英汉对照「二」“Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship”

I try to describe this long limitation, hoping that with such power as is now mine, and such use of language as is within that power, this will convince any one who cares about it that this “living” of mine had been done under a heavy handicap….
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman（夏洛特•帕金斯•吉尔曼）
If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view?
假如说王后的窥镜发出的是国王的声音，那么，这一充满权威的、长久警告的声音，又会对王后自己的声音产生怎样的效果呢？由于国王的声音是王后能够听到的主要声音，王后在发出自己声音的时候，是否会摹仿国王的语气、国王的语调、国王的用词和国王的观点呢？
A literary text “is inhabited … by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts.（J. Hillis Miller）
这部文本“的存在……是伴随着一连串的寄生物、回声、引用典故、客人，以及前代文本的幽灵的”
Bloom has postulated that the dynamics of literary history arise from the artist’s “anxiety of influence,” his fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings.
布鲁姆把弗洛伊德式的结果引入了有关文学谱系的研究之中，提出，文学史的发展动力正在于艺术家身上所存在的“影响的焦虑”（anxiety of influence），即他会担心自己并不是自己作品的真正创造者，它们的真正创造者其实是他的先辈，他们出现在他之前并超越于他之上，具有对他的创作的优先权。
Thus Bloom explains that a “strong poet” must engage in heroic warfare with his “precursor,” for, involved as he is in a literary Oedipal struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father.
一位“强有力的诗人”必须从事一场与他的“先辈”的英勇较量，因为，他所卷入的是一场文学上的俄狄浦斯式的战斗，他必须击败他的诗人父亲，才能成为一名真正的诗人。
does Bloom describe literary history as the crucial warfare of fathers and sons, he sees Milton’s fiercely masculine fallen Satan as the type of the poet in our culture, and he metaphorically defines the poetic process as a sexual encounter between a male poet and his female muse.
布鲁姆不仅把文学史描述为父亲和儿子之间所进行的你死我活的较量，而且还把弥尔顿笔下那位具有明显男性特征的堕落的撒旦看成我们文化中的诗人的那种类型，他还形而上地将诗歌的创作过程定义为男性诗人与女性缪斯之间发生的一种性关系。
At first glance, indeed, she seems to be anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider. Just as in Freud’s theories of male and female psychosexual development there is no symmetry between a boy’s growth and a girl’s (with, say, the male “Oedipus complex” balanced by a female “Electra complex”) so Bloom’s male-oriented theory of the “anxiety of influence” cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer.
只要看上一眼，你就会发现，她似乎是匿名的、无可定义的、格格不入的和反复无常的外来户。正如我们从弗洛伊德有关男性和女性的精神性别发展的理论中可以看到的那样，男孩和女孩的成长发育过程（比如说，与男性的“俄狄浦斯情结”对应，有女性的“厄勒克特拉情结”）并不具有对称性，因此，布鲁姆以男性为中心的“影响的焦虑”理论，也并不是简单地作一下修订或作一番颠倒，就可以用来说明女性作家所处的情形的。
Not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority (as our discussion of the metaphor of literary paternity argued), they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of her self—that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity.
这些前辈不仅体现出父权意识的权威（正如我们对于文学的父性特征的比喻的分析所指出的那样），甚至还试图将她拘禁在有关她的人格和潜能的界定之中，方法便是通过对她进行极端化的删削，把她变成模式化的天使或怪物，而这是与她真正的自我严重冲突的——也就是说，是与她的主体意识、自主性和创造性严重冲突的。
“Thus both sexes repudiate the implications of femininity,” but the girl learns (in relation to her father) “that her subjugation to the law of the father entails her becoming the representative of’nature’ and ‘sexuality,’ a chaos of spontaneous, intuitive creativity.”
因此，男孩女孩都不愿接受女性气质所代表的种种涵义”，但是，女孩又懂得（在与她父亲的关系之中）“她对父亲的法律的屈从会使她成为‘自然’和‘性活动’的代表，而这种性活动是一种自发的、本能的创造性所造成的混乱”。
And just as the male artist’s struggle against his precursor takes the form of what Bloom calls revisionary swerves, flights, misreadings, so the female writer’s battle for self-creation involves her in a revisionary process.
如果说男性艺术家与他的前辈之间发生的战斗所采取的形式，用布鲁姆的话来说是修正性的偏离、逃跑和误读，那么，女性艺术家争取自我创造的战斗则会使她卷入一种修正性的过程之中。
Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention—all these phenomena of “inferiorization” mark the woman writer’s struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart.
