足本《金瓶梅》英譯問世，詳盡呈現明代世情
閱讀2013年11月21日
1950年，16歲的美國傳教士之子芮效衛(David Tod Roy)踏進了中國南京的一個舊書店，找一本色情書。
他要找的是未刪減版的《金瓶梅》。16世紀晚期，一個不知名的作者寫了這本傷風敗俗的色情小說，講的是一個腐敗商人發跡和衰敗的故事。
芮效衛之前只見過一個不完整的英文譯本，書中出現過於淫穢的描寫時，該版本便適時地轉用拉丁語。但在毛澤東於此前一年掌控中國後，緊張的老闆們丟棄了道德上及政治上可疑的物品，該書——一本古代的中文完整版——就是其中之一。
「作為一個十幾歲的少年，有機會讀一些色情的東西讓我感到非常激動，」日前，芮效衛在電話中回憶說，「但我發現，這本書的其他一些方面也很有趣。」現年80歲的芮效衛是芝加哥大學(University of Chicago)中國文學榮休教授。
追隨芮效衛的讀者們也有同樣感受。芮效衛花費了將近40年的時間將 完這部足本《金瓶梅》翻成了英文，這項工作最近剛剛完結，普林斯頓大學出版社(Princeton University Press)出版了第五冊，也就是最後一冊——《死亡》(The Dissolution)。
明代小時《金瓶梅》的插畫。芮效衛剛剛翻譯了此書，譯本共有五冊，尾注達4400餘條。
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. Photograph by John Lamberton
小說家斯蒂芬·馬爾什(Stephen Marche)上個月在《洛杉磯書評》(The Los Angeles Review of Books)發表文章，稱讚芮效衛巧妙地呈現了一部內容豐富的明代風俗百科全書式小說，他總結道，譯本具有好萊塢式的風格，就像「簡·奧斯汀(Jane Austen)與赤裸裸色情描寫的結合」。芮效衛的博學多識也讓做學術的同事們肅然起敬，他似乎對所有文學典故和文化細節都作了注釋。
「他是這樣一個人，覺得自己有責任知道一切與這本書有關的事情，甚至包括那些順便提到的事情，」哥倫比亞大學(Columbia University)中國文學教授商偉說，「完成這樣的工程需要一定的執着精神。」
同樣，普通讀者也需要一定的執着才能讀完五冊圖書，因為該書的篇幅 （將近3000頁）堪比普魯斯特(Proustian)的作品，人物陣容（有800多個人物）堪比德米爾(DeMille)的電影，還有類似《尤利西斯》 (Ulysses)的平凡細節描寫，更別說芮效衛添加的4400個尾注，這些尾注的範圍與準確度可與納博科夫(Nabokov)筆下那些痴迷考據的學者一 比高下。
尾注的內容包含小說中一些往往晦澀難懂的文學典故，並有關於「使用鳳仙花及蒜汁染指甲的方法」的深入閱讀建議，以及一些鮮為人知的明代俚語，芮效衛驕傲地指出，連母語是中文的學者都不知道這些俚語的意思。
芮效衛
Nathan Weber for The New York Times
「這不僅僅是一個譯本，還是一本參考書，」匹茲堡大學(University of Pittsburgh)的訪問學者張義宏說。「這為中國文學及文化打開了一扇窗。」張義宏正在將芮效衛的一些注釋翻成中文，以此作為博士論文的一部分，他在北京外國語大學攻讀博士。
然後就是讓該書充滿魅力的性描寫，雖然很少有人真的讀過這本書。在毛澤東統治時期，只有政府高官（他們奉命研究有關王朝時代腐敗的描述）和經過挑選的學者才能看到未刪節的版本。如今，儘管很容易在中國網站上下載這本書，但仍然很難找到完整版。
這本書的直露程度甚至讓一些西方文學學者感到吃驚——特別是臭名昭著的第27章。在這一章中，名叫西門慶的商人對他最卑劣的情婦進行了匪夷所思的長時間性虐。
「教到這裡的時候，我的學生都目瞪口呆，雖然他們早就知道這部小說 內容不雅，」俄亥俄州立大學(Ohio State University)的中國文學教授夏頌(Patricia Sieber)說。「性虐待、把各種不同尋常的東西當做性玩具、濫用春藥、各種令人髮指的性交，這本書里應有盡有。」
小說中的性描寫也對一些現代作品產生了啟發作用。譚恩美(Amy Tan)的新小說《驚奇谷》(The Valley of Amazement)描述了這樣一個場景：在20世紀初的上海，一名上了年紀的高級妓女被人要求再現《金瓶梅》當中一個格外下流的性愛場面。
「要我說，這裡面沒有哪個角色是可愛的，」譚恩美在提到《金瓶梅》時說，「但它的確是一部文學巨著。」
