Chapter 10 Part Two: From Chinese to English in Westminster Abbey

In Westminster Abbey at Westminster Abbey Last year, Writers Publishing once again invited my husband and I to translate a book titled Darwin's Worms ("Darwin's Earthworms").The author of the book is the British Adam Phillips (Adam Phillips).At first, I thought that Darwin was a person who studied biological evolution. The focus of his research should be paleontology, ancient humans, and small things like earthworms that exist as long as there is soil. He may just mention it in passing, and there will be nothing special meaning. When I got the original book, I first saw a line of small words under the title of the cover:

A profound meditation...Philips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time. (This is a profound meditation...Phillips is one of the best English stylists ever writing, the Emerson of our time.) After reading this line of fine print, I was thinking, what is there for Phillips to contemplate on the little earthworm?Who is Adam Phillips to be hailed as a contemporary Emerson?I have read Emerson's papers and lectures. He has profound thoughts and broad vision. His unique language is sometimes as calm as water and sometimes as fierce as fire. His words are always memorable for a long time. How did Adam Phillips What about a language master who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Emerson?

Opening the book, I thought, the best way to know the author of the book is to read his words. After just two pages, I couldn't take my eyes off this book, a philosophical work on death.Adam Phillips moves from a concert program to a discussion of whether there is more or less suffering in the world, and then turns to a discussion of the word nature and what it means.Some people say, Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language. (Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.) There are many words in English that are polysemous. According to the "English-Chinese Dictionary", when nature is capitalized, it means:

nature, nature, force of nature The lowercase meanings are: natural state, original state, original life; nature, disposition, disposition, disposition; essence, nature, kind, type; a person (or thing) with a characteristic; Reason, common sense; real, true; vital functions, life force, physiology, physiological needs ………… For the word nature, the author often uses the two meanings of "nature" and "nature" interchangeably or at the same time in the book, so, as the author himself said, we are led into the conceptual muddle: Nature can seem to be at once the problem and the solution.

(Nature seems to be both the problem and the answer to it at the same time.) Seeing this, I seem to feel a bit of Adam Phillips' ingenious language. The reason why he wants us to lead us into the quagmire of this concept is because the two people he discusses in this book are Charles Darwin who studies nature. (Charles Darwin), and the other is Sigmund Freud, who studied human nature. What an ingenious design!However, the ingenuity of this concept has caused many difficulties in translation. We have to think hard in every place where the word nature is used, trying to figure out whether it means "nature" or "nature" here, or what the author has given here. Its double meaning - nature and nature.

My husband and I picked up the pen and started the day of translation.We will try our best to show this language master that Chinese is not inferior to English in expressing the same concept. Although sometimes the full meaning cannot be expressed clearly in one sentence and additional annotations are needed, we have maintained our utmost sincerity. Big patience. Darwin, a name I am very familiar with.I have always admired him.When I was ten years old, I was a girl who could only lie on the hospital bed every day. My illness made me miserable and irritable, but my sense of novelty about the world grew day by day. I read all kinds of books.One day, my mother found me a Darwin book, and she told me that Darwin discovered how humans evolved.I didn't know the word evolution at that time, so my mother said that Darwin's book was about how monkeys became humans.In this way, I understand, and I know it very vividly - a long, long time ago, people used to be monkeys.For a child, Darwin's discovery was so interesting, and he also surprised me with a lot of imagination - how many generations ago my ancestors were monkeys?How did they live at that time?But I couldn't make it through the thick "The Descent of Man" (The Descent of Man, And Selection in Relation to Sex).

When I was young, I read "The Origin of Mankind" again, only to realize that he created a new understanding of human beings' own origin, biological formation and evolution, and his views made the religious myth that God created man unbreakable.He has made outstanding contributions to the history of human cognition and thought.Since then, he has been ranked with Marx, Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. in the starry sky of my life. It was no accident that Darwin's fascination with earthworms occurred.When he was young, he took the Beagle (Beagle) ship for transoceanic expeditions. He traveled to the Americas and Australia, visited many "untamed" (untamed savages) areas, and collected a large number of wild animal and plant specimens and fossils. , "witnessed the dance of man on the boundary line between civilization and barbarism".Investigation and research enabled him to unlock the mysteries of biological evolution, but he could not make his epoch-making great discovery public, because in Britain and Europe at that time, the church still firmly imprisoned people's thinking, and the theory of evolution It was a fatal blow to the creation of the church.It is conceivable how crazy Darwin was attacked by the church and other conservative forces!And his wife Emma (Emma is also his cousin) is a devout Catholic, his theory is so incompatible with her belief.And his ten children, what will society do with them?

Darwin hesitated. "To be, or not to be" (survival, or destruction), the author unexpectedly mentioned Hamlet in the book.At this moment, a great discovery is quietly lying in an envelope, waiting to be announced to the world, but its discoverer is caught in Hamlet's anxiety.Under the double torment of disease and pain, Darwin turned his attention to earthworms, this little life hidden in the soil, dedicated diligently and in obscurity, turning the wilderness back into green and fertile land, and turning death back into life ... Not only that, the conclusion of the survival of the fittest made him himself fall into the crisis of the concept of life and death.The competition for survival is too cruel. One of the purposes of living things seems to be to make themselves a link in the entire food chain. Once the food chain is interrupted, extinction will follow.Death happens all the time.In his scientific expeditions, Darwin made an in-depth study of the extinction of species.Therefore, death, especially the disappearance of biological individuals, is an inextricable knot hidden in his heart.His beloved daughter Anna died at the age of ten. Darwin's heartache was indelible. It was Anna's death that prompted him to announce his theory of evolution to the world.After thirteen months of frantic writing, the epoch-making book Origin of Species ( ) was completed.Later, Darwin came to a place called Moore Park to recuperate. In his letter to his wife, there was such an intriguing sentence:

