五四运动以前的荷马

Homer in China Before May-Fourth Movement

荷马是西方百代诗宗,但他并不是迟至20世纪才进入中国人的视域。早在明清之际,荷马便以“阿嘿汝”或“何默乐”等意大利文或拉丁文音译在华现身。进入清末,荷马之名的音译更是五花八门,直至梁启超推出《饮冰室诗话》后,今日通用的“荷马”才一锤定音。荷马当然是史诗大家,而“史诗”一词的定译,也要等到清末才由入华传教士译出,然后经日本汉字吸收,再由彼时的留日学生或革命党人传回中国。荷马的两部史诗《伊利亚特》《奥德赛》的中译,在晚明及晚清也同样可见,虽然仅译出区区数行。本文从考证的角度出发,最后再拉回到中国人的荷马研究。

Homer is generally taken as one of the most representative poets in the West.It was not,however,until twenty-first centuries that Homer attracted the attention of Chinese readers.In the late Ming and the early Qing dynasties,Jesuit missionaries Alfonso Vagnone and Joseph Prémare mentioned Homer,alluding to him by his Italian or Latin names.In the late Qing dynasty,Homer’s name was translated into Chinese in various ways.Today he is best known by the name in the Chinese characters which Liang Qichao used.Similarly,the genre of epic,known in Mandarin as shishi,remained unknown until the late Qing dynasty,when Wilhelm Lobscheid,a German missionary,began to translate the Meriam Webster Dictionary into Chinese.The term shishi returned to China through the Japanese borrowing of it in the late nineteenth century.A few short segments of the Homeric epics were rendered into Chinese in the late Ming and late Qing periods.Given source studies as the major approach to Homeric problems in pre-modern China,however,there was no scholarship on Homer in Chinese until the early Republican era.