文学奖“橘子奖”带有性别歧视吗?

文学奖“橘子奖”带有性别歧视吗?

BRITAIN’S prestigious Orange Prize, awarded exclusively for fiction by women writing in English without regard to nationality, has just now completed its 17th year. And while the prize is lauded for its international reach and has never been disparaged for choosing to bar translated work, once again the annual clamor erupts: how can such a circumscribed honor be deemed legitimate? Why only women?

英国享有盛名的橘子奖(Orange Prize)，刚刚走过第17个年头，它不分国籍、只颁给女作家创作的英语小说。在该奖因其国际化的影响力而获得称颂、把翻译作品排除在外却从未遭人贬抑的同时，一年一度的责难声又再度响起：怎么能把这样一份附带限制条件的荣誉视作理所当然?为什么只面向女性作者?

A. S. Byatt, the eminent British novelist who in 1990 won the Booker Prize, and who has determinedly kept her books out of the Orange race, offers a blunt answer: “The Orange Prize is a sexist prize. You couldn’t found a prize for male writers. The Orange Prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter — which I don’t believe in.” Responding to the recent report that Orange, a telecommunications company, will no longer sponsor the award, this principled writer demurs yet again. “I shan’t mourn it. ... Women should be allowed to have everything men have, but they shouldn’t be allowed to have their own little sheep pens.”

英国赫赫有名的小说家、1990年布克奖得主A.S.拜雅特坚决不让自己的作品参加橘子奖评选，她坦言：“橘子奖带有性别歧视。你找不到一个为男作家设立的文学奖。橘子奖假定存在女性题材一说——对此我不以为然。”响应近期橘子(Orange)电信公司将不再赞助该奖项的报道，这位原则性很强的作家再度呛声，“我不会为此感到遗憾……女人应该和男人一样，平等的享有一切，但她们不该有自己的小羊圈。”

On one hand, “sheep pen,” “ghetto,” “biologically based self-confinement.” And on the other, the Woolfian ideal of “a room of one’s own,” ultimately culminating in the Orange Prize. Which view is truer, which owns the greater persuasive force?

一方面，是“羊圈”、“隔离区”、“基于生物学的自我拘囿”;另一方面，是伍尔芙有“一间自己的房间”的理想，在橘子奖上达到极致的巅峰。哪种观点更合情理，更具说服力?

In the hope of settling this dispute, I ask you to consider the history of literary women. It turns out, oddly, to be also a prolific history of “men,” among whom the most celebrated are Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell (Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin), Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).

寄望能解决这场纷争，我请大家思考一下女性文人的历史。说来奇怪，这也是一部丰厚的“男人”史，其中最著名的有库瑞尔(Currer)、阿克顿 (Acton)、艾利斯·贝尔(Ellis Bell)、勃朗特三姐妹 (Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte)、乔治·艾略特(George Eliot)、玛丽·安·伊文思(Mary Ann Evans)、乔治·桑(George Sand)、阿曼蒂娜·奥萝尔·露茜·杜班(Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin)、伊萨克·迪内森(Isak Dinesen)、卡琳·布利克森(Karen Blixen)、弗农·李(Vernon Lee)维奥莱特·佩吉特(Violet Paget)。

The motive behind these necessary masquerades is hardly an urge to hide. Instead, it is a cry for recognition and a means of evading belittlement, or worse yet, the curse of not being noticed at all. The most pointed symptom and symbol of this pervasive fear is the poignant exchange between the 20-year-old Charlotte Brontë and Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate. Humbly and diffidently, she had sent him a sampling of her poems, trusting that he might acknowledge the worth of what she knew to be her “single, absorbing, exquisite gratification.”

取这些必要的假名，背后的动机并不是为了竭力掩藏身份。相反，那是渴望得到认可的疾呼，以免被人小看，或乃至更糟的，落入根本无人问津的厄运。这种普遍的恐惧，最突出的症状和标志体现在20岁的夏洛特·勃朗特与英国桂冠诗人罗伯特·骚塞(Robert Southey)可悲的通信中。勃朗特选了一首自己的诗歌代表作，谦卑而战战兢兢地寄给骚塞，企盼他会肯定其中的价值，勃朗特认为那是她“唯一引人入胜、造诣精湛的满意之作”。

His notorious reply, while conceding her “faculty of verse,” is nearly all that remains of his once powerful fame. “Literature,” he chided, “cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.” If such condescending sentiments leave a contemporary writer feeling sick at heart, Brontë thought the letter “kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good.”

