張愛玲缺席《中國現代文學大紅寶書》

In 1906, while studying medicine in Japan, a young Chinese man called Zhou Shuren was shown a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, which was partly fought on Chinese territory. It showed a crowd of Chinese watching while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese, accused of being a Russian spy. “They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic,” Zhou recalled. “After this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles. ... The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement.”

1906年，一個名叫周樹人的中國人在日本學醫期間，看到一幅幻燈片，上面是1904-1905年日俄戰爭中的一幕，這場戰爭有部分是在中國的領土上發生的。幻燈片上，一箇中國人被日本人認定爲俄軍間諜，周圍的一羣中國人就這樣目送自己的同胞被斬首。“一樣是強壯的體格，而顯出麻木的神情，”周樹人回憶。“從那一回以後，我便覺得學醫並非一件緊要事，凡是愚弱的國民，即使體格如何強健，如何茁壯，也只能做毫無意義的示衆的材料和看客……所以我們的第一要著，是在改變他們的精神，而善於改變精神的事，我那時以爲當然要推文藝，於是想提倡文藝運動了。”

Soon after this Damascene moment — one of the most celebrated conversions in 20th-century Chinese culture — Zhou began his career as the self-appointed literary doctor of China’s spiritual ills. Across the next three decades, under the pen name Lu Xun, he became one of the founding figures of modern Chinese literature.

這個時刻是20世紀中國文學史上最著名的轉變之一，不久後，周樹人就自詡爲文學醫生，專門療救中國人靈魂的沉痾。在接下來的30多年裏，他以“魯迅”爲筆名，成了現代中國文學的奠基者之一。

Lu Xun’s publicly enunciated motives for becoming a writer have subsequently been seen as emblematic of modern Chinese literature’s obsession with politics. Like many critics before him, Yunte Huang, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also defines this literature as an overwhelmingly political phenomenon. It is, he explains in his introduction to this new collection of 20th-century writing from mainland China, a story that carries “the historical weight of a nation,” an expression of these writers’ crisis-ridden sense of China as a country “on the brink of .”

魯迅公開闡明瞭自己成爲作家的動機，後來這成爲中國現代文學無法擺脫政治影響的象徵。和之前的許多評論家一樣，加利福尼亞大學聖塔芭芭拉分校英語系教授黃運特也把中國現代文學定義爲一種過於政治化的現象。在新出版的20世紀中國大陸文學選集的導言中，他解釋道，現代中國文學是一個承擔着“整個民族歷史重負”的故事，作家們對處在“亡國邊緣”的中國表達自己的憂患意識。

There is something to be said for this reading; indeed, it dominated academic study until the early 1990s. But the equation of modern Chinese literature with politics is also something of a straitjacket. Since at least the Cold War, the stain of ideology has adversely affected its perception in the West, where nonspecialist reviewers and readers have often characterized 20th-century Chinese writing as preoccupied with didactic political messages, to the exclusion of stylistic or psychological complexity. Like literature everywhere, however, that of modern China expresses a confounding mix of history, humanism and aesthetics; it has always done far more than reflect its political context. And although this worthwhile anthology asserts the primacy of the political story, it also allows alternative literary visions to glimmer through.

然而，關於這種解讀也有爭議；事實上，直至20世紀90年代初，這種說法一直統治着中國的學術界。但是把中國現代文學與政治等同起來，有點像是一種束縛。因爲至少在冷戰階段，意識形態同樣左右着西方人的判斷力，評論者與讀者如果不是專家，通常會認爲20世紀中國文學充斥着獨裁政治的信息，缺少風格，亦缺少精神上的複雜性。但是，正如全世界的文學一樣，現代中國文學是歷史、人性與美學的複合；反映出的東西遠較其政治背景爲多。儘管這本很有價值的選集把政治層面放在第一位，但亦有其他文學深度在其中滲透出微微的光亮。

