书评 | 永远的简·奥斯汀（下） | 大西洋月刊

Jane Austen Is Everything （Part II）

Another of this year’s Austen books suggests an answer: the new Oxford World’s Classics Teenage Writings, a collection of three notebooks of her adolescent writings, co-edited by Kathryn Sutherland, one of a handful of true experts in Austen’s manuscripts. Novel-writing is an adult-only game, rarely amenable to youthful prodigies like an Ingres, a Mozart, or a Keats. But if anyone in the form’s history comes close, it is Austen. From the age of 11 she showed a fantastically precocious understanding of the novel’s usual rules, because already by then she was parodying them. 

今年出版的另一部奥斯汀作品提供了一种答案，即新版《牛津世界经典少年著作》，该书收纳了三部奥斯汀少年时代的笔记版作品，由凯瑟琳·萨瑟兰参与汇编，她是几个真正的奥斯汀手稿研究专家之一。小说是成人的游戏，很难有像画家安格尔、音乐家莫扎特或诗人济慈之类的青年才俊涉足创作。如果小说史上有人最堪比肩，那一定就是奥斯汀。她11岁起就早早谙熟小说创作的一般法则，因为那时她便开始模仿这些法则。

Her earliest juvenilia are insouciant send-ups, each of a slightly different aspect of the fictional form of her time. Various kinds of prose technique (long, descriptive passages, novels in letters) and assorted kinds of stories (foundling plots, mystery plots, tales of star-crossed lovers) are rendered ridiculous in what is already her recognizably exact voice. 

她早期的少女作是随性的戏仿之作，每部作品都涉及当时的小说形式中稍有不同的方面。把丰富的语言技巧（描述性的长段落、书信形式的小说）和狗血故事（弃婴、推理和苦命鸳鸯等情结）读来很滑稽，辨认得出那正是她的语气。

On the period’s stereotypically virtuous suffering heroines, she offers this, likely written in her early teens: Beloved by Lady Harcourt, adored by Sir George & admired by all the world, she lived in a continued course of uninterrupted Happiness, till she had attained her eighteenth year, when happening one day to be detected in stealing a bank-note of 50£, she was turned out of doors by her inhuman Benefactors.

一段可能她十二三岁写的东西，塑造了当时贞洁女主人公的刻板形象，她是这样写的：哈考特夫人疼爱她，乔治爵士爱慕她，全世界都赞美她，她的幸福日子永不间断，直到满十八岁时，某一天，恰好被发现偷了一张五十英镑的纸币，她竟被没有人性的恩主们逐出家门。

Or this, possibly written as early as age 11, on the cousin-lovers familiar from sentimental fiction: They were exceedingly handsome and so much alike, that it was not every one who knew them apart.—Nay even their most intimate freinds [sic] had nothing to distinguish them by, but the shape of the face, the colour of the Eye, the length of the Nose & the difference of the complexion.

她还写过感伤小说中常有的表亲恋情桥段，下面这句可能是她早在11岁就创作了的：二人花容月貌又如此相像，不是每个人都能分得清她们，连最亲密的友朋（原文如此）都没办法。除了轮廓和眼睛的颜色不同、鼻子各有短长，肤色有所差异，其余再也无从分别了。

Laugh lines like these exploit the comedy of precision, a riposte to the windy generalities of fictional clichés; and from the beginning virtually everything about fiction for Austen was a cliché, or a genre, a kind of unconscious expectation that she could expose or pierce. The insight and skill are remarkable, but even more so is the absence of any self-revelation. Austen seems to have had none of the usual adolescent impulse toward autobiography. Instead she displays a preternatural self-possession. Nothing is too giddy, or too self-important; no dreaminess or yearning or complaint intrudes. What personality makes itself felt is composed of intellectual delight—the pleasure of the mind’s exertion, directed toward a family audience.

