2019年4月20日 星期六

Victor Hugo《巴黎聖母院》 Notre-Dame de Paris2章:Book III I. Notre Dame; THE RAT-HOLE. ;一段

"We must nevertheless do him justice: malice was probably not innate in him. From his earliest interactions with men he had felt, and afterward he had seen himself, despised, rejected, cast off. Human speech had never been anything to him but a jeer or a curse. As he grew up he found nothing but hatred around him. He had adopted it. He had acquired the general malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded."
—from THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME (1831) by Victor Hugo
Hugo’s grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo, his adoptive son Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral, and Captain Phoebus. Falsely accused of trying to murder Phoebus, who attempts to rape her, Esmeralda is sentenced to death and rescued from the gallows by Quasimodo who defends her to the last. The subject of many adaptations for stage and screen, this remains perhaps one of the most romantic yet gripping stories ever told. THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME is an epic of a whole people, with a cast of characters that ranges from the king of France to the beggars who inhabit the Parisian sewers, and at their center the massive figure–a character in itself–of the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of the cathedral; his foster father, the tormented archdeacon Frollo; and the beautiful and doomed Gypsy Esmeralda are caught up in a tragedy that still speaks clearly to us of revolution and social strife, of destiny and free will, and of love and loss. READ an excerpt from the introduction here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-hunchback-of-notr…/


Hanching Chung
假設牛津的英譯本是對的。那麼,《巴黎聖母院》*的兩中國譯本和台灣的遠景的,第五卷第一章第一段的翻譯,各有數個錯誤。

*
 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris), 1831.





Wikipedia 中文版亂說:
《鐘樓怪人》是第一部包羅萬象的小說,從法國國王到地溝裡的老鼠,
事實上,THE RAT-HOLE 是比喻,參考本章末段:
遠景版在本章幾處拉丁文都沒翻譯,許多處不知所云:建議參考英譯本。

此章更難翻譯:
Book III I. Notre Dame, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) 2種英譯 Book III I. Notre Dame, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) 2...


CHAPTER II. THE RAT-HOLE.



The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève, which
we quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la Esmeralda.

It is ten o’clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the day
after a festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish; ribbons, rags,
feathers from tufts of plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs of
the public feast. A goodly number of bourgeois are “sauntering,” as we
say, here and there, turning over with their feet the extinct brands of
the bonfire, going into raptures in front of the Pillar House, over the
memory of the fine hangings of the day before, and to-day staring at the
nails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider and beer
are rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy passers-by
come and go. The merchants converse and call to each other from the
thresholds of their shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole,
the Pope of the Fools, are in all mouths; they vie with each other, each
trying to criticise it best and laugh the most. And, meanwhile, four
mounted sergeants, who have just posted themselves at the four sides
of the pillory, have already concentrated around themselves a goodly
proportion of the populace scattered on the Place, who condemn
themselves to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.

If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy scene
which is being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now transfer
his gaze towards that ancient demi-Gothic, demi-Romanesque house of the
Tour-Roland, which forms the corner on the quay to the west, he will
observe, at the angle of the façade, a large public breviary, with rich
illuminations, protected from the rain by a little penthouse, and from
thieves by a small grating, which, however, permits of the leaves being
turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed by two
iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the square; the only
opening which admits a small quantity of light and air to a little cell
without a door, constructed on the ground-floor, in the thickness of the
walls of the old house, and filled with a peace all the more profound,
with a silence all the more gloomy, because a public place, the most
populous and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it.

This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three
centuries, ever since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for
her father who died in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out
in the wall of her own house, in order to immure herself there forever,
keeping of all her palace only this lodging whose door was walled up,
and whose window stood open, winter and summer, giving all the rest to
the poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twenty
years for death in this premature tomb, praying night and day for
the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a
pillow, clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water
which the compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge
of her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her
death, at the moment when she was passing to the other sepulchre, she
had bequeathed this one in perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers,
widows, or maidens, who should wish to pray much for others or for
themselves, and who should desire to inter themselves alive in a great
grief or a great penance. The poor of her day had made her a fine
funeral, with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, the
pious maid had not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those among
them who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter
might be accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had
frankly besought God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the deceased.
The majority had contented themselves with holding the memory of Rolande
sacred, and converting her rags into relics. The city, on its side, had
founded in honor of the damoiselle, a public breviary, which had been
fastened near the window of the cell, in order that passers-by might
halt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer might
remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses of Madame
Rolande’s vault, might not die outright of hunger and forgetfulness.

Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the cities
of the Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most frequented street,
in the most crowded and noisy market, in the very middle, under the feet
of the horses, under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a
well, a tiny walled and grated cabin, at the bottom of which a human
being prayed night and day, voluntarily devoted to some eternal
lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the reflections which that
strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day; that horrible cell, a sort
of intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery and
the city; that living being cut off from the human community, and
thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop
of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave;
that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone;
that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye already
illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the walls of a tomb;
that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a prisoner in that dungeon
cell, and beneath that double envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur
of that soul in pain;--nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd.
The piety of that age, not very subtle nor much given to reasoning, did
not see so many facets in an act of religion. It took the thing in the
block, honored, venerated, hallowed the sacrifice at need, but did not
analyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity for them. It brought
some pittance to the miserable penitent from time to time, looked
through the hole to see whether he were still living, forgot his name,
hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger,
who questioned them about the living skeleton who was perishing in that
cellar, the neighbors replied simply, “It is the recluse.”

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration,
without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet
been invented, either for things of matter or for things of the mind.

Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the examples
of this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities were in truth
frequent, as we have just said. There were in Paris a considerable
number of these cells, for praying to God and doing penance; they were
nearly all occupied. It is true that the clergy did not like to have
them empty, since that implied lukewarmness in believers, and that
lepers were put into them when there were no penitents on hand. Besides
the cell on the Grève, there was one at Montfauçon, one at the Charnier
des Innocents, another I hardly know where,--at the Clichon House, I
think; others still at many spots where traces of them are found in
traditions, in default of memorials. The University had also its own. On
Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space
of thirty years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill at
the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had finished, singing
loudest at night, _magna voce per umbras_, and to-day, the
antiquary fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du
Puits-qui-parle--the street of the “Speaking Well.”

To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say that
it had never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame Roland, it
had stood vacant for a year or two, though rarely. Many women had come
thither to mourn, until their death, for relatives, lovers, faults.
Parisian malice, which thrusts its finger into everything, even into
things which concern it the least, affirmed that it had beheld but few
widows there.

In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription on the
wall indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose of this cell.
The custom was retained until the middle of the sixteenth century of
explaining an edifice by a brief device inscribed above the door.
Thus, one still reads in France, above the wicket of the prison in the
seignorial mansion of Tourville, _Sileto et spera_; in Ireland, beneath
the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to Fortescue Castle,
_Forte scutum, salus ducum_; in England, over the principal entrance
to the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: _Tuum est_. At that time
every edifice was a thought.

As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these two
words had been carved in large Roman capitals over the window,--


   TU, ORA.


And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so much
refinement in things, and likes to translate _Ludovico Magno_ by “Porte
Saint-Denis,” to give to this dark, gloomy, damp cavity, the name of
“The Rat-Hole.” An explanation less sublime, perhaps, than the other;
but, on the other hand, more picturesque.

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