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1、Lesson Eight The Case for Greater Clarity in Writing写作中写得更清楚的理由The literary fashion of these days is not to know what you mean and, if challenged, to shrug a careless shoulder and say that you write what you write and the reader must make his oen interpretation. The authors observations are presumed
2、 to be pregnant; the reader is to be midwife and bring the child to birth. It is no business of genius to make itself plain.如今的文学时尚就是不知道你说什么，假如你受到挑战，你就耸一耸无所谓的肩膀，说你写你的，读者需要去作自己的阐释，作者所说的话被假定孕育着意义，读者需要去做助产师把孩子生出来。天才作品的任务不是要把话说得明白。This was the line taken up by T.S. Eliot in an interview given after the
3、first production of The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh Festival of Arts in 1949. The play later acted with immense success in London and New York was, I think, a simplified and improved version of the original. But that does not affect Eliots replay to the charge of being obscure and his tenet that
4、 the artist is under no obligation to be explicit. He projects his thoughts, feeling, and fancies: on the task of interpretation the public must bring its own wits to bear这就是1949年爱丁堡艺术节首次演出了“鸡尾酒会”后T.S. Eliot在接受采访时采取的路线。 该剧后来在伦敦和纽约上演获得了巨大的成功，我认为，该剧本是在原版上进行了简写和改进的版本。但这并不影响Eliot对他晦涩难懂的指控的回答，也不影响他的关于艺术家
5、没有责任把话说得明白易懂的信条。艺术家就是去投射自己的思想，感情，和想像，读者大众必须用自己的智慧去诠释。I suggest in return that this attitude betrays either laziness or affectation. It is the abdication of authorship. It is the business of the literary artist to know his mind and to speak it. Mr. Eliot, after all, was dramatizing certain problems o
6、f conduct and of human relations and he presented a Psychotherapeutic Sage as moral preceptor. He was not just fetching up thoughts that lie too deep for tears: he was informing us about destiny and salvation, important matters on which we have a right to clear instruction. In that cause we surely a
7、re entitled to know what his opinions on these great matters are. The fact that the play was written in what might be called conversational verse does not affect the proposition that an author is evading his responsibilities if he is not intelligible.作为对Eliot的回答，我的想法是他的这种态度，要么表明懒惰，要么表明装腔作势。这种态度就是放弃了
8、作者的任务。文学艺术家的任务就是知道自己想什么并把它说出来。不管怎么说，Eliot是在用戏剧表现某些行为问题和人际关系的问题，他在“鸡尾酒会”剧本中给我们呈现是一个精神疗法的圣人的形象，是作为一个道理导师呈现给观众的。他做的事不是把观众心中埋藏得太深的思想挖掘出来赚取廉价的眼泪，他是在给我们提供关于人类命运和人类灵魂拯救的信息，对于这些重要的问题，我们有权得到他的明确的指示。在这样的情况下，我们当然有权知道他关于这一重要论题的意见。“鸡尾酒会”是用可以称为会话体诗歌写出来的，这一事实并不影响“如果作者没有把他的作品写得明白易懂，那他就是在逃避作者的责任”这一论点。Swift shrewdly
9、said that the true definition of style is “proper words in proper places To this I would add “proper thoughts in proper order.” There is nothing impossible about that. The greatest prose writers of our time are in my estimation Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham. Did rather of them ever write a sente
10、nce that was vague?Swift非常精明的说过，文体的真正定义是“合适的词，用在合适的地方”，对于这一点，我还想指出一句“合适的思想，以合适的顺序写出来”要做到这一点没什么不可能。我们这个时代最伟大的散文作家，在我看来是萧伯纳和毛姆,他们有没有一个人写过一句模糊的话吗？If you are anti-Shavian you can accuse Shaw of writing every sort of nonsense, but you need never pause for a moment to wonder what sort of nonsense he inten
11、ds. And as a model of lucid scrutiny of a lifes experience and a lifes conclusions Maughams The Summing-Up is unsurpassed. Again you need not agree with his judgments and valuations, but you know precisely what those judgments are.假如你反对萧伯纳你可以指控他写的是各种各样的废话，但是你从不需要停顿片刻去问自己他想说什么样的废话。毛姆写的大总结这本书是对一个人一生经验
12、和一生总结作清晰的、仔细观察的典范，毛姆写的大总结这本书是没有人能超越的。同样如此，你可以不同意他的判断和评价，但你能确切的知道他的评价是什么。Now let us have some examples of the muddled writing for which in my opinion there is no excuse. Mr Henry Greens novels are now very much in the intellectual fashion, presumably because he so loftily disdains syntax, grammar, an
13、d punctuation . Here is a typical sentence from page 1 of his much-praised story, modestly called “Nothing”.现在让我们来看一些例子，那些在我看来是没有理由写出来的杂乱无章的例子. 亨利的小说现在在知识分子的圈子里非常流行，也许是他非常傲慢的藐视句法、语法和标点符号，下面是一段来自他写的一篇收到广泛好评的短篇小说第一页的一个典型句子，这篇短篇小说被谦虚的称着“一无所有” It was wet then, did she remember he was saying, so unlike t
14、his he said, and turned his face to its dazzle of window, it had been dark with sad tears on the panes and streets of canals as he sat by her fire for Jane liked dusk, would not turn on the lights until she couldnt see to move, while outside a single street lamp was yellow, reflected over a thousand
15、 raindrops on the glass, the fire was rose, and Pen elope came in.Could anything be untidier? A schoolboy would be in trouble for such infantile, turbid, ill-punctuated stuff, with its flood of commas and contempt of all the rules of composition; those rules were not made to be a nuisance to writes
16、but for the advantage of readers. As a reader I object to having this mess thrown at my head.有没有任何东西能够比这个更加混乱？一个中小学的学生读到这样幼稚的，混浊的，标点标得糟的东西一定会陷入困境，因为整篇写作用了一连窜逗号，而且藐视所有写作规则。那些规则的制定不是为了让作家头痛的，而是为了给读者带来好处的。作为一名读者，我反对将这些混乱的东西砸到我头上来。Then we have Mr. T.S.Eliot writing “Notes Towards a Definition of Culture.” Note the timidity of the title. He is not offering to define culture; he is going to devote 124pages to fidgeting round the edges of a definition. H
