经济学人逝者 || 美国文学批评家哈罗德·布鲁姆

Falstaff Agonistes

斗士福斯塔夫

英文部分选自经济学人191026 Obituary版块

Obituary: Harold Bloom

讣告：哈罗德·布鲁姆

Falstaff Agonistes

斗士福斯塔夫

Harold Bloom, literary critic, died on October 14th, aged 89

哈罗德·布鲁姆，文学批评家，于10月14日逝世，享年89岁。

As he slumped in his chair, listening to some interviewer or student, Harold Bloom could seem a very picture of gloom. His jowly head leaned lower on his hand; his eyes sank deeper in their dark circles; his impressive belly sagged outward with each breath. Inside that head reposed all Shakespeare’s works, both plays and Sonnets; all the poetry of William Blake, including the most obscure; Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and as much of the Bible as was composed in Hebrew. Besides a good deal else. He was a monument of memory and exposition, a rock round which eager pupils gathered. But to his mind he was also a tired creature who was losing, or had lost, a war. He was Samuel Johnson, best of critics, who nonetheless grappled with “vile melancholy” all his life. And he was Falstaff, the philosopher of Eastcheap, the charismatic larger-than-life spirit of misrule, who was rejected in the end by Prince Hal for simply offering him a teacher’s love.

当哈罗德·布鲁姆瘫坐在椅子里听某个采访者或学生说话的时候，他看上去简直就是忧郁的化身。他把有着宽大下巴的脑袋低倚在手上；他眼圈发黑，眼睛陷得更深；而他显眼的肚腩随着每次呼吸往外摊出。在这颗脑袋里，歇息着莎士比亚所有的作品——既有戏剧，又有十四行诗；威廉·布莱克所有的诗歌——包括最晦涩难懂的那些；弥尔顿的《失乐园》；以及但凡是希伯来语写成的圣经。除此之外，还有好多的其他作品。他是强识和论道的典范，是求知若渴的学生们可以聚集的磐石。但在他自己看来，他也是一个打了败仗或者正在败下阵来的疲惫之人。他是塞缪尔·约翰逊，最优秀的批评家，却一生都在与“邪恶的忧郁”作斗争。他也是福斯塔夫，东切普街的哲学家，魅力四射又具传奇色彩的失序人物，最终却被哈尔王子拒绝，仅仅因为他给予了老师般的爱。

Goodness knows, he had reason to be discouraged. Over the decades that he had taught English literature, principally at Yale, he had found himself steadily surrounded by enemies. At first it was only the New Critics, F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot and the rest, with their promotion of dry Anglican Metaphysicals and their hatred of the Romantics he adored: Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats. By the 1960s he had managed to install his favourites on the syllabus again. Yet all around him the belief persisted that literature should be studied theoretically and reductively, for its structure and etymologies, as if genius could not appear and astonish out of a clear sky. My dear, as he would sigh to students giving him such piffle for the umpteenth time, that wouldn’t do.

他确实有理由感到沮丧。在他教授英语文学（主要是在耶鲁）的几十年里，他发现敌人也稳步相随。一开始还只是新批评派——F.R.利维斯、T.S.艾略特等人，他们推崇枯燥无味的盎格鲁玄学派文学，厌恶他钟爱的浪漫主义诗人：雪莱、华兹华斯、济慈。到了20世纪60年代，哈罗德·布鲁姆成功地将他所喜爱的作品再次列入教学课程。然而在他周围，人们却坚持认为，文学应以理论化和精简化的方式研究，研究它的结构和语源。说得好像天才不会突然横空出世似的。“亲爱的”，他无数次对着向他说这些鬼话的学生叹息道，“不是那样的。”

注：

1．玄学派诗人：Metaphysical Poets

玄学派（Metaphysical School）文学特点：

（1）二分体（dyad）：诗人与另一个人（女人、上帝）的故事、关系。情诗与宗教诗可能用类似的词汇及表达方式，让情诗神圣，宗教诗世俗。

（2）含有丰富情感。如刻画刻骨的性爱、神秘的柏拉图式精神恋爱、报复性的快人快语等。

（3）较为晦涩难懂，多修辞，如反语、类比等。很多隐喻被称为Conceits，（即奇思妙想），突出意想不到之感。意象诡谲，令人震惊（startling, grotesque）。

