《黑色雅典娜》中译本序

Preface to the Chinese Translation of Black Athena

我很高兴《黑色雅典娜》第一卷能翻译成中文,这有若干理由。首先,它连接了我生命中的两个学术爱好,中国和“黑色雅典娜”项目。我在剑桥正式开始学习汉语之前很久,我和中国的联系就开始了。第二次世界大战期间,我7岁时,作家和翻译家萧乾给了我一本他的书《中国而非震旦》(China But Not Cathay),当时他是伦敦大学亚非学院的讲师。在书的卷首插图,他陈述了该书的主题,即中国不是神秘的东方天堂,而是一个真实的地方,中华民族当时饱受日本侵略、政治腐败和自然灾害的苦难,但中国人民的力量终将使它胜利。

I am delighted that the first volume of Black Athena should have been translated into Chinese for a number of reasons.In the first place,it connects the two academic loves of my life,China and the'Black Athena'project.My involvement with China began long before I began to study Chinese formally at Cambridge.During the Second World War,when I was seven years old,the writer and translator Xiao Qian,then a lecturer at the London'School of Oriental and African Studies',gave me a copy of his book China But Not Cathay.In the frontispiece of which he set out its theme,that China was not a mysterious oriental paradise,but a real place and a nation that was then suffering from the Japanese invasion,corruption and natural disasters.