福克纳诺贝尔奖致辞(William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech)

    不管在什么地方，只要谈到美国文学，人们都认为威廉·福克纳是二十世纪最伟大的作家之一。他是美国“南方文学”派的创始人，也是整个西方最有影响的现代派小说家之一。他的代表作品有《喧哗与骚动》、《八月之光》等等。

    福克纳从小生长在美国南方，年轻时曾在当地邮政局做过一阵不太负责任的局长，后因玩忽职守而被辞退。他游历过许多地方，但最终依然回到美国南方，并且所有的作品都以南方为背景。1949年，因为“他对当代美国小说作出了强有力的和艺术上无与伦比的贡献”，福克纳获诺贝尔文学奖。

    本片演讲的内容，是福克纳在一九四九年度诺贝尔文学奖获奖时所作的答辞。这是一篇脍炙人口的演讲词。然而，由于福克纳本人对语言运用的独特性和精深性。对初学者来说，这篇美文也许颇有些难度。

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

我感觉，这个奖不是授予我这个人，而是授予我的工作，它是对我呕心沥血、毕生从事的人类精神探索的工作的肯定。我的这项工作不为名，更不图利，而是要从人类精神的原始素材里创造出前所未有的东西。

演讲全文：Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech / William Faulkner

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.