2. read extensively but select reductively: 博观约取

3. for the umpteenth time: 无数次

Worse was to come. He watched American universities, even those of name, fall prey to a rabble of Marxists, feminists, pseudo-historicists and cultural-hegemonists, who forced their own programmes on to English departments. His response, in 1994, was “The Western Canon”, a clarion-call that listed, from Dante to Molière, from Freud to Neruda, from Chaucer to Beckett, the 26 writers he considered central, and at the back the 3,000 or so books that everyone should read. His list of writers was all-white and almost all male—inevitably, as he refused to be strong-armed into picking “rudimentary” African-Americans or “sadly inadequate” women. He was now in hot water indeed, especially with those female students he had tried to seduce, Falstaff-clumsily, with Amontillado sherry; but he ignored it. As a lower-class Jew, the son of a garment-worker, decidedly rare on the faculty at Yale, he needed no lessons in minority-sensitivity. That was beside the point.

更糟糕的还在后头。哈罗德·布鲁姆眼看着美国大学——甚至那些名校——被一群乌合之众严重影响，有马克思主义者、女权主义者、伪历史主义者和文化霸权主义者。他们把自己的课程强加到英文系。而他的回应，是1994年推出的《西方正典》。这本战斗号角一样的书，列出了从但丁到莫里哀，弗洛伊德到聂鲁达，乔叟到贝克特等26位他认为最重要的作家，并在最后列出了约3000本必读书目。他列出的作家全是白人，而且几乎全是男性——必定会这样，因为他拒绝迫于强压而选择“尚不成熟”的非裔美国作家和“能力让人遗憾”的女性作家。他现在的确处境艰难，尤其是身陷和一些女学生的是非：他试图在喝过阿蒙提拉多雪利酒后引诱她们，像福斯塔夫般笨拙；但是布鲁姆对此不加理会。身为一个下层犹太人、一名裁缝的儿子——这样的出身在耶鲁的教职人员中很少见，他不需要谁来教他少数派的敏感性。而且这与主题无关。

注：

1.《西方正典》是哈罗德·布鲁姆的一部作品，里面列举的书单皆为西方文学的经典，告诉人们，莎士比亚或塞万提斯，荷马或但丁，乔叟或拉伯雷，阅读他们作品的真正作用是增进内在自我的成长。深入研读经典不会使人变好或变坏，也不会使公民变得更有用或更有害。心灵的自我对话本质上不是一种社会现实。西方经典的全部意义在于使人善用自己的孤独，这一孤独的最终形式是一个人和自己死亡的相遇。

2.In 2004, the author Naomi Wolf wrote that he made unwanted advances while she was attending Yale. Bloom denied the allegations.

作家纳奥米·沃尔夫在2004年写道，当她进入耶鲁大学时他（哈罗德·布鲁姆）对她进行了性骚扰。但是布鲁姆否认了这项指控。

The list of books caused a furious row too, as to what was on it and what not. His method had been simple: if a book survived a second serious reading, he included it. (He could read 400 pages in an hour; it was not so difficult.) People carped about contemporary relevance; but great literature, from Homer on, was always relevant. It reflected eternal verities of human life. A truly great book was not only an aesthetic pleasure; it also expanded cognitive power. It allowed an experience of otherness, and the lives of others, that was impossible otherwise. From this the self could take what it found most useful, and grow. As Emerson said—Emerson, with the transcendental Gnostics, being his sage, and “Self-Reliance” the creed he most approved of—some words could even strike the reader as sublime truth that he had known before. Thus “God in you…responds to God without”.

