Why I Write (1947)
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我為什麼寫作 (1947)
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George Orwell
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喬治•奧威爾
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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or
six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.
Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I
tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the
consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and
that sooner or later I should have to settle down and
write books.
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小時候，大約五、六歲吧，我便知道自己長大後該當作家。十七至二十四歲左右我打算放棄這念頭，但我意識到這樣做是在違背真我，而早晚我總也會平定下來著書的。
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I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap
of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father
before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was
somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable
mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my
schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up
stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons,
and I think from the very start my literary ambitions
were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and
undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and
a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this
created a sort of private world in which I could get my
own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless
the volume of serious -- i.e. seriously intended --
writing which I produced all through my childhood and
boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote
my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother
taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything
about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger
had "chair-like teeth" -- a good enough phrase,
but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's
"Tiger, Tiger."
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我在家中三子女中排第二，其餘兩位分別比我大五歲和小五歲，而我在八歲前很少見到父親。由於這個以及其他的理由，我頗為孤獨，而我很快便養成些討人厭的怪癖，令我在上學的日子裡都不受歡迎。我有捏造故事和跟虛構人物談話這些孤寂孩童的習慣，而我老早就覺得，我文學上的抱負跟我給孤立和輕視等感覺密不可分。我知道我有遣詞用字的才能，也有面對不快事情的能耐，而我認為這給我創造了一個私人的世界，供我在人生中失意時尋回自己。雖然如此，我童年和少年時認真
-- 即認真地構思 -- 的作品其實只得幾頁。我四、五歲時寫了第一首詩，我母親把它默寫記下來。我除了記得它跟老虎有關以外，其餘都記不起了，那隻老虎有「椅子樣的牙齒」
-- 挺好的造句，但依我想這首詩應該是抄襲布力克的《老虎，老虎》的。
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At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote
a patriotic poem which was printed in the local
newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death
of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older,
I wrote bad and usually unfinished "nature
poems" in the Georgian style. I also attempted a
short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the
total of the would-be serious work that I actually set
down on paper during all those years.
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十一歲時，第一次大戰爆發，我寫的一首愛國詩給刊登在本地報章裡，兩年後的另一首也一樣，那是寫基捷拿之死的。當我年長一點時，我常常寫些拙劣而又多半沒完成、帶點喬治亞風格的「自然詩」。我又嘗試過寫一個短篇故事，卻又徹底失敗。以上就是我在那些年頭寫下來，而又有望成為認真之作的所有成果。
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However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage
in literary activities. To begin with there was the
made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and
without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work,
I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I
could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed
-- at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation
of Aristophanes, in about a week -- and helped to edit a
school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These
magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you
could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than
I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by
side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was
carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different
kind: this was the making up of a continuous
"story" about myself, a sort of diary existing
only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of
children and adolescents.
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不過，在這段日子裡我在某意義上是在從事文學事業的。先有那些又容易又快完成，但沒有太多樂趣的膳稿。課餘時我寫些半誇張的詩vers
d’occasion，如今想起也驚嘆我那時可以寫得如此快
-- 十四歲時我我寫了一整部押韻的劇，是模倣亞里士多芬尼的，大約一星期便完成--
我也幫忙編輯校刊，印成的和起草的也有。這些刊物是你所能想像最叫人難堪的鬧劇，而我應付這些比現在應付那膚淺浮誇的新聞行業輕鬆得多了。與此同時，我正從事另一類文學習作，維持了最少十五年：創作一個有關自己的連續故事，某種只留在腦海的日記。我相信這是少年兒童的普遍習慣吧。
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As a very small child I used to imagine that I was,
say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of
thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story"
ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more
and more a mere description of what I was doing and the
things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing
would be running through my head: "He pushed the
door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of
sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted
on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside
the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved
across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell
cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit
continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my
non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did
search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this
descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind
of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I
suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers
I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it
always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
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當我還是個幼兒的時候，我會幻想自己是，比如說，羅賓漢，然後假想自己是冒險故事的英雄，但很快我的「故事」不再粗製濫造地自戀，而逐漸變成對我所做和所見的純粹描寫。某時候這樣的東西會在我腦中展現幾分鐘：「他打開門後入房。一道黃色的陽光穿過平紋窗簾，斜照在桌子上，那兒有個半開的火柴盒，躺在墨水瓶旁。右手插袋的他走近窗子。街上一隻有棕色斑紋的貓在追逐一片落葉。」等等等等。這個習慣持續到二十五歲，包括了我並非從事文學的時期。雖然我需要尋找，而我實在也尋找過，合適的字眼，我好像是受著某種外力驅使，違背己意的去作這種選詞用字的工夫。我覺得，這「故事」肯定反映了我不同年紀喜歡的作家的不同風格，但就我記憶所及它經常有著同樣巨細無遺的描寫特質。
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When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the
joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of
words. The lines from Paradise Lost --
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我十六歲時突然發覺文字本身的樂趣，如文字的聲調和聯繫。《失樂園》中的幾行：
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So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
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So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
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which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent
shivers down my backbone; and the spelling
"hee" for "he" was an added pleasure.
As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it
already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to
write, in so far as I could be said to want to write
books at that time. I wanted to write enormous
naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of
detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also
full of purple passages in which words were used partly
for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first
completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was
thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of
book.
