如何勾勒一幅月色?How to Sketch the Contours of Moonlight?

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　　如何勾勒一幅月色?How to Sketch the Contours of Moonlight?

（中国）鲁院MBA作家班闫文盛文 汉译英独立翻译学者 黄少政

今天，能够参加这个研讨会，我感到非常高兴，首先，请容许我表达一份谢意，不仅仅是对我就读的北京师范大学，对鲁迅文学院，更是对我们所从事的文学事业。或许可以这么说，在我迄今四十年的人生历程中，文学已经成了一个最基本的联结，由它所沟通的各种经验，就包含了生活，宇宙和时间的全方位的启示。

I feel privileged to be among such a brilliant cast of writers and poets home and abroad as found in this seminar today. First of all, please allow me to express my gratitude both to Beijing Normal University and Lu Xun Academy of Literature where I enroll for a 3-year instruction towards a master degree diploma of literature. Indeed the key word here, ie, literature forms the nexus of my 40 years life, skewering my banal expectations of life, my literary graduation from debut to being relatively accomplished with confidence, as I reap a host of revelations on my part of life, the world, time etc.

但我这里所谈的时空，却不只是一个东西方的概念，它可能比我们所起居和行走的区域要大得多。它是一个变动不居的文学的存在，在它的内部所铭刻的，一是我们曾有的，已经被历史化了的记忆层面的想象，这种想象构成了我们庞大的文学经验的一个坚实的基座，而另一种想象，却指向了根本性的未知。这种未知，就孕育在"世界"和"未来"之中。

But the time and space I mention here is much more than the humdrum version either of the Oriental nor of the Occidental origin, perhaps even larger than the sweep of human imagination. I am yearning for a literary landscape that speaks of cosmic permanence beyond the shifts of time ,immutably engraved with historicized human imagination in aggregate as solid foundation upon which our vast body of human literature is erected, as well as a Janus -portal pointing to the unknown. This unknown is the offspring of the "world" and "the future."

作为一个祖居于东方中国的写作者，生活在唯一性的二十一世纪，面对日益全球化的写作资源，我们所获得的是"双重的世界经验"。而我们所能够进入和"撑开"的，是"只有很少一点生活"和"我的心略大过了整个宇宙"之间的缝隙。

A writer of China in the Orient, I inhabit every second of this unique 21st century of ours, every detail of our cultured environment of increasingly global writing resources, leaving me a man of letters of "double world experiences". Yet, astute and omniscient we might seem, we are still poignantly aware of our impotency , the sense of futility of our effort gnawing ,at even comprehending a tiny portion of reason which is manifest in nature, in the world. The chasm is all the more glaringly unfathomable between the lamentable recognition of" no more than morsels of life " and the egoistic boast of my heart large than the cosmos".

或许可以这样来展开，即在思考的无限丰富性面前，我可能更推崇一种自然而然的抵达，是物与我共融的，彼此一体的一种消化的能力。想象力如果能够成为一种营养的话，它不管经过多少灵魂间的冲撞和历险，都需要与我们的内心达成一种与生俱来的呼应，也就是说，想象力不是长在我们皮肉的表层，它应该汇入我们最浓稠的血液之中。

Maybe it is no fantasy to posit a pre-historical one-ness, a primeval arrival, or the pristine unity of subject and object before the encroachment of the multiplicity of human thinking upon history and nature. And human thinking, to become a nutrient, despite of all the mental toils and thought experiments , must resonate with our souls ,our hearts. That is, our thinking must be invested with an urge, one presumes, born of those human experience , the things which really matter. Imagination must not float on the surface of our skins. It should sink into our thickest blood.

