《长友诗》的晚清民初之旅——文化之“诱”与“反诱”

Exploring the Translators’ Cultural Inveiglement and Counterinveiglement in “A Psalm of Life” during the Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China

译本研究旨在探究翻译与社会文化的互动,重建某一历史时期两种语言文化的碰撞和交织。本文采用描写翻译研究的范式,以美国诗人朗费罗的“A Psalm of Life”在同治时期的《长友诗》汉译本为研究对象,通过梳理该译诗晚清民初的学术接受史,定位1864年威妥玛译诗底本、董恂改译本的偏移,阐发威妥玛1873年译诗定本的文化意图,重构晚清中西文化接触之初西洋人和国人借助翻译图谋文化上的“诱”与“反诱”,从而引发当今全球化背景下对译者身份和翻译意图的思考。

Product-oriented Translation Studies aims to represent the collision and communication between target language culture and source language culture in a given historical era by restoring the cultural interaction between translations and their receptive cultures. By adopting the paradigm of Descriptive Translation Studies, the paper studies three versions of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” during the reign of Tongzhi Emperor. After tracing the academic acceptance of the three Chinese versions in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, this paper, by locating the regulative deviations between Thomas Francis Wade’s version in 1864 and Dong Xun’s revised version in the same year, interprets the cultural intentions of Wade’s published version in 1873 and reconstructs the two translators’ opposite agendas to perform the cultural inveiglement and counter-inveiglement at the early stage of Chinese and Western cultural contact. Under the context of globalization, it is high time that we should reflect on the role of translators and their translation agendas.