美之创造 贵在新颖——《莎士比亚选集》前言

Novel Expressions as the Key to the Creations of Beauty:A Preface to The Collected Works of Shakespeare(2017)

美的创造乃人生乐趣之真谛。翻译文学可谓是创造美之艺术。纵观世界,莎士比亚是世界上创造美最多之人,故以另一门语言重现莎剧之美,亦是一种美的创造。回顾往昔,莎译无数,之所以仍需重译,《马克思恩格斯选集》给出了充分的解说,即"古代人的性格描绘在今天是不再够用了"。

The true essence of human pleasure is to create beautiful things. And to translate literary works is considered the art of creating beauties. In this world, either today or yesterday, Shakespeare is believed to be the one who ever produced the most works of beauty. Therefore, to reproduce the beauty of the source Shakespearean texts is also a action of creating beauty. Going through the history of Chinese versions of Shakespeare, many Chinese versions have been produced and reproduced. Why they need to be retranslated once again can be explained by the words from The Collected Works of Marx and Engels as ＂the words used to de- scribe the characters of ancient people are not enough today＂.