不为人知的鲁迅:开现代小说先河的中国作家(1)

It's hard to find a precise Western analogue for Lu Xun (1881-1936). He is China's Dickens, for his mercilessly sharp portrayals of the era he lived through; he is Joyce, a re-maker of language and form. He has a good deal of Orwell, too, for his political commentary and the plain vernacular style that he championed. And, as a writer who in his final years became a figurehead of the literary left and was sanctified by his the Chinese communist leadership after his death, he has a touch of Gorky.

要在西方找到一个与鲁迅（1881-1936）完全对等的人物并非易事。他是中国的狄更斯，因他以尖锐的笔触无情地抨击了他生活过的那个时代；他又是中国的乔伊斯，因他改革了文学作品的语言与形式。他常撰写政治评论、倡导自然朴实的白话文体，因此亦可以说是中国的奥威尔。作为一名在人生的最后岁月中成为“左翼”文学领袖人物、在死后作品又被共产党领导层所禁的作家，他又与高尔基有些许相似之处。

Lu Xun owes his immense literary reputation in mainland China primarily to his satirical fiction but also to the prose poems and polemical essays that he wrote in the last two decades of his life. In 1918, his surreal first short story in vernacular Chinese, 'Diary of a Madman,' portrayed Chinese culture as cannibalistically eating its young. Its iconoclastic premise propelled him to the center of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s. The two volumes of short fiction he produced between 1918 and 1925, 'Outcry' and 'Hesitation,' were admired for their portrayals of a China in a state of spiritual emergency: backward, impoverished and complacent.

鲁迅在中国大陆的崇高文学声望主要源自他的讽刺小说，他在人生最后二十年中撰写的散文诗和评论文章也功不可没。其发表于1918年的第一篇白话文短篇小说《狂人日记》为超现实主义风格，将中国文化描绘为“吃人”的文化。该篇小说打破旧习的主题将鲁迅推到了1919年新文化运动的中心位置。他在1918年和1925年间创作的两部小说集《呐喊》和《彷徨》备受赞誉，描绘了陷入精神危机的中国──她落后、贫穷又自大。

In the story 'Kong Yiji,' a crowd of thuggish revelers delight in humiliating the village failure, roaring with laughter at the discovery that his legs have been broken by the local magistrate. In 'Tomorrow' and 'Medicine,' children die of superstition: A 3-year-old with typhoid is diagnosed by a respected doctor of Chinese medicine as having a 'blocked stomach'; a tubercular boy is fed a supposedly miracle cure岸a bread roll dipped in the blood of an executed revolutionary. 'The Real Story of Ah-Q'岸Lu Xun's best-known fictional re-creation of the doltish Chinese everyman岸sardonically follows the stupidities of its subject, a man too idiotic even to realize that he is going to his own execution. Within years of his invention, Ah-Q had entered the Chinese language as shorthand for the national character in all its less appealing aspects: its obsession with face, its superiority complex, its servility before authority and cruelty toward the weak.

在《孔乙己》这篇小说中，一群经常在小酒馆饮酒的粗野村夫以羞辱孔乙己这个潦倒汉为乐，在发现他的双腿被当地举人打断后更是爆发出狂笑。《明天》和《药》则讲述了孩子因迷信而丧命的故事。在《明天》这篇小说中，一个染上伤寒的三岁孩子被一名受人尊敬的中医诊断为“中焦塞着”。在《药》中，一个患肺结核的男孩被家人喂了一种据传很神奇的药方──浸了被处决的革命党鲜血的馒头。鲁迅最知名的小说《阿Q正传》再现了愚昧的中国普通百姓，以讽刺手法记述了主人公阿Q的各种愚昧行为，而其竟愚蠢到不知自己将被处决。在“阿Q”这个词被创造出来的数年间，它成为汉语中指代所有让人厌恶的国民性──好面子、迷恋权势以及畏强凌弱──的统称。

In the People's Republic of China today, 'Luxunology' keeps an army of researchers and publishers busy. Lu Xun remains a touchstone against which other authors are judged, however inappropriately. After the young celebrity novelist-racing driver Han Han launched his hugely popular satirical blog in 2006, pundits labeled him 'the new Lu Xun.'

在当今的中国，“鲁学”让一大批研究者和出版社忙前忙后。他还是被用以评判其他作家的标杆，无论这么做有多不恰当。知名青年作家兼赛车手韩寒在2006年开设其人气超高的讽刺性博客后，有评论人士将其誉为“当代鲁迅”。

No Anglophone trade publisher has yet commissioned the comprehensive biography that Lu Xun deserves. Gloria Davies's dense and careful study, 'Lu Xun's Revolution,' passes quickly over the short fiction that first made him famous and concentrates on Lu Xun's response to China's revolutionary turmoil of the late 1920s and 1930s. Ms. Davies does not, therefore, offer a full overview of the writer's dramatic life, but she does illuminate his inner conflicts during his last, most contentious decade岸particularly his hesitation between the aristocratic literary tradition with which he had grown up and the radical modern egalitarianism to which he aspired.

目前英语世界尚未有出版商委托他人编写一部鲁迅应得的全面综合的传记。黄乐嫣(Gloria Davies)密集而细致的研究作品《鲁迅的革命》(Lu Xun's Revolution)对最早让鲁迅声名鹊起的短篇小说一笔带过，集中关注了他对上世纪20年代末和30年代革命动荡局势的反应。因此，黄乐嫣并未全面展示这位作家引人注目的一生，但她确实阐述了鲁迅在其最具争议的人生最后十年中的内心挣扎，特别是描绘了他在伴随其成长过程的上层文化传统与其向往的激进的现代平等主义之间的彷徨。

The grandson of a high-ranking member of the Beijing civil service, Lu Xun was born into the fraying, fin de si豕cle world of late imperial China. As a boy, he was educated in the cultural archaisms of the Chinese classics. During his teens, however, Lu Xun's family sank from gentility into poverty and disgrace. His grandfather was imprisoned for trying to bribe a civil-service examiner, while his father destroyed his health (and the family finances) with a liquor and opium habit.

鲁迅出生于19世纪末分崩离析的清王朝末期，其祖父是北京一名高级文职官员。他在童年时期接受的是中国儒家经典的旧式教育，在十几岁的时候，其家道中落，从富贵人家陷入贫穷和羞辱。他的祖父因试图贿赂科举主考官而锒铛入狱，父亲则因酗酒和抽鸦片的恶习毁掉了健康（及家族财富）。