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最近看到一本文学理论名著(Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction )的中文译本:《论解构》,卡勒著,陆扬译,北京,中国社会科学出版社,1998年。
译者陆扬,不是很多网友都熟悉的云中君,他的简单情况如下:
陆扬,南开大学哲学系教授,博士研究生导师,美学学科学术带头人,系学位委员会委员
http://www.aesthetics.com.cn/s24c403.aspx
陆曾经完成了大量介绍解构思想以及德里达本人的著、译作品,上面所说的”学术带头人”体现了陆在这个领域的地位。
为了考察译者对原作的理解程度,我好奇地翻开该译本的正文第一页,未对照原文粗读,觉得还算文从字顺。拿来原文比照,发现有些问题,但也不算太坏,基本达到了大陆此类译著的平均水准。
做过此事的人都知道,翻译是体力活,稍微注意力分散,译文就会留下瑕疵;要求译者在全书中一字不错,就好比要求长跑选手在马拉松全程都保持时装模特的仪态。刚才说到”平均水准”,内行人说是一页一大错,我觉得这就可以谅解了:你我来做,未必更好,所谓哀矜而勿喜,这应该是中肯而现实的态度。
对照完毕本想做别的事情,但突然想到,对译文的错误,率尔取笑固然不该,但保持警惕,诫己诫人,总还是有意义的。最近在本坛受益很多,何不发起个活动,让译文的错误成为大家交流的机缘,庶几可谓变废为宝了。
下面是原文和译文。每位指出新错误的朋友,都能获得5财富/错误的酬谢。对错误的认定若有分歧,我想有劳gidiok和woi55两位专家来评判。
Roland Barthes opens Le Plaisir du texte by asking us to imagine a bizarre creature who has rid himself of the fear of self-contradiction, who mixes reputedly incompatible languages and patiently endures charges of illogicality. The rules of our institutions, Barthes writes, would make such a person an outcast. Who, after all, can live in contradiction without shame? “Yet this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of texts at the moment when he takes his pleasure” (p. 1013). Other critics and theorists have disagreed about the character of the reader, celebrating her freedom or his consistency, making her a hero rather than anti-hero, but they have concurred in casting the reader in a central role, both in theoretical discussion of literature and criticism and in interpretations of literary works. If, as Barthes claims, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,” many have been willing to pay that price (Image, Music, Text, p. 148).
Even critics who find the price exorbitant and resist what they consider dangerous trends in contemporary criticism seem inclined to join in the study of readers and reading. Witness some recent titles: Wayne Booth’s Critical Understanding, Walter Davis’s The Act of Interpretation. E. D. Hirsch’s The Aim of Interpretation, John Reichert’s Making Sense of Literature, Geoffrey Strickland’s Structuralism or Criticism: Some Thoughts on How We Read. These theorists for whom criticism is essentially an elucidation of an author’s purposes have felt compelled to provide their own accounts of reading so as to challenge those that make the reader an anti-hero, a fall guy, an unabashed hedonist, a prisoner of an identity theme or of an unconscious, or a willful inventor of meanings. Seeking to eliminate such nonsense with, as Reichert puts it, a criticism that “cuts through the plethora of competing critical languages to recover and redignify the simple procedures of reading, understanding, and assessing,” they have thrown themselves into the critical competition for the rights to “the reader” (Making Sense of Literature, p. x). If, as Barthes says, the reader can live in contradiction without shame, this is doubtless a good thing, for on this disputed figure converge the contradictory claims and descriptions of current critical debate. “Reader and audience,” writes Susan Suleiman, introducing a reader-centered anthology, “once relegated to the status of the unproblematic and the obvious, have acceded to a starring role” (The Reader in the Text, p. 3). Why should this be?
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982, 31-2
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