翻译的阐释运作——GeorgeSteiner.doc

Guided Reading导读George Steiner was born in 1929 in Paris, France. As a prolific author, essayist, literacy critic, and philosopher, he has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, particularly in light of modern history, and the impact of the Holocaust with his field primarily in comparative literature and his work as critic has tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly dealing with translation and the nature of language and literature.乔治斯坦纳1929年生于法国巴黎，著作等身，在文学创造、语言评论和哲学方面均有很深造诣。他主要的研究领域为比较文学，写了大量关于在现代历史背景下语言、文学和社会关系，以及是大屠杀的社会影响方面的文章。在文学批评上，他的视角延伸向了文化与哲学，在翻译，语言和文学的本质问题上的观点独树一帜。The word “hermeneutics” originates in old Greek and its Latin spelling is “hermeneuein”, meaning to understand. In the Middle Ages, it developed into hermeneutics of theology, as it applied to the interpretation of the decrees of God and records of antiquity. Through the reformation of the Renaissance, hermeneutics, applied for semantic explanations in rhetoric and poetics, evolved into a methodology contributed by the German Romantics, Schleiermacher (1786-1834) and Dilthey (1833-1911) who interpreted various texts of historical records in their work.Hermeneutics一词来源于古希腊，拉丁语的拼法为hermeneuein，意义为理解。在中世纪，这个词发展成了对神学的阐释，也就是对神旨以及历史记录的解读。经过文艺复兴时代的宗教改革，阐释学这个应用于修辞学和诗学上句法解释的词语，经过德国浪漫主义学派的哲学家施莱尔马赫91786-1834)和威廉.狄尔泰的努力，发展成为一种具有方法论意义的词汇，他们二人曾在他们的作品中对许多关于历史记录的文本进行了解读。Steiners After Babel is the key advance of the hermeneutics of translation. The hermeneutic approach defined by Steiner is “the investigation of what it means to understand a piece of oral or written speech, and the attempt to diagnose this process in terms of a general model of meaningIt gives the subject of translation a frankly philosophic aspect” (Steiner 1975:249). “Steiners initial focus is on the psychological and intellectual functioning of the mind of the translator, and he gives on to discuss the process of meaning and understanding underlying the translation process”( Munday 2001:163 ).His description of the hermeneutics of translation, “the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning,” is “based on a conception of translation not as a science but as an exact art”(ibid.). The core of his description is the hermeneutic motion, representing the four moves of translation. 斯坦纳的巴别塔之后是翻译阐释学的一个重要里程碑著作。他定义的阐释方法：研究在理解一篇口语讲话或书面文本时的意义问题，用一种意义的普通模式来解释这个过程从而翻译这门课题具有了哲学研究视角。”最初，斯坦纳的首先思考了译者思维中的心理和心智功能，进而研究了在翻译过程中意义和理解的形成过程。（Munday,2001:163）他对翻译的阐释学描述为：“启发行为以及意义的适当转换”，是“以翻译的概念不是作为一种科学，而是一种严谨的艺术为前提的”。他的文章的中心是阐释的运作，也就是翻译的四重性行为。The nature of translation is explicated in light of hermeneutics, as Steiner approaches the act of translation in the “four-beat model of the hermeneutics motion”“a narrative of process”(1) initiative trust (2) aggression (or penetration) (3) incorporation (4) reciprocity or restitution (Steiner 1975: xvi). Trust is the translators belief that there are meaningful ideas in the source text to be understood. “All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust” (ibid:312). Aggression is reflected in the translators comprehension and expression of the source ideas, as subjectivity is unavoidable. Steiner points out, “It is Heideggers contribution to have shown that understanding, recognition, interpretation are a compacted, unavoidable mode of attack” (ibid: 313) “The translation invades, extracts, and brings home” (ibid: 314). 通过阐释学，斯坦纳陈述了翻译的本质。他用这种阐释运作的四重奏模式说明了翻译行为“过程叙述”（1）最初的信任（2）入侵（渗入）（3）融合（4）互补或补偿。信任就是译者相信在原文本中，一定有能够可以理解的意义。“所有的理解，以及作为翻译的对理解的外在描述，都起始于信任行为”。入侵反映在译者的理解和对原文思想的表达上，因为主观性是不可避免的。斯坦纳指出：海德格尔在这方面的贡献就是让我们认识到理解、认知和解释是一种简约、不可避免的攻击行为。”