《纽约时报》书评：《爱茶花的女人》
In 1847, shortly before 23-year-old Marie Duplessis, one of 19th-century Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, died of consumption, she told her maid, “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life.” Her prophecy came true: she found enduring fame in the work of a former conquest, Alexandre Dumas fils, “La Dame aux Camélias” (there’s a newly translated version by Liesl Schillinger, a regular contributor to the Book Review), as well as in “La Traviata,” the opera Verdi based on Dumas’s novel and play.
玛丽·杜普莱西斯是19世纪巴黎最出名的交际花之一。1847年，23岁的杜普莱西斯因肺痨去世。她去世之前不久曾对女仆说过这样一句话，“我一直觉得我会复活”。她的预言成真了，她在早期的追求者小仲马的名著《茶花女》。（《纽约时报》书评的一名作家——李思尔施令格近来推出了最新版本的《茶花女》翻译篇）和意大利歌剧作曲家威尔第由《茶花女》改编的歌剧中再获不朽盛名。
Duplessis had also been a celebrity during her lifetime, thanks to her ethereal beauty (willowy and pale, with black hair and “lips redder than cherries,” she looked to Dumas “like a little figurine made of Dresden china”) and her high-profile paramours (Dumas himself, an assortment of pre-eminent noblemen, Franz Liszt). But the novel, play and opera made Marie — renamed Marguerite by Dumas and Violetta by Verdi — a cultural icon by imbuing her with a purely fictional trait: the willingness to sacrifice her own material comforts, and her most cherished lover, for the sake of that lover’s familial honor. Like Dostoyevsky’s Sonia Marmeladov, the prostitute with the heart of gold in “Crime and Punishment,” Marguerite/Violetta enchants audiences because her trajectory takes her from debasement to its opposite — transfiguration through repentance, redemption through selfless love.
杜普莱西斯生前就是一个名人，其一这归功于她的天生丽质——苗条，苍白，黑发，樱桃红唇。就如小仲马在书中描述的“她就像是用德累斯顿细瓷器做成的小雕像”；另外还有她高调的情人们——小仲马本人，优秀贵族混血儿，还有弗朗兹李斯特。但是小说《茶花女》及戏剧还有歌剧使得玛丽（小仲马命名为玛格丽特，威尔第命名为维奥莱塔）成为了一个文化偶像，因为她被赋予了一些纯粹虚构的特征：甘愿为了爱人的家族荣誉而牺牲自己的物质享受，甚至是这个爱人。像俄罗斯作家陀思妥耶夫斯基在其作品《罪与罚》当中描写的具有金子般心灵的妓女索尼娅玛玛拉多，玛格丽特/维奥莱塔使读者着迷，因为她的悔改使得她转变，无私的爱使得她获得救赎，这样她的人生便由堕落走向高尚。
With her colorful new biography, “The Girl Who Loved Camellias,” Julie Kavanagh exposes the tawdry reality behind her heroine’s legend. The author of an acclaimed life of Rudolf Nureyev, Kavanagh reveals that cold-eyed pragmatism, not saintly self-abnegation, formed the bedrock of Duplessis’ character and career. “Marie was practical, willful, grasping and manipulative,” her conduct of a piece with the brutal materialism and frank hedonism associated with both the trade she plied and the era in which she lived. (This last, the go-go period of France’s so-called July Monarchy, was “the epoch of the fortune seeker, a world defined by self-indulgence, frivolity and a febrile quest for excitement.”) As Duplessis herself put it in a note to one potential suitor:
朱莉·卡瓦纳在她的最新的丰富多彩的传记——《爱茶花的女人》中揭露了女主人公传奇一生背后的俗丽现实。作为鲁道夫纽瑞耶夫受称赞一生的传记作者，卡瓦纳表示是冷眼旁观的现实主义而非圣洁的自我牺牲打造了杜普莱西斯的个性及事业。“玛丽现实，任性，贪婪，好掌控权利。”类似的还有残酷的唯物主义和弗兰克享乐主义二者都相关她做的贸易和她生活的时代（最后活跃的法国“七月王朝”是一个追求财富，自我放纵，轻浮，狂热追求兴奋的时代）。正如杜普莱西斯自己在各一个潜在的求婚者的信中说道：
“Monsieur le baron, I realize that mine is a sordid profession, but I must let you know that my favors cost a great deal of money. My protector must be extremely rich to cover my household expenses and satisfy my caprices.”
