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牛津大学出版百年旗舰产品,英文版本原汁原味呈现,资深编辑专为阅读进阶定制,文学评论名家妙趣横生解读。 内容简介
维特在一次舞会上与夏绿蒂相逢、产生爱慕之情,但她早已订婚。维特内心无限痛苦,绝望之余,终于自杀。小说表现了当时的知识分子对封建道德、等级观念的反抗和个性解放的要求。 作者简介
歌德(1749—1832),德国著名思想家、作家、博物学家。他十分博学,涉猎广泛,在诸多领域都取得了卓越的成就。他著名的作品是书信体小说《少年维特的烦恼》、诗体哲理悲剧《浮士德》。
精彩书评
它(《少年维特的烦恼》)是欧洲文学的杰作之一。
——拿破仑·波拿巴
这篇描写炽热而不幸的爱情的故事(《少年维特的烦恼》),其重要意义在于,它表现的不仅是一个人孤立的感情和痛苦,而是整个时代的感情、憧憬和痛苦。
——勃兰兑斯 目录
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
Explanatory Notes 精彩书摘
BOOK ONE
4 May 1771
How glad I am to be away! My dear friend, what a thing the human heart is! I leave you, whom I love so much, from whom I was inseparable, and I am glad! You will forgive me, I know. Were not all my other dealings with people expressly designed by Fate to alarm and distress a heart like mine: Poor Leonore!* And yet I was innocent. Could I help it that whilst her charming and heedless sister was amusing me, a real passion was forming in poor Leonore’s heart? And yet—am I wholly innocent? Did I not foster her feelings? Was I not myself delighted by the wholly truthful expressions of her nature, which, though not in the least laughable, so often made us laugh, and did I not—? But what sense is there in berating ourselves? My dear friend, I promise you I will mend my ways and Cease forever chewing over the small evils that Fate put sin our path. I will enjoy the present and be done with the past. Dear friend, you are quite right, there would be less pain among people if they would desist—God knows what makes them do it—from so busily employing their imaginations in remembering past ills rather than in enduring an indifferent present.
I‘d be grateful if you would tell my mother that I shall do my very best in her affair and that I‘ll write to her about it just as soon as I can. I’ve spoken to my aunt* and found her not at all the wicked woman our family makes her out to be. She is lively, spirited, and very good-hearted. I explained my mother‘s grievances over the portion of the inheritance being withheld; she told me her grounds ,the reasons, and the conditions on which she would be prepared to release everything, and more than we were asking for.—In brief, I don‘t want to write about it now: tell my mother all will be well. And in this small matter, my friend, I have realized once again that misunderstandings and lethargy can cause more going wrong in the world than cunning and wickedness do. At least, those two are certainly less common.
Beyond that, I very much like being here, in this paradisal part of the country solitude is a precious balm for my heart.,and that heart,so often struck cold, is warmed by the youthful season in all abundance. Ever tree, every hedge is a bouquet of blossom. Oh to be a maybug and flit where you like in that sea of scents and get all your nourishment there!
The town itself is disagreeable but all around the beauty of nature is beyond expression. This induced the late Count M.* to lay out his garden on one of the numerous hills that in lovely variations cross their courses here, forming the sweetest valleys. The garden is simple and you feel the moment you enter that it was designed not by a scienti?c gardener but by a feeling heart desiring to enjoy itself. In the dilapidated little Summer house that was once his favourite place and is now mine, I have wept more than once in memory of the dead man. I’ll soon be the lord of the garden. After only these few days the gardener is well disposed towards me—and he won’t be the laser by it.
