TED英語(yǔ)演講：我的閱讀世界年
安.摩根認(rèn)為自己擅于閱讀，直到她在自己的書架上發(fā)現(xiàn)到不得了的文化盲點(diǎn);在眾多的英、美作家之列，極少作品出自英語(yǔ)世界以外的作家。所以她訂出一個(gè)豪情萬(wàn)丈的目標(biāo)-「在一年的歷程閱讀世界各國(guó)的一本書」;現(xiàn)在她鼓勵(lì)其他的崇尚英風(fēng)者們?nèi)ラ喿x翻譯作品。下面是小編為大家收集關(guān)于TED英語(yǔ)演講：我的閱讀世界年，歡迎借鑒參考。
演說(shuō)題目：我的閱讀世界年!
演說(shuō)者：Ann Morgan
It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. What do my bookshelves say about me? Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. But my bookshelves told a rather different story. Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock.
And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. And so I did. And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today.
But it started with some practical problems. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week,
I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations, and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from French and published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland. French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in.
The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it -- I was a clueless literary xenophobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world?
I was going to have to ask for help. So in October 2011, I registered my blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet. Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And pretty soon, it was strangers.
Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books -- Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet.
But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still.
Books often came from surprising sources. My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account. And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the work of the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "The Golden Horse." He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English.
Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.
And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola.
But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking African island nation of S?o Tomé and Príncipe. Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a S?o Toméan author that I could buy enough copies of online. Here's one of them. And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read.
In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had become a big opportunity. When it came to S?o Tomé and Príncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. My weakness had become the project's strength.
The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. But it can also be really enlightening. Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world.
When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities.
Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together.
And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. And I hope many more people will join me. If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that.
Thank you.
常說(shuō)看一個(gè)人的書架 就能了解到這個(gè)人很多事情 那么我的書架是怎么展現(xiàn)我的呢? 嗯，當(dāng)幾年前我問(wèn)自己這個(gè)問(wèn)題時(shí) 我被自己嚇了一跳 我一直覺得自己是一個(gè)有教養(yǎng)的 比較與時(shí)俱進(jìn)的人 但我的書架展現(xiàn)的卻是另一回事 大部分的書 作者都是英國(guó)或北美的 基本沒什么翻譯過(guò)來(lái)的書 在我的閱讀里， 我發(fā)現(xiàn)了這個(gè)龐大的文化盲點(diǎn) 確實(shí)挺驚人的
當(dāng)我仔細(xì)去想的時(shí)候，真的挺遺憾的 我知道在這個(gè)世界上除了英語(yǔ) 一定還有很多其他語(yǔ)言的有趣的故事 而我的閱讀習(xí)慣意味著 我估計(jì)永遠(yuǎn)也不會(huì)去接觸這一類書 這想起來(lái)讓人有點(diǎn)傷心 所以我下定決心 把自己的閱讀范圍擴(kuò)大到世界級(jí)的范圍 2012年對(duì)于英國(guó)來(lái)說(shuō)是非常國(guó)際化的一年 這一年倫敦舉辦了奧運(yùn)會(huì) 所以我決定把它當(dāng)成一個(gè)時(shí)間段 去嘗試從世界上不同的國(guó)家里 選一本小說(shuō)來(lái)讀，不管是短篇的還是自傳的 所以我這么做了 非常刺激 我學(xué)到很多有用的東西 也了解到很多有趣的聯(lián)系 讓我很想今天跟大家分享
但萬(wàn)事開頭難 當(dāng)我整理出這個(gè)世界不同國(guó)家的 列表后 我又對(duì)照了聯(lián)合國(guó)認(rèn)證的國(guó)家列表 所以我增加了臺(tái)灣(中國(guó)) 所以總共有196個(gè)國(guó)家 在我算出如何在一周內(nèi) 一周五天的時(shí)間內(nèi) 讀完并記錄日志后，
我不得不面對(duì)這么一個(gè)現(xiàn)實(shí) 就是我可能無(wú)法獲取每個(gè)國(guó)家書籍的英文版 大約在英國(guó)出版的有翻譯版本的書籍 僅占全部的4.5% 對(duì)于世界上講英語(yǔ)的其他地區(qū)來(lái)說(shuō)， 這個(gè)數(shù)字也差不多 盡管在許多其他國(guó)家 翻譯出版的書籍的比例要高很多 4.5%對(duì)剛開始來(lái)說(shuō)雖然足夠 但這個(gè)數(shù)字并沒有告訴你的 是這些書中很多會(huì)來(lái)自 擁有強(qiáng)大出版網(wǎng)絡(luò)的國(guó)家 而且當(dāng)中很多專業(yè)人士也很想把這些書 賣給英文出版社 例如，雖然每年有超過(guò)100本的法語(yǔ)書 會(huì)譯成英文在英國(guó)發(fā)行 但大部分是來(lái)自法國(guó)或瑞士 另一方面，在非洲講法語(yǔ)的地區(qū) 則幾乎沒有機(jī)會(huì)涉及到
結(jié)果就是，有很多很多國(guó)家 根本進(jìn)不了英文文學(xué)的商業(yè)區(qū) 根本進(jìn)不了英文文學(xué)的商業(yè)區(qū) 對(duì)世界上發(fā)行語(yǔ)言受眾最多的讀者來(lái)說(shuō) 這些國(guó)家的書籍鮮為人知 但當(dāng)談到閱讀世界這一做法時(shí) 對(duì)我來(lái)說(shuō)最大的困難就是 我不知道從何入手 我這一生幾乎都在閱讀 英國(guó)和北美的書籍 我根本不知道該怎么搜索尋找 去選擇世界上大部分其他地方的作品 我沒辦法告訴你 要怎么去搜索斯威士蘭的文學(xué)作品 我不知道納米比亞有哪些好的文學(xué)作品 這些作品并沒有被藏起來(lái)—— 我在文學(xué)上就是一個(gè)外盲 那么我到底要怎么去閱讀這個(gè)世界呢?