这种俏皮话产生的喜剧感恰到好处，机敏地回击了当时小说中大而化之的空话；事实上，对奥斯汀而言，小说打一开始都是些陈词滥调，或是一种文学类型，让她不自觉想去揭露或刺穿。她的见解和技巧都很卓越，但更了不起的是她不表露自我。奥斯汀似乎没有青少年常有的那种写自传的冲动，相反她展现了超乎寻常的淡定。没什么显得过于轻浮或是妄自尊大，你找不到沉迷于幻想、渴求或是抱怨的痕迹。表现出来的人物性格都源自思考带来的快乐——动脑筋让人心情愉悦，适合全家人阅读。

In her published novels—she wrote a first draft of Pride and Prejudice in her early 20s, and her last novel, Persuasion, as she turned 40 (a year before she died)—that avoidance of the personal was refined into a method capable of more than parody. It is a recurrent problem for biographical criticism of Austen’s novels that Jane Austen, the unmarried woman who spent much of her adulthood living on the not particularly lavish charity or hospitality of male relations, is nowhere present in them. You will find no wittily sardonic yet sympathetic aunts who happen to write fiction in the interstices of the day’s other duties, no talented and unmarried daughters of deceased clergymen negotiating with London publishers from a Hampshire cottage. Instead, her pages present young women destined, with various degrees of initial willingness, for the marriages they eventually deserve.

她二十岁出头写了《傲慢与偏见》，满四十岁时（去世前一年）创作了最后一部作品《劝导》，在出版的小说中，那种避免表达自我的方法如此精致，并非模仿作品堪比。奥斯汀小说批评史中总会有人问：终生未嫁的奥斯汀，成年后多数时间里与男人接触不多，相处也不太顺心，她却从未在小说中现身说法。妙语刺世却不乏同情心的阿姨们恰好在劳动间隙写小说，已故牧师那些文采平庸、尚未出嫁的女儿们在汉普郡一所别墅里同伦敦出版商周旋，这些情形都不属于奥斯汀。相反，她字里行间展现的是，一开始年轻女子们心中各有憧憬，最终走向婚姻，有了各自的归宿。

Which is to say that the exuberance of her juvenile parodies, a way of turning the self’s delight in its own powers outward, is in the novels given to Austen’s extraordinarily vibrant protagonists. They share nothing of Austen but their enjoyment of their own powers, particularly their intellectual powers. They are, to use a word of Austen’s, spirited. That has always been their appeal. 

这就是说，青少年时的模仿作品是让个人喜悦自发表达出来的一种方式，奥斯汀把作品中的活力赋予小说中生气勃勃的主人公们。她们与奥斯汀的相同之处只在于各自的禀赋都得以发挥，尤其是她们的知性。用奥斯汀的话来说，她们有活力，那永远是其吸引力所在。

Spiritedness has its many moods, but it is never just physical, nor is it resentful, brooding, interiorized. It is vibrant, quick, sensitive, willing to collide with the world yet also self-sufficient. Take Elizabeth Bennet, when she overhears Darcy telling Bingley that she is “not handsome enough to tempt me”: Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous. Elizabeth, the young parodist. No wonder that Darcy later admits to first admiring her for “the liveliness of your mind,” or that we see his sister, Georgiana, feeling “an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother.”

保持精神饱满有很多方式，可从不只是肉体上的，也不只是愤恨、忧郁和内省，那是一种充沛、果敢和敏感的、愿意同世界碰撞却又有所分寸的性情。以伊丽莎白·班纳特为例，她无意间听到达西对彬格莱说，自己“长得无法让我动心”时，奥斯汀这样写道：“达西先生走开了；伊丽莎白对他还是没有多少好感，可她却绘声绘色地把这个故事讲给朋友们听；她天性活泼风趣，喜爱一切荒唐之事。”伊丽莎白不愧是年轻的笑料家，难怪达西后来承认最仰慕她“头脑灵活”，也难怪他妹妹乔治安娜“对伊丽莎白与哥哥轻松活泼的谈话方式有种近乎惊慌的惊奇。”

The pleasure that spiritedness provides, as everyone who reads Austen discovers, tends to feel self-evident; her spirited characters stand out because they enchant us. But all pleasures have their politics, even the seemingly personal pleasure of watching her lively heroines assert themselves. There is something pagan about spiritedness as a virtue; it is the usual translation of the Greek term “thumos,” which for Aristotle meant the energetic defense of one’s personal dignity—quick to feel injury, quick to respond, courageous about one’s principles, active in the expression of one’s self-respect. (It is no coincidence that many of Austen’s most devoted readers, such as Gilbert Ryle and Alasdair MacIntyre, have been philosophers steeped in Greek thought.) 