10 May
A wonderful cheerfulness has taken complete possession of my soul , like the beautiful spring mornings that I am enjoying so wholeheartedly. I am alone and am glad of my life in this locality made for souls like mine. My dear friend, I am so happy and hate sunk so deep into the feeling of calm existence that my art suffers under it. I couldn’t do a drawing now, not a line of one, and yet was never a greater artist than I am in these moments. When the moisture rises in a mist in the sweet valley all around me and the high sun rests on the surface of the forest’s impenetrable darkness and only occasional beams ?nd their way into the inner sanctum and l lie in the tall grass by the tumbling stream and, thus close to the earth, become aware of the myriad varieties of grasses, and when I feel the seething of the world of small things among the stalks, feel against my heart the countless unfathomable shapes and form: of the tiny creatures that ?it and crawl, and I feel the presence of the Almighty who created us in his image, the wafting breath of the Love that encompasses all, that upholds and sustains us in an eternal joy, oh my friend, at the dawning then before my eyes when the world and the heavens reside in my soul completely like the bodily shape of a beloved woman, then how I yearn and often have said to myself. Oh could you give that some answering expression, only breathe into the page what is so fully and warmly alive in you till it becomes the mirror of your soul just as your soul is the mirror of the unending deity!—Oh my friend!—But it will be the downfall of me, I lie defeated by the force of the splendour of these phenomena.
12 May
I can’t tell whether deceiving spirits hover over this locality or whether it is the warm and heavenly imagination of my heart that makes everything around me so paradisal. Just outside the town there is a well*—to which I am in thrall like Melusina* and her sisters.—You descend a small incline and ?nd yourself at a cupola below which perhaps twenty steps go down to where an utterly clear water bubbles up out of marble. The low wall making an enclosure at the top, the tall overshadowing trees all round, the coolness of the place, it draws me and gives me the shivers too. No day goes by without my sitting there an hour. The girls come from the twon to fetch water, the most innocent and the most necessary of tasks that formerly the very daughters of kings used to perform. As I sit there, the patriarchal idea comes to life very vividly in me, how they, the forefathers, would meet and become acquainted and courtships would begin* and how kind the spirits are that hover around wells and springs. Oh, anyone who after a long summer Walk has ever refreshed himself at the coolness of a well must feel as I do.
13 May
You ask should you send me my books?—For heaven’s sake, my dear friend, do no such thing! I have no wish to be directed, encouraged, ?red up, any more. My heart is in quite enough ferment of itself. I need lulling, and I have had that in abundance from my Homer.* How often he has helped me calm the upheaval of my blood, for nothing you have ever encountered is quite so uneven and unsteady as this heart of mine. But I don‘t need to tell you that, since you, my dear friend, have so often had the burden of watching me shift from sorrow to extravagance and from sweet melancholy to harmful passion. But I tend my heart now like a sick child, grant its every wish. Keep that to yourself—there are people who would begrudge it me.
15 May
The common people hereabouts know me now and like me, especially the children. A sad thing struck me. At ?rst when I approached them and asked them in a friendly way about this or that, some thought I had a mind to make fun of them and put me off very coarsely. I did not let that grieve me but I felt very keenly what I have often remarked: people of a certain social standing will always keep themselves coldly at a distance from the lower orders as though they feared any rapprochement might diminish them; and then there are ?ighty characters and evil jokers who make a show of abasing themselves only so that their superiority may be all the more painfully apparent to the poor.
I know very well that we are not equal, nor can we be; but in my view anyone who feels it necessary to keep away from the so-called common hard to make them respect him is as much at fault as a coward who keeps himself hidden from his enemy for fear of defeat.
The other day I came to the well and found a young maidservant who had put down her pitcher on the bottom step and was looking round for one of her friends to come and help her lift it onto her head. I went down and addressed her.—Shall I help you, young lady?’—She blushed and blushed—‘Oh no, sir,’ she said—‘Come now.’—She adjusted the coil of cloth on her head and I helped her. She thanked me and climbed the steps.