我不得不尋求幫助 在2011年10月，我注冊(cè)了我的博客 ayearofreadingtheworld.com 然后我發(fā)了一條簡(jiǎn)短的求助 我解釋我是誰(shuí) 我的閱讀面有多窄 我問(wèn)有沒有人愿意 給我留言，建議我應(yīng)該去讀 這個(gè)世界上其他地方的那些書 我當(dāng)時(shí)不知道有沒有人會(huì)給我留言 但在我發(fā)了求助后的幾個(gè)小時(shí)內(nèi) 人們開始給我回復(fù)了 一開始，是朋友和同事 然后就是朋友的朋友 很快，就是陌生人
在我在網(wǎng)上留了那條求助之后的第四天 我收到了一條消息 它來(lái)自一位在吉隆坡叫 Rafidah 的女士 她說(shuō)她很喜歡我這個(gè)項(xiàng)目的意義 問(wèn)她能不能去當(dāng)?shù)氐挠⑽臅?然后幫我選馬來(lái)語(yǔ)書籍然后發(fā)給我? 我滿腔熱情地接受了 幾個(gè)星期后 包裹來(lái)了，里面不是一本，是兩本—— Rafidah 選的一本是馬來(lái)西亞的書 還有一本也是她選的，來(lái)自新加坡的書 當(dāng)時(shí)，我都驚呆了 一個(gè)遠(yuǎn)在6000英里之外的陌生人 會(huì)如此用心去幫一個(gè) 她從未見過(guò)的陌生人
但 Rafidah 的善良，成了那一年的常規(guī) 一次又一次，人們用他們的方式來(lái)幫我 有些人幫我做了研究 有些人在假期或出差的時(shí)候 專門跑一趟書店幫我找書 事實(shí)證明，如果你想閱讀這個(gè)世界 如果你想用開放的思維去與之交流 那么整個(gè)世界都會(huì)幫你 對(duì)于那些 在商業(yè)上沒什么機(jī)會(huì) 進(jìn)入英文文學(xué)界的國(guó)家來(lái)說(shuō) 人們會(huì)更努力地去幫我
這些書籍的來(lái)源經(jīng)常讓我出乎意料 舉個(gè)例子，我的巴拿馬閱讀，是來(lái)自 推特上我和“巴拿馬運(yùn)河”這個(gè)賬號(hào)的對(duì)話 是的，巴拿馬運(yùn)河在有推特賬號(hào)的 當(dāng)我在推特上發(fā)布我這個(gè)項(xiàng)目的消息時(shí) 它建議說(shuō)，我可能會(huì)想要去讀一讀 一位叫 Juan David Morgan 的巴拿馬作家的作品 我找到了作家的網(wǎng)站， 然后給他發(fā)了一條消息 問(wèn)他，他的西語(yǔ)小說(shuō) 有沒有被翻譯成英文的 他答復(fù)說(shuō)目前還沒有出版 但他確實(shí)有一份未出版的英文譯文 一本名叫《金馬》的小說(shuō) 他用郵件把譯文發(fā)給我 允許我成為第一批閱讀這本書 的英文版本的讀者之一
Morgan 并不是唯一一個(gè) 愿意用這種方式和我分享他的作品的作家 從瑞典到帕勞 作家和翻譯家給我發(fā)來(lái)他們自己出版的書籍 還有未被以英文為母語(yǔ)的出版商挑中的 或者是不再有機(jī)會(huì)發(fā)表的 所有未出版的手稿 這讓我有機(jī)會(huì)一窺某些精彩的世界 比如說(shuō)，我讀了 關(guān)于南非國(guó)王 Ngungunhane 的書籍 他在19世紀(jì)領(lǐng)導(dǎo)反抗葡萄牙人 我也讀了土庫(kù)曼斯坦的里海岸邊 那些偏僻村莊的結(jié)婚儀式 我還讀了科威特版本的《BJ單身日記》
我還讀了安哥拉一場(chǎng)樹上狂歡