不言自明，这种活泼给人带来快乐，每个阅读奥斯汀作品的人都不 46 33232 46 15288 0 0 3691 0 0:00:09 0:00:04 0:00:05 3690发现。作品中性格活泼的人物很出彩，她们令人着迷。然而，所有这些快乐都不乏各自的政治，即使生气勃勃的女主人公表达自我时貌似只给人带来个人的欢乐也并不例外。把活泼视作优点本身就有点离经叛道。“活泼”译自希腊语“激奋”，对亚里士多德而言，这意味着对个人尊严的强力捍卫，迅速感知伤害并迅速做出反应，勇于捍卫自己的原则，积极表达自己的尊严。（许多奥斯汀的忠实读者，如吉尔伯特·赖尔和阿拉斯泰尔·麦金太尔，都是谙熟希腊思想的哲学家，这并非巧合。）

Even Austen’s less witty protagonists, like Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price and Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, carry a sense of self-sufficiency and a devotion to their self-conception that make them more than just models of rectitude. As for Elizabeth and Emma, they exude a kind of self-generated joy. Flawed and blinkered, their spiritedness is still a form of personal flourishing—an energetic defense of the very idea of having a self. It qualifies them for that most clichéd, and yet most profound, of Austen’s words: happiness.

即使是奥斯汀作品里不那么机智的主人公，像《曼斯菲尔德庄园》里的芬妮·普莱斯和《劝导》里的安妮·艾略特，也有自我存在感，她们坚持自我意识，而不仅做道德楷模。至于伊丽莎白和爱玛，她们体现出一种自娱自乐的趣味，二人活泼的性格尽管有所缺陷，或失于狭隘，可依然张扬个性，有力捍卫了“我之为我”的主张，她们配得上奥斯汀那个最老套却最深刻的词：幸福。

This is in fact the ethic, painted in many different period-appropriate colors, that saturates the examples of Austen adaptation in Looser’s book, from the declamations of late-19th-century elocution handbooks to the many Elizabeths of stage and screen. But it is also crucially, as Kelly would no doubt insist, embedded in the history of Austen’s own moment. 

事实上，正是这一道德准则让卢瑟书中举出的作品丰富饱满，那些作品淡抹浓妆，以适合各自时代的色彩改编了奥斯汀的小说，其中既包括19世纪末的诵读手册，也包括以伊丽莎白为主角的诸多舞台和电影作品。但这一准则还嵌入到奥斯汀所处的历史时代，这至关重要，无疑正如凯利所主张的。

Spiritedness is a way of understanding oneself as having rights. It experiences those rights as a joy, as a sense of blossoming, of freedom; but also as something often in need of quickly roused defense. It is the style of the revolutions—American, French—encroaching on Austen’s Britain, put in the mouths of intelligent young women who know their own worth. “I am only resolved to act in that manner,” Elizabeth tells her aristocratic antagonist Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

生气勃勃是认识到自己拥有权利的一种方式，它不仅主张了欢乐、自我觉醒和自由的权利，同样包含了某些经常要奋起捍卫的东西。这体现出革命正在侵蚀奥斯汀所在的英国——美国革命，法国革命，革命风让睿智的年轻女子主张她们自己的价值。“我决心那样做，”伊丽莎白告诉她的贵族敌人凯瑟琳·德·波女士，“在我看来，这就是我的幸福，与你或与我完全无关的其他人没有任何关系。”

Elizabeth’s is a declaration of rights; she demands the pursuit of happiness. The echoes of famous documents of the late 18th century are there, but harmonized by a personal style one might love and not just admire: The spirited self, joyous even in the act of refusal, is a pleasure to watch in action. 