……
前言/序言
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The sorrow of Young Werther), published in the autumn of 1774,made Goethe’s name; but for three of four years before then he had already be writing with great self-confidence and distinction. Briefly as a young student in Leipzig he adopted the poetic tone and manners of his urbane rococo contemporaries; but moving to Strasbourg in 1770 and meeting the critic and philosopher Herder, he was directed by him into ballads, folk-songs, the deeply congenial world of so-called primitive song. Characteristically, that literary influence conjoined at once with a passionate love—for Friederike Brion—and in poems addressed to her—‘Mailed’, ’Heidenr?slein’, ’Willkommen und Abschied’—he broke through into his own poetic voice. With his early work on Faust (the so-called Urfaust), and the ‘Shakespearian’ chronicle-play G?tz von Berlichingen and a douzen more vital and characteristic poems (‘Der Wandrer’, ’Wandrers Sturmlied’, ‘Mahometsgesang’, ‘Ganymed’. . . ), Goethe’s achievement by his mid-twenties was prodigious in its originality, force, and variety. G?tz, written and published in 1773, was first performed in April 1774 in Berlin, and by the end of that year, after Werther’s appearance in September, Goethe had become, as Byron said half a century later, ‘the first literary character in Europe’.
Goethe was the chief maker of the movement in German literature known as Sturm und Drang (literally, ‘storm and stress’). There were other gifted and important writers in it too, J.M.R.Lenz, for example, and, at the end of the period, Friedrich Schiller; but Goethe was pre-eminent and, unlike others, moved on, sloughing off one skin for the next(the image is his). Sturm und Drang in its language, gestures, forms, was a literature of revolt. Enlisting Shakespeare, the writers sought to uncover a culture of their own from ender the dead tradition of the French; to be more natural, more local, achieve an identity. There was a social and political edge to this, most obvious in Goethe’s Urfaust (not published till 1887), Schiller’s Die R?uber (The Robbers), and Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (The Tutor),but the successful revolt was all literary, benifiting later writers, among them the politically far more definite Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht.
Sturm und Drang is usually studied as a distinct period of German literature, separate from Germany‘s own Romanticism (Novalis, Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, Brentano) and those of Britain and France; but really, from a larger perspective, it belongs in the context or a European Romanticism beginning in the 1760s. Viewed like that, Goethe was and, despite his later Classicism, remained, a Romantic writer and Werther is a Romantic text .In that novel, in his early Faust, and in dozens of lyric poems be on already in the 1770s asserting, as Keats would nearly fifty years later, ‘the holiness of the heart‘s affections' in ‘the true voice of feeling‘. The relative naturalism of his language anticipates Wordsworth's championing, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads(1798/1800), of the use in poetry of ‘the real language of men’. And most strikingly, what Werther suffers and describes in his letter of 3 November, that loss of spirit, is the anxiety and horror in the heart of all Romanticism that Coleridge called, in his ode of that name (1802), ‘dejection’—when the genial spirits fail, when the ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’ cannot sustain any vital connection between the subject and the world.
The Making of Werther
Goethe was—he said so himself—a ‘confessional’ writer; that is, what he wrote came in large measure out of the life he lived. How directly and obviously depended of course on the project in hand—poems, ?ctions, plays have their own determinants—and, somewhat, on the phase of life in which he wrote. Werther (1774) and Elective Affinities(1809) are both novels. Of the latter he said, ‘I lived every word of [it]’; but also, his chronicler Eckermann reports :‘He said there was nothing in his Elective Affinities which had not been really lived, but nothing was there in the form in which it had been lived.’ But when Werther came out the people close to it and soon everybody else quite understandably believed that much or even must of it had really been lived and in that form.
In part it is a matter of genre. Lyric poems may be very auto-biographical and many of Goethe’s are, in all the phases of his life; but novels and stories are more likely to induce readers to wonder are the characters and situations ‘true’ because, if written at all in the realist mode, they need more of the real world’s details for their existence and effect than poems do. For Werther, his ?rst novel, Goethe used the stuff of his own and other people’s lives with a quite extraordinary immediacy and ruthlessness.
There are three main contributions of biographical and auto-biographical fact to the making of Wether: the triangle: Goethe—Christinn Kestner Charlotte Buff (who became Kestner’s wife); the life and suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem; and the triangle: Goethe-Peter Anton Brentano-Maximiliane von La Roche (who became Brentano‘s wife).