Drawing on the work of numerous translators, “The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature” is divided into three parts, devoted to the Republican Era (1911-49), the Revolutionary Era (1949-76) and the Post-Mao Era (1976 to the present). The first section among others, the authors of the first half of the 20th century who form the “patriotic canon” of modern Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin). Associated with the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s (which, alongside other aims, sought to create a serious literature in vernacular Chinese that would forge a vigorous national consciousness), their writing denounced the poverty, injustice and political chaos that afflicted the country from the late 19th century onward. The anthology’s second section showcases a handful of “revolutionary” works, including a model opera, a peasant writer’s short story and Mao’s own unabashedly classical poetry. The third section can be read as a creative reaction against the strictures of the Mao era, and of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Here we encounter the return of ambiguity and nuance in the poetic language of Bei Dao; Mo Yan’s -busting fiction, packed with sex and gore; and the linguistic playfulness of Ma Yuan and Che Qianzi.

這本《中國現代文學大紅寶書》(The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature)是許多翻譯家工作的成果，分爲三部分，分別是民國時期(1911-1949)、革命時期(1949-1976)和後毛澤東時期（1976至今）。第一部分中特別選入了20世紀上半葉奠定了“愛國主義經典”的中國現代作家（魯迅、茅盾，巴金）的作品。他們與19世紀10年代與20年代中國的新文化運動密切相關（新文化運動的首要目標就是在白話文的基礎上創造一種嚴肅文學，促進民族的覺醒），他們的作品譴責貧窮與不公，乃至自從19世紀末以來困擾着這個國家的政治動盪。選集的第二部分是一小批“革命”作品，包括樣板戲、一位農民詩人的短篇小說，以及毛澤東本人大氣的詩詞作品。第三部分可以被視爲對毛澤東時期，特別是“文革”時期嚴苛約束的創意反撥。這一部分裏收入了北島詩意的語言、莫言充滿性愛與流血的禁忌題材小說，以及馬原和車前子的語言遊戲，他們重新把模糊與微妙帶回了文學之中。

Huang’s selections also accommodate literary innovators who challenge the idea of modern Chinese literature as dominated by politics. Our understanding of writers celebrated for their sociopolitical commentary, meanwhile, is complicated by the inclusion of works that are whimsical and intimate as well as those engaged in fierce denunciations of Chinese society. Rather than include Yu Dafu’s best-known short story, “Sinking” (a melodramatic first-person narration by a Chinese student in Japan in the early 1920s that blurs an individual’s sexual inferiority complex into a collective sense of national humiliation), Huang chooses a movingly low-key essay about Yu’s struggles as a penniless writer in Shanghai. Commendably, Huang himself has translated several of the more recherché entries.

黃運特的選擇亦兼顧了那些挑戰現代中國文學中“政治決定文學”理念的創新者們。對於那些以評議社會政治而聞名的作者，本書一方面收入他們激烈批判中國社會的作品，同時亦收入了他們異想天開而私人化的作品，從而加深了我們對他們的理解。比如，書中沒有收入郁達夫最著名的短篇小說《沉淪》（19世紀20年代一個留日的中國學生感傷的第一人稱敘事，把他的性自卑情結與國家恥辱感的集體情緒混合在一起），而是選了一篇感人、低調的散文，講述身無分文的作家郁達夫在上海掙扎求生的經歷。值得一提的是，黃運特自己還動手翻譯了好幾篇冷門的文章。

In the pre-1949 section, the standout is an excerpt from the novel “Tales of Hulan River” by Xiao Hong, a loosely left-wing female writer who died tragically young in 1942, when she was only 30 years old. Xiao Hong’s close male contemporary, Ba Jin, achieved much greater fame in his lifetime for his emotional denunciations of Confucianism in novels like “Family,” but Xiao Hong’s laconically detailed account of local superstition in her birthplace in China’s frozen northeast is much more effective as an attack on the mindless inhumanity of Chinese conservatism: “Spring, summer, autumn, winter — the seasonal cycle continues inexorably, and always has since the beginning of time. Wind, frost, rain, snow; those who can bear up under these forces manage to get by; those who cannot must seek a natural solution. This natural solution is not so very good, for these people are quietly and wordlessly taken from this life and this world.”