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如今看來雖然不太可觀，但它們卻曾震撼我的心靈，而其中把he串作hee更是額外的趣味。對於形容事物的要求，我早已知之甚詳。所以我清楚知道自己想寫些什麼類型的書，若我那時也算想寫書的話。我打算寫些自然主義、結局不如意的長篇小說，描寫詳盡而比喻吸引，又要充滿只求文字的聲調美的雕琢片段。而實際上我那早已構思，三十歲時寫好的第一本完整的小說《緬甸歲月》，就是這類的作品。
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I give all this background information because I do
not think one can assess a writer's motives without
knowing something of his early development. His subject
matter will be determined by the age he lives in -- at
least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like
our own -- but before he ever begins to write he will
have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will
never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to
discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at
some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he
escapes from his early influences altogether, he will
have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need
to earn a living, I think there are four great motives
for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in
different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer
the proportions will vary from time to time, according to
the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
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我提供這些背景資料，只因我相信若然沒有對一個作家的早年發展有所了解，實在不能對他的寫作動機給予評價。他作品的主題為其所處的時代氛圍所決定
-- 至少在我們這個亂糟糟的、革命的時代是對的
-- 但在他下筆之前，他總會得到一種永不能完全脫離的情感取態。毫無疑問，他有責任去抑制其情緒，也要避免乖僻失控而顯得不夠成熟；但若然他把早期的影響全盤捨棄，又會熄滅了其寫作衝動。除了糊口的需要，我認為寫作
-- 當然包括寫作散文 -- 有四大動機。對每個作家來說它們的程度輕重有異，而根據個別作家身處的環境，它們的比例更常有改變。它們是：
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1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be
talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your
own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,
etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive,
and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with
scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers,
successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top
crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not
acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they
almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all --
and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered
under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted,
willful people who are determined to live their own lives
to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious
writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and
self-centered than journalists, though less interested in
money.
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一、純粹的自我中心。希望看起來精明一點、成為談論對象、死後留名、在童年時瞧不起你的人面前一雪前恥，等等等等。假裝這不是一種動機的人無疑是在說謊，而且是個大謊話。與作家共有這種特性的還有科學家、藝術家、政治人物、律師、軍人、顯赫商賈
-- 簡言之是人類的整個高等階層。大部分的人並非貪婪無比。三十歲以後他們差不多都不以個人自居
-- 主要是為別人而活，或者過著營營役役的日子。但世上總會有這類有天份的、固執的少數份子，他們決意由始至終只為己而活，作家便屬於這類人。我必須指出的是，嚴肅的作家全都比新聞工作者更自負更自以為是，雖然相比下對金錢的興趣要低一點。
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2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty
in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words
and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of
one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or
the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience
which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
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二、美的追求。對外在世界或對字句結構的美的追求。聲調交織的樂趣，來自扎實的散文或者有節奏感的好故事。渴望分享自己認為不可錯失的寶貴經驗。
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The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of
writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks
will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for
non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about
typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a
railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
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於許多作家來說追求美的動機相當薄弱，但就算是小冊子或教科書的作者，也會被一些有趣的字句吸引，而並非基於實際的考慮；又或者他對印刷、版頁留白的尺寸等等的事情感覺極深。所有比鐵路指南高明的書，無一不顧及美感。
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3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as
they are, to find out true facts and store them up for
the use of posterity.
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三、歷史推動。渴望直視真相，追尋事實，以及將其紀錄下來以供後代使用。
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4. Political purpose -- using the word
"political" in the widest possible sense.
Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter
other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they
should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely
free from political bias. The opinion that art should
have nothing to do with politics is itself a political
attitude.
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四、政治目的。這是「政治」一字最廣義的用法。渴望將世界推向某一方向，改變別人對理想社會的概念。同樣地，沒有書全無政治偏見。認為藝術與政治無關本身已是一政治取向。
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It can be seen how these various impulses must war
against one another, and how they must fluctuate from
person to person and from time to time. By nature --
taking your "nature" to be the state you have
attained when you are first adult -- I am a person in
whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth.
In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely
descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware
of my political loyalties.
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由此可見這幾種原動力必定互相衝突排斥，而因時因人它們也會程度有異。我天生
-- 所謂的「天生」是指你剛長大成人時的狀態
-- 頭三種動機就比第四種強得多。太平盛世之時我也許會寫寫雕章琢句或純然描寫的書，又或者會對自己的政治立場全無意識。
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Translator's note: This masterpiece of modern
essay was written by the novelist, essayist and
commentator George Orwell, and it is a gem of his works
besides his novels. This translation is for fun only, and
it is also an act of bluff. As I have no other relevant
materials to rely on, the whole process is accomplished
by poring dictionary and guessing. The translation will
probably be unsatisfactory and may even contain mistakes.
Suggestion and criticism are always welcomed. This is the
first part of the whole essay.
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譯者註：這是小說家、散文家和政論家喬治•奧威爾(George
Orwell)的名篇，是其小說之外的優秀作品。譯者翻譯的動機純然是玩票性質，乃強裝內行之舉。譯者手頭上沒有參考資料，只靠翻查字典和推測文意翻譯。譯文有許多不如意的地方，並很可能有誤譯，希望各位讀者原諒指教。這是全文的上半篇。
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