Goethe moved to Wetzlar in May 1772 to get some practical experience of law, the profession he had studied for and in which he took no interest. There he got to know Christian Kestner. A secretary at the courts, and, at a dance on 9 June, the young woman Kestner intended to marry, Charlotte Buff. In March of the previous year her mother had died, leaving her, then aged eighteen, the second-eldest of twelve children, to look after the family and manage the household. Goethe, Kestner, and Charlotte became a close trio; and to her family also Goethe was fondly attached. In a fashion already characteristic, he broke out of the entanglement and left Wetzlar without warning on 11 September, and on foot and by boat made his way down the Lahn to Koblenz, where he met the sixteen-year-old Maximiliane Von La Roche. He was back home in Frankfurt by the nineteenth,
In book 13 of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) Goethe had this to say about quitting Charlotte Buff and meeting Maximiliane Von La Roche: ‘It is a very pleasant feeling when a new passion starts in us before the old has quite lapsed—as at sunset when we see the moon rising opposite and enjoy the double radiance of both heavenly lights.’ The ?ctional Lotte, mostly Charlotte Buff, has Maximiliane‘s black eyes.
Goethe and Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem had been students together for two years (1765-7) in Leipzig and renewed their aquaintanceship, never very cordial, in Wetzlar. Jerusalem, an amateur of the arts and philosophy, held a secretarial post; got on badly with his superior, an envoy at the Court; and was in love with a married woman by the name of Elisabeth Herd who didn't love him and complained about him to her husband. Jerusalem shot himself on the night of 29-30 October 1772. Goethe, back in Wetzlar in early November, appalled by this event, found out all he could about it and his chief source was Kestner who wrote, perhaps at Goethe’s bidding, an extraordinarily full account, much of which Goethe utilized for Werther. During the rest of November 1772 Goethe busied himself collecting details about Jerusalem rather as the Editor in his novel would about the ?ctional Werther. He put many of these biographical facts as well as many details of his own relationship with Kestner and Charlotte directly into the novel, as though he were indeed the editor and/or narrator of his own terminated life. Years later in Dichtung und Wahrheit he wrote another version. Werther, near the beginning of his career, is a particularly drastic example of the compulsive working and reworking of the stuff of life, his own and other people‘s, that would be Goethe's way of being in the world for the rest of his days.
Kestner and Charlotte were married on 4 April 1773, but neither that nor Jerusalem’s suicide was the immediate catalyst for the writing of Werther. Goethe saw the La Roches, mother and daughter, intelligent, artistically gifted and lively women, in Frankfurt that August. When he saw Maximiliane next, in January 1774, again in Frankfurt. she was married to the businessman Peter Anton Brentano, more than twenty years her senior and a widower with ?ve children whom she had to look after. For those two weeks in January Goethe Continued his relationship with her. They were like brother and sister, he recalls in Dichtung und Wahrheit, far closer in age than she and her husband, while he was, Goethe says, ‘The only one in her entire circle in whom she could hear an echo of that music of the intellect and the spirit to which in girlhood she had grown accustomed'. But Brenuno was no Kestner and did not in the least want Goethe in his family. Maximiliane bore Brentano twelve children (among them Bettina and Clemens, two Romantic writers) and died in 1973 aged thirty-seven.
