Iris Iris
性别: 
加入时间: 2008/02/28
文章: 274
经验值: 9741
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作者：Iris Iris 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
尚能胡说（17）：无根的惆怅
这一阵子围绕着奥运“肾火”的传递，海内外的华人，不论其政治立场如何，肾上腺素都着实被激发了一下子。又逢柏杨老驾鹤西归，细想起来，这一切似乎都与中国的酱缸文化不无干系，而这种文化又是有它的人文地理和历史根源的。
中平的近作中所列举的那些国内的不良风气，其实只要有中国人的地方，就不会绝迹—去一下这里的中国城、中国店，you’d feel right at home!
在美籍华人学者中有一位叫段义浮（Yi-Fu Tuan)的老先生，是著名的人文地理学家，他在西方学术界的地位，绝不亚于那些华裔诺奖获得者或余英时这样的人文学者，但奇怪的是，在中国人圈子里却鲜为人知。他1970年代初在Harper’s Magazine 上曾发表了一篇短文，后来被《诺登文选》（”Norton Anthology”) 收入，建议所有的中国人都应该读一遍。
我每次回国，去探亲访友，进了人家的家门，看到室内装修得或富丽堂皇，或优雅别致，那进门前所走过的楼道和走廊的脏乱，在我的脑子里却愈加挥之不去，这时我就会想起段老的那篇美文。
去年夏天，我去北京万国城的一个朋友家去做客，那个小区比纽约中央公园的一些豪华公寓，一点儿也不逊色，难怪上了去年《时代周刊》的世界十大建筑榜。区内的住户，不是外国人就是高等华人，在楼道里碰巧撞上了一位电影明星，朋友跟她打招呼，向我介绍说是梅婷，惭愧的是我竟不知道她是谁。还有那些带着紫绒法兰西帽的门卫们，总让我想起上世纪二、三十年代上海租界上的红头阿三。而小区门外的香河园路，却是狭窄、拥挤、脏乱，路对面是低矮的破旧房子。这种蒙太奇就是当今中国社会的缩影。这时我又不禁想起段老的那篇美文。
段老的这篇文章题为：”American Space, Chinese Place”（附后），好像有人翻译为《美国的空间，中国的位置》。如果一个读者只看标题的话，一定不知其所云！若是我翻译的话，我会根据文中的内容翻译为：《美国人重生活的大空间，中国人重自家的小地盘》。虽然我翻译的啰嗦一些，也许更达意一些。
正如段老在文中指出的那样，中国人对故土（根）的眷恋、对自家那一亩三分地的辛勤耕耘和悉心呵护，是有其历史根源的。在这种大历史观下，来冷静地分析中国的酱缸文化，来客观地看待很多海外华人走上街头的现象，一切都make perfect sense, 一切也都变得了无新意。
清人龚定庵诗云：“种花都是种愁根，没个花枝又断魂。”中国就是我们心头的那个愁根，不管你嘴上愿不愿意承认。
American Space, Chinese Place
by Yi-Fu Tuan
Americans have a sense of space, not of place. Go to an American home in exurbia, and almost the first thing you do is drift toward the picture window. How curious that the first compliment you pay your host inside his house is to say how lovely it is outside his house! He is pleased that you should admire his vistas. The distant horizon is not merely a line separating earth from sky, it is a symbol of the future. The American is not rooted in his place, however lovely; his eyes are drawn by the expanding space to a point on the horizon, which is his future.
By contrast, consider the traditional Chinese home. Blank walls enclose it. Step behind the spirit wall and you are in a courtyard with perhaps a miniature garden around the corner. Once inside the private compound you are wrapped in an ambiance of calm beauty, an ordered world of buildings, pavement, rock, and decorative vegetation. But you have no distant view: nowhere does space open out before you. Raw nature in such a home is experienced only as weather, and the only open space is the sky above. The Chinese is rooted in his place. When he has to leave, it is not for the promised land on the terrestrial horizon, but for another world altogether along the vertical, religious axis of his imagination.
The Chinese tie to place is deeply felt. Wanderlust is an alien sentiment. The Taoist classic Tao Te Ching captures the ideal of rootedness in place with these words: "Though there may be another country in the neighborhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic between them; and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other." In theory if not in practice, farmers have ranked high in Chinese society. The reason is not only that they are engaged in the "root" industry of producing food but that, unlike pecuniary merchants, they are tied to the land and do not abandon their country when it is in danger.
Nostalgia is a recurrent theme in Chinese poetry. An American reader of translated Chinese poems may well be taken aback, even put off, by the frequency, as well as the sentimentality of the lament for home. To understand the strength of this sentiment, we need to know that the Chinese desire for stability and rootedness in place is prompted by the constant threat of war, exile, and the natural disasters of flood and drought. Forcible removal makes the Chinese keenly aware of their loss. By contrast, Americans move, for the most part, voluntarily. Their nostalgia for hometown is really longing for childhood to which they cannot return: in the meantime the future beckons and the future is "out there," in open space. When we criticize American rootlessness we tend to forget that it is a result of ideals we admire, namely, social mobility and optimism about the future. When we admire Chinese rootedness, we forget that the word “place” means both location in space and position in society: to be tied to place is also to be bound to one's station in life, with little hope of betterment. Space symbolizes hope, place, achievement and stability.
作者：Iris Iris 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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ZT: 无根的惆怅
