2008-09-15 21:13:26YV
Beowulf, Beowulf!
講了四小時的話,沒力氣再寫了。把這則寫給大學同學看的小文轉貼充數。
---------------------------------------------------------------------
今天要教 Beowulf, 備課時胡亂翻到兩則有意思的軼事,心情大好,上課上得很高興,光是引述這兩則,就讓這些小小藝術家動容,專注的氣氛連我都很訝異。下課要回家,有個學生挪位子讓我站進電梯,忽然從後面把我(連書包)抱住:「我要把老師定(釘?)起來!不讓老師跑掉。」裡面的一位陌生老師對我眨眨眼,出電梯還給我一個美麗的微笑。相較於過去兩天半的稀飯豆腐乳生活,今天實在有一點兒超寫實!
這兩則軼事是什麼呢?!
其一:
Seamus Heaney (1995 年的諾貝爾獎得主)受邀翻譯《貝奧武夫》時,正是他在哈佛授課忙得不可開交的時候。可是他一聽 Norton 出版社來邀翻譯稿就立即答應,因為當時他被美國腔美國調的當代詩搞得非常毛躁,所以翻譯那個(比較)接近他的母語文學愛爾蘭話的古英語是一種「解藥」,讓他可以在盎格魯薩克遜的語言河床裡裡安身。
Consequently, when an invitation to translate the poem arrived from
the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, I was
tempted to try my hand. While I had no great expertise in Old
English, I had a strong desire to get back to the first stratum of
the language and to ”assay the hoard” (l. 2509). This was during
the middle years of the 1980s, when I had begun a regular teaching
job at Harvard and was opening my ear to the untethered music of
some contemporary American poetry. Saying yes to the Beowulf
commission would be (I argued with myself) a kind of aural antidote,
a way of ensuring that my linguistic anchor would stay lodged on
the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor. So I undertook it. (xxii)
其二:
Heaney 念大學的時候,語言史老師介紹字的源由讓他興奮莫名,例如威士忌酒,等他「重新認識」這個字之後,眼中的那條河變成酒河,那座山就像糖果山一樣了。
Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of
cultural determinism early on, in my first arts year at Queen’s
University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the
English language by Porfessor John Braidwood. Braidwood could not
help informing us, for example, that the word ”whiskey” is the
same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water,
and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the
River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly
turned into a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a
pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans
Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some pre-political,
prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain--and all of
this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon me. The Irish/English
duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed, and
in the resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition flashed
through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential which
seemed at the same time to be a somewhere being remembered. The
place on the language map where the Usk and uisce and the whiskey coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a
loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has called ”the
partitioned intellect,” away into some unpartitioned linguistic
country, a region where one’s language would not be a simple badge
of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official
imposition, but an entry into further language. And I eventually
came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.
這些看爛了希羅神話的英國人因為托爾金再度發現的北海英雄貝奧武夫而眼睛閃亮。他們更應該高興的是語言的擴充吧?不如咱們都來寫精靈文.....
---------------------------------------------------------------------
今天要教 Beowulf, 備課時胡亂翻到兩則有意思的軼事,心情大好,上課上得很高興,光是引述這兩則,就讓這些小小藝術家動容,專注的氣氛連我都很訝異。下課要回家,有個學生挪位子讓我站進電梯,忽然從後面把我(連書包)抱住:「我要把老師定(釘?)起來!不讓老師跑掉。」裡面的一位陌生老師對我眨眨眼,出電梯還給我一個美麗的微笑。相較於過去兩天半的稀飯豆腐乳生活,今天實在有一點兒超寫實!
這兩則軼事是什麼呢?!
其一:
Seamus Heaney (1995 年的諾貝爾獎得主)受邀翻譯《貝奧武夫》時,正是他在哈佛授課忙得不可開交的時候。可是他一聽 Norton 出版社來邀翻譯稿就立即答應,因為當時他被美國腔美國調的當代詩搞得非常毛躁,所以翻譯那個(比較)接近他的母語文學愛爾蘭話的古英語是一種「解藥」,讓他可以在盎格魯薩克遜的語言河床裡裡安身。
Consequently, when an invitation to translate the poem arrived from
the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, I was
tempted to try my hand. While I had no great expertise in Old
English, I had a strong desire to get back to the first stratum of
the language and to ”assay the hoard” (l. 2509). This was during
the middle years of the 1980s, when I had begun a regular teaching
job at Harvard and was opening my ear to the untethered music of
some contemporary American poetry. Saying yes to the Beowulf
commission would be (I argued with myself) a kind of aural antidote,
a way of ensuring that my linguistic anchor would stay lodged on
the Anglo-Saxon sea-floor. So I undertook it. (xxii)
其二:
Heaney 念大學的時候,語言史老師介紹字的源由讓他興奮莫名,例如威士忌酒,等他「重新認識」這個字之後,眼中的那條河變成酒河,那座山就像糖果山一樣了。
Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of
cultural determinism early on, in my first arts year at Queen’s
University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the
English language by Porfessor John Braidwood. Braidwood could not
help informing us, for example, that the word ”whiskey” is the
same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water,
and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the
River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly
turned into a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a
pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans
Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some pre-political,
prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain--and all of
this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon me. The Irish/English
duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed, and
in the resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition flashed
through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential which
seemed at the same time to be a somewhere being remembered. The
place on the language map where the Usk and uisce and the whiskey coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a
loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has called ”the
partitioned intellect,” away into some unpartitioned linguistic
country, a region where one’s language would not be a simple badge
of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official
imposition, but an entry into further language. And I eventually
came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.
這些看爛了希羅神話的英國人因為托爾金再度發現的北海英雄貝奧武夫而眼睛閃亮。他們更應該高興的是語言的擴充吧?不如咱們都來寫精靈文.....
下一篇:這一篇 FREE 絕對不能偷看!