《美文》2015年第6期

                       巴恪思 与《太后与我》

      Compiled and Written by Robin Gilbank

                                                                          Translated by Hu Zongfeng

                                                                  （英） 罗宾·吉尔班克      

                                                                              胡宗锋   译

       The Empress Dowager not only loved to be painted as the goddess of mercy, but she clothed herself in the garments suitable to that deity, dressed certain ladies of the court as her attendants, with the head eunuch Li Lien-ying as their protector, ordered the court artists to paint appropriate foreground and background and then called young Yu, her court photographer, to snap his camera and allow Old Sol the great artist of the universe with a pencil of his light to paint her as she was.

     慈禧太后不仅喜欢人家把她画的像观音菩萨，也把自己打扮成观音菩萨，并让宫女装扮成金童玉女，太监头李莲英扮成依怙尊。让宫里的画家把前后背景画好，然后宣她的御用摄影师，年轻的裕勋龄为她照相，让阳光这个伟大的画家照射出她的光辉。

      One day while visiting a curio store on Liu Li Chang, the great book street of Peking, my attention was called by the dealer to four small paintings of plum blossoms in black and white, from the brush of the Empress Dowager. These pictures had been in the panels of the partition between two of the rooms of Her Majesty's apartments in the Summer Palace, and so I considered myself fortunate in securing them.

      一天，在北京著名的文化街参观琉璃厂的一家古玩店时，玩家手里慈禧太后画的四小幅黑白梅花引起了我的注意。这四幅画以前一直挂在她陛下颐和园寝宫两间房子的过道里，能得到这几幅画我自认为很荣幸。

       "You notice," said he, "that each section of these branches must be drawn by a single stroke of the brush. This is no easy task. She must be able to ink her brush in such a way as to give a clear outline of the limb, and at the same time to produce such shading as she may desire. Should her outline be defective, she dare not retouch it; should her shading be too heavy or insufficient, she cannot take from it and she may not add to it, as this would make it defective in the matter of calligraphy. A stroke once placed upon her paper, for they are done on paper, is there forever. This style of work is among the most difficult in Chinese art."

     “你注意看，”那人说：“这画上的每一笔都是一气呵成，此举实乃不易。她的笔在用墨上，既要线条分明，同时还要达到期望中明暗的渐变。要是线条有瑕疵，无法重画；要是明暗不到位，也无法加减，这是书法和绘画中的大忌。一笔下去，落地生根。此乃中国艺术的最高境界。”

        After securing these paintings, I showed them to a number of the best artists of the present day in Peking, and they all pronounced them good specimens of plum blossom work in monochrome, and they agreed with Lady Miao, that if the Empress Dowager had given her whole time to painting she would have passed into history as one of the great artists of the present dynasty.

     得到这几幅画后，我曾让当代北京的几位大画家看过，他们都说这几幅梅花是单色水墨中的上品，与缪嘉慧的看法一样，认为要是慈禧太后一辈子作画，她就会成为历史上当朝的大画家之一。

     One day when one of her court painters called I showed him these pictures. He agreed with all the others as to the quality of her brush work, but called my attention to a diamond shaped twining of the branches in one of them.

      有天，慈禧太后的一位御用画家来访，我让他看这几幅画。他赞同其它几位对慈禧作品的评价，但却让我看其中一幅画上的菱形交叉枝叶。

"That," said he, "is proof positive that it is her work."

"Why?" I inquired.

"Because a professional artist would never twine the twigs in that fashion."

"And why not?"

"They would not do it," he replied. "It is not artistic."

"And why do not her friends call her attention to this fact?" I inquired.

"Who would do it?" was his counter question.

      “这个，”他说：“能证明是她的画，”

       “何以见得？”我问。

       “因为职业画家的笔下枝叶不是这个样子。”

       “为什么不是这样？”

       “画家不这样画，”他说：“没有美感。”

        “那太后的朋友为什么不提醒她？”

       “谁敢那样？”他反问道。

             (Isaac Headland, Court Life in China：The Capital, its Officials and People.)

       节选自何德兰（ Isaac Taylor Headland 1859－1942）著

              《中国的宫廷生活：首都的官和民》 1909年出版 

      Even if the aesthetic sense of her work often leaves something to be desired, one cannot deny that the brushstrokes of Cixi’s painting and calligraphy carry an emphatic energy and a resolute poise. My first encounter with a specimen of her art came several years ago on a trip to Dangjiacun far up in the hills near to the border with Shanxi. After walking along the crammed and uneven bluestone streets of that ancient town, the main thoroughfare suddenly expanded into a miniature square where visitors could stand and marvel at one of the community’s most cherished artifacts. When the Qing Court was forced to flee Beijing in 1900 under the threat of annihilation at the hands of the Eight Nation Alliance, Dangjiacun became a stopping-off point on the long road to refuge in Xi’an. One of the tokens the Dowager Empress left behind was a gigantic version of the character fu (“good fortune”), which was meant to symbolize her enduring gratitude to these loyal subjects for their hospitality and the hope that they might enjoy continued prosperity. Now copied onto a brick frieze in the wall, modern-day tourists scramble to be photographed stretching their fingers up to the design. Doubtless, a few of them harbour the wish that some modicum of lucky charisma might be transmitted down through the ages.

