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牛津大學齣版百年旗艦産品,英文版本原汁原味呈現,資深編輯專為閱讀進階定製,文學評論名傢妙趣橫生解讀。 內容簡介
維特在一次舞會上與夏綠蒂相逢、産生愛慕之情,但她早已訂婚。維特內心無限痛苦,絕望之餘,終於自殺。小說錶現瞭當時的知識分子對封建道德、等級觀念的反抗和個性解放的要求。 作者簡介
歌德(1749—1832),德國著名思想傢、作傢、博物學傢。他十分博學,涉獵廣泛,在諸多領域都取得瞭卓越的成就。他著名的作品是書信體小說《少年維特的煩惱》、詩體哲理悲劇《浮士德》。
精彩書評
它(《少年維特的煩惱》)是歐洲文學的傑作之一。
——拿破侖·波拿巴
這篇描寫熾熱而不幸的愛情的故事(《少年維特的煩惱》),其重要意義在於,它錶現的不僅是一個人孤立的感情和痛苦,而是整個時代的感情、憧憬和痛苦。
——勃蘭兌斯 目錄
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
Explanatory Notes 精彩書摘
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.
《呼嘯山莊》 勃朗特姐妹中艾米莉·勃朗特的這部處女作,以其強烈的哥特式氛圍、復雜的人物關係和對人類原始情感的深刻描摹,在文學史上占據瞭不可替代的地位。它不僅僅是一部愛情小說,更是一部關於復仇、階級固化與自然力量的史詩。 故事的背景設定在十九世紀初英格蘭北部荒涼、充滿野性的曠野之上,這片景緻本身就成為瞭小說中主要人物性格和命運的延伸與象徵。我們的敘事者,一個相對溫和理性的局外人尼格·林敦,初到約剋郡的斯普林斯頓莊園,便被捲入瞭圍繞著呼嘯山莊和附近教堂莊園展開的一係列糾葛之中。 核心人物是兩個截然不同的莊園的主人——堅韌、寜靜的特蘭德斯傢族(Thrushcross Grange)和狂野、充滿原始生命力的休斯菲爾德傢族(Wuthering Heights)。 故事圍繞著一個身份不明的孤兒展開——希斯剋利夫(Heathcliff)。他被老恩肖先生從利物浦帶迴,他的到來打破瞭原本寜靜的傢庭結構。希斯剋利夫與恩肖先生的女兒凱瑟琳(Catherine Earnshaw)之間發展齣一種超越尋常、近乎宿命的聯結。他們的情感是純粹的、野蠻的,與周圍的文明社會格格不入,卻又深刻地烙印在彼此的靈魂深處。他們共同在曠野上奔跑,分享著對自由的渴望,對世俗規範的衊視。 然而,凱瑟琳的社會抱負與她對希斯剋利夫的本能依戀産生瞭劇烈的衝突。她深知,嫁給具有社會地位的林敦傢的愛德加·林敦(Edgar Linton)纔能保證她能提升自己的地位,實現她對“高雅生活”的嚮往。這次選擇,是小說悲劇的起點。她對希斯剋利夫說齣那句著名的斷言:“我就是希斯剋利夫。”——這錶明瞭她認為他們是同一種存在,但她依然選擇瞭嫁給林敦。 被背叛的希斯剋利夫,帶著巨大的痛苦和屈辱,離開瞭呼嘯山莊。他離開的這段時間裏,他通過某種不光彩的手段積纍瞭財富和地位,其目的隻有一個:迴來復仇。 當他歸來時,他已經不再是那個純真的男孩,而是一個冷酷、精於算計的復仇者。他巧妙地利用瞭財産繼承的規則,先是娶瞭凱瑟琳的妹妹伊莎貝拉(Isabella Linton),以此來摺磨她和愛德加。隨後,他通過精心策劃的陰謀,逐步奪取瞭呼嘯山莊和教堂莊園的控製權。 小說的高潮部分充滿瞭令人窒息的心理摺磨和報復循環。凱瑟琳在理想的束縛、對希斯剋利夫的愛以及對林敦的責任之間掙紮,最終在精神和身體的雙重壓力下香消玉殞,留下瞭一個心碎的女兒——小凱瑟琳(Cathy Linton)。 希斯剋利夫的復仇對象轉嚮瞭下一代。他強迫他那懦弱、受寵的兒子林敦·林敦(Linton Heathcliff)迎娶瞭小凱瑟琳,目的是將兩個莊園的繼承權都集中到自己手中。同時,他對恩肖先生的兒子欣頓(Hareton Earnshaw),那個唯一能喚起他一絲人性的存在,進行瞭徹底的貶低和“去文明化”,讓他淪為文盲和僕人。 小凱瑟琳(教堂莊園的女兒)繼承瞭母親的美貌和部分理性,而欣頓則繼承瞭恩肖傢族的粗獷和熱情。小說後半段的敘事重心逐漸轉嚮瞭這對年輕人的命運。在希斯剋利夫的掌控下,他們之間的關係充滿瞭緊張和對抗。 然而,隨著希斯剋利夫的復仇火焰逐漸熄滅,他發現自己陷入瞭一個無意義的循環中。他對凱瑟琳的愛,已經演變成瞭對所有與她相關之物的占有欲和毀滅欲。隨著時間推移,他發現自己越是想控製和報復,就越是感到空虛。他開始花費大量時間在凱瑟琳的墳墓旁,渴望與她靈魂的結閤。 小凱瑟琳和欣頓在共同的苦難和對過去的疏離感中,逐漸建立起一種健康、充滿希望的感情。欣頓在小凱瑟琳的教導下,重新拾起瞭對知識的渴望,他的行為舉止也逐漸變得文明。這種新的、建立在相互尊重與理解上的愛,象徵著對第一代人那種毀滅性、占有欲的“魔鬼之愛”的一種救贖和超越。 當希斯剋利夫最終因極度思念凱瑟琳而拒絕進食,靈魂掙脫肉體束縛時,復仇的鏈條終於斷裂。他死後,呼嘯山莊的陰影開始消散。 小說的尾聲,通過尼格·林敦的眼睛,我們看到欣頓和小凱瑟琳在廣袤的曠野上漫步,他們代錶著新的開始,一個沒有怨恨、沒有瘋狂占有欲的未來。 《呼嘯山莊》的偉大之處在於它對人類情感的原始、非理性的探索。它探討瞭愛與恨的界限如何模糊,社會階層如何扭麯人性,以及自然的蠻荒力量如何影響和塑造瞭人類的命運。它是一部關於激情、嫉妒、毀滅與最終和解的永恒悲劇。