“尊敬的男爵先生，我知道我的职业是下流的，但我还是要让你知道我的爱好你消费不起，我的护花使者一定要是相当地富裕以满足我的家庭开支及忍受我的任性。”
Such mercenary shrewdness may surprise readers expecting or hoping to find in Marie Duplessis the sublime integrity with which Dumas and Verdi endowed her alter ego. Setting forth this caveat, Kavanagh cites in her introduction the response from one early reader of her manuscript: “You’re actually demolishing the myth. . . . I regard Violetta as one of the great characters in drama. . . . Marie can’t help but be morally dwarfed by her. She’s the sow’s ear.”
如此这般的唯利是图的精明可能会令读者惊讶，因为读者们都希望在玛丽·杜普莱西斯身上找到小仲马和威尔第赋予她改变的自我当中的高尚，完整。设定这个警告，卡瓦纳在简介中援引一位早期的读者看了手稿之后的反应：“事实上你毁了这种神秘，我认为维奥莱塔是戏剧中的最伟大角色之一。玛丽无法控制的道德下滑。她简直是母猪的耳朵。
In Kavanagh’s sympathetic telling, the sow’s ear seems the regrettable but all too comprehensible product of a childhood straight out of Dickens or Zola. Rose-Alphonsine Plessis was born to an unhappy, wretchedly poor family of Norman peasants. Her father, an alcoholic peddler named Marin Plessis, regularly and savagely abused her mother, who died when Alphonsine was 7. Marin formally abandoned his daughter a year later. For a time, the little girl scraped by thanks to charitable relatives and to a brief stint as a laundress’s apprentice. But when she was 14, Marin Plessis resurfaced and took her to live with “a septuagenarian with ‘a detestable reputation’ as a debaucher.” (Here and throughout her book, Kavanagh quotes from a memoir by Duplessis’ trusted childhood friend, Romain Vienne.) Neighbors suspected that Alphonsine’s father had “sold” her to the other man, a story that seemed all too likely given that Marin had already reportedly tried to barter for her with a band of Gypsies (when she was 11) and a troupe of mountebanks (when she was 13). Eventually, Marin packed her up and traveled with her to Paris — then, according to one account, proceeded to “lose” her there, leaving Alphonsine to fend for herself in the vast, unfamiliar metropolis.
在卡瓦纳动情的讲述中，母猪的耳朵似乎是令人遗憾的，但又是一个直接来源于狄更斯或左拉的童年的可理解产物。罗斯——阿尔丰西娜·普莱西生于诺曼一个不快乐，贫穷的农民家庭。她的父亲——马林·普莱西是一个酗酒的小贩，经常残忍地虐待她的母亲，而她的母亲不幸在她七岁那年去世。一年后马林正式抛弃了他的女儿。有一段时间，她靠善良的亲戚的救济勉强维持生计，短暂地做过洗衣女工的学徒。但在她14岁那年，马林普莱西斯重新出现，把她带走，和一个70多岁，臭名昭著的堕落者居住在一起。（在此及整本书中，卡瓦纳引用了杜普莱斯儿时要好的玩伴，罗曼维安娜的回忆录中的话）邻居怀疑阿尔丰西娜的父亲把她卖给了另外一个人，这是许多小说中类似的故事情节.在她11岁的时候，她父亲把她同一批吉普赛人做了交易，13岁的时候又卖给了一批江湖郎中。最终，马林把她带到了巴黎——然后，不明原因地，把她丢在那里，让她一个人在举目无亲的大都市中自力更生。
At first, the girl made her way by working in a laundry and then in a dressmaker’s shop. But as she “was becoming disturbingly pretty,” Alphonsine soon realized she had another option: being “kept” by a man of means. The first such prospect presented himself in the form of a middle-aged, middle-class widower who offered her a furnished apartment, rented in her own name, and 3,000 francs up front for her “initial needs.” However degrading this proposal may have been, Kavanagh writes, the alternative was “even less appealing,” for Alphonsine most likely earned no more than 22 francs a month working six-day weeks, 13 hours a day, as a shop girl — “a punishing routine in which it was all too easy to become trapped for decades.” In fact, according to Kavanagh, “in Alphonsine’s mind, there was no alternative.” And while one might question the certainty with which a biographer purports to know the workings of her subject’s mind (especially when the subject has left behind no diaries and very few letters to document those workings), the outcome of Marie’s musings was incontrovertible. Weighing disreputable comfort against respectable hardship, Alphonsine chose comfort. A femme entretenue was born.