“在翻译中存在着侵入、提取和回归的过程”。The third move of the hermeneutic motion is the impact of meaning and form of the source. “But whatever the degree of “naturalization”, the act of importation can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure “(ibid.:315). As Steiner analyzes, the target language and text are being transformed in the incorporative movement, which leads to enactment of reciprocity in order to restore balance to the morals of translation to compensate the loss of meaning and the violent transport (ibid.:316).阐释运作的第三个行为是原文意义和形式的影响。“自然化能达到何种程度，也就是吸收引入的行为对整个本土体系结构具有干扰和重置的可能性。”斯坦纳分析道，在融合的过程中，目的语和文本都有所变形，从而为了平衡这种关系，保持翻译的道德，弥补意义的流失和暴力的迁移，就必须要进行互补行动。In regard to the explication on the hermeneutic motion in translation, the following points are derived: understanding is the search for meaningful ideas, which is subjective and destructive. Thus understanding is at the risk of comprehensive appropriation, and therefore results in subsequent compensation.After Babel is a theoretical monograph on translation while presenting the authors reflections on language and culture. The authors profound learning on language, poetics, literary criticism, and cultural history all serve for his interpretation of translational behavior. He points that language exists permanently in a dynamic change as interpretation and translation continue for human communication. He presents “penetrative insight into the act of translation, into the phenomeno-logical and philosophic aspect of this act” (Steiner 1975: Preface to the second edition ).在解释翻译的阐释性运作过程中衍生了如下的观点：理解就是寻求有意义的思想，这种需求不仅具有主观性，而且具有破坏性。因此，理解就存在着全面错用的风险，因此就需要后续的补偿。巴别塔之后是一篇翻译专著，体现了作者关于语言和文化的思考。作者在语言、诗学、语文批评和文化史方面的广博学识，使他很好的解释了翻译行为。他指出，语言永远处于动态变化之中，口译和笔译都是为了人类的交流。他提出了自己“对翻译行为、以及这一行为现象逻辑和哲学方面的深邃理解”。“After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges” (ibid.:xii).“巴别塔之后提出，在每一次交流行为中，在每一次和所有的意义形式释放和接受过程中，翻译在形式和实际上都是不清楚的，不管是最广义的符号学还是更特指的言语交流中。”Since Steiners proposition of the hermeneutic approach to translation, translation scholars have come to further recognition of the nature of translation in light of the philosophical hermeneutics.在斯坦纳提出翻译的阐释学方法之后，翻译学者开始进一步认识到了哲学阐释视角下的翻译本质。The Hermeneutic MotionBy George SteinerThe hermeneutic motion, the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning, is fourfold. There is initiative trust, an investment of belief, underwritten by previous experience but epistemologically exposed and psychologically hazardous, in the meaningfulness, in the “seriousness” of the facing or, strictly speaking, adverse text. We venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there is “something there” to be understood, that the transfer will not be void. All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust. This confiding will, ordinarily, be instantaneous and unexamined, but it has a complex base. 阐释运作，即启发行为和意义的适当转换，是一种四重性行为。面对一篇文本甚至是对自己不利或者充满敌意的文本时，（译者）首先要对文本意义内涵和严峻性给予初步信任，也就是信心的投入。这种信任有赖于先前的经验，这在认识论层面是显而易见的，但是在心理上却存在一定的危险。我们且冒险向前跃出了一大步：我们一开始认为“那里的某些东西”需要理解，（对意义的）转换不会毫无意义。所有的理解，以及对这种理解的外在表述的翻译，都起始于一种信任行为。这种表达一般而言具有瞬时性，也没有经过验证，但是却具有非常复杂的基础。It is an operative convention which derives from a sequence of phenomenological assumptions about the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps formally antithetical semantic systems, about the validity of analogy and parallel. The radical generosity of the translator (“I grant beforehand that there must be something there”), his trust in the “other”, as yet untried, unmapped alternity of statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in which “this” can stand for “that”, and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be meanings and structures.