在1949年之前的部分，特別精彩的是蕭紅的小說《呼蘭河傳》的節選。蕭紅大體上可算作是一位左翼作家，1942年不幸英年早逝，只有30歲。蕭紅的同齡好友巴金憑着《家》等感傷地譴責封建制度的小說，獲得了比蕭紅大得多的聲譽；但蕭紅對故鄉——中國東北一個寒冷的村莊——地方迷信充滿細節的簡潔描寫，卻是對毫無人性的中國保守勢力更有力的譴責：“春夏秋冬，一年四季來回循環地走，那是自古也就這樣的了。風霜雨雪，受得住的就過去了，受不住的，就尋求着自然的結果。那自然的結果不大好，把一個人默默地一聲不響地就拉着離開了這人間的世界了。”

Much of the pre-1949 poetry is interesting mainly as literary history, chronicling the break with the classical past. While these early-20th-century poets clearly reveled in new freedoms of form and expression, the writing sometimes veers into self-indulgent romanticism (“I am a patch of cloud in the sky/Casting by chance a shadow on your heart”). The two short stanzas of Bian Zhilin’s “Loneliness,” however, are superbly desolate, beguiling the reader with a na pastoral start before moving to a bleak conclusion.

許多1949年以前的詩歌主要是因其具有文學史上的價值而有趣，那是中國詩歌與古典傳統發生斷裂的時代。這些20世紀初的詩歌顯然令詩人們在全新的形式與表達的自由中狂歡，他們筆下的詩句有時不免陷入放縱的浪漫主義（“我是天空裏的一片雲，偶爾投影在你的波心”）。卞之琳的兩首短詩《寂寞》則有一種莊嚴的淒涼，開頭以天真的田園風光魅惑着讀者，但最終以淒涼收場。

The gender balance here is sharply skewed toward male writers. This would not be surprising for a book of imperial Chinese literature, but in a collection of modern writing the disequilibrium need not be so marked. After all, the emergence of the female writer as a public personality early in the last century was one of the defining features of a newly modern Chinese literature. The most glaring omission is surely Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang, a sophisticated psychological modernist celebrated by Sinophone readers for her intricately oppressive tales of Shanghai domesticity. Lu Yin, Ru Zhijuan and Xu Xiaobin also deserve

選集中的性別比例明顯偏向男性作者。這種失衡對於封建時期的中國文學來說並不驚人，但是對於一個現代文學的選集來說卻過於醒目。畢竟，上世紀初，女性作家開始成爲公衆人物是中國現代新文學的重要特徵之一。最明顯的缺失顯然是張愛玲，她是一位深刻的、刻畫人物心理的現代主義作家，講述上海家庭生活的故事，風格極爲壓抑，備受華語讀者推崇。此外蘆隱、茹誌鵑、徐小斌等人的作品亦值得收入。

In his choices for the 1990s and beyond, Huang favors poetry, neglecting the tough, individualistic urban fiction of writers like Dong Xi, Han Dong, Xu Zechen and Zhu Wen, whose work chronicles the disaffected restlessness of contemporary China’s consumer society.

在選擇20世紀90年代及之後的作品時，黃運特更爲青睞詩歌，忽略了那些風格嚴峻而個人化的都市小說作家，諸如東西、韓東、徐則臣和朱文，他們的作品記載了當代中國消費社會人們不滿的焦慮情緒。

These quibbles aside, it’s heartening to see a serious publisher, one whose list is geared to the general reader, invest in an anthology that manages to combine the established canon with less-well-known selections. The breadth and variety of “The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature” will, one hopes, encourage new readers to explore more Chinese literature in full translations.

雖有上述這些吹毛求疵，看到一家嚴肅的、面向普通讀者的出版社投資出版這樣一部選集，把經典作品與罕爲人知的作品收集在一起，實在令人振奮。希望《中國現代文學大紅寶書》內容的廣度與豐富性可以鼓勵更多新讀者去探索中國文學的完整譯本。