Reading　談閱讀

Reading

談閱讀

Wystan Hugh Auden

威斯坦·休·奧登

作者簡介

威斯坦·休·奧登（Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907—1973），英裔美國詩人，20世紀最偉大的作家之一。他自幼在牛津接受教會文學熏陶，在擔任英國左翼政黨主筆多年后，于20世紀40年代移居美國。奧登在政治、心理學、神學方面均有建樹，作品以《葬禮藍調》（Funeral Blues）和《1939年9月1日》（September 1, 1939）流傳最廣，均被翻拍成電影。

本文節(jié)選自1962年出版的奧登散文集《染工之手與其他散篇》（The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays），文風極其犀利，名言警句層出不窮。文中提及了一個關于閱讀的經(jīng)典問題——荒島求生，該帶何書？不知作者睿智精辟的回答會不會令你大跌眼鏡。

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

—G. C. Lichtenberg

One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.

—Paul Valery

The interest of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.

We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so.

As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case—history of the author's sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer”than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

We cannot read an author for the first time in the same way that we read the latest book by an established author. In a new author, we tend to see either only his virtues or only his defects and, even if we do see both, we cannot see the relation between them. In the case of an established author, if we can still read him at all, we know that we cannot enjoy the virtues we admire in him without tolerating the defects we deplore. Moreover, our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.

A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgments as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great-Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!

In literature, vulgarity is preferable to nullity, just as grocer's port is preferable to distilled water.

Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitation which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be.

It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,”he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,”because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else's.

一本書就是一面鏡子：如果一頭毛驢朝鏡里看，你就別指望能照出個圣徒。

——G. C. 利希滕貝格1

只有帶著點私人目的去讀書，才可能讀得好?；蛟S是想汲取力量，或許是出于對作者的憎恨。

——保爾·瓦雷里2

作家和讀者的興趣永遠不一樣。如果兩者偶爾一致，那是幸運的巧合。

對于讀者與作家的關系，大多數(shù)讀者持雙重標準：讀者可以隨心所欲地對作者不忠，作者卻萬萬不能對讀者不忠。

閱讀就是翻譯，因為沒有兩個人的閱讀體驗是相同的。拙劣的讀者就像蹩腳的譯者——該意譯時直譯，該直譯時意譯。學習如何閱讀時，學問固然有價值，卻不如直覺重要；有些偉大的學者就是糟糕的譯者。

擯棄作者有意安排的途徑，另辟蹊徑地讀一本書，往往能獲益匪淺。不過只有當（已不再是孩子的）我們知道自己在做什么時，這種情況才成立。

在某種程度上，大多數(shù)讀者就像往廣告女郎臉上畫胡子的頑童。

一本書具有文學價值的標志之一，是它能以多種方式閱讀。反之亦然，色情作品沒有文學價值的證據(jù)是，如果你讀它不是為了尋找性刺激，而是為了——打個比方——研究作者性幻想史的心理案例，那你一定覺得無聊透頂。

盡管文學作品能以多種方式閱讀，但方式十分有限，而且可以按等級次序排列。有些方式明顯比其他“更真實”，有些比較可疑，有些明顯是錯的，有些——比如倒著讀小說——則是荒謬的。這就是為什么被困荒島時，人們會選擇帶一部好詞典，而非他能想到的最偉大的文學名著。因為對讀者來說，詞典是絕對被動的，能以無限種方式閱讀。

我們第一次閱讀某位作家的作品時，不可能采取閱讀成名作家新作的方式。對于一位新作家，我們傾向于只看優(yōu)點或缺點；即使既看見優(yōu)點也看見缺點，我們也弄不清兩者的關系。對于成名作家——如果我們還讀他的作品的話——我們就會知道，不容忍令人嘆息的缺點，就無法欣賞令人欽佩的優(yōu)點。再者，我們對成名作家的評價，不僅僅是審美的評價。他的新書除了文學作品本身的優(yōu)點，還包含著我們長久以來對他的喜愛。他不只是詩人或小說家，還是我們自傳中的一個角色。

詩人讀其他詩人的詩歌，或小說家讀其他小說家的小說時，一定會把別人和自己的作品作個比較。他對所讀作品的評價總是這類：我的上帝??！我的祖爺爺??！我的舅舅??！我的敵人??！我的兄弟??！我的蠢兄弟??！

在文學作品中，粗俗無聊勝過空洞無物，就像雜牌葡萄酒勝過蒸餾水。

好的品味不是指排斥劣作，而是指識別優(yōu)劣。如果某人品味極好而不得不排斥某書，那他也是心懷遺憾，而非心情愉悅。

讓人心情愉悅絕非萬無一失的指南，但至少犯錯最少。

孩子閱讀為求一樂，但樂趣對他來說沒有差別。比如，他無法區(qū)別審美的樂趣、學習的樂趣和做白日夢的樂趣。進入青春期后，我們意識到有許多不同的樂趣，也知道其中有些無法同時感受，但我們需要別人幫忙界定這些樂趣。無論是品嘗美食還是鑒賞文學作品，年輕人都會尋找一位值得信賴的權威導師。他按照導師的推薦去吃東西和閱讀，當然也難免會偶爾欺騙一下自己；他不得不裝作喜歡吃橄欖，或是喜歡讀《戰(zhàn)爭與和平》，但實際上沒那么喜歡。20歲到40歲是我們弄清“自己是誰”的時期，包括弄懂“偶然的限制”（我們有責任在成長中突破這種限制）與“天性必須的限制”（逾越這種限制必受懲罰）之間的區(qū)別。在這個學習過程中，很少有人能不犯錯，很少有人不想超越自我的局限，成為一個不平凡的人。

在這個時期，一位作家最容易被另一位作家或某些空論引入歧途。當一個20歲到40歲之間的人提到一件藝術品時說，“我知道自己喜歡什么”，他實際上說的是“我沒有自己的品位，只是接受了我文化背景的品位”。因為在20歲到40歲之間，一個人擁有真正獨立品位的最確定的標志，就是他對此不敢確定。40歲之后，如果我們還沒喪失真正的自我，樂趣就會再次像在我們兒時一樣，指引我們應該讀些什么。

藝術品帶給我們的樂趣，不能和我們享受的其他樂趣混為一談。但是兩者之間存在聯(lián)系——這是屬于我們的樂趣，而不屬于其他人。

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1．格奧爾格·克里斯托夫·利希滕貝格（Georg Christoph Lichtenberg，1742—1799），德國物理學家、諷刺作家。

2．保爾·瓦雷里（Paul Valery，1871—1945），舊譯梵樂希，法國象征派大師、法蘭西學院院士，被譽為“20世紀法國最偉大的詩人”。