雨果怒斥火烧圆明园
 
发布时间：2008-07-24 来源：翻译中国 发布者：上海翻译公司


名著欣赏－雨果怒斥火烧圆明园

Victor Hugo Condemning the Burning of the Winter Palace

Victor Hugo, 1802---1885, was a celebrated French literary giant. After the British and French invaders had burnt the Winter Palace in November, 1861, he wrote a reply to a lieutenant named Bartlette(?), denouncing indignantly the Allied atrocities. An extract of the letter follows.

“Sir, you ask me what I think of the expedition to China. You must feel that it was praiseworthy, well done. You are very polite, putting a high premium upon my feelings. In your opinion, the expedition, performed under the joint banner of Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon, was nothing short of a British-French glory. Therefore, you would like to know to what extent I appreciate this glory.”

Since you ask, I will answer as follows:

In a corner of the world there existed a man-made miracle --- the Winter Palace. Art has two sources: one, an ideal, whence has come European art; two, fancy, whence has issued Oriental art. The Winter Palace belongs in the art of fancy. The Winter Palace, indeed, was the crystalisation of all of the art that an almost superman race could have fancied. The Winter Palace was a hugescale prototype of fancy if fancy can have a prototype. If only you can imagine an ineffable architectural structure, like a palace in the moon, a fairyland, that is the Winter Palace. If you can imagine a treasure-island, a pool of human perceptive power, expressed in the concrete form of palaces and temples, that is the Winter Palace. It took two generations of manpower to create the Winter Palace, which subsequently went through improvement and perfection over several centuries. For whom was the Winter Palace built, after all? Eventually, for the people. Because as time passes by, all that the people has made remains in the possession of mankind. Great artists, poets, philosophers --- they all knew about the Winter Palace. Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)once talked about it. Many people at different times compared the Winter Palace to the Parthenon, the Pyramids, the Arena, the Notre Dame. If they could not see the Winter Palace with their own eyes, they could dream about it --- as if in the gloaming they saw a breath-taking masterpiece of art as they had never known before --- as if there above the horizon of European civilization was towering the silhouette of Asian civilization.
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