EMERSON, Ralph Waldo (1803—1882), American poet, lecturer, and essayist, who was said by Mathew Arnold to have produced “the most important work done in prose in the nineteenth century.” Emerson was the leading member of the group of New England idealists known as the transcendentalists.

拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（1803年至1882年），美国诗人、演讲者和随笔作家，马休·阿诺德说他创作了“19世纪最重要的散文作品”。爱默生是被称为先验论者的新英格兰唯心主义团体的主要成员。

Early Years.  Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, the THIRD of six sons of William and Ruth Hasking Emerson. William Emerson, prominent in local affairs, was pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston, chaplain to the state senate, and an editor of the Monthly Anthology, a literary review. On his death in 1811, the family was left in straitened circumstances, but through the indefatigable persistence of Ruth Emerson and of her sister-in-law Mary Moody Emerson, each of the four older surviving sons completed studies at the Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard College.

早年。1803年5月25日，爱默生于波士顿，是威廉和露丝·哈斯金·爱默生六个儿子中的老三。在当地事物中地位显赫的威廉·爱默生是波士顿一个上帝一位论派教堂的牧师，州参议院的专职教士，也是一家文学评论《选集月刊》的编辑。当他于1811年去世时，家庭便陷入了困境，但通过露丝·爱默生和孩子们的姑姑玛丽·穆迪·爱默生不知疲倦的坚持，四个幸存的儿子都完成了在波士顿拉丁语学校的学业，并从哈佛学院毕业。

Emerson entered Harvard in 1817 on a scholarship, and during collegiate holidays he taught school. He was not a remarkable student and made no particular IMPRESSION on his contemporaries. In 1821 he graduated 13^th in a class of 59, and was elected class poet only after 6 other students had declined that honor but at Harvard be began the first volume of the journal that for the rest of his life would be the “savings bank” in which he deposited thoughts and quotations to be withdrawn as needed in later writings.

1817年爱默生获得奖学金进入哈佛大学，并在学校放假期间，在校授课。他不是一个引人注目的学生，而且没有给他同时代的人留下特别的印象。1821年他在有59人的班级中以第13名的成绩毕业，并在其它6位学生拒绝了这一荣誉后被选为了班级唯一的诗人，但在哈佛却开启了他日志的第一卷，以至于在他的余生中成为了他存放思想和经典语录的“储蓄银行”，在后来的写作中如有需要便从中提取。

After graduation he taught again, experimented with fiction and verse, and read randomly in theology until 1825, when he entered the Harvard Divinity School. A year later, he received an M. A. and was “approbated to preach.” In 1827 he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

毕业后他又开始教课，试过小说和韵文，还随意地读过神学，直到1825年，当时他已进入哈佛大学三一学院。一年后，他获得了文学硕士学位，并被批准传教。1827年，他被选入美国大学优等生荣誉学会。

Emerson had been suffering from symptoms of tuberculosis, and in the fall of 1827 he went to Georgia and Florida for his health. He returned to New England late in December and occasionally supplied pulpits in the Boston area. In Concord, N. H., he met Ellen Tucker, a 17-year-old poet who was also tubercular. They were married in September 1829, just after Emerson had been ordained a pastor of the Second Church of Boston. The young couple were wondrously happy, but both were ill, Ellen died in 1831, after less than two years of marriage.

爱默生一直都遭受着肺结核的折磨，1827年秋，他因健康原因去了乔治亚和佛罗里达。12月末，他返回了新英格兰，偶尔在波士顿地区开设讲坛。在新罕布什尔的康科德，他遇到了埃伦·塔克，一位17岁也患有结核病的诗人。他们于1829年9月结婚，就是在爱默生被任命为波士顿第二教会的牧师之后。这对青年的夫妇非常幸福，但两人都有病，在结婚不到两年后，埃伦于1831年去世。

By the end of the following year, Emerson had resigned his pastorate, giving among his reasons his unwillingness to administer the sacrament of the Last Supper, which he considered an anachronistic rite. One Christmas Day of 1832 he left for Europe, even though he was so ill that it was doubted whether he could survive the rigors of a winter voyage.