不過，學者們急切地補充道，《金瓶梅》的內容遠不止是性愛。這是中國第一部與神話或武裝起義無關的長篇小說，它關注普通人和日常生活，記錄了衣食、家庭風俗、醫藥、遊戲和葬禮的微小細節，還提供了幾乎所有東西的精確價格，包括各級官員行賄受賄的數額。
芮效衛說，「這本書對一個道德敗壞的社會進行了異常詳細的描述。」
芮效衛表示，他的翻譯工作始於20世紀70年代。當時，克萊門特· 埃傑頓(Clement Egerton)1939年的英文譯本出了一個修訂本，把譯成拉丁語的淫穢內容轉譯成了英語。但是，芮效衛說，這個版本仍然省略了許多出自中國古詩和散文 的引文，比原文少了很多韻味。
所以，他開始把每一個引自較早中國文學作品的句子都抄在卡片上，最終累積了幾千句；為了找到引語的出處，他還閱讀了已知的曾在16世紀末流通的所有文學作品。
譯本第一冊於1993年出版，受到了廣泛好評；第二冊在漫長的八年之後才出版。一些同事敦促他加快進度，減少注釋的量。有一次，一個中國網站甚至報道稱，他已在工作時死亡。
即將完成最後一冊的時候，芮效衛被確診患了盧·格里克病(Lou Gehrig\'s disease)，所以也排除了任何出精簡版的可能性。他的芝加哥同事余國藩(Anthony Yu)在翻譯另一部明代長篇經典小說《西遊記》時曾採用這種做法。余國藩的譯本備受讚揚。
「我想念專註於某件事情的感覺，」芮效衛說，「不幸的是，我經常會覺得疲勞。」
學者們認為，芮效衛（他的弟弟芮效儉[J. Stapleton Roy]是美國1991年至1995年的駐華大使）拯救了《金瓶梅》在西方的名譽。西方原來認為這本書不過是一本富於異國情調的色情小說，有了他的譯本，人們可以更多地從政治角度來閱讀這部作品了。
對於中國的評論者而言，這部作品不難獲得。中國人認為，這部小說也是當今充斥報端的各種政治和社會醜陋現象的寫照。
「你現在很容易就能找到西門慶這樣的人，」匹茲堡大學的張義宏說。「不僅是在中國，世界各地都有。」
翻譯：許欣、陳柳*****
【金瓶梅】(淨本) 台灣市面頗多版本
【金瓶梅詞話】北京: 人民文學出版社 2000 上下 (有注解) 約同時---美國某大學出版社有詳細的英譯本
十幾年前，陳巨擘先生主持巨流出版公司，曾引進許多原版書，當然包括普林斯頓大學出版社的這本“The Plum in the Golden Vase,” Translated by David Tod Roy 當時可能只出版前2本. 我是代理商，當時也忙著出版自己的書，所以沒好好讀它. 幾年之後我知道臺灣大學圖書館有此書.....
An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still
November 21, 2013
When David Tod Roy entered a used-book shop in the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1950, he was a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book.
His quarry was an unexpurgated copy of “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” an infamously pornographic tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant, written by an anonymous author in the late 16th century.
Mr. Roy had previously encountered only an incomplete English translation, which switched decorously into Latin when things got too raunchy. But there it was — an old Chinese edition of the whole thing — amid other morally and politically suspect items discarded by nervous owners after Mao Zedong’s takeover the previous year.
