《表情独特的脸庞》（1987）

布罗茨基Joseph Brodsky. On Grief and Reason: Essays

他的《小于一》也非常好

中文版P54有删改，最好中英对读。

Uncommon visage表情独特的脸庞。1987年诺奖演讲稿

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/

A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system.

我这一行当的人很少认为自己有成体系的思维；在最坏的情况下，他才自认为有一个体系。

If art teaches anything, it is the privateness of the human condition.

如果艺术能教给人一点东西，那便是人之存在的孤独性。

It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.

因为这个原因，那些公共利益的捍卫者、民众的领袖和代表历史必然性的先驱们，往往不喜欢艺术，尤其是文学、诗歌。因为在艺术涉足的地方，诗歌被阅读的地方，他们发现期待中的赞同与众口一词，成了冷漠和异议；本该果敢行为的地方，出现了怠慢和厌恶。换句话说，在那些公共利益的捍卫者和民众的统治者试图利用的许多个零上，艺术添上了“句号，句号，逗号和一个减号”，将每一个零转换成一个小小的人，尽管他们并不总是拥有漂亮的脸蛋。

It’s in acquiring this “uncommon visage” that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically.

人类存在的意义正在于这“表情独特的脸庞”，因为对这种独特性，我们似乎已经做好了基因上的准备。

This flight is the flight in the direction of “uncommon visage”, in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy.

这种逃遁向着“表情独特的脸庞”，向着分子、自主性与独特性飞翔。

Though we can condemn the material suppression of literature – the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books – we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

尽管我们可以谴责物理意义上对文学的压制——对作者的迫害，审查制度的施行，焚书——但对于最糟糕的“亵渎”我们却是无能为力的：那就是“不读书”。由于这个罪过，一个人将付出他的一生；如果犯罪者是一个国家，国家将抵上她的历史。

A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

识字的人也好，受过教育的人也好，完全有可能一边宣读这样或那样的政治专著或小册子，一边杀害自己的同类，甚至因此体验到一种信仰的喜悦。列宁、斯大林和希特勒都识字，毛泽东甚至写诗。但这些人有一个共同点，被他们杀害的人的名单比他们的阅读书单更长。（中文版删去4个姓名）

Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty – indeed, a terrifyingly wasted – place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture’s continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

回顾过去，我可以说我们开始于一片空地——事实上，是一片可怕的荒地，我们更多出于直觉而不是有意识地，致力于文化延续性影响的重建，致力于文化形式和修辞的重建，用我们自身崭新的，或者在我们看来是崭新的当代内容，来充盈少数几个幸存下来，但多半已被彻底毁坏的文化形式。（反观中国也是这样，儒教道教佛教，几乎毁灭殆尽了，再来提中华文明的重建。文化人共同的悲哀啊）