混沌中的秩序:重读《透明物》——兼论两个中文译本的缺陷

Order in Chaos:Rereading Transparent Things and Analyzing the Deficiencies in Two Chinese Translations

弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫的《透明物》是一部元小说风格的作品,内容隐晦,结构复杂。其叙事者具备双重身份,小说表面来看是围绕着主人公的四次瑞士之旅展开的有关主人公的命运故事,而深层故事却是有关一个作家如何建构一部艺术作品的步骤勾勒。这部作品目前国内有两个译本,但是由于两位译者都没有看出原著貌似混乱的表象下面隐藏的深层秩序,两个译本都在不同程度上把原作中一些关键性的信息当做噪音屏蔽掉了,结果彻底消解了原作中的深层故事,破坏了原作的元小说风格,让中文译本读者感受到的只是一些混乱琐碎的细节。强调秩序隐藏于混沌之中的混沌理论被认为是解读元小说的一种有效方法,借用该理论的"神奇吸力"、"重复"和"自我组织"三个概念,认为《透明物》的各种叙事技巧使其文本结构具备"自我组织能力",召唤读者对文本反复重读。

Vladimir Nabokov＇s Transparent Things is an elusive metafiction with a complicated structure. The narrator of the novel has double functions and hence, two stories are interwoven in the same text. Ostensibly, it is a life story evolved around the protagonist＇s four trips to Switzerland. The deep hidden story is a nearly transparent display of the procedures of how to construct a novel. The novel has got two Chinese translations. The two translators were probably ]~eguiled by the chaotic appearance of the novel and did not reveal the deep-hidden order. They left out certain information as noise, eradicated any possibilities for Chinese readers to capture the deep hidden story of the novel, and therefore, distorted the metafictionai style of the source work. Chaos Theory is regarded as an effective methodology to approach a metafictional work. Three concepts, including ＂strange attractor＂, ＂iteration＂ and ＂self organization＂ are applied here to explicate that the text of Transparent Things presents a self-organizing structure awaiting the repeated participation of the reader.