Mad or not Mad? That IS the Question. A Reading of Zhou Shoujuan's and Woo Kuangkien's Translations of 'The Tell-Tale Heart'

「瘋」「狂」之間：周瘦鵑、伍光建譯愛倫坡短篇小說'The Tell-Tale Heart'初探

吳碩禹(Shuoyu Charlotte Wu)

Edgar Allan Poe ； Zhou Shoujuan ； Woo Kuangkien ； 愛倫坡 ； 周瘦鵑 ； 伍光建

翻譯學研究集刊

20輯（2016 / 12 / 01）

57 - 73

英文

Among all the Western writers introduced to China between the 1900s and the 1930s, Edgar Allan Poe was a unique case. He was first known as ‘the father of short stories’ and then a poet in China. At the time when short stories came to be the favorite among literati, Poe and his works became the icon of such a genre for both translators and writers. The present study proposes to go back to the first site of contact-translation-to explore how translation serves as a hybrid textual space that allows contacts between a foreign work and the domestic system to be realized. For this purpose, the present study analyzes Zhou Shoujuan’s and Woo Kuangkien’s translations of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ to explore how and why ‘madness’ in Poe’s story was embodied in two completely different manners. In Zhou’s translation, the focus on recollecting of a past event, acknowledgement of the wrongdoing and depicting the strangeness of the event make Zhou’s narrator a Chuangqi-like protagonist. Woo, a translator who had a great knack of taming the foreign texts with domesticated translation, opted for a near sentence-to-sentence translation, presenting a psychopath who can barely express himself clearly. The present paper argues the incarnation of ‘madness’ in Zhou’s and Woo’s translation projects a shift of translation canon as well as a changing imagination of the West.

周瘦鵑與伍光建同為清末民初前後的翻譯大家。兩人譯著等身，大力引介西方作品，但身後評價卻不一。魯迅嘗謂周譯為「用心頗為懇摯，不僅志在愉悅俗人之耳目，足為近來譯事之光。」。反觀伍譯，卻遭忽略、飽受「不忠實」之評。本研究比對周、伍二人於1917 年及1934 年所譯愛倫坡之短篇小說The Tell-Tale Heart。周以淺文理文言翻譯此文，無論語彙體裁皆都取歸化手法。伍譯則以白話譯出此文。不同於伍光建早期以歸化為主的譯法，伍光建此譯近乎直譯。一文一白，一歸化一直譯，愛倫坡筆下人物的瘋狂行徑因而以兩種不同面貌躍然紙上。周譯以擬傳奇之筆法，側重追憶、補過、立異寫出「狂人」異事。伍氏並非不懂如何調動句式以求譯文通暢，但此例中伍譯卻緊貼原文直譯，語句乖誕，囈語一般地道出「瘋人」之事。本文首先爬梳愛倫坡於中文世界的譯介狀況，進而分析周、伍二譯如何解讀狂人心事，以及此二解讀所映射的翻譯脈絡與意涵。

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