放逐在宇宙之外——Wakefield_放逐之刃

　　纳撒尼尔·霍桑(Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804～1864)，是美国文学史上最伟大的小说家之一。他出生于美国马萨诸塞州塞勒姆市。霍桑大学就读于缅因州的鲍登学院，毕业后隐居故乡，专注于读书写作，蛰居长达12年之久。1837年，霍桑出版了短篇小说集《重述的故事》(Twice-Told Tales)，获得了众多批评家的认可，奠定了他浪漫文学大师的文坛地位。霍桑的代表作还有《红字》(The Scarlet Letter)、《七个尖顶的阁楼》(The House of Seven Gables)和《福谷传奇》(The Blithedale Romance)等长篇小说。他擅长在小说中深入挖掘人物的内心世界，探讨人性本质。《威克菲尔德》(Wakefield)选自其短篇小说集《重述的故事》，是其中较有影响的一篇。
　　Excerpts1)
　　In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor—without a proper distinction of circumstances—to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit2), this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency3); and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years. During that period, he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn4) Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial5) felicity6)—when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife, long, long ago, resigned to her autumnal7) widowhood—he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death….
　　What sort of a man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own idea, and call it by his name. He was now in the meridian8) of life; his matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm, habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most constant, because a certain sluggishness9) would keep his heart at rest, wherever it might be placed. He was intellectual, but not actively so; his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings10), that ended to no purpose, or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words. Imagination, in the proper meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield’s gifts. With a cold but not depraved11) nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with riotous thoughts, nor perplexed with originality, who could have anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked, who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing today which should be remembered on the morrow12), they would have thought of Wakefield. Only the wife of his bosom13) might have hesitated. She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to craft, which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she called a little strangeness, sometimes, in the good man. This latter quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.