到了第二年的年末，爱默生辞去了他的牧师职务，给出的理由之一是他不愿执行最后晚餐的仪式，他认为那是一种过时的仪式。1832年的一个圣诞节，他去了欧洲，虽然病得如此严重，以至于人们怀疑他是否能熬过严寒的冬季航行。

He traveled through Italy, where he met the English author Walter Savage Landor, and then went to Paris. In London, Emerson met the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill. At Highgate, just outside of London, he visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose Aid to Reflection he had admired but whose rush of conversation seemed now to consist only of quotations from that book. Emerson spent a disappointing day at Rydal Mount in the English Lake district with William Wordsworth, but in Scotland he and Thomas Carlyle, the historian and social critic, laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship.

他经过意大利，在那里他遇见了英国作家沃尔特·萨维奇·兰道，然后去了巴黎。在伦敦，爱默生遇到了经济学家和哲学家约翰·斯图尔特·米尔。在海格特，就在伦敦的郊外，他访问了塞缪尔·泰勒·柯尔律治，爱默生曾钦佩过他的《思维之助》，但他们谈话重点现在似乎只有那本书中的经典语录了。爱默生在英国湖区的赖德尔山庄与威廉·华滋华斯度过了令人失望的一天，但在苏格兰，他和历史学家，评论家托马斯·卡莱尔奠定了终生友谊的基础。

Productive Years.  After his return from Europe in the fall of 1833, Emerson began a career as a public lecturer with an address in Boston. The lecture, entitled The Uses of Natural History, attempted to humanize science by explaining that “the whole of Nature is a metaphor or image of the human mind,” an observation that he was often later to repeat or rephrase. Other lectures followed—on subjects such as Italy, biography, English literature, the philosophy of history, and human culture.

多产的几年。1833年秋他从欧洲返回后，爱默生在波士顿进行演讲，开始了作为公共演说者的生涯。演讲的标题为《自然史的运用》，试图通过解释“整个大自然是人类心灵的隐喻和意象”使科学人性化，一种他后来经常重复或改述的言论。随后的其它演讲---涉及如意大利、传记、英国文学、历史哲学和人类文化的一些主题。

In late September 1834, Emerson moved to Concord, Mass., as a boarder in the home of his step-grandfather Ezra Ripley. On Sept. 14, 1835, he married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, insisting that she change her name to Lydian to avoid the unpleasant r sound that New Englanders inevitably added to words ending in a. The couple moved to a house of their own in Concord, where they lived the rest of their lives. The house became a gathering place for a group of writers and conversationalists that included the Channings, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and others. For half a century the meetings of this eminent group made Concord seem “the Athens of America.”

1834年9月末，爱默生搬到了马萨诸塞的康科特，寄宿在他继祖父以斯拉·里普利的家中。1835年9月14日，他迎娶了普利茅斯的莉蒂亚·杰克逊，坚持她将名字改成莉蒂安，以避免令人不快的r音，因为新英格兰人不可避免的在单词结尾要加入一个a音。这对夫妇搬到了康科特自己的一所房子，在那里，他们度过了他们的余生。那所房子变成了一个聚集了一群作家和健谈者的地方，包括詹宁斯，阿莫斯·布朗森·奥尔科特，玛格丽特·富勒，亨利·大卫·梭罗以及其他的人。这种杰出集体持续半个世纪的会面使康科特像是“美国的雅典城”。

Emerson’s first book, Nature, appeared in 1836. Although only a slim volume, it contains in brief the whole substance of his thought. But it sold so poorly that after a dozen years its edition of 500 copies was not exhausted. His Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837, The American Scholar, however, was immediately popular, and, when printed, sold well. But a year later his address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School created such a tempest because of its advocacy of intuitive personal revelation that he was not invited back to his alma mater for 30 years.