因此，女性艺术家的孤独感、她与男性前辈们格格不入的感情，始终伴随着她对亲如姐妹的前辈和后继者的需要，伴随着她对女性听众的急切渴望，以及对男性读者敌意的恐惧，她还有文化造成的、对于自我戏剧化（self-dramatization）的胆怯之心，对于父权制度下艺术权威的恐惧，对于女性是否拥有正常的创造能力的焦虑——所有这些“低人一等”的现象都在女性作家争取艺术上的自我界定的过程中打下了印记，并使她自我创造的努力和男性同道们的努力有所不同。
self-definition：自我界定
subculture：亚文化
revisionism：修正主义
patrilineal：父系的
The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feels hopelessly belated; the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging.
许多父亲的儿子、今天的男性作家感到和前代之间有着千丝万缕的联系，怎么也无法割裂；但寥寥无几的母亲的女儿、今天的女性作家却感觉到，她正在为一个最终浮出水面的独立发展的传统贡献着自己的力量。
If contemporary women do now attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture.
假如说当代女性现在确实已经在富有成效与权威地写作，这只是因为她们那些身处18世纪和19世纪的前辈母亲们已经在看似疾病的孤独状态中、看似疯狂的格格不入中、看似瘫痪的黑暗中进行了奋斗的缘故，她们努力挣扎，以便可以战胜仅仅在她们的文学亚文化中才会出现的作者身份焦虑。
alienation：格格不入
obscurity：卑微，默默无闻
A creative female subculture was established against terrible odds. 
一个富有创造性的女性亚文化是在恐怖的基础上建立起来的。
The fact that “infection in the sentence breeds” suggests Dickinson’s recognition that literary texts are coercive, imprisoning, fever-inducing; that, since literature usurps a reader’s interiority, it is an invasion of privacy.
“句子的影响力量会不断再生”的事实又告诉我们，艾米莉·狄金森已经意识到文学文本是具有抑制性的、囚禁功能的和引发疾病的；因此，既然文学侵入了一位读者的个人领地，那么，它就构成对隐私的一种侵犯。
coercive, imprisoning, fever-inducing 具有抑制性的、囚禁功能的和引发疾病的
interiority：个人领地
Finally, such traditional, metaphorically matrilineal anxiety ensures that even the maker of a text, when she is a woman, may feel imprisoned within texts—folded and “wrinkled” by their pages and thus trapped in their “perpetual seam[s]” which perpetually tell her how she seems.
最后，那些传统的、从形而上的意义上说具有母性特征的焦虑表明，即便是一部文本的制作者，只要她是女性，就有可能会感到自己被囚禁于文本当中——她被那部文本的书页折叠起来、搞得“满面皱纹”，陷落于书页“永久的隙缝”之中，这些“永久的隙缝”会不断地告诉她，她是一副怎样的尊容。
matrilineal：母系的
debilitation：削弱、使衰弱
looking glasses of literary texts：文本的窥视之镜
Whether she is a passive angel or an active monster, in other words, the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to “breed” like sentences of death in the bloody shoes she inherits from her literary foremothers.
换句话说，无论她是一位被动的天使，还是一位积极主动的怪物，女性作家都会感到自己或从实际意义上或从象征意义上步履蹒跚，受到她身处其中的文化提供给她的不利条件的影响，她还别无选择，她处境艰难，有时，似乎死亡的句子/判决（sentences）会穿着她从文学之母那里继承而来的鲜血淋漓的鞋子，“不断地再生”。
Rejecting the poisoned apples her culture offers her, the woman writer often becomes in some sense anorexic, resolutely closing her mouth on silence (since—in the words of Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney—“a woman’s only power is the power of refusal”21), even while she complains of starvation. 
通过拒绝身处其中的文化提供给她的有毒的苹果，女性作家经常成为某种意义上的厌食症患者，她坚决地闭紧嘴巴，保持沉默（因为——用奥斯汀笔下亨利·提尔尼的话来说就是——“女性唯一的权力就是拒绝的权力”21），即便一边还在抱怨说饥饿。
Tell all the truth but tell it slant. 讲出所有的真理，但以倾斜的方式。（狄金森）
The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.
女性作家创作的文学作品中的疯女人并不仅仅是女主人公的对手，或阻挠与干预她的人。从某种意义上说，她通常更有可能是作者的重影或替身（double），表达了作者自己的焦虑和愤怒的形象。