搖搖一生
出版社:香港浸會大學翻譯研究中心、國際演藝評論家協會聯合出版
出版日期:2005
ISBN:9789628321544
作者:Samuel Beckett,黎翠珍 (譯)
页数:104页
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Mother tongue in a foreign mouth: Jane Lai’s Cantonese translations for the theatreLAI, JANE CHUI CHUN. Jane Lai Drama Translation Series (9 vols.). Hong Kong: Centre for Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University, & International Association of Theatre Critics (HK), 2005. This series presents Jane Lai’s translations of nine plays in the Cantonese vernacular, including established repertoire pieces such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear, and more recent works like Samuel Beckett’s minimalist dramaticule, Rockaby. Since they are translated in the vernacular, they were meant, from the very beginning, to be vocalised on stage rather than read on the page: a welcome starting point, for the very life of the theatre lies precisely in its vocal enactment in performance. The choice of Cantonese raises some interesting issues. Martha Cheung in her Introduction to the series mentions the reluctance of publishers to accept the plays for publication, as no one would put one’s business at stake by launching something written in an ‘inferior’ language like Cantonese. This leads us to ponder the unique status of Cantonese in Hong Kong. In most parts of China, Putonghua is the absolute higher variety of the Chinese language. Putonghua’s prestige comes from its long and respected literary tradition, and is consolidated by education and national standardisation; while local dialects (including Cantonese) are used only for everyday functions and learned by children in the natural way: they belong in the lower varieties. Putonghua has been standardised in such a way as to have superseded the role of local dialects as the mother tongue. In Hong Kong, however, the picture is far less holistic. Where one talks the way one writes in Putonghua, in Cantonese one never talks the way one writes. Cantonese itself is thus divided into two varieties, the ‘higher’ one used only on formal occasions like Chinese courses and recitation contests; the ‘lower’ other used by most people most of the time in daily communication. While this is true of other Cantonese-speaking communities like Guangzhou, the divide is less marked as people in those communities can resort to Putonghua when it comes to formal activities – Putonghua has been internalised in such a way that it assumes an absolute higher status. People in Hong Kong, however, have nothing to resort to. Think of the coexistence of a higher, written form of Chinese and the spoken form of the Cantonese vernacular: students recite in Cantonese, for instance, a passage which is written in that higher form of Chinese. Every act of enunciation in that written form of Chinese becomes ‘abject’ in nature: there is something lurking threateningly in this that is not ‘me’. Hence the ultimate complication: while politically and culturally the written form enjoys a higher status, the spoken form of Cantonese assumes psychological prestige as it is the more ‘intimate’ variety, the mother tongue. Thus Jane Lai’s translation in the Cantonese vernacular makes some special pleading for itself. It seeks to (a) bring Cantonese speakers a most intimate experience of the plays; and (b) reinvigorate the literary quality of Cantonese by showing that it is more ‘presentable’ than most people think. This is no easy task which demands more than a talent for language. If it takes a poet to translate poetry, then it must take at least a practitioner of theatre, if not a playwright, to translate drama. For only someone with empirical knowledge of theatre will see what works on stage and what does not. Jane Lai’s background in dramatic production stands her in good stead because her endeavour is virtually unique in its concern with the sounds and rhythms of the plays. Most of the plays collected in this series have been staged by the Seals Theatre, which she co-founded with Vicki Ooi in 1978. Working closely with actors, directors, and stage dancers, matching language with stage décors, body movements, as well as the performers’ vocal attributes, she has sought to achieve the best possible speech rhythms and capture the musicality of the original. Sometimes the translations are nuanced to the level of exclamations: Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;And take upon the mysteries of things,As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,That ebb and flow by the moon. 李 唔去唔去、唔去唔去。嚟啦，我哋去監牢，我哋兩人高歌，好似係籠中鳥，你若求我祝福，我就會下跪向你求寬恕。我哋可以咁樣度日，祈禱，唱歌，仲可以講故事，笑一下啲披金戴銀嘅蝴蝶，聽一下閒人閑語話當朝，同佢哋高談闊論朝中事，誰勝誰負，誰人失勢，邊個當權。傾下普天之下嘅奧妙事，好似得天獨厚知天意。安坐於監牢四壁內，冷眼看朋黨浮沉於官宦潮。(King Lear, 114)Jane Lai is sensitive enough to have spotted the drastic differences between English and Chinese exclamations: where the former is less varied in vocabulary, its tone heavily dependent on the context of articulation, the latter is more vocabulary- and rhythm-based. Tellingly she observes, ‘The four No’s in the original are fine, you can say them in whatever way you like. You can say, for instance, “No No, No No”, “No! No, No, No!” or even “No, No, No! No!” But in Chinese, three consecutive 不’s will have sounded funny, four, hilarious, as in the case of Zhu Shenghao’s translation. In Cantonese, you normally say 唔去 three times when you’re angry. Four 唔去’s in a row with a pause after each would have rendered Lear effeminate.’ (‘Conversation with Martha Cheung’, Rockaby, 39-40) Eventually she broke down the four into two parts, each consisting of two 唔去’s. By doing so, she retains the original power and number of words while avoiding being funny. Apart from its sensitivity to sound patterns, this passage is also extremely beautiful. We see that archaic expressions and syntax fit very well into spoken Cantonese without appearing odd or strange. ‘I find the Cantonese vernacular beautiful … People say that Cantonese is not presentable, I don’t believe that. I said I would convince them by translating King Lear into Cantonese, … the point is how you use the language.’ (‘Conversation with Martha Cheung’, Rockaby, 35) According to Lai, there are forgotten elements of the dialect that need to be discovered so as to reinvigorate it as the carrier of local culture. Cantonese proves to be most energetic and accommodating in her translations: with common people, it is vigorous and vivacious; in a palace or on an altar, it is delicate, forceful, and solemn. Whatever the situation, it shows no signs of depletion. In a disarming preface, Lai says that where she had to decide between accuracy and the actors’ convenience, she would sacrifice the former for the sake of the latter: ‘It’s better to “see” with your ears, after all.’ Her translations display a strong dependence on the ear’s capability to hear – as we read them aloud, we marvel at the imminent presence that sounds alone can bring about. Here, theatre is at its quintessential best when sonic energies surge and foam and bodies diffuse, melting into each other, subsiding into the heaving syrup of a rare felicity. Indeed, no disservice is worse than to fossilise a highly performable text in the course of translation, however accurate it may be. I like Jane Lai’s humble but suggestive comment on the communicative function of her translation: ‘I don’t translate to introduce a foreign culture to the local audience; I translate to bring them the pleasure that a foreign audience would experience.’ To this ‘pleasure’, Walter Benjamin would have given the name ‘pure language’. According to him, it is in view of this that the translator must work: instead of reproducing the meaning of the original, one ‘must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable fragments of a greater language’ (Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’). In this sense, each becomes an echo of a ventriloquist’s voice, suggestive of an unexplained presence in which they are complicated, but which they do not contain. Then the boundaries between them break down and they spill into each other: the original gains new vigour in the translation, when the translation achieves a life of its own by refusing to be a mere ‘copy’ of the original. This is, to borrow from Roland Barthes, a vertical kind of domestication. For so long, we have been talking about the pros and cons of a horizontal kind of domestication whereby words ‘deliver their meaning when the utterance is completed’ so that ‘meaning […] moves across them, over time, in a constant process’ (Barthes, ‘Writing Degree Zero’). In Jane Lai, however, words and their connotations are far less important than the vertical axes of style in which the utterances exceed their content, representing a dynamic not restricted by the original: Lear. The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft.Kent. Let it fall rather, though the fork invadeThe region of my heart: …李 利箭上急弦，你避開！健 利箭離弓由他發，雖然中的在我心…… (King Lear, 7)Lines like these remind us of Cantonese Opera, yet a fine balance is maintained. While we are constantly aware of the presence of a familiar form, we are never able name it. The similarity is alienated such that the audience feel, ‘The play is so freshly ours!’All in all, Jane Lai’s translations are extremely beautiful, well-paced, and vivaciously colloquial with a good sense of rhythm. One can always quibble with the rendering of a line here and there, but the standard of translation is very high on the whole. This is rich fare not only for practitioners of drama who want to discover something new about their familiar plays, but also for the discerning student of Western theatre who might find the original intimidating: they serve to whet the appetite for further exploration of individual figures. In reading these plays, one is haunted by lines like冇嘢要，又冇人要, a terse and moving translation of Eugene O’Neill’s original: ‘… who does not really want and is not really wanted …’ (Long Day’s Journey into Night, 140) Such a simple but immensely touching rendering is by no means easy to come up with: it takes all good sense on the translator’s part in her most intimate encounter with the original, as she works through the selvedges of its textile. Because I admire this series, I offer here a mild animadversion. There are occasional typographical errors, where, for instance, it is said that Samuel Beckett died in 1982 at the age of eighty-three (Rockaby, 85). Lovers of Beckett would not be happy to learn that their favourite writer had died seven years earlier than he actually did.
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黎翠珍教授原是海豹劇團的創始人，翻譯劇本一直用廣東話。貝克特這部劇考驗的是語言的連貫性，把整個劇本讀出來相當好聽，例如，long day 譯