爱默生的第一本书《论自然》于1836年面世。尽管只是一本薄薄的书籍，但它以简洁的形式包含了其思想的全部主要内容。但它销售很差，以至于在12年后它的500本书依然没有售完。然而，1837年他在哈佛大学的美国大学优等生荣誉学会上发表了致词《论美国学者》，立刻受到大众的喜爱，而且当时印刷、销售都很好。但一年后，他对哈佛三一学院毕业班典礼的演讲，因提倡直觉的个人启示引发了一场风暴，以至于他在之后的30年里再未被邀请回到过母校。

Since 1836, Emerson had been a member of the Transcendentalist Club, which often met at his house, and in 1840 he helped launch the Dial, a quarterly of literature, philosophy, and religion. For four years the Dial presented transcendentalist views. After the first two years, Emerson succeeded Margaret Fuller as its editor. Though now recognized as almost the “official” voice of transcendentalism, Emerson looked with suspicion on such offshoots of the movement as the experimental communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands. See also TRANSCENDENTALISM.

    从1836年开始，爱默生都是先验主义俱乐部的成员，他们经常在他的家中聚会，而且在1840年，他帮助创办了一份文学、哲学和宗教期刊《日晷》。四年来《日晷》》介绍了先验主义的观点。在开头的两年之后，爱默生接替玛格丽特·富勒成为杂志的编辑。虽然现在几乎被认为是先验主义的“官方”声音，但爱默生对这样的运动分支持有怀疑的态度，就像布鲁克农场和果乡的实验社区。也可参阅先验主义词条。

In 1841, Emerson published the first volume of his Essays, a carefully constructed collection that contains some of his best-remembered writings, such as Self-Reliance, Compensation, and The Over-Soul. A second series of Essays in 1844 firmly established his reputation. Lectures given in 1845 were published five years later as Representative Men. Poems appeared in 1847.

1841年，爱默生出版了他的《论文集》第一卷，一本精心构思的选集，包括了他的一些最著名作品，如《论自助》，《论补偿》和《论超灵》。1844年，《论文集》第二集的出版牢固奠定了他的声望。五年后，出版了在1845年的讲座，如《代表人物》。1847年《诗集》面世。

Later that year Emerson again went abroad, lecturing with success in England, renewing his friendship with Carlyle, meeting other notable British authors, and collecting materials for English Traits (1856). A collection of Addresses and Lectures appeared in 1849 and Representative Men in 1850. In Conduct of Life (1860) he simplified and reinforced earlier themes.

那年晚些时候，爱默生再次出国，在英格兰的讲演获得了成功，恢复了与卡莱尔的友谊，会见了其他的英国著名作家，并为《英国人的特性》（1856年）搜集素材。1849年《演讲与讲座》和1850年《代表人物》的选集相继问世。在《论生活的行为》中他简化并加深了早期的主题。

Later Years.  Thereafter, Emerson’s intellectual vigor progressively waned. He continued to lecture, venturing as far west as the Mississippi. The Civil War troubled him, though during the 1850’s he had courageously supported the anti-slavery movement, and when the war broke out he supported the Northern cause.

晚年。此后，爱默生的智力逐渐衰退。他继续在讲座，向西远至密西西比。内战困扰着他，尽管在19世纪50年代他勇敢地支持废奴运动，而当战争爆发时，他却支持北方的事业。

May Day and Other Pieces (1867) was a second gathering of his poems, and further essays were collected in Society and Solitude (1870). In 1866, Emerson was reconciled with Harvard, when the college gave him an honorary LL. D. degree and invited him to give the Phi Beta Kappa address there the following year. Lectures at Harvard in 1870 were published as Natural History of the Intellect (1893).

《五月节与其它诗》（1867年）是他的第二个诗集，而《社会与独处》（1870）收集了更多的论文。1866年，爱默生与哈佛大学和解了，当时学校授予他荣誉法学博士学位，第二年还邀请他到美国大学优等生荣誉学会上去致词。1870年在哈佛大学的讲座被命名为《智力的自然史》（1893年）出版。

Emerson traveled to California in 1871 and to Europe again in 1872. In 1879 he joined Bronson Alcott and others in establishing the Concord (summer) School of Philosophy. He died of pneumonia in Concord on April 27, 1882, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery there.