伊丽莎白的故事堪称权利宣言，她要谋求幸福。这回应了18世纪末那份著名的文件，只是前者用个人风格加以调和，或许有人不仅欣赏，还很喜爱：活力十足的个体，就算被拒也很欢乐，这真是畅快淋漓。

The radical formal twist in Austen, however, is that these spirited characters are monitored with steely objectivity, inside and out, by her impersonal omniscient voice, one that never explicitly judges but that still exposes their misapprehensions and solipsisms. Someone is always watching, and that someone is the Austen voice itself, detached from any merely personal Jane Austen. There is the characters’ self-assertion, brilliant and enjoyable; and there is observation and implied assessment, keeping that self-assertion balanced with an objective world of shared values.

但奥斯汀偏不一味放纵，她彻底倒转笔触，用无处不在的冷漠声音摆布着这些活泼的人物，从里到外，绝对客观。虽然她从不直接评价，但仍揭示出她们的误会和自以为是。总有个人冷眼旁观，那就是奥斯汀的声音，却与奥斯汀本人的境遇两相分离。既有人物的自我呈现，聪明伶俐又充满欢乐；又不乏观察和背后的评价，让自我表达与普世价值的客观世界达成平衡。

No one has made spiritedness more compelling, and no one has taken more care to hedge it with such perfect control. At different historical moments, one side or the other of that equation has been emphasized—sometimes the ironic wit keeping characters under surveillance, sometimes the spirited relish with which those characters defend their rights—but the equipoise has demonstrated remarkable durability. 

无人曾把这种活力表达得如此淋漓尽致，也没人会如此精心控制，收放自如。在不同历史时期，总是等式的某一边被突出，有时讽世之言让人物成为作者的传声筒，有时生气勃勃的人物又搁于捍卫自我权利——可正是这种均势让作品流芳百世。

The balance between self and society is the core dream of a liberal world: a place where individuals might be both sufficient unto themselves and possessed of rights accordingly, but also bound to one another in a pact of mutual correction. Call it civil society, as both a joy and a duty. Austen is, as Kelly would put it, a fantasist about her moment—but that fantasy is also still ours.

个体和社会间的平衡是自由世界的核心梦想，个体既能我行我素，拥有相应的权利，又能团结起来，相互纠正。我们称之为公民社会，既有欢乐，又有责任。正如凯利所言，奥斯汀是她那个时代的幻想主义者，可她依旧传达了我们的幻想。

For how much longer? Is it possible to imagine a world that no longer finds such a fantasy gratifying or necessary, a world that no longer reads and reimagines Jane Austen? If and when that time arrives, we will know that her comic ideal, of spirited, rights-holding individuals living in social concord, no longer seems appealing, or viable, and that her idea of what it means to be an individual is no longer recognizable. 

她的幻想能传承多久呢？你能想象一个世界，在那个世界中幻想不再令人愉悦、不再必不可少，在那个世界中没人阅读并重新想象简·奥斯汀吗？如果那个世界真得来了，我们才能说她那种轻松的理想生活，那些身处和睦之中却充满活力并主张权利的个体，看起来没有吸引力或不合时宜了。如果那个世界真得来了，我们才能说她关于何为个人的观点变得难以辨认了。

In this 200th year After Austen, there are plenty of signs, none of them a pleasure to consider, that such a day may not be far off. For the moment, we’re left in relation to Austen where Mr. Knightley started with Emma, looking on anxiously and thinking: “I wonder what will  become of her!”

在奥斯汀逝世200周年之际，说那一天为时不远，这无论如何都让人开心不起来。此刻，我们同奥斯汀的关系，就像奈特利先生初见爱玛，他心神不安地打量着她，心里在想：“我想知道她命运何从？”

译者 周江

招募翻译志愿者，译者应尽量保证两周完成外报外刊文章翻译任务一条，篇幅和难度请参考公号每日推送。公号系免费平台，无法付酬。运营者将校对译文，欢迎翻译爱好者参与，有意者可后台回复“试译”。

观世界，学英文

《英文联播》新闻精读课程

精选、精读、精听、精译、精讲

入圈不分先后

课时存量开放

100次精讲+学习笔记+互动交流

300元

回复“小密圈”试听

下载“小密圈”，扫描二维码

准备开始学习之旅