而哈罗德·布鲁姆列出的书目也引发了激烈争论，关于哪些书该列入、哪些不该。他的挑选方法很简单：如果一本书挺过了第二次郑重其事地阅读，就把它放到书单里。（哈罗德·布鲁姆能在1小时内读400页书；所以这么做并不难。）人们对文学作品的现世意义吹毛求疵；但是伟大的文学，从荷马开始，世世代代都有意义。它们反映了人类生活中的永恒真理。一部真正伟大的作品不仅给人美的享受，还能拓展人们的认知能力。它让人们感受差异性，体验他人的生活；没有这些书，人们是不可能有这些体验的。而通过这种体验，个体可以学习自认为最有用的东西，然后成长。正如爱默生所说——爱默生与超验的诺斯底主义者都是哈罗德·布鲁姆眼中的圣人，而《论自立》是他最为赞同的信条——有些话甚至能让读者猛地想起之前就知道的崇高真理。因此，“你心中的上帝……回应在你之外的上帝”。

注：诺斯底主义（或称灵知派和灵智派）的“诺斯底”一词在希腊语中意为“知识”，并把这种通过个人经历所获得的知识或意识称为“灵知”（或“真知”）。诺斯底主义者相信“灵知”可使他们脱离无知及现世。是一种企图中和物质和精神的二元论的世界观。

This had happened to him for the first time when he was swept away by Hart Crane’s poetry in the Bronx Public Library. He was eight, and already perplexing his Yiddish-speaking family by reciting Blake’s “Prophecies” around the place. Now, as he read “O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits/The agile precincts of the lark’s return”, the strange words burned. Eight years later it happened again, when he saw Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” and first met Falstaff in the round flesh, crying out his vitality (“Give me life!”) and his pathos. The writer who could create both Sir John and Hamlet, that quintessential ironist torn between thought and action, could be treated only with awe. He was God. Shakespeare, he wrote in 1998, had invented the modern concept of personality, the first characters who overheard their inner selves and were changed by it. It mattered little what sort of man Shakespeare was, whom the Sonnets were addressed to, what his politics were. His infinite art contained everyone. To the question “Why Shakespeare?” Professor Bloom’s answer was: “My dear, what else is there?”

哈罗德·布鲁姆第一次有这种感受，是在布朗克斯的公共图书馆读到哈特·克莱恩的诗歌的时候，他被深深吸引。他八岁时，就在布朗克斯那一带背诵威廉·布莱克的《预言》，就已经让说意第绪语的家人们听得一头雾水。现在，当他读到“啊！是你坚定的领悟，那一跳一跃，铸就了云雀回归的敏捷”时，那些奇怪的字句在他心中燃烧。8年后，这样的感受再次出现：他观看了莎士比亚的《亨利四世》，丰腴的福斯塔夫第一次鲜活地出现在他眼前，喊出了他的生命力（“给我生命！”）和悲怆。莎士比亚同时塑造出了约翰·福斯塔夫爵士和哈姆雷特——这个陷入思想和行动两难境地的最完美的批判者，哈罗德·布鲁姆认为对待他只能用敬畏。莎士比亚是上帝。哈罗德·布鲁姆在1998年写道，莎士比亚创造了性格的现代概念，创造了第一批倾听内心的自己并被其改变的角色。到底莎士比亚是什么样的人，他的十四行诗是写给谁的，他的政治主张是什么，这些问题都无关紧要了。因为他浩瀚的艺术作品覆盖了每种人。“为什么是莎士比亚?”对于这个问题，哈罗德·布鲁姆教授的回答是:“亲爱的，还有更好的选择吗?”

In that thought, the sense of a colossus whose work would never be bettered, lay the impulse for the whole enterprise of literature: for all the books stacked in his study, his shingle house in New Haven and his apartment in Greenwich Village, and laid up in layers in his brain. Each writer, he wrote in 1973, especially each poet, was engaged in an Oedipal agon, or struggle, against the influence of masterly precursors. Shelley had fought against Milton, Whitman against Emerson, Mailer against Hemingway. Inner anxieties, not outside factors, drove them. Each needed to let their own lustre shine. Only the strongest could manage that clinamen, that Lucretian swerve of the atoms which achieved change. Those were the men and women whose works had to be read.