“As a teenage boy, I was excited by the prospect of reading something pornographic,” Mr. Roy, now 80 and an emeritus professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, recalled recently by telephone. “But I found it fascinating in other ways as well.”
So have readers who have followed Mr. Roy’s nearly 40-year effort to bring the complete text into English, which has just reached its conclusion with the publication by Princeton University Press of the fifth and final volume, “The Dissolution.”
A 17th-century illustration for the Ming dynasty novel “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” newly translated, in five volumes with more than 4,400 endnotes, by David Tod Roy.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. Photograph by John Lamberton
The novelist Stephen Marche, writing last month in The Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Mr. Roy’s masterly rendering of a richly encyclopedic novel of Ming dynasty manners, which Mr. Marche summed up, Hollywood-pitch style, as “Jane Austen meets hard-core pornography.” And Mr. Roy’s scholarly colleagues are no less awe-struck at his erudition, which seemingly leaves no literary allusion or cultural detail unannotated.
“He is someone who believes it’s his obligation to know absolutely everything about this book, even things that are only mentioned passingly,” said Wei Shang, a professor of Chinese literature at Columbia University. “It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to complete this kind of project.”
It also may take a certain stubbornness on the part of ordinary readers to make it all the way through this five-volume work, given its Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters) and “Ulysses”-like level of quotidian detail — to say nothing of Mr. Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes, whose range and precision would give one of Nabokov’s obsessive fictional scholars a run for his money.
They touch on subjects ranging from the novel’s often obscure literary references and suggested further reading on “the use of impatiens blossoms and garlic juice to dye women’s fingernails” to obscure Ming-era slang whose meaning, Mr. Roy notes with pride, had long eluded even native Chinese-speaking scholars.
“It’s not just a translation, it’s also a reference book,” said Yihong Zhang, a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who is translating some of Mr. Roy’s notes into Chinese as part of his doctoral dissertation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. “It opens a window onto Chinese literature and culture.”
And then there is the sex, which has fed fascination with the book, even though few people could actually read it. In Mao’s China, access to the unexpurgated edition was restricted to government high officials (who were urged to study its depiction of imperial corruption) and select academics. Today, complete versions remain hard to find in China, though it is easily downloadable on Chinese Internet sites.
The level of raunch remains startling even to some Western literary scholars — particularly the infamous Chapter 27, in which the merchant, named Ximen Qing, puts his most depraved concubine to particularly prolonged and imaginative use.
“When I taught it, my students were flabbergasted, even though they knew about the novel’s reputation,” said Patricia Sieber, a professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University. “S-and-M, the use of unusual objects as sex toys, excessive use of aphrodisiacs, sex under all kinds of nefarious circumstances — you name it, it’s all there.”
The novel’s sex has also inspired some modern reconsiderations. Amy Tan’s new novel, “The Valley of Amazement,” features a scene in which an aging courtesan in early-20th-century Shanghai is asked to re-enact a particularly degrading sex scene from this classic.
“I can’t say any of the characters are likable,” Ms. Tan said of the older novel. “But it’s a literary masterpiece.”
But the “Chin P’ing Mei,” as the novel is known in Chinese, is about far more than just sex, scholars hasten to add. It was the first long Chinese narrative to focus not on mythical heroes or military adventures, but on ordinary people and everyday life, chronicled down to the minutest details of food, clothing, household customs, medicine, games and funeral rites, with exact prices given for just about everything, including the favor of bribe-hungry officials up and down the hierarchy.
“It’s an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society,” Mr. Roy said.
Mr. Roy dates the beginning of his work on the translation to the 1970s. By then, a revision of Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation had put the Latinized dirty bits into English. But that edition still omitted the many quotations from earlier Chinese poetry and prose, along with, Mr. Roy said, much of the authentic flavor.
So he began copying every line borrowed from earlier Chinese literature onto notecards, which eventually numbered in the thousands, and reading every literary work known to have circulated in the late 16th century, to identify the allusions.
