The modern age shows us how helpless the individual is when he is at the mercy of his unconscious drives and, at the same time,

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问题     The modern age shows us how helpless the individual is when he is at the mercy of his unconscious drives and, at the same time, is beginning to lose individuality because he is in the power of huge political and social collectives. It is an age of deepening inner despair and of appalling catastrophes, an age when society says one thing and then does something entirely different, when everybody talks about peace and prepares for more and worse wars. Western Man is now schizophrenic. Literature, which is further removed from the center than ever before, does what it can. The writer of genius cannot help responding to the innermost needs of his age; he sees and reports what in its depths it asks him to see and report. He cannot help becoming, through his own relation to his unconscious (and without this relation no creative work of value is possible), an instrument of whatever there is in the general deep unconscious, the inner world of the whole age, that is trying to compensate for some failure in consciousness, to restore a balance destroyed by one-sidedness, to reconcile the glaring opposites, to bring to our outer and inner world a life-enhancing unity. But literature itself now becomes one-sided, inevitably because it is over-introverted, often so deeply concerned with the inner world, with the most mysterious recesses of the personality, and so little concerned with the outer world, that it cannot really fulfill the task it set itself. It now becomes a literature largely for specialists, themselves nearly always equally introverted; and people in general, for whom it is really intended, to find it either too "difficult" or too "neurotic" and "unhealthy".

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答案 我们看到在当今时代,当个人在他无意识的欲望支配下,同时在强大的政治和社会团体的控制下逐渐丧失自己的个性时,他是多么的无能为力。这是一个人们内心日益绝望的时代、一个充满了骇人的灾难和不幸的时代,一个社会言行不一致的时代,一个人人都在谈论和平却准备发动更多可怕战争的时代。西方人现在都患上了精神分裂症。文学尽管前所未有地远离了社会的中心,却仍发挥着应有的作用。天才作家不由自主地对他那个时代最本质的需求作出回应,他观察并报道这个时代真正最需要他观察和报道的。通过自己与潜意识的联系(没有这种联系就不可能创造出有价值的作品),他不由自主地变成了反应大众内心深处和整个时代内部世界的一个工具,这个工具试图弥补意识的缺陷、恢复被片面性破坏的平衡,调和势不两立的矛盾,给我们的外部和内心世界带来统一,以提高生活的品质。但文学现在也变得片面了,这在所难免,因为它过于内向化,常常深切地关注内心世界,关注最神秘莫测的人性深处,却极少涉及外部世界,所以它不可能真正完成它赋予自身的任务。文学在很大程度上成了专家的文学,那些专家同样几乎总是关注内心世界,而它的真正对象——普通大众,要么觉得它晦涩难懂,要么觉得它过于神经质或充满病态。

解析     helpless在这里更多的是表现想有作为而不能的心情,故翻译为“无能为力”;when引导的状语从句放在后边是为避免英语句子头重脚轻,而中文多把状语放在句子前面,故翻译时需调整句序;at the mercy of和drive分别意为“听凭……支配”和“驱动”。它们的含义其实一样,翻译时为避免冗余,只翻译出其中一个即可。
    为保留“It is an age of…,an age—when…,when…”这个结构的语气和情感,译文保留了原文结构,译为排比句,一气呵成;says one thing and then does something entirely different对应汉语中的习语“言行不一致”,简洁且地道;prepare for的含义是“为……做准备”,由于后边的宾语为“战争”,翻译时添加动词“发动”,语意表述更完整。
    形容词“introverted”原意是“内向的”,但是结合上下文可知,该词在这里并不是形容某人的性格内向,而是说专家和文学一样,都“内向化,总是关注内心世界”,翻译时需要将这一内涵解释清楚。翻译最后的三个形容词difficult、neurotic和unhealthy时,则需要考虑其修饰对象“文学”,故译文使用了“晦涩难懂”“神经质”和“充满病态”。
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