The Corporeal Realities of Emotions
情感的物质意义
The phrase quoted at the beginning of the present article (不知五脏如何,先见四肢不举), has been rendered by one translator as follows: “If you don’t know how she feels inside, just look first at her motionless limbs.” This translation, however, neglects the intensely corporeal dimension of emotions and suffering expressed in the sentence.
本文开篇的引文(不知五脏如何,先见四肢不举)由一位译者表述为:“如果你不知道某人的内心感受,只需先察看她静止的肢体。”然而,这种翻译方式忽略了句中所表达的情绪和痛苦的物质因素。
With “corporeality” I do not refer to the bodily analogies which are commonly employed in texts to make the dominant societal order appear as natural. Neither do I refer to the body-society analogy that is often focused on in socio- logical and anthropological analyses, which attempt a social reading of the “natural body” by focusing on bodies as intentional and signifying expressions of cultural life. By corporeality, rather, I refer here to the fact that literary and medical texts in the 16th and 17th centuries alike abound with evidence for the representational predominance of the corporeal, particularly visceral, condition of the emotions.
此处的物质性并非指代文本中为使主导的社会秩序表现得自然而普遍使用的肉体类比物,也并非指代社会学与人类学分析通常所关注的肉体-社会类比物(亦即从社会的角度解读“自然的肉体”,将其视为意图的载体并作为文化生活的表达方式)。而这里的物质性是指16和17世纪文学和医学文献都类似地证明了情感的物质(特别是内心)状况的优势,具有一定代表意义。
To leave aside these specific corporeal aspects of emotions would mean to obstruct the possibility of approaching the very modes by which people felt. The translation of the phrase as cited above implies, as the conceptual framework underlying it, an inner-outer division which might mislead the reader into conceiving it as a hidden, private state of the soul.
忽略情感的这些特定的物质因素,将意味着阻碍人们向某种感受方式接近的可能。针对上述引文译本的言下之意在于,内外的划分可能使读者将其误解为灵魂中隐藏的私密状态,如同观念体系所强调。