Foreword 序言1

Foreword

序

 

One morning in 1905, or the 31st year of the reign of tEmperor Guangxu of Qing Dynasty, two brothers set out by boat from their hometown Boa-ah, a mountain hamlet in Fujian province on the southern coast of China, for the port city of Xiamen, some sixty miles away.  The boys were full of excitement and chatter, especially the younger one. Yutang  was ten years old, and today, he was taking leave of his hometown and going with his borther to study in Xiamen. They were sons of Pastor Lin Zhicheng, who was born in the poor village of Wulisha. Pastor Lin was sending his sons to free missionary schools in Xiamen.

 

清朝光緒31年，也就是1905年的清晨，兄弟二人離開了他們的家鄉寶峨（Boa-ah)，中國南部沿海省份福建的一個小山村，搭船前往六十英裏外的港口城市廈門。他們滔滔不絕，興奮不已，尤其是其中年幼的一個。語堂年方十歲，他正離開家鄉和哥哥前往廈門求學。他們是牧師林至誠的兒子。林至誠出生在貧窮的五裏沙村。他要把自己的兒子送到廈門免費的教會學校裏讀書。

 

The pastor was not a follower of convention, so the boys did not wear queues. Yutang  was a little guy, deeply tanned, with a prominent forehead, a pair of sparkling eyes, and a narrow chin. Six miles later, when the skiff came to xiaoli, the boys changed to a five-sail junk, and sailed toward zhangzhou on west river. There were paddy fields and farm houses on either side of the river, and tall mountains stood behind them, clad in grey-purplish hues. Yutang thought it inexpressibly beautiful. After a days journey, the junk tied up against the bank under some bamboo trees. Yutang was told to lie down, cover himself with a blanket and go to sleep.

 

林牧師並不是個恪守傳統的人，所以男孩們都沒有留長辮。語堂個頭不高，膚色深褐，前額突出，有雙閃閃發光的眼睛和窄窄的下巴。船行六英裏，到了孝澧後，他們由小漁船登上了五帆舢板，繼續沿西江前往漳州。西江兩岸，稻田成茵，農舍散布，高山如黛聳立在他們的身後。景色之美，令語堂感到難以描述。幾日後，小舢板靠岸拴在了竹子上。按照吩咐，語堂要蓋條毯子躺下睡覺。

 

But sleep was the last thing on the boy's mind. The boatman sitting at the junk's was sucking his pipe, and between gulps of bitter tea, telling stories about the empress Dowager Cexi, who ruled the court today, having put the emperor guagnxu under house arrest for supporting the reformers at the palace. Another junk was tied up on the opposite bank, brightly lit by lanterns. A soft breeze wafted sounds of merrymaking and music from a lute across the water. Oh, what a beautiful scene! Yutang thought. I must remmeber this evening  well, so that the sights and sounds will always be fresh in my mind when I recall this night, however old I might be.

 

然而此刻在少年的心裏，睡覺是最不情願的事情了。船工正坐在一邊吸著他的旱煙，一邊講述著把支持維新派的光緒皇帝軟禁在宮，眼下正統治著朝廷的慈禧太後的故事，不時地喝上幾口濃茶。對岸也泊著一艘舢板，船上燈籠閃亮。夜風輕輕的飄蕩，水麵上傳來歡樂的喧鬧和琵琶的奏鳴。哦，多迷人的景色！我一定要把這個夜晚牢牢的記在心裏，這樣將來不論我多老，一想起今夜，這些迷人的景色和美妙的聲音都會活生生的出現在我的腦海裏。語堂心裏想著。

 

At the thought of going to the school in xiamen, his heart leapt with anticipation. He often went to watch the sunset behind the tall mountains which completely surrounded the hamlet. The mountain peaks were always shrouded in clouds. How did a person get out of this deep valley, he wondered. What was the world like outside? To the north there was a crack in one of the peaks, let there, it was said, when a fairy stubbed his toe on a rock. The world was so big that it boggled his mind. Two years ago, his father told him the first airplane had a successful test flight.. "I've read everything I could lay my hands on about the airplane", his father said, "but I have never seen one, and I don't know whether I should believe it." his father also told him that the best university in the world were the university of berlin in Germany, and oxford university in England. "you must study hard, young man," his father often said, sitting beside the boy's bed at night, turning up the oil lamp and smoking his pipe. "study hard, so that you can go to one of those universities. Acquire an education and become a famous man."

 

想到了要到廈門上學，他的心裏便充滿了期望。他經常跑去看日落，看太陽落在那些把小山村團團包圍的群山的背後。那些山峰總是被包裹在燦爛的雲霞之中。別人是怎麽能夠走出這深深的山穀的呢，他有點困惑。外麵的世界會是什麽樣的呢？在北麵的一座山峰上有道裂縫，據說那是一個仙女的腳趾蹭了一下留下來的。世界這麽大，讓他有點不敢麵對。兩年前，他的父親告訴他第一家飛機成功的進行了一次試飛。“我度過我能找到的所有的有關這架飛機的報道，”他的父親說，“但我從來沒有見過飛機，我也不知道我是否該相信它。”他的父親經常對他說世界上最好的大學是德國的柏林大學和英國的牛津大學。“你一定要用功學習，小夥子，”他父親常常坐在他的床邊，點亮油燈，吸著煙管這樣的教導他。“刻苦學習，將來才能到這些大學讀書，接受教育，成為一個名人。”

 

（名人的童年就是不一樣，我小的時候可是一片懵懂，隻知道笑和哭，根本沒有什麽關於世界什麽樣的深刻思考和困惑。我老爸更是平常，從來沒有跟我說過出名之類的話，倒是我的一個堂姐高考落榜，自己在家痛苦的複習過一段時間，她經常對我說，你一定好好學習，你名字裏的wen可是聞名世界的wen啊，但這些對我的影響多大呢？那個聞字也隻在我的名字裏偶爾出現過幾次。）

 

My father often repeated this story to me. As I sat in his study, surrounded by bookshelves of his works, I knew that grandfather's words were the inspiration of his life. In his 80 years, my father wrote and translated more than 50 books and became a world-renowned author. The new york times said at the time of his death, "Lin Yutang had no peer as an interpreter to western minds of the customs, aspirations, fears and thought of his people." father was a novelist, essayist, philosopher, philologist and lexicographer. He also invented a chinese typewriter. "but he was more,” wrote Prof. Nelson I. Wu of Washington University of St. Louis, Missouri. “He was a total man, stubbornly going his own way through the criticism of lesser minds to become a universial genius.”