         虽然慈禧太后作品的审美意识常常有点差强人意，但不可否认的是其绘画和书法中的笔画苍劲有力，绝对的泰然自若。几年前出去旅游时，我在陕西的党家村初次看到了慈禧的作品，党家村位于临近山西的小山里。沿着古镇挤满了人、凸凹不平的青石板街道走进去后，主街忽然成了一个小广场，人们站在那里可以欣赏镇里最宝贵的艺术品之一。1900年“八国联军”入侵，清朝皇室恐落入敌手逃离北京。党家村成了逃亡西安避难路途上的歇息驿站。慈禧太后留下的纪念之一就是她御笔钦赐的一个巨大的“福”字，象征她永远感谢这些忠实臣民的款待，祝愿他们能继续发达昌盛。慈禧赐福被雕刻在墙上，现在到此旅游的人都挤着在那里照相，并伸出手指摸“福”。毫无疑问，人们期望能沾一点吉祥福传承下来的福气。

To my eyes, however, the image is unsightly. One can feel impressed that in what must have been a period of uncertainty, even dejection the old lady still retained a firm hand, but my admiration must stop there. The upper stroke slants crookedly like a crane raising its bill to swallow food, and, if we take the waterfowl conceit one stage further, the strokes to the rear are even more troublesome. It is as though with x-ray vision one has been granted the ability to look inside the bird and discern its internal condition. The appearance of the tian conveys the impression of an intestinal obstruction which would surely imperil the poor creature’s existence.

但在我眼里这字一般，人能感到在那个动荡的年代，即便沮丧这位老妇依旧大权在握，然而我欣赏的不是这。这个“福”字的一笔弯曲，像一只鹤扬嘴吞食，要是进一步想像一下这只水鸟的寓意，后面的几笔就更有问题了。人好像是被赋予了X光的功能，能看穿这只鸟，看透它的内心。而下面出现的“田”则意味着内心的不爽，“田”对这只可怜的鸟肯定是个威胁。

       Cixi loved to be praised for her brushwork, with the opinions of foreigners being especially valued. Were communication with the long-dead possible, I would naturally be in no hurry to pass on my honest evaluation of this calligraphic “masterpiece” to her. The above account by Isaac Taylor Headland (1859-1942), is especially piquant since he implies that in spite of following such sedate pursuits as floral painting, not one of those around her could for a single moment forget the authoritarian menace she exuded. Compared to a lot of the sycophantic accounts of Cixi, written by pampered foreign dignitaries who were briefly honoured with admittance to the Court, Headland’s words very likely carry a greater ring of truth. An American by birth, he was ordained as a minister and felt called to teach science at Peking University, becoming fluent in the Chinese language. Upon the death of his first wife, he married a colleague, Dr. Mariam Sinclair, who was eventually invited to the palace to act as the Western physician to the Dowager Empress and her female relatives. Instead of focusing upon deconstructing the myth of the “dragon lady,” the memoirs written by Headland and his wife are refreshingly free from obvious political motives and full of detail, not to mention authorial self-deprecation. From them we learn, for instance, how desperate the Guangxu Emperor was to acquire a bicycle of his own.The contraption was cherished for a brief time, only to be ditched after his queue became tangled in the rear wheel causing him to tumble over! Mercifully, the couple managed to resist embellishing such scenes with attempts at literary flair. They could so easily have used this incident as metonym for Guangxu and his stalled attempts to introduce foreign technology and reforms to the Old China.    

          慈禧太后喜欢人吹捧她的作品，且特别看重外国人的评价。要是人能与早亡的人联络，我肯定自然会不慌不忙的把我对她这幅书法“大作”的真实评价告诉她。上面何德兰的这段话就更有趣了，他的意思是说，虽然大家都在追求静怡的花卉创作，但太后身边的人却时刻不敢忘记她身上散发出的独裁和威严。许多奉承慈禧太后的描述是外国的一些娇生惯养的权贵写的，因为他们曾有幸获准短暂的入宫。相形之下，何德兰的描述听来更真实。何德兰是美国人，他是传教士，在北京汇文书院任教，他的汉语很流利。在结发妻子去世后，他和自己的同事玛丽亚姆·辛克莱（Mariam Sinclair）结了婚。他夫人一直是慈禧太后和其女家眷的西方御医。何德兰及其夫人的回忆录重点不在解构这位“龙夫人”的神话，不谈政治动机，而是专注于细节，更谈不上有自我炫耀，令人耳目一新。从这对夫妇的描述中读者看到许多平常事，如光绪皇帝十分渴望有自己的一辆自行车。不过他对这新玩意的钟爱好景不长，在自行车的后轮缠住他的辫子把他绊倒后，他就把它扔到了一边。所幸的是，这对夫妇没有试图用文学色彩来渲染类似这样的轶事，他（她）们完全可以轻而易举的把这转喻为光绪试图为古老的中国引进外国科技和改革，但却失败了。

        Therein is to be found the point of departure for the present article. How much priority should we give to “truth” and how much poetic license should we be prepared to tolerate in the portrayal of the Dowager Empress in writings meant for foreign eyes? In recent times, there has been renewed fascination with the figure of Cixi, and her character and legacy have both been subject to reevaluation. Here is not the place to offer a fresh assessment of the reasons for the collapse of the Qing Dynasty or to answer any large-scale overarching questions. Instead, my main concern will be with how she has found herself subject to a growing myriad of conflicting interpretations. Cumulatively these perhaps create greater perplexity than clarity.

有关此话本文就到此打住。在写给外国人看的有关慈禧太后的作品中，我们能看到多少“真相”？不得不忍受多少文字上的发挥呢？近来，有关慈禧太后的形象、性格以及身后事，再次成为人们热议和重新评价的主题。这里不适合对清朝灭亡的原因提出新论，也不会对任何有影响的大问题给出己见。我主要想说的是为什么慈禧太后会成为越来越有争议的人物，我的文章也许会让清水更浑。

                                                                             汉语原文载《美文》2015年第6期 （未完待续）