赫尔曼·黑塞(Hermann Hesse)的《荒原狼》，库尔特·比尔斯(Kurt Beals)翻译

The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, translated by Kurt Beals

January 21, 2023 Steve Donoghue

原文：

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/the-steppenwolf-by-hermann-hesse-translated-by-kurt-beals

译者注：这是基于谷狗的翻译。我比较认真地一句一句地读译文，同时努力加以润色，因为这次谷狗没有能够很好地翻译。我把原文放在中文后面，帮助自己“慢慢地嚼”，也方便你（对照着）看。

曾几何时，在哈佛广场喧闹的陈旧日子里，美国银行大厦还没有出现，一位非常内向的哈佛退休老教授，他也曾经是波恩书商（Bonn bookseller），常常在下午的时候拿着棋盘对抗所有挑战者。这些挑战者大多是本科生，其中一位不幸的挑战者，在他出手之前，把他破旧的平装书放在了棋盘的一边。那个脾气暴躁的退休老教授看到书名——赫尔曼·黑塞 (Hermann Hesse) 的《荒原狼》 ——抓起它开始阅读。老教授让比赛继续进行——棋赛进行得很快——但是，以那种高级学者擅长的羞辱举止，老教授也不停地翻看着小说。

Once upon a time, in the ratty, bustling, pre-Bank of America days of Harvard Square, a wonderfully reserved old Harvard emeritus and former Bonn bookseller used to spend some of his afternoons holding down a public chessboard against all comers. These were invariably college undergraduates, and one of these unfortunates, prior to his defenestration, set his battered paperback on the side of the board. That crusty emeritus spotted the title   – Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse – snatched it up and began reading. He kept the game going – the defenestration proceeded apace – but, in the kind of  fillip of humiliation in which senior academics once specialized, he also kept turning the pages. 

一会儿，棋赛变成了战场，本科生面临着可能是他一生中唯一有保障的取胜，而这位退休的老人非常沮丧，以至于他的自尊心稍微下滑了一点。

“这，”他结结巴巴地说，“这是什么？”

“这是一部很棒的小说，”本科生说，仍然抱着顽固的希望研究着棋盘。 “它，完全改变了我的人生。”

“这不是黑塞！”

“为什么不？”本科生问道，暂时从他的厄运中走了出来。 “翻译错了吗？”

“比错误更糟糕，”愤怒的老书商（即老教授）咆哮着，把书扔到台子上，用他的王后无情地结束了棋赛。 “这（书）很无聊。”

In due course, the board was a bomb site, the undergraduate was facing what would likely be the only guaranteed mating of his life, and the old emeritus was so upset that his self-possession was slipping just a bit. 

“This,” he sputtered, “what is this?”

“It’s a great novel,” said the undergraduate, still studying the board in stubborn hope. “It, like, totally changed my life.”

“This is not Hesse!” 

“Why not?” asked the undergraduate, momentarily distracted from his doom. “Is the translation, like, wrong?”

“It’s worse than wrong,” growled the outraged old bookseller, slapping the book down and extinguishing the game with a ruthless crack of his queen. “It’s boring.” 

旁观者很难判断哪个（因素）似乎压垮这位大学生，是他被一位根本没有认真下棋的老人将死，还是被一位无可争辩的权威认为改变自己人生的书是一个骗局。他拿起自己的《荒原狼》 ，悄悄地走开了，毫无疑问自己会在贝尔斯登（Bear Stearns；译者注：大投资公司）谋得一份职业。

An observer would have found it difficult to decide which seemed to crush that undergraduate more, the fact that he was checkmated by somebody who wasn’t even paying attention, or the fact that an indisputable authority had deemed his life-changing book a fraud. He picked up his copy of Steppenwolf and slinked off, doubtless to a career at Bear Stearns. 

那是 Basil Creighton 对黑塞 1927 年出版的经典著作Der Steppenwolf的翻译书，平装本在很多年前为 Bantam（出版商） 赚了一大笔钱，尽管多年来该翻译已经被提炼、重新装饰、和再次印刷，但这部翻译书的局限性不仅没有被纠正，而且通过传播而得以保留在以后的翻译版本中。

That was the old Basil Creighton translation of Hesses’ 1927 classic Der Steppenwolf, in a paperback edition that made a tidy pile of money for Bantam many years ago, and although that translation has been refined and redecorated and recycled over the years, its limitations have not only persisted by 【but？】 very likely spread virally to later translations. 