 

 我的父親經常向我反複訴說這個故事。當我坐在他的書房，四周被放滿了他的著作的書架包圍的時候，我明白祖父的話曾經是他生活的鞭策。在八十歲的時候，父親已經創作和翻譯了50本書，並成了一個世界聞名的作家。紐約時報在他去世的時候報道說，“林語堂在向西方人的詮釋他的人民的風俗習慣，理想追求，擔憂恐懼和所思所想方麵舉世無雙，無與倫比。”父親是個小說家，散文家，哲學家，語言學家和字典編纂者。他甚至還發明了一種中文打字機。“但是他的貢獻不止這些”，位於美國密蘇裏州聖路易斯的華盛頓大學的Nelson I Wu教授寫道“他是一個徹頭徹尾的人，他不顧少數人的批評，執著的堅持自己的道路，並成了一個世界級的天才。”

 

Father was born in 1895, the fifth of six sons of Lin Zhicheng. The Presbyterian pastor, a self-taught man, communicated to his children a passionate zest for all that was new and modern from the west, and decided that his sons must learn English and receive western educations. With the help of one of his brothers and a loan, Yutang attended St. John’s University in Shanghai. The main emphasis was on English. Yutang also studied theology, because he wanted to be a pastor like his father. But after extensive reading in science, he began to have doubts about Christian dogma, and changed his major to philosophy.

 

父親生於1895年，是祖父林至誠六個孩子中的老五。作為長老會的牧師，一個自學成才的人，祖父將他對所有西方西方新穎先進事物的一腔熱忱傳遞給了他的孩子們，他認定他的孩子們必須學習英語並接受西方式的教育。在貸款和他的一個兄弟的幫助下，語堂加入了上海的聖約翰大學學習。該校的主要強調英語學習。語堂也學習了神學，因為他希望和他的父親一樣成為一名牧師。然而在閱讀了大量的自然科學知識後，他開始對基督教的教義產生了懷疑，並把專業轉到了哲學。

 

When he graduated from st. John’s in 1916, Yutang accepted a teaching post at Qinghua college in Beijing. Here, he found himself surrounded by Chinese history, and he realized how small the confines of his Christian education had been. He knew that joshua’s trumpet blew down the walls of Jericho, but did not know the folktale of meng jiangnu, whose tears for her lost husband at the great wall caused a section of the wall to collapse and expose his dead body. Determined to make up his inadequacy, Yutang haunted bookstores, asking shopkeepers what were the most important books to read, because he was too ashamed to ask others.

 

1916年自聖約翰大學畢業後，語堂在北京的清華大學接受了一份教學工作。在清華，他發現他被中國的曆史所包圍，並且認識到他所受的基督教式教育的局限是多麽的狹隘。他知道約書亞德號角摧毀了耶利哥市的城牆，卻不知道孟薑女的眼淚也曾經使一段長城崩塌，暴露出她因修長城死去的丈夫的屍骨。語堂決心彌補自己知識的不足，他留戀在各個書店之間，因為羞於向別人請教，他隻好向店員谘詢那些才是最重要的書籍。

 

When he was not reading, Yutang tried to devise a better method for looking up characters in a Chinese dictionary than the prevailing Kangxi method, the bane of scholars and students alike. At the age of 23, he published “an index system for Chinese characters” for which Cai Yuanpei, chancellor of National University of Peking (Beida), wrote a preface. The work attracted the attention of scholars and was a catalyst for change. But Yutang was already dissatisfied with his method, and he continued throughout his life to work on improvements. These were finally incorporated in his monumental Chinese-English dictionary published when he was 77 years old.

 

不讀書的時候，語堂就嚐試設計一種更省事在漢語字典裏查找漢字的方法，因為那時流行的康熙漢字係統無論對學者還是對學生都是一種負擔。23歲時，他發表了 由國立北平大學校長蔡元培作序的“漢字索引係統”一書。該書吸引了許多學者的注意並成了變革的催化劑。但是語堂早已不再滿足於他自己的方法，他畢生都在探尋改進。這些工作最終加入了他在77歲時出版的漢英詞典中。

 

Yutang taught at Qinghua for three years, then qualified to study in America. He received a half-scholarship to major in modern languages at Harvard graduate school of arts and sciences. In 1919, he married liao cuifeng from xiamen, and took his bride with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the end of the year, his stipend stopped coming, and he had not enough money to get his master’s degree at Harvard.

 

語堂在清華教了三年書，後來獲得了赴美國留學的資格。他收到了哈佛文理研究生院的現代語言專業的半獎。1919年，他和生於廈門的廖翠鳳結婚，並把他的新娘帶到了馬塞諸塞州的劍橋。然而在這一年年底的時候，他的生活補助卻停止了，他沒有足夠的錢來維持他在哈佛的研究生學習。

 

（嗬嗬，天才如林語堂也拿得是半獎啊，而且還中途斷流，好可憐，不知道是不是因為得了C的原因，^O^,我已經得了一個C了，：P）