他者之聲：文本中的語言多樣性與重譯──以《金甲蟲》為例

The Voices of the Other: A Case Study of The Gold Bug as a Multilingual Text in Retranslation

二十世紀初期到1949年間，美國作家愛倫‧坡（Edgar Allan Poe）的短篇小說在中文世界譯介不斷，不但譯介篇目多、重譯次數眾，譯者也都是當時一時之選。傅東華、錢歌川、茅盾、周作人、伍光建、周瘦鵑等名譯者都曾譯介坡之作品。本文所探究之《金甲蟲》（The Gold Bug）為第一個譯入中國的愛倫‧坡短篇小說，自1905年周作人首譯至1949年間，共有六個譯本。此尋寶故事中夾雜大量黑人英語以及破解藏寶圖密碼之解碼英文，當中的語言混雜性使得譯者在翻譯時，必須因應兩種不同層次的多語性。本文由多語文本翻譯這個角度切入，分析黑人英語與解碼英語兩種分別作為「他者的他者」以及「他者」之表徵在六譯本中的隱與現。六譯看似都將黑人「噤聲」，任英語「發聲」，但操作手法卻不盡相同。筆者爬梳六譯翻譯脈絡後推論，即便外來他者以鮮明語言表徵現身文本中，譯者在考察、處理、再現原文中的語言異質性時，也同時挪用、重新肯定、更新、改造了譯入系統對於他者的理解。時人以翻譯為引進西方的維新之途，其實同時也引發了與自身系統的再次對話。

This article investigates the retranslations of The Gold Bug, the first of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories that was introduced into the Chinese literary world. The text was chosen for its unique linguistic diversity, given the use of both Black English and regular English in deciphering the treasure map. This heterogeneous linguistic aspect of the story meant that the six Mandarin-speaking translators of the story were taking on a multilingual task. With an eye to exploring how multiple foreign languages, in this case Black English and English, are represented in the retranslation process, all six translations are analyzed. Despite the seemingly similar approaches to muting the Black English and voicing the regular English, the manipulations across all six translations are in fact divergent. A re-contextualization of the analysis shows us the interesting dynamics between Self and the Other in the translations. The translators re-presented the Other via resources available in the target system, such as the then-popular genres, the experiments with the contemporary vernacular Mandarin, and the perception of American “literary system” at the time. This study argues that when translators are dealing with multilingual texts, in which the voices of the Others are strongly imposed on translations, their practices may trigger both the dialogue between Self and the Other and that within the target system itself.