最新的英文版《荒原狼》，由 WW Norton 美妙包装出版。Kurt Beals坦率地谈到这种翻译“热“，即使他提供了一个防火带（fire break）来“阻止这种热”。Beals的翻译如此高水平（so assuredly），轻而易举地优于其所有前辈的版本，以至于感觉这本书更像是一个（新的）起点，而不是传统翻译版的延伸。

The latest of these, The Steppenwolf, smartly issued by WW Norton, Kurt Beals frankly addresses this translation virology even as he provides a fire break against it. His translation is so assuredly, handily superior to all its predecessors that it feels more like a starting point than an extension of tradition. 

Beals的引言，一开始确实让人因（担心翻译者的）愚蠢而心悸——他一开始就提到“Steppenwolf”是摇滚乐队的名字，该乐队在 1968 年推出了热门单曲，然后继续提到乐队的成员都没有听说过这本原著（他们的制作人建议的这个乐队名字），并且没有办法知道黑塞会怎么想这首歌，因为他在这首歌登上排行榜前五年就去世了……换句话说，是开场白（清嗓子）中最糟糕的，最浪费时间的那种。但Beals一开始就把这些槽吐出来了，然后就着手撰写了引人入胜的引言，讲述了“这一唯一‘正确’的，绝对理想的渐进、逐渐逼近” 翻译（the “incremental, asymptotic approximation of the impossible ideal of a single ‘correct’ translation.”）。他对 Creighton 的翻译、多年来的各种修订、以及 David Horrocks和 Thomas Wayne 的其他版本的评价非常慷慨，但他仍然认为，他自己作了一些“比以前的任何翻译都更接近于德语的准确翻译文本。”

True, his Introduction at first gives heart palpitations of stupidity – he opens by mentioning that “Steppenwolf” was the name of the rock band who had a hit single in 1968, then going on to mention that none of the band’s members had ever heard of the book (their producer suggested the band’s name) and that there’s no way to know what Hesse would have thought of the song, since he died five years before it hit the charts … in other words, editorial throat-clearing of the worst, most time-wasting sort. But he gets it out of his system early on and proceeds to write fascinatingly about the “incremental, asymptotic approximation of the impossible ideal of a single ‘correct’ translation.” He’s generous with the Creighton translation, its various revisions over the years, and additional versions by David Horrocks and Thomas Wayne, but he nonetheless tentatively proposes that he himself has produced something that “comes closer than any previous translation to an accurate rendering of the German text.” 

Beals做到了；他不仅对某些单词和短语的做了极度怪异的精确翻译（extreme geekish precision），而且还直截了当地面对书中的种族主义或性别歧视，没有早期版本的bowdlerization（鲍德勒化；即，删去原文中的“不正确文字“），也没有目前在 21 世纪方兴未艾的“焦土道德审查”（scorched-earth moral censorship）。 “这些段落读起来不舒服，翻译起来也不舒服，”他只是承认，“但它们告诉我们一些关于黑塞以及他生活和写作的时代和文化的重要信息。”

He has, and he’s managed it not only by bearing down with extreme geekish precision on certain words and phrases but also by taking the book’s racist or sexist bit squarely as he finds them, without the bowdlerization of earlier versions and without the scorched-earth moral censorship that is currently ascendant in the 21st century. “These passages are unpleasant to read, and unpleasant to translate,” he admits simply, “but they tell us something important about Hesse and the period and culture in which he lived and wrote.” 

矛盾的是，通过如此贴近原文，Beals给了英文版读者一种比他们在英语中遇到过的更新感觉的黑塞风格（newer-feeling Hesset）。 在他围绕一个不断变化且看似半虚构的城市的奇怪旅程中，小说的主人公，荒原狼哈里·哈勒（Harry Haller）【即，黑塞本人的一种游乐场镜子替身；正如Beals所指出的，小说中的大多数角色，都是黑塞本人的游乐场镜子替身——而哈里·哈勒（Harry Haller）很可能独自一人呆在他的阁楼里】遇到了一些超现实的人物。 街上的一个陌生人递给他一本小册子，似乎是在描述他的生活。 一位名叫 Hermine 的神秘女性用 Beals 完美捕捉到的轻率语调，与他谈论紧迫的形而上学（urgent metaphysics）：

By thus sticking so close to the original, Beals has, paradoxically, given readers a newer-feeling Hesset than they’ve ever encountered in English. In his strange journey around an ever-changing and seemingly half-imaginary city, the novel’s main character, The Steppenwolf, Harry Haller (a kind of funhouse-mirror stand-in for Hesse himself; as Beals notes, most of the characters in the book are funhouse-mirror stand-ins for Hesse himself – Harry Haller may very well be alone in his garrett) meets a handful of surreal characters. A stranger on the street hands him a small pamphlet that seems to describe his life. A mysterious woman named Hermine talks to him about urgent metaphysics in headlong tones Beals captures perfectly:

