the mind is now exposed—the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock[2] to Trollope,[3] from Scott to Meredith[4]—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great finesse of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great artist—gives you.

但是当你试图用语言重现那个场景时，你将会发现场景已支离破碎。有些场景只需一带而过，而有些场景则需加强。在这个过程中，你极可能失去当初对此景的感受。把目光从这些支离破碎的场景中转移到阅读一些伟大的小说家们的名著，比如笛福，简·奥斯丁，或者托马斯·哈代。现在你能够更好地去欣赏他们的高超之处。我们不仅仅面对着不同的伟大的小说家——笛福，简·奥斯丁，或者托马斯·哈代，而是我们生活在一个完全不同的世界里。在《鲁滨逊漂流记》中，我们在一条平坦的公路上跋涉前进，事情接踵而至，只要事实和其先后顺序便足够了。但是如果户外和冒险对笛福来说意味着一切的话，那么对简·奥斯丁来说却毫无意义。对简·奥斯丁来说最重要的便是客厅，人们在那里谈天说地，通过他们谈话的写照反映出他们的性格。如果当我们已经习惯了简·奥斯丁的客厅以及它所反映出的事物时，我们再把目光转向哈迪，我们将再一次的感到眩晕。思想的另一面显现出来——孤寂中所产生的黑暗面，而不是社会中的光明面。我们的关系不是与人的关系，而是与自然和命运的关系。然而这些作者所描述的世界虽然不同，但是他们各自都统一协调。他们都很谨慎地遵循各自所提出的观点应遵循的法则，不论是多么歪曲的观点，他们也都不会使我们感到困惑。因为有少数作家会经常这样做，在同一本书中介绍了两种不同的现实。因此，从一个伟大的小说家转移到另一个伟大的小说家——从简·奥斯丁到哈代，从皮科克到特罗洛普，从斯科特到梅雷迪斯，你就会由于观点的改变感到痛苦和泄气。被扔到这里，然后再被抛到那里。阅读小说是一门艰难而又复杂的艺术。如果你想要利用小说家——伟大的小说家——所