这是一种操作习惯，它起源于一系列的表象假设（phenomenological assumptions），包括对世界的整体性、非常不同甚至形式上相对的句法系统中展现的意义、以及类比和比较正当性的表象假设。然而在没有尝试和计划使用其他的表述之前，译者的宽宏（之前我就认为那里存在某些东西），也就是对“他者”的信任，从哲学的角度看，它很大程度上是人类的一种偏见，也就是把世界看做是符号性的，存在了某种可以用“这个”替代“那个”的关系，而且只要存在意义和结构，就可以有这种替代行为。But the trust can never be final. It is betrayed, trivially, by nonsense, by the discovery that “there is nothing there” to elicit and translate. Nonsense rhymes, poesie concrete, glossolalia are untranslatable because they are lexically non-communicative or deliberately insignificant. 但是这种信任永远都不会是最终的。如果发现“那里不存在”需要启发和翻译的东西，根本不存在意义，那么这种信任也就受到了这种无意义导致的恶意背叛。无意义的音律、具体诗（poesie concrete）、捏造出来的词组都是不可翻译的，因为他们从词汇角度上就不具备交流的特质，有可能是有意制作的这种无意义的表达。The commitment of trust will, however, be tested, more or less severely, also in the common run and process of language acquisition and translation (the two being intimately connected). “This means nothing” asserts the exasperated child in front of his Latin reader or the beginner at Berlitz. The sensation comes very close to being tactile, as of a blank, sloping surface which gives no purchase. Social incentive, the officious evidence of precedent“others have managed to translate this bit before you”keeps one at the task. But the donation of trust remains ontologically spontaneous and anticipates proof, often by a long, arduous gap (there are texts, says Walter Benjamin, which will be translated only “after us”). As he sets out, the translator must gamble on the coherence, on the symbolic plentitude of the world. Concomitantly he leaves himself vulnerable, though only in extremity and at the theoretical edge, to two dialectically related, mutually determined metaphysical risks. He may find that “anything” or “almost anything” can mean “everything”. This is the vertigo of self-sustaining metaphoric or analogic enchainment experienced by medieval exegetists. Or he may find that there is “nothing there” which can be divorced from its formal autonomy, that every meaning worth expressing is monadic and will not enter into any alternative mould. There is Kabbalistic speculation, to which I will return, about a day on which words will shake off “the burden of having to mean” and will be only themselves, blank and replete as stone.无论是从一般意义上，还是在语言习得和翻译过程中（这两者是紧密相关的），这种信任的付出都会或多或少的受到严格的检验。“这毫无意义”也证明了孩子在面对拉丁语读者的那种抓狂和初学者面对berlitz语读者时候的彷徨。这种感觉非常贴近那种触摸一种空白毫无抓手的斜面的感觉。社会上的刺激、以及先前的非正式的经验“在你之前，已经有人尝试翻译这句话了”都会让译者要做这项工作（付出信任）。但是从本体论上看，这种信任的付出是自然而然的，而且期望得到证明，但是有时候会有很大的差距（瓦尔特.本杰明说，有些文本只有在“我们之后”才可以进行翻译）。译者开始着手翻译的时候，就必须要在世界整体性和符号多样性方面进行赌博。与此同时，译者会将自身置于一种非常脆弱的，两种辩证相关、相互决定的超自然的危险境地下，虽然这只是在极端情况下和在理论的边际发生。他会发现“任何事”或“几乎任何事”都能意为“一切”。这就是中世纪的注释家们所体会的那种受自反隐喻和类比束缚而导致的晕头转向的感觉。或者他会发现那种“那里什么也没有”的状态可以和形式的自我状态相剥离，他会发现每一个有表达价值的意义都是单一的，不能成为二元可选的模式。我现在要重提Kabbalistic假设：某一天，词语都将摆脱“必须要有意义的负担”，他们就是他们自己，就像石头一样空白而完整。After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator is incursive and extractive. The relevant analysis is that of Heidegger when he focuses our attention on understanding as an act, on the access, inherently appropriative and therefore violent, of Erkenntnis to Dasein. Da-sein, the “thing there”, “the thing that is because it is there”, only comes into authentic being when it is comprehended, i.e. translated. Paul Ricaur, “Existence et hermeneutique” in Le Confit des interpretations (Paris, 1969). The postulate that all cognition is aggressive, that every proposition is an inroad on the world, is, of course, Hegelian. It is Heideggers contribution to have shown that understanding, recognition, interpretation are a compacted, unavoidable mode of