尽管承认勃朗特“在诗文上的才华”，但骚塞恶名昭彰的答复，令他曾经显赫的名声几乎只剩下这封回信。他斥责道：“女人一生不能从事文学，也不该从事。她越埋首于自己应尽的职责，就越不会有闲暇时间来舞文弄墨，即便是作为一种才艺或消遣。”纵然这种充满优越感的看法令当代作者从心底感到厌恶，但勃朗特认为这封信“和蔼亲切、令人佩服;有一点点严苛，但对我有益。”

The Orange Prize, then, was not born into an innocent republic of letters. Nor need we thumb through past centuries to discover the laureate’s enduring principle. After gaining a modicum of notice following an eclipse lasting years, I was once praised, as a kind of apology, by a prominent editor with these surprising words: “I used to think of you as a lady writer” — an inborn condition understood to be frivolous and slight, and from which recovery is almost always anomalous.

如此看来，橘子奖并非诞生在一个清白无辜的文坛。我们也无需上溯过去几个世纪，找出这位桂冠诗人秉持不变的原则。我在隐没了很长一段岁月、继而受到些许关注后，一次，一位知名编辑以道歉的方式褒奖我，措辞令人讶异：“我原本以为你是一位妇人作家”——不言而喻，那意味着天生微不足道、无足轻重，能从中获得新生，几乎无一例外都是反常的。

So much for the defense of a reparative award dedicated solely to writers who are women. Advocacy of this sort, vigorously grounded as it is in a darker chamber of the literary continuum, is not the Orange’s only defense. We are reminded that there are, abundantly, prizes for regional writers, for black writers, for Christian writers, for Jewish writers, for prison writers, for teenage writers, for science writers, and on and on. Why must a prize for women’s writing be the single object of contention?

为一个补偿性的、专为女作家设立的文学奖辩护的理由还有许多。因为在文学不可分割的整体内，女性处于相较不为人知的暗室，因此对此类奖项的支持，不仅限于捍卫橘子奖。而且，别忘了我们有诸多针对某一特定群体作家的文学奖，针对黑人作家的、基督教作家的、犹太作家的、监狱作家的、青少年作家的、科普作家的，等等等等。为什么偏偏一个针对女性创作的文学奖，成为唯一争论非议的对象呢?

Yet this argument will not hold water. Each such category signals a particular affinity, or call it, more precisely, a culture (and in the case of Jews and Christians, a deeper and broader civilization), and women are integral to all of them. To argue for femaleness-as-culture is to condemn imaginative and intellectual freedom and to revert to the despised old anatomy-is-destiny. And to the sheep pen and the ghetto and the circumscribed body of feeling and thought.

不过这一论点站不住脚。每个这样的类别，标志着一种特有的相似性，或更确切的说，一种文化(至于犹太人和基督教徒，那是更深广的文明)，女性是所有这些类别里不可或缺的部分。主张把女性列为一种文化，等于否定想象和思想的自由，回复到旧有的、遭人鄙弃的“生理决定命运”说(anatomy-is- destiny)。回复到羊圈、隔离区、被局限的情感和思想。

In an essay titled “Literature and the Politics of Sex,” I once ventured a definition of feminism. “In art,” I wrote, “feminism is that idea which opposes segregation; which means to abolish mythological divisions; which declares that the imagination cannot be ‘set’ free, because it is already free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or the leg of a mosquito. Classical feminism,” I concluded, “was conceived of as the end of false barriers and boundaries; as the end of segregationist fictions and restraints.”

在一篇题为“文学与性别政治”的文章里，我曾大胆地定义女权主义。“在艺术领域，”我写道：“女权主义是一种反对隔离的态度;它意味着废除无根据的划分;宣告想象力不能‘被’解放，因为它本就是自由、无拘无束的。作为一名写作者，我想成为什么就是什么。我可以把自己想成男的、女的，想象成石头、雨滴、木块或蚊子的腿。正统的女权主义，”我总结说：“在构想中是对错误的壁垒与界限的终结;是对隔离主义小说与束缚的终结。”