A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (Excerpt) 双语 2

    Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic as sumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

    但还是男性化的价值观占主流。直白的说，足球和体育是"重要"的；对时尚的崇拜和买衣服是"无关紧要"的。这种价值观必然会从生活渗透进小说之中。批评家会说，这本书很重要，因为它讲的是战争。这本书不重要，因为它讲的是客厅里女人们的感情。

    So that I will only pause here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which must be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them.

    所以我只稍微说上两句，请大家注意，对将来的女性来说，物质条件至关重要。书必须在某种程度上适应人的身体条件，甚至可以草率地说，女性写的书应该比男性写的书更短更紧凑，结构要清晰，不用进行长时间集中且不间断的写作。因为她们总是受到干扰。另外，男性和女性脑中输送营养的神经似乎构造不同，如果要他们发挥出各自最好和最努力的状态，就必须找到适合他们的方式。

    And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can't do this and you shan't do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way! So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the racecourse, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or to left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that. Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping and the crying were fraying to the nerves. But she did her best. Considering that Mary Carmi chael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.

    我看着她接受考验，我看到那些主教和院长，博士和教授，家长和教师大喊大叫，但希望她没有听到。他们都在警告和建议她：你不能做这个，你不该做那个！只有研究者和学者才能走上草坪！女性要有介绍信！胸怀大志的优雅女性小说家走这边！他们纠缠着她，像挤在赛马场栏杆边上的人群，她所面临的挑战，就是能否忽略身边的人，一心跨越自己的栅栏。我对她说，如果停下来咒骂，你就输了；停下来笑，也是一样。如果你犹豫，慌乱，你就完蛋了。我央求她，只管跳你的，仿佛我把所有钱都押在了她身上；她跨越了栅栏，轻盈得像只鸟儿。但是栅栏之后还有一道道栅栏。我怀疑她坚持不下来，因为鼓掌和叫喊声都消磨着她的精力。但她尽力了。考虑到玛丽·卡迈克尔不是天才，而是一位无名女子，在卧室兼起居室里写出了自己的第一部小说，没有足够好的条件，时间，金钱和闲暇，我想，她已经做得不错了。

    There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is 'to develop the Italian novel'. 'Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations' came to gether the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope 'that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it'. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town.

    学者们召开了一场会议，主题是“促进意大利小说的发展”。那天出席的都是“贵族，金融界和工业界名流，或法西斯集团名人”，他们讨论该议题后，给领导人发了一封电报，称“法西斯时代很快就会催生一位不愧于这个时代的诗人”。我们大可以虔诚地相信，但诗歌可不是孵化器生得出来的。诗歌的诞生需要母亲，也需要父亲。恐怕法西斯诗歌会变成一个可怕的夭折的胎儿，就像小县城博物馆里的藏品那样，装在一个玻璃瓶里展出。

    Since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren.

    因为一个人的大脑中要是没有这种融合，理智就会占了上风，大脑的其他能力就会僵化，最后荒废。

    It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

    对于自己性别的思考，是任何一个写作者的致命伤。成为一个简单纯粹的男人或者女人，都是致命的。

    Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn.

    任何艺术创作，都需要大脑中的男性和女性先达成某种合作。两种对立的元素必须紧密结合。作家的大脑必须完全放开，我们才能感觉到他完整地表达出了自己的经验。大脑必须自由，必须宁静，没有一个轮子嘎吱作响，没有一星半点的光，窗帘必须拉严。

    Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.

    赞美和批评一样毫无意义。虽然衡量的过程可能是一种愉快的消遣，但却是一项最徒劳的事业，屈服于衡量着的规则，是一种最为卑躬屈膝的态度。重要的是写自己想写的东西，至于它能存活好几年还是仅仅几个小时，没有人能说清楚。但如果牺牲你一丝一毫的想象力，或抹去它一点一滴的色彩，对某个手里拿着银奖杯的校长或袖中藏着标尺的教授言听计从，那就是一种最可悲的背叛。

    'The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance… a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.' That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

    “无论是现在还是过去两百年以来，贫穷的诗人都机会渺茫……英国的穷孩子就像雅典奴隶的儿子一样，很难实现心智的解放和自由，很难催生出伟大的文字来。”就是这样。物质基础决定心智的自由，心智的自由决定诗歌的诞生。