The first volume appeared in 1993 to rave reviews; the next came a long eight years later. Some colleagues urged him to go faster and scale back the notes. At one point, a Chinese website even reported that he had died amid his labors.
Just as Mr. Roy was completing the final volume, he received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which ruled out any prospect of preparing a condensed edition, as his Chicago colleague Anthony Yu did with his acclaimed translation of “Journey to the West,” another marathon-length Ming classic.
“I miss having something to concentrate on,” Mr. Roy said. “But unfortunately, I’m suffering from virtually constant fatigue.”
Scholars credit Mr. Roy (whose brother, J. Stapleton Roy, was United States ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995) with rescuing “The Plum in the Golden Vase” from its reputation in the West as merely exotic pornography and opening the door to a more political reading of the book.
It’s one that already comes easily to commentators in China, where the novel is seen as holding up a mirror to the tales of political and social corruption that fill newspapers now.
“You can find people like Ximen Qing easily today,” said Mr. Zhang in Pittsburgh. “Not just in China, but everywhere.”
林漢章說〈續1〉
http://www.wretch.cc/blog/fryuan1954/12374294其十
【金瓶梅詞話】一書，明代萬曆年間蘭陵笑笑生所著，另有一說是王世貞所著，迄無明確定論。這是一本描述明末社會人情世態的小說，對於人物生活、對話及家庭 瑣事的描述可謂淋漓盡致，在文學及社會學的研究上有其可觀的價值，李漁將其與三國演義、西遊記、水滸傳合稱「四大奇書」。書中也有許多對於性的描寫，因此 屢遭禁燬，後世許多印本都將其中與性有關的內容予以刪除，俗稱「潔本」。台灣也一度禁止金瓶梅的出版，在開放書禁後，才允許出版金瓶梅的原本。
民國六十七年四月，聯經出版事業公司景印萬曆丁巳年版【金瓶梅詞話】。萬曆丁巳年刊印的【金瓶梅詞話】，是現存最早的版本，共十卷，每卷十回，原書目前收 藏在台北故宮博物院。這部書是民國二十一年在山西省發現，為北平圖書館購藏。民國二十二年，北平古佚小說刊行會據以縮印一百部行世，這部縮印本還納入另一 部崇禎版的木刻插圖二百幅，彙裝成一冊，不過這部縮印本流傳並不廣，傅斯年先生珍藏其中一部。
聯經公司景印的版本，就是借自傅斯年先生家裡收藏的縮印本，並持與故宮收藏的原版本比對整理，將版式放大與萬曆原版一致，該套色印製的部份予以確定，並將 插圖分裝至每一回之前，予以影印行世，限定三百部，剛出版時定價新台幣三千八百元，六十八年十二月時調整為新台幣五千元。
林漢章說，聯經公司是向傅斯年的遺孀俞大綵夫人借得這部縮印本加以整理影印，這限定三百部，不是人人都可以買，當時限制必須是從事相關研究教學的教授及機構才可以訂購，他當時就買不到。
大概就是這個原因，所以後來在市面上又出現另外一種版本，沒有出版社的名稱，其版式與聯經景印版幾乎一樣，在「出版說明」中也說是依據傅斯年先生藏本並比 對故宮珍藏萬曆本整理後景印。二者差別在於聯經版線裝二十冊，每一冊都有包角，在每一頁右下角處印有「聯經出版事業公司景印版」字樣，第一冊首頁右下方有 傅斯年先生「孟真」朱印一方；而後來出現的版本，雖然一樣是線裝，只裝訂成十冊，而且沒有包角，每一頁右下角處僅有「景印版」三個字，而且「孟真」朱印變 墨印，因為沒有出現出版社的名字，一般人不知道是哪個出版社所印製。
林漢章說，這個後來出現的版本是當時一家名叫「康橋」的出版社所印的，這家出版社後來也不知如何了。
這個訊息讓一件矇矓不清的事情有了答案，我想，如果沒有當年康橋出版社的印製，現在要看到萬曆版【金瓶梅詞話】，恐怕也不是容易的事情。