事实上，无论东方西方，但凡经典的作品中，都几乎秉承了这样的基因，即作品的书写看似具有风格的唯一性，但其指向却是对我们"思考经验的弥合"，或者说，经典作品都具有通透的，不局促的共同特质，都具有世界性。这不只是对"越是民族的，就越是世界的"一种现实反映，而是说，即便是区域性的事件本身，也暗藏着世界经验的洪流。

In truth, East or West, all classic writing displays an identical chromosomal transfiguration and genes alignment, ie, uniqueness in style, the quality of the writing and the level of honesty and profundity that distinguish itself from the stock, run-of-mill stuff, oriented towards "closing the rift between experience and thinking" within us, or to put it another way, masterpieces are all transparent, free of insularities, universally recognized as such, suggesting the truth value of a commonplace claim "the more ethnic a piece of a work is, the more cosmopolitan it is valued". In sum, even the regional events themselves contain the seeds of world experience.

中国向世界贡献了一些很大的诗人和作家，别的我不讲了，今天我只想提及两位，一是中国唐代的李白，一是中国当代的昌耀。李白和昌耀，在我的心目中双峰并峙，是贯通中国古今时空的两个大诗人。

China has contributed a great many poets and writers of veritable eminence to the world. Suffice it to bring up two names, Li Bai of the Tang Dynasty in medieval China and Chang Yao, a contemporary poet achieving increasing critical acclaim. Li Bai and Chang Yao, the twin stars in my mind, bridge classical Chinese and modernity.

李白游刃于天地万物，其诗歌风格一气流转，如激流瀑布倾泻而下，他的想象空间是世界性的；正如他的小诗《静夜思》，不经意却勾勒了一个寻常唐朝夜晚的月色，千年以来，因其手法高妙，至简至朴，俘获了东西方无数读者的想象。

Li Bai's imagination soars across the entire human experience. The reader is awed by the majesty of his style as fantastic images and memorable lines come escalading forth, rushing, tumbling and spluttering while But he could be also as tender as the love-sick lover wooing his liebchen in the moonlight clear in Schubert's serenade.

"Before my bed a pool of light / Is it hoarfrost upon the ground ? / Eyes raised I see the moon so bright / Head bent in homesickness I'm drowned". Indeed, this small quatrain of Li Bai has established once and for all a natural and inevitable association, in the minds of readers ,East and West, for millennia who derive lasting pleasure due to the bond which unites moonlight with the rush of throngs of sensation and nostalgia.

至于昌耀的诗歌，却是一种仓颉造字式的，深达命运核心的书写，他以心处寰宇的宏大无比的内在时空，抵达了个人史诗一般的一个抒情巅峰。

I deem, Chang Yao ,a contemporary of us, an addictive personality ,embodies epic and the murky and troublesome modernity, a sample of arcane writing of Herculean proportions, and readers will hear, in his difficult but intensely lyrical poems, the cruel fate laid bare, the obsessive chords of the past that more often lock up than not liberate our hearts. Both to me, are expanding in their own way, worthwhile for sure, the range of Chinese literature.

最后，我想表述的是：如今，无论是东方还是西方，我们已经站在了一个同样的基点上，文学的译介更新如此快捷，文学的技艺，各种手法的创造和传承已经很难出新。那么，在这样一个共同的文学星空下，如何绘制一幅幅新的文学地标，如何基于我们的文学想象去勾勒一幅月色，确实是一个非常值得深入思考的新的课题。

Now to my thesis as conclusion: we are met at a great nodal point, East or West. Classicism and modernism, even post-modernism, their force all but spent, arrive at this junction to be transformed and flow out again. Omniscient and omnipresent literary translation has made cross breeding of techniques and skills both a liability and asset for writers and poets. The world of literature, enriched by the common property of Homer, Li Bai, Tolstoy, and Faulkner ,battered by the assaults of a burgeoning homogenizing citizenry in an era of globalization, arrives at this juncture pulled by the same force that can both elevate us or downgrade us in an immensely daunting task：how to navigate in this vast uncharted waters, or to put it more specifically: is our literary imagination up to sketch the contours of a mundane moonlight with high fidelity and panache as Li Bai does?

鲁迅文学院 北师大国际写作中心5,14日研讨会上的发言

东方与西方：个体写作中的世界想象

West to East：Imaging The World by Individual Writers By Yan Wenshen