“名气真的只是为了教育而存在，这是学校老师关心的事情，这并不是名气，哦，不是！但我称之为“永恒”（eternity）。虔诚的人称它为上帝的王国。我总是告诉自己：我们这些人——要求更高的人，有我们的渴望，有太多的一维（又一维）——如果没有这个世界的空气之外可以呼吸的其他空气，我们任何人都无法生存，如果没有超越时间的东西——永恒，那就是真实的境界。它包括莫扎特的音乐和伟大诗人的诗歌，它包括创造奇迹的圣人，包括殉道者的死亡，为人类树立了伟大的榜样。但永恒也包括每一个真实行为的形象，每一种真实感受的力量，即使没有人知道它、看到它、写下它、并为后代保存它。永恒（本身）没有后代，我们都是同时代的人。”

“Fame really only exists for the sake of education, it’s something that schoolteachers care about, It isn’t fame, oh no! But what I call eternity. Pious people call it the Kingdom of God. I always tell myself: we people – the more demanding ones, with our longings, with our one dimension too many – none of us would be able to live at all if there weren't some other air to breathe beyond the air of this world, if there weren’t something beyond time – eternity, and that is the realm of the authentic. It includes the music of Mozart and the poems of your great poets, it includes the saints who performed miracles, who died martyrs’ deaths and set a great example for mankind. But eternity also includes the image of every authentic deed, the power of every authentic feeling, even if no one knows about it and sees it and writes it down and preserves it for posterity. In eternity there is no posterity, we are all contemporaries.”

这些“日耳曼废话”的热情段落，是《荒原狼》成为年轻人的邪典经典的两个品质之一（黑塞本人注意到了这一点，并且通常对此感到困惑）。 随着小说的进展，另一种品质的出现频率和强度都在增加，而哈勒（Haller）那狭小的确定性橱柜逐渐被清空：黑塞的散文在长长的、循环的句子中展开，这些句子光彩夺目、无穷无尽。 由于英语不像德语那样适合这类描述，以前的译者往往会把它翻译成短句；但Beals在这样的段落中欣喜若狂地大显身手：

These ardent passages of Germanic twaddle are one of the two qualities that have always made The Steppenwolf a cult classic among a younger demographic (Hesse himself noticed this and was, typically, bemused by it). The other quality increases in frequency and strength as the novel progresses and Haller’s slim cupboard of certainties is steadily emptied out: Hesse’s prose unspools in long, looping sentences of glorious interminability. Since English isn’t nearly as suited for this kind of thing as German, previous translators have tended to curtail it, but Beals exults in such passages:

所有的墙上都张贴着狂野的、极具挑衅性的海报，巨大的字母像火炬一样闪耀，呼吁这个国家最终站起来为人民站起来，反对机器，最终结束肥胖、衣冠楚楚、满身喷香的富人，他们用他们拥有的机器，从其他人身上榨取最后一盎司的脂肪——杀死那些富人，连同他们喘着粗气、发出不祥的咆哮、发出恶魔般的嗡嗡声的大汽车一起杀死，最后放火烧毁工厂，清洁被亵渎的地球、并减少一点人口，以便草可以再次生长，使得这尘土飞扬的水泥世界可以再次让位于森林、草地、石南丛、溪流、和沼泽。

There were wild, wonderfully provocative posters on all the walls, with giant letters that blazed like torches, calling on the nation to finally stand up for the people, against the machines, to finally but an end to the fat, well-dressed, fragrantly perfumed rich people who used their machines to squeeze the last ounce of fat out of everyone else – to kill those rich people along with their big, wheezing, ominously growling, diabolically purring automobiles, to finally set fire to the factories and clear out the desecrated earth and depopulate it a bit so that grass could grow again, so that the dusty cement world could once again give way to something like forest, meadow, heath, brook, and moor.

在这个煞费苦心的不计后果的演绎中，《荒原狼》揭示了一种奇怪的、笨拙的想象力，正是这种力量使它在一个世纪前，成为像《悉达多》一样的轰动。如果赫尔曼·黑塞要找到新一代的读者，就像本读者一样，通过翻译版。

In this painstakingly reckless rendition, The Steppenwolf reveals the odd, ungainly imaginative power that made it every bit the reading sensation its predecessor Siddharthahad been, a century ago. If Hermann Hesse is to find a new generation of readers, it will be through translations just like this one.

Steve Donoghue是Open Letters Monthly的创始编辑。他的书评出现在《华盛顿邮报》、《美国保守党》、《旁观者》、《华尔街日报》、《国民报》和《每日星报》上。他定期为波士顿环球报、葡萄园公报和基督教科学箴言报撰稿，并且是佐治亚州Big Canoe News 的图书编辑。

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.