最初，女孩在洗衣店和裁缝店工作以谋生。但随着她变得”漂亮得令人不安“，阿尔丰西娜很快意识到她又另外一个选项：被一个有本事的男人”保养“。第一次预期来临是一个中产阶级的中年寡妇给她提供一套公寓，她的名字租赁，并提供给她3,000法郎以满足基本的需求。无论这个提议多么地上不了台面，卡瓦纳写道，其他选择“更缺乏吸引力”，阿尔丰西娜最多能做一名女店员，每天工作13小时，每周工作六天，每月挣22法郎，“在这令人疲乏的工作上轻易地耽搁几十年”。事实上，根据卡瓦纳所述，“在阿尔丰西娜的意识里，没有其他选择”。有人可能会对传记作者声称自己了解她笔下人物的思想表示质疑，尤其当这个人物没有任何日记而仅有稀少的信件的时候，但玛丽沉思的结果一定是毋庸置疑的。权衡令人声名狼藉的舒适生活和备受尊崇的艰苦生活之后，阿尔丰西娜选择了舒适的生活。由此，一个娇柔的情妇诞生了。
It did not take long for Marie Duplessis — Alphonsine selected the nom de guerre because “Marie” was “the name of the Virgin” and because the particule “du” implied patrician birth — to trade her first benefactor for a slew of grand aristocrats. Notable among these was Agénor de Guiche, the dashing scion of an august ducal family. In addition to buying Marie magnificent clothing, jewels and horses (not to mention the camellias that became her trademark accessory), he arranged for her to receive daily instruction in French, drawing, music and dance. This training imbued the once impoverished waif from Normandy with an air of distinction and refinement that would make her, as Liszt later observed, “unique of her kind.”
这样的生活没有持续多久，玛丽·杜普莱西斯，即阿尔丰西娜，她把名字改为玛丽，这是圣母玛利亚的名字，代表处女，且名字的后缀意味着贵族出生，这一切是为了摆脱第一个恩人而投入更多贵族的怀抱。其中颇具名声的是Agénor de Guiche，一个令人敬畏的公爵家庭的后代。除了给玛丽买华丽服饰、珠宝和马匹（更别提玛丽的典型饰物山茶花了），他还为玛丽安排了每日的学习，法语，绘画，音乐和舞蹈。这些训练让这个曾经来自诺曼底的穷困潦倒的流浪儿慢慢变得不俗且精致，如李斯特所说，成为独一无二的一个人。
Subsequent lovers further advanced her metamorphosis. The Estonian Count Gustav von Stackelberg, over 50 years Duplessis’ senior, spent lavishly to enhance “the style and surroundings of his teenage mistress.” As for the Comte Edouard de Perregaux, the hopelessly besotted young man on whom Dumas based Marguerite’s grand amour, Armand Duval, he provided an arguably even more precious gift: on Feb. 21, 1846, he married her, thus making her a countess.
后来的情人进一步促进了她的变身。爱沙尼亚的伯爵，古斯塔夫·斯塔克尔伯格，比杜普莱西斯年长五十岁，花费大量金钱来提升他的小情妇的个人风格和生活环境。对于爱德华佩雷戈伯爵，阿曼德杜瓦尔来说，小仲马小说中玛格丽特与之拥有伟大的恋情，他可能给予了更珍贵的礼物，那就是在1846年2月21日与玛格丽特结婚，让她成为公爵夫人。
Unfortunately for Perregaux, Marie wanted his title only to enhance her status with Liszt, who, although (or perhaps because) he was a chambermaid’s son, eagerly sought exalted company and connections. And unfortunately for Marie, Liszt declined her offer to accompany him on the 18-month performing tour he had begun shortly before her wedding. (“I shan’t bother you,” she pleaded. “I sleep all day . . . and at night you can do with me what you will.”) Marie reacted to the composer’s rejection by throwing herself into a frenzy of boozy, nonstop merrymaking that directly anticipated Marguerite’s and Violetta’s feverish joie de vivre. Less than a year later, she was dead. Laid low by tuberculosis, the courtesan-turned-countess left behind a trove of luxury items that were sold off to pay her many creditors. Still, her coachman reported, “at the end she drank nothing but Champagne.”
不幸的是，对于佩雷戈伯爵来说，玛丽仅仅是要这个头衔来增进她与李斯特的关系，李斯特（尽管或也许正因为他是家仆的儿子）迫切追求与她厮守在一起。对于玛丽来说不幸的是，李斯特拒绝她在婚礼举办之前陪伴他进行18个月之久的巡回演出。（她辩解着，我要日夜和你在一起，你也会这样做的。）被这个作曲家抛弃之后，她投入到了嗜酒的迷乱生活中，永不停歇的寻欢作乐直接预示了玛格丽特和维奥莱塔的极度兴奋的生活乐趣。不到一年，她死了。因为肺结核而香消玉殒，这位由高等妓女变成的公爵夫人留下一堆奢侈物，它们被变卖来还众多债权人了。她的车夫说，“在生命的尽头她仍然只喝香槟度日”。
原文：http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/books/review/the-girl-who-loved-camellias-by-julie-kavanagh.html?_r=0
译文：jenniferloulou
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