基于这种想法，即认为某个巨匠的作品永远无法超越，才产生了筑起整座文学大厦的推动力：哈罗德·布鲁姆书房里存放的所有书籍就是来自这种动力（无论是位于纽黑文的木瓦房还是格林威治村的公寓），存在于他脑海里的作品也是如此。1973年，哈罗德·布鲁姆曾写过，每一位作家，尤其是诗人，都在与伟大前驱的影响，做一场“俄狄浦斯式的”agon（译者注：古希腊语，斗争，呼应了题目里的agonistes）”，或者说斗争。比如，雪莱与弥尔顿，惠特曼与艾默生，梅勒与海明威。内心的焦虑，而非外界的因素，驱使着作家们前进。每一个作家都需要让自己的才能得到彰显。但是只有最强大的人，才可以完成“克里纳门” ，即卢克莱修使宇宙发生改变的原子偏倚。这些人的作品才是我们必须去读的。

 注：

1. 俄狄浦斯情结的（Oedipal）

哈罗德·布鲁姆认为，每一个诗人的发轫点是一种比普通人更为强烈的对“死亡的必然性”的反抗意识。年轻的诗人从一开始就是逆反式的人物，像他的前驱们那样去追求一个永不能达到的目标，传统就像父亲的形象一样，企图压制新人，阻止其树立起强者诗人的地位，而新崛起的诗人又好像有着“俄狄浦斯情结”的儿子一样，试图对前驱的诗歌进行有意或者无意的误读，从而贬低传统。

2. 本文题目这么使用Agonistes也会让人联想到”Samson Agonistes《斗士参孙》”这个书名，弥尔顿的作品。

3.“克里纳门”（Clinamen）

这个词借自哲学家卢克莱修，原意是指原子的偏移能使宇宙发生变化。布鲁姆用它来指对诗歌的有意的误读。布鲁姆借用弥尔顿《失乐园》中的人物来作比喻，认为撒旦是现代诗人的形象，上帝是他的先辈诗人，而亚当则是尚未找到自己声音的、具有强大潜质的诗人。这种诗人和诗人之父之间的“克里纳门”是后来的诗人完成的，一部现代诗歌的真实历史就是这些修正式转向的精确记载，布鲁姆特别指出：“一部成果斐然的‘诗的影响’的历史——亦即文艺复兴以来的西方诗歌的主要传统——乃是一部焦虑和自我拯救的漫画的历史，是歪曲和误解的历史，是反常和随心所欲的修正的历史，而没有所有这一切，现代诗歌是根本不可能生存的”（31页）。

And where was he on this battlefield? At the forefront in some ways, with his books bestsellers and his name glorious or notorious in the celebrity realm of buzz. He was leading the charge to keep great literature alive: to ensure it was both read and, above all, taught in the universities, where he fretted that syllabuses might soon consist of Harry Potter and Batman comics. The Western canon was still his chief care, a tradition accrued over 3,000 years; let others add on, if they wanted, the Asians and the Africans. He worried, too, about the squandering of short and precious time. Intimations of mortality added to his Johnsonian bouts of sadness. He had great precursors; his successor was not obvious.

那么，在这种战斗中，哈罗德·布鲁姆又处在哪个位置呢？从某种程度上来说，他处在前线，带着自己的畅销书，以及在名人圈中或熠熠生辉或臭名昭著的名声。他带头保护文学著作，使之永存不朽：保证它们不但被阅读，而且更重要的是，在大学里被教授。他担心不久后大学的教学大纲就可能会囊括《哈利·波特》和《蝙蝠侠》漫画。西方的经典文学，作为一项沿袭了3000年的传统，仍然是他最为挂心的。就让其他人——如果他们愿意的话——来添上亚洲作者和非洲作者的作品。此外，对于虚度短暂宝贵的光阴，他也担忧不已。这种对必死性的暗示更加剧了他的约翰逊式悲伤。他有众多伟大的前驱，他的继任者却还未崭露头角。

Still, another hero, Rabbi Tarphon, provided a motto. “You do not need to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” He was busy teaching at Yale on October 10th.

尽管如此，另一位伟人，拉比·塔蓬（Rabbi Tarphon）曾说过一句至理名言： 你并不需要完成作品，但是你不能随便半途而废。”10月10日，在他去世前几天，哈罗德·布鲁姆还在耶鲁大学忙于教书。

翻译组：

Alex，不务正业的理工男

Echo，爱英音的翻译专业学生

Sheri，坚信可以forever young的老年人

校核组：

Cece，消防人+经济学人粉丝

Qianna，追求专业的非英专，很讲逻辑，英伦摇滚迷

Rachel Zhang，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译（年年备战一口）