attack. We can modulate Heideggers insistence that understanding is not a matter of method but of primary being, that “being consists in the understanding of other being” into the more nave, limited axiom that each act of comprehension must appropriate another entity (we translate into). Comprehension, as its etymology shows, “comprehends” not only cognitively but by encirclement and ingestion. In the event of interlingual translation this manoeuvre of comprehension is explicitly invasive and exhaustive. Saint Jerome uses his famous image of meaning brought home captive by the translator. We “break” a code: decipherment is dissective, leaving the shell smashed and the vital layers stripped. Every schoolchild, but also the eminent translator, will note the shift in substantive presence which follows on a protracted or difficult exercise in translation: the text in the other language has become almost materially thinner, the light seems to pass unhindered through its loosened fibres. For a spell the density of hostile or seductive “otherness” is dissipated. Ortega y Gasset speaks of the sadness of the translator after failure. There is also a sadness after success, the Augustinian tristitia which follows on the cognates acts of erotic and of intellectual possession.信任之后就是入侵。译者的这个二重行为带有攻击性和并带有摄取的内涵。与此相关的是海德格尔的分析，他提醒我们，理解是一种行为，需要关注对从认知到此在的理解（erkenntnis to Dasein），这是一种内的适当行为，但存在一定的暴力性。此在（Da-sein），“那里的东西”，“那个东西因为在那里而存在”，存在仅当被理解、被翻译之后还成为一个真正的存在。所有的认知都具有侵入性，世界上所有的命题都具有攻击性，这就是黑格尔的假说。海德格尔的理论指出，理解、识别和解释密不可分、不可避免的攻击模式。海德格尔认为理解不是一种关于方法的东西，而是一种基本的存在，一种存在于对另一种存在的理解中的存在。我们可以将海德格尔的思想变通为一种更加简单、严谨的公理，即理解行为就是对另一个实体的占有（我们将其翻译成这样）。从词源学的角度看，理解这个词不仅是要进行认知性理解，而且还具有包容和吸纳的内涵。在语际翻译过程中，这种理解的操作具有明显的侵入性和穷竭性。Saint Jerome利用了他的著名的形象，意义就是译者带回来的俘虏。我们“打破”一个符号：解码的工作是剖析性的，要打破外壳，剥掉关键的外衣。学生和优秀的译者都会有体会，意义的转换需要漫长而艰涩的翻译练习：他语中的文本几乎变得越来越薄，光线看起来可以毫无障碍的透过它稀疏的纤维。但是充满敌意或诱惑力的“他者”咒语却在弥漫。奥尔特加加塞特（Ortega y Gasset）说过译者在失败之后的悲哀。其实也存在成功之后的悲哀，即奥古斯丁的忧伤(Augustinian tristitia)，这种忧伤紧随拥有情爱和理性之后。The translator invades, extracts, and brings home. The simile is that of the open-cast mine left an empty scar in the landscape. As we shall see, this despoliation is illusory or is a mark of false translation. But again, as in the case of the translators trust, there are genuine borderline cases. Certain texts or genres have been exhausted by translation. Far more interestingly, others have been negated by transfiguration, by an act of appropriative penetration and transfer in excess of the original, more ordered, more aesthetically pleasing. There are originals we no longer turn to because the translation is of a higher magnitude (the sonnets of Louise Labe after Rilkes Undchtung). I will come back to this paradox of betrayal by augment.译者侵入、摄取，之后理解。这就像露天煤矿开采之后在大地上留下的伤痕一样。我们可以看出，这种掠夺是虚幻的，或者是错误翻译的一个标志。但是在另一方面，如果译者投入了信任，那么就一定存在边界。有些文本或题材确实被翻译进行了充分的挖掘。更加有趣的是，通过变形、适当的渗入行为和转换，他者的印象已经消除，原作从而变得更加有条理、更加善心悦目。有些时候我们不再理会原作，因为译作达到了一个更高的层次。我将重新来谈这种背叛的悖论。The third movement is incorporative, in the strong sense of the word. The import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum. The native semantic field is already extant and crowded. There are innumerable shadings of assimilation and placement of the newly-acquired, ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness at the core of the kind which cultural history ascribes to, say, Luthers Bible or Norths Plutarch, all the way to the permanent strangeness and marginality of an artifact such as Nabokovs “English-languge” Onegin. But whatever the degree of “naturalization”, the act of importation can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure. The Heidegge