在人們想盡辦法 幫我去閱讀這個(gè)世界的例子中 可能最讓人驚奇的 出現(xiàn)在我網(wǎng)上求助的最后時(shí)期 當(dāng)時(shí)我在找一本書 它來(lái)自來(lái)自說(shuō)葡萄牙語(yǔ)的 圣多美島和普林西比島非洲小島國(guó) 花了好幾個(gè)月，用盡所有我能想到的辦法 去找一本從別的國(guó)家翻譯成英文的書 (但都找不到) 我覺得剩下的唯一方式 就是看能不能重新去翻譯 我當(dāng)時(shí)也沒什么把握 不知道是否有人愿意幫我 愿意花時(shí)間來(lái)為我做這樣的事 但，就在我在推特和臉書上發(fā)出 尋找會(huì)講葡萄牙語(yǔ)的人 這一消息的一周內(nèi) 我找到的人多到超乎預(yù)期 包括有 Margaret Jull Costa， 在她領(lǐng)域的杰出人才 她翻譯了獲諾貝爾獎(jiǎng)的文學(xué)作品 《若澤·薩拉馬戈》 然后帶著9位志愿者 我找到了一本出自圣多美島作家的書 然后在網(wǎng)上買了幾本 這是其中的一本 我給每個(gè)志愿者都發(fā)了一本 他們各自從這個(gè)系列中選幾個(gè)短故事 然后開始翻譯，然后把譯文發(fā)給我 在六周內(nèi)，我已經(jīng)擁有一本可讀的書了
類似的情況在我閱讀世界那一年經(jīng)常發(fā)生 我的不知，以及無(wú)畏自己的局限 成了一個(gè)巨大的機(jī)遇 說(shuō)到圣多美島和普林西比島 不單是一個(gè)學(xué)習(xí)新知識(shí)的機(jī)會(huì) 探索新文學(xué)作品的機(jī)會(huì) 還是將人們聚集起來(lái) 團(tuán)結(jié)起來(lái)創(chuàng)新努力的機(jī)會(huì) 我的局限反倒成了這個(gè)項(xiàng)目的優(yōu)勢(shì)
那一年我看過(guò)的書開拓了我的視野 那些享受閱讀的人就能體會(huì) 書籍有著強(qiáng)大能力把你帶出自我 進(jìn)入別人的思想眾 所以，至少有一段時(shí)間 你能看到別人眼中的世界 這或許不會(huì)是一段好過(guò)的經(jīng)歷 尤其是你在讀一本 文化上與自己的觀念大為不同的書 但它卻可能很有啟發(fā)性 與不熟悉的想法產(chǎn)生碰撞 能幫你更好認(rèn)識(shí)自己的想法 也能幫你告訴自己 在你看到這個(gè)世界的方式上有哪些盲點(diǎn)
當(dāng)我回頭看我從小到大 讀過(guò)的大多數(shù)英文文學(xué) 相比世界上其他書籍的豐富程度 這些書籍確實(shí)太狹隘了 每翻一頁(yè) 便長(zhǎng)一智 積少成多 我年初列出的國(guó)家列表 從一些列枯燥充滿學(xué)術(shù)的地名 變成了活生生會(huì)呼吸的實(shí)體
現(xiàn)在，我并不想建議說(shuō) 單靠讀一本書就能大致了解一個(gè)國(guó)家 但積少成多，那一年我讀過(guò)的故事 它們的對(duì)這個(gè)世界展示的豐富性， 多樣化性，和復(fù)雜性 讓我更有存在感 就好像是這些世界性的故事 以及那些想辦法幫我閱讀這些書籍的人們 是他們讓我變得真實(shí) 這些天來(lái)，當(dāng)我看著我的書架的時(shí)候 或者在我的電子閱讀器上思考這些作品時(shí) 它們?cè)谠V說(shuō)這一個(gè)不一樣的故事 這是一個(gè)關(guān)于書籍的故事 書能將我們聯(lián)系在一起， 跨越政治，區(qū)域，文化，社會(huì)，宗教的隔閡 它是人們擁有協(xié)同工作的潛能的故事
還有，它是一個(gè)證明的故事 證明了我們現(xiàn)在的這個(gè)時(shí)代，由于有互聯(lián)網(wǎng) 讓一切變得前所未有的方便—— 讓一個(gè)陌生人來(lái)與來(lái)自地球另一半 素未謀面的另一陌生人 分享一個(gè)故事，一種世界關(guān)，一本書 我希望這是一個(gè)我閱讀這么多年所追求的故事 我也希望會(huì)有更多的人可以與我同閱 如果我們都擴(kuò)寬我們的閱讀面， 那么對(duì)于出版商來(lái)說(shuō) 就更有動(dòng)機(jī)去翻譯更多書籍 我們就有機(jī)會(huì)更廣地閱讀了
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