《呼啸山庄》 勃朗特姐妹中艾米莉·勃朗特的这部处女作,以其强烈的哥特式氛围、复杂的人物关系和对人类原始情感的深刻描摹,在文学史上占据了不可替代的地位。它不仅仅是一部爱情小说,更是一部关于复仇、阶级固化与自然力量的史诗。 故事的背景设定在十九世纪初英格兰北部荒凉、充满野性的旷野之上,这片景致本身就成为了小说中主要人物性格和命运的延伸与象征。我们的叙事者,一个相对温和理性的局外人尼格·林敦,初到约克郡的斯普林斯顿庄园,便被卷入了围绕着呼啸山庄和附近教堂庄园展开的一系列纠葛之中。 核心人物是两个截然不同的庄园的主人——坚韧、宁静的特兰德斯家族(Thrushcross Grange)和狂野、充满原始生命力的休斯菲尔德家族(Wuthering Heights)。 故事围绕着一个身份不明的孤儿展开——希斯克利夫(Heathcliff)。他被老恩肖先生从利物浦带回,他的到来打破了原本宁静的家庭结构。希斯克利夫与恩肖先生的女儿凯瑟琳(Catherine Earnshaw)之间发展出一种超越寻常、近乎宿命的联结。他们的情感是纯粹的、野蛮的,与周围的文明社会格格不入,却又深刻地烙印在彼此的灵魂深处。他们共同在旷野上奔跑,分享着对自由的渴望,对世俗规范的蔑视。 然而,凯瑟琳的社会抱负与她对希斯克利夫的本能依恋产生了剧烈的冲突。她深知,嫁给具有社会地位的林敦家的爱德加·林敦(Edgar Linton)才能保证她能提升自己的地位,实现她对“高雅生活”的向往。这次选择,是小说悲剧的起点。她对希斯克利夫说出那句著名的断言:“我就是希斯克利夫。”——这表明了她认为他们是同一种存在,但她依然选择了嫁给林敦。 被背叛的希斯克利夫,带着巨大的痛苦和屈辱,离开了呼啸山庄。他离开的这段时间里,他通过某种不光彩的手段积累了财富和地位,其目的只有一个:回来复仇。 当他归来时,他已经不再是那个纯真的男孩,而是一个冷酷、精于算计的复仇者。他巧妙地利用了财产继承的规则,先是娶了凯瑟琳的妹妹伊莎贝拉(Isabella Linton),以此来折磨她和爱德加。随后,他通过精心策划的阴谋,逐步夺取了呼啸山庄和教堂庄园的控制权。 小说的高潮部分充满了令人窒息的心理折磨和报复循环。凯瑟琳在理想的束缚、对希斯克利夫的爱以及对林敦的责任之间挣扎,最终在精神和身体的双重压力下香消玉殒,留下了一个心碎的女儿——小凯瑟琳(Cathy Linton)。 希斯克利夫的复仇对象转向了下一代。他强迫他那懦弱、受宠的儿子林敦·林敦(Linton Heathcliff)迎娶了小凯瑟琳,目的是将两个庄园的继承权都集中到自己手中。同时,他对恩肖先生的儿子欣顿(Hareton Earnshaw),那个唯一能唤起他一丝人性的存在,进行了彻底的贬低和“去文明化”,让他沦为文盲和仆人。 小凯瑟琳(教堂庄园的女儿)继承了母亲的美貌和部分理性,而欣顿则继承了恩肖家族的粗犷和热情。小说后半段的叙事重心逐渐转向了这对年轻人的命运。在希斯克利夫的掌控下,他们之间的关系充满了紧张和对抗。 然而,随着希斯克利夫的复仇火焰逐渐熄灭,他发现自己陷入了一个无意义的循环中。他对凯瑟琳的爱,已经演变成了对所有与她相关之物的占有欲和毁灭欲。随着时间推移,他发现自己越是想控制和报复,就越是感到空虚。他开始花费大量时间在凯瑟琳的坟墓旁,渴望与她灵魂的结合。 小凯瑟琳和欣顿在共同的苦难和对过去的疏离感中,逐渐建立起一种健康、充满希望的感情。欣顿在小凯瑟琳的教导下,重新拾起了对知识的渴望,他的行为举止也逐渐变得文明。这种新的、建立在相互尊重与理解上的爱,象征着对第一代人那种毁灭性、占有欲的“魔鬼之爱”的一种救赎和超越。 当希斯克利夫最终因极度思念凯瑟琳而拒绝进食,灵魂挣脱肉体束缚时,复仇的链条终于断裂。他死后,呼啸山庄的阴影开始消散。 小说的尾声,通过尼格·林敦的眼睛,我们看到欣顿和小凯瑟琳在广袤的旷野上漫步,他们代表着新的开始,一个没有怨恨、没有疯狂占有欲的未来。 《呼啸山庄》的伟大之处在于它对人类情感的原始、非理性的探索。它探讨了爱与恨的界限如何模糊,社会阶层如何扭曲人性,以及自然的蛮荒力量如何影响和塑造了人类的命运。它是一部关于激情、嫉妒、毁灭与最终和解的永恒悲剧。