1015_附件二：英译汉试题

附件二：

首届“外教社杯”

江苏省高校外语教师翻译大赛英译汉试题

将下列段落译成汉语：

It is surely no coincidence that Montesquieu should lay out his touristic method during that part of his text that pertains to his lengthy stay in Rome. For of all the cities visited by Montesquieu, Rome is the one most clearly not dominated by some central cathedral spire or other tall monument.

The city of the seven hills offers a number of different perspectives, none of which is manifestly superior to the others. Even though he spends nearly half his year-long Italian adventure in Rome, Montesquieu's touristic theory cannot grasp Rome: “One is never finished seeing”. And as Montesquieu’s authorial persona is scattered through a perspectivism such that while abroad, he says, “I attached myself th ere just as to what is my own”, so Rome’s multiplicity englobes all nationalities: “Everyone lives in Rome and th inks to find his homeland there”. The statement echoes the words written nearly 150 years earlier by that other Gascon nobleman who pursued a similar itinerary and who even went so far as to acquire an official document granting him Roman citizenship.

Since “all roads” are proverbially said to lead there, Rome is everybody’s home, and everybody wants to go there. The superimposition of itineraries means that one is also always seeing what others have seen, making Rome, the sight of so many sightings, the tourist attraction par excellence. It is truly the “eternal city”as Montesquieu can only say after (and before) so many others. The history of famous visitors to Rome produces a cultural sedimentation on a par with the traditionally mentioned geological sedimentation that physically superimposes the Rome of one historical period over another.Rome is what one can never

finish seeing because ever new layers of sedimentation cover over the layers below even as they point to the existence of those layers.

As for Montesquieu’s desire to see, the endlessness of things to see endlessly maintains the pleasure of seeing by denying the ultimate satisfaction of the desire to see everything. This is the aesthetics later formulated in his Essai sur le go?t (Essay on Taste, 1757) and epitomized by none other than the sight of Saint Pe ter’s in R ome: “As one examines it, the eye sees it grow bigger, and the astonishment increases”.Not unsurprisingly, the basic premise of Montesquieu’s aesthetics, first published in the article “Go?t”in the Encyclopédie, lies in the desire to see more: “Since we love to see a great number of objects, we would like to extend our sight, to be in several places, to traverse more space; in short, our soul flees all confines, and it would like, so to speak, to extend the sphere of our presence: it is thus a great pleasure for it to set its sight in the distance”. The aesthetic experience is understood as a travel of the gaze, whose pleasure is guaranteed by an indefinite extending of the soul’s “s phere of presence.” Undisrupted by any of the displacement or repetition required by the limited vision of the tourist in his tower, this appropriative aesthetics of visual pleasure geometrically describes the (asymptotically unattainable) ideal of a pure, unobstructed view in every direction and with every point along its circumference equidistant from the ocular oikos of its center.

But this same pleasure can just as easily be reversed into the anguish poignantly expressed in the later books of The Spirit of the Laws by an aging Montesquieu gone blind from too much reading and painfully aware of the ways in which his vast subject matter—the totality of laws and human institutions—exceeds the purview of his theoretical gaze. Interestingly enough, the theorist’s dilemma is thematized, once again, in terms of tourism: “I am like that antiquarian who set out from his own country, arrived in Egypt, cast an eye on the Pyramids, and returned home”. In this passage, the theorist sees himself as a tourist in the pejorative sense of someone who undertakes a great voyage only to take back a partial,

superficial view of what he has seen. What he sees without really seeing is seen at the cost of a great effort, of an expense that ludicrously exceeds the revenue. It is equally to be remarked that this partial view is a view that looks out at the monumental height of the pyramids from below. We have strayed from the economy of a theoretical vision that sees everything from the height of its tower.

The image of the theorist as tourist returns a few pages later: “When one casts one’s eyes upon the monuments of our history and laws, it seems that it is all open sea, and that this sea does not even have bounds. All these cold, dry, insipid and hard writings must be read and devoured”. Here, the touristic vision sees not too little but too much, a situation evoking the disorientation of being set adrift in a boundless sea, which is none other than the infinity of text in which the theorist finds himself lost and engulfed. The vision is not only excessive, but its very excess is turned back against the spectator and erodes his position, so much so that in seeing too much he ends by seeing too little. The movement or travel of the vision no longer “fixes” anything down; rather, it is what erodes any possible point of reference, what undermines the economy of travel as method. This radical estrangement within erudition, warned against by Descartes in the Discourse on Method, is also signaled by the egregious mixing of metaphors in this passage. The casting of one’s gaze upon the material to be read in Montesquieu’s research on the laws oddly converts that material into a dauntingly boundless sea. The sea of erudition is then described as wha t must be not merely read, but “devoured.”(Excerpts from Georges Van Den Abbeele’s Travel as Metaphor)