Reading　谈阅读

Reading

谈阅读

Wystan Hugh Auden

威斯坦·休·奥登

作者简介

威斯坦·休·奥登（Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907—1973），英裔美国诗人，20世纪最伟大的作家之一。他自幼在牛津接受教会文学熏陶，在担任英国左翼政党主笔多年后，于20世纪40年代移居美国。奥登在政治、心理学、神学方面均有建树，作品以《葬礼蓝调》（Funeral Blues）和《1939年9月1日》（September 1, 1939）流传最广，均被翻拍成电影。

本文节选自1962年出版的奥登散文集《染工之手与其他散篇》（The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays），文风极其犀利，名言警句层出不穷。文中提及了一个关于阅读的经典问题——荒岛求生，该带何书？不知作者睿智精辟的回答会不会令你大跌眼镜。

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

—G. C. Lichtenberg

One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.

—Paul Valery

The interest of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.

We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so.

As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case—history of the author's sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer”than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

We cannot read an author for the first time in the same way that we read the latest book by an established author. In a new author, we tend to see either only his virtues or only his defects and, even if we do see both, we cannot see the relation between them. In the case of an established author, if we can still read him at all, we know that we cannot enjoy the virtues we admire in him without tolerating the defects we deplore. Moreover, our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.

A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgments as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great-Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!

In literature, vulgarity is preferable to nullity, just as grocer's port is preferable to distilled water.

Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitation which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be.

It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,”he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,”because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else's.

一本书就是一面镜子：如果一头毛驴朝镜里看，你就别指望能照出个圣徒。

——G. C. 利希滕贝格1

只有带着点私人目的去读书，才可能读得好。或许是想汲取力量，或许是出于对作者的憎恨。

——保尔·瓦雷里2

作家和读者的兴趣永远不一样。如果两者偶尔一致，那是幸运的巧合。

对于读者与作家的关系，大多数读者持双重标准：读者可以随心所欲地对作者不忠，作者却万万不能对读者不忠。

阅读就是翻译，因为没有两个人的阅读体验是相同的。拙劣的读者就像蹩脚的译者——该意译时直译，该直译时意译。学习如何阅读时，学问固然有价值，却不如直觉重要；有些伟大的学者就是糟糕的译者。

摈弃作者有意安排的途径，另辟蹊径地读一本书，往往能获益匪浅。不过只有当（已不再是孩子的）我们知道自己在做什么时，这种情况才成立。

在某种程度上，大多数读者就像往广告女郎脸上画胡子的顽童。

一本书具有文学价值的标志之一，是它能以多种方式阅读。反之亦然，色情作品没有文学价值的证据是，如果你读它不是为了寻找性刺激，而是为了——打个比方——研究作者性幻想史的心理案例，那你一定觉得无聊透顶。

尽管文学作品能以多种方式阅读，但方式十分有限，而且可以按等级次序排列。有些方式明显比其他“更真实”，有些比较可疑，有些明显是错的，有些——比如倒着读小说——则是荒谬的。这就是为什么被困荒岛时，人们会选择带一部好词典，而非他能想到的最伟大的文学名著。因为对读者来说，词典是绝对被动的，能以无限种方式阅读。

我们第一次阅读某位作家的作品时，不可能采取阅读成名作家新作的方式。对于一位新作家，我们倾向于只看优点或缺点；即使既看见优点也看见缺点，我们也弄不清两者的关系。对于成名作家——如果我们还读他的作品的话——我们就会知道，不容忍令人叹息的缺点，就无法欣赏令人钦佩的优点。再者，我们对成名作家的评价，不仅仅是审美的评价。他的新书除了文学作品本身的优点，还包含着我们长久以来对他的喜爱。他不只是诗人或小说家，还是我们自传中的一个角色。

诗人读其他诗人的诗歌，或小说家读其他小说家的小说时，一定会把别人和自己的作品作个比较。他对所读作品的评价总是这类：我的上帝啊！我的祖爷爷啊！我的舅舅啊！我的敌人啊！我的兄弟啊！我的蠢兄弟啊！

在文学作品中，粗俗无聊胜过空洞无物，就像杂牌葡萄酒胜过蒸馏水。

好的品味不是指排斥劣作，而是指识别优劣。如果某人品味极好而不得不排斥某书，那他也是心怀遗憾，而非心情愉悦。

让人心情愉悦绝非万无一失的指南，但至少犯错最少。

孩子阅读为求一乐，但乐趣对他来说没有差别。比如，他无法区别审美的乐趣、学习的乐趣和做白日梦的乐趣。进入青春期后，我们意识到有许多不同的乐趣，也知道其中有些无法同时感受，但我们需要别人帮忙界定这些乐趣。无论是品尝美食还是鉴赏文学作品，年轻人都会寻找一位值得信赖的权威导师。他按照导师的推荐去吃东西和阅读，当然也难免会偶尔欺骗一下自己；他不得不装作喜欢吃橄榄，或是喜欢读《战争与和平》，但实际上没那么喜欢。20岁到40岁是我们弄清“自己是谁”的时期，包括弄懂“偶然的限制”（我们有责任在成长中突破这种限制）与“天性必须的限制”（逾越这种限制必受惩罚）之间的区别。在这个学习过程中，很少有人能不犯错，很少有人不想超越自我的局限，成为一个不平凡的人。

在这个时期，一位作家最容易被另一位作家或某些空论引入歧途。当一个20岁到40岁之间的人提到一件艺术品时说，“我知道自己喜欢什么”，他实际上说的是“我没有自己的品位，只是接受了我文化背景的品位”。因为在20岁到40岁之间，一个人拥有真正独立品位的最确定的标志，就是他对此不敢确定。40岁之后，如果我们还没丧失真正的自我，乐趣就会再次像在我们儿时一样，指引我们应该读些什么。

艺术品带给我们的乐趣，不能和我们享受的其他乐趣混为一谈。但是两者之间存在联系——这是属于我们的乐趣，而不属于其他人。

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1．格奥尔格·克里斯托夫·利希滕贝格（Georg Christoph Lichtenberg，1742—1799），德国物理学家、讽刺作家。

2．保尔·瓦雷里（Paul Valery，1871—1945），旧译梵乐希，法国象征派大师、法兰西学院院士，被誉为“20世纪法国最伟大的诗人”。