At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed. (Finally, I was falling asleep on the grass, surrounded by birds chirping, squirrels squeaking up the treetops, and a few woodpeckers singing. Their chorus woke me up, which It's the most pleasant country scene I've ever seen, and I don't care how the beasts and birds came to be.) Darwin was so intoxicated by the idyllic beauty that he exclaimed "I don't care how those beasts and birds are formed".I think, one penny here is by no means "a penny", but "not worth it", "insignificant", "don't care".

The great scientist retreated, not because of attacks and insults from churches and conservative forces, nor because of insurmountable difficulties in research work, but because the pleasant scenery of nature made him fall asleep on the grass. In the last section of the book, Darwin describes his meditations on a vegetated embankment, saying, …with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth…have all been produced by laws around us. (Birds singing in the bushes, insects of all kinds flitting around, and earthworms digging up wet soil...all of this is determined by the laws around us.)

Ah, the law decides everything.So, what are the laws?Darwin cites the following: Growth of Reproduction Inheritance Variability a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life Natural Selection Divergence of Character the Extinction of less-improved forms I added the word "rule" after every word and phrase.This is the case with translation. Where clarification is required, the translator must clarify the problem.In the translation of this book, we often encounter such places that require us to think hard. Nature is governed by laws, and human emotions, no matter how exciting, sighing, or tearful, are pale.Death is inevitable, but who can really face death? There is one person. This is another person in the book - Freud.He was an Austrian psychiatrist, psychologist, and founder of psychoanalysis. Not much is known about Freud's life, and that's because he destroyed all his manuscripts and most of his letters when he was in his twenties, perhaps he didn't want to leave posterity to trace his life He also firmly opposes the writing of his biography.However, some of the nouns he used make people unable to forget him. For example, libido, literally translated as "libido", some dictionaries write "libido", and some dictionaries write "life force, vitality", and some Written as "sexual desire", etc.But I think it is best to transliterate this word, because there is still no word that can completely correspond to it in Chinese, and it may be the same in other languages. The real meaning of Freud's use of it may only be himself. Only then did I understand. Freud believed that what determines all human motivations and behaviors is sexual desire in the final analysis. Sexual requirements and behaviors have begun since infancy, and it has always dominated a person's life.Freud said in his famous work Analysis of Dreams (), why do people dream?That's because people's sexual desire is suppressed during the day, so it is expressed in the form of dreams at night, which is "thinking by day, dreaming at night."It turns out that dreams are a manifestation of sexual desire. Freud's views greatly offended the dignity and decency of religion. He stripped away the sacred coat bestowed on man by God, exposed man's heart and appearance nakedly, and treated him (her) Carry out the analysis of sexuality and the judgment of death.Freud coined three concepts about man: Self (id) ego superego He believes that the purpose of life is ultimately to die.He used Eros, the god of love in ancient Greek mythology, to represent the human life instinct, and Thanatos, the god of death, to represent the human death instinct. He said that everyone has these two instincts. Yes, death is the ultimate goal of life, and people live to "die in one's own fashion". Freud, like a street peddler, sold his own psychoanalysis theory everywhere, and made "repressed sexual desire", "secret love" and "Oedipus complex" for his patients in his own clinic. (Oedipus complex)" and so on, and prescribed psychoanalysis one after another.His grotesque is self-evident.However, Freud could not allow others to "diagnose" him personally. He once rejected an author's request to write a biography for him in vicious language: You, who have so much better and more important things to do, you who can establish monarchs and who can survey the brutal folly of humanity from a lofty vantage point; no, I am far too fond of you to permit such a thing. who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding…… (You have so many better and more important things to do, you can create kingdoms, you can look down on the bestial ignorance of human beings from a vantage point, no, I am far less willing to allow you to do this One thing. Anyone who writes a biography must be entangled with lying, concealment, forgery, flattery, and even covering up his ignorance...) Darwin and Freud, these two people also created the theory of earth-shattering, but there is such a huge difference between them.A person who is willing to dedicate his life in obscurity like an earthworm, even though he is attacked and insulted by the church and other conservative forces, still immerses himself in studying the little earthworm, showing the broad mind of a scientific worker.Darwin's death was honored and he was buried in Westminster Abbey with the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton by his side. Freud narrowly escaped the Nazis and was allowed to leave Austria for London in June 1938, but he died of cancer shortly thereafter.However, he really died in his own style. With his face festered and unable to eat, he asked the doctor to inject him with drugs to help him sleep forever-I think this is euthanasia. After translating this book, I seem to understand why a large part of the book is devoted to Freud, but the title of the book is "Darwin's Earthworm".Positive meaning in life, I suppose, will always be celebrated, like Darwin's earthworm.However, all the good things are always short-lived and fleeting, just like the poet Shelly's sad lines: The flower that smiles today Tomorrow dies All that we wish to stay Tempts.... And then flies. What is this world's delight? Lightning that mocks the night Brief even as bright. (Flowers smile today withered tomorrow We want beauty to last forever She seduces us... then fly away What is happiness in this world? Lightning surprises the night Dazzling only for a moment)