1871年爱默生旅行到加利福尼亚，1872年再次去了欧洲。1879年他参加了布朗森·奥尔科特和其他人建立的康科特（夏季）哲学学校。1882年4月27日，他因肺炎在康科特去世，并葬于那里的沉睡谷墓地。

Thought.  Emerson’s thought is sometimes said to be subsumed in a single phrase: the divine sufficiency of the individual. In the essay Self-Reliance he called on his countrymen to know themselves to trust their insights, and to recognize that what was true for them in their own hearts was inevitably true for all men. “Our age,” he charged in Nature, “is retrospective.” It looks backward, feeding on thoughts of its ancestors. Why depend on revelations of the past? He asked in his Divinity School address. Look into your own hearts, he said, for fresh revelations that are fit for today. In his address The American Scholar he advised his audience to read the great book of Nature. Man-made books are for idle hours, to be put side when Nature can be confronted face to face.

思想。爱默生的思想有时据说可归为一句话：个人天赐的充分性。在论文《论自助》中，他呼吁同胞了解自身，相信他们的洞察力，并且认识到他们自己心中真实的东西必然是所有人心中的真实。“我们的时代”，他在《论自然》中写道，“是可回顾的时代”。回顾过往，都以祖先的思想为食。为什么要依赖过往的那些启示呢？他曾在三一学院的致词时问到。他说，为适合今天的新启示，请审视你们自己的内心吧。在其致词《美国学者》中，他建议听众读读伟大的自然之书。人造的书籍是为闲暇时准备的，当我们能与大自然面对面时，就把那些书放在一边。

   Central to Emerson’s argument are two consistently held distinctions. The first is that between Nature and Spirit. Nature, he explained, is everything that is not “me.” It consists of all that is corporeal or tangible. It is man’s body and everything that can be apprehended sensually.

    爱默生论点的核心被认为是两个始终如一的区别。第一是大自然与精神之间的区别。他解释道，大自然就是一切，不是什么“自我的一部分”。它包含了所有有形的或可感知的东西。它是人的身体和可从感官上理解的一切事物。

   Closely allied to the distinction between Nature and Spirit is that between Reason and Understanding. Reason supplied immediate access to truth. Understanding is rational. It depends on man’s ability to read Nature correctly. But because every man is imperfect, the products of Understanding, though often temporarily useful are inevitably faulty. Each generation will amend them. Understanding produces man-made theories or creeds. Reason plunges directly to truth, which has existed since the beginning of time in the mind of God.

    与大自然和精神之间的区别密切相关的是理性与知性之间的区别。理性为获得真理提供了直接通道。知性是富有理性的。这取决于人类正确阅读大自然的能力。但由于诸多的原因，每个人都是有缺点的，虽然经常暂时有用，但知性的产物不可避免地是有缺陷的。每一代人都会修正它们。知性产生人造的理论或信条。理性直接奔向真理，它存在于开天辟地的上帝心中。

   Man’s mind is an imperfect copy of the mind of God, but man’s spirit, or soul, is part of and identical with the great oversoul, which hovers over and enters into all being. The divine spirit resides in every man, accessible if he will seek it out. Understanding produces illusion. Reason discovers facts behind appearances.

    人的心灵是对上帝心灵的不完美复制，但人的精神，或灵魂是上帝的一部分，并与伟大的超灵完全相同，它盘旋并进入所有的存在。神圣的精神驻留在每个人身上，如果他愿意找出它的话是很容易找到的。知性产生错觉。理性会发现在表象后的实事。

   Little that Emerson said was startlingly original. His thought was an amalgam of inherited Puritan view tinctured by Unitarianism, of reading in Plato and the Neoplationists, and of his study of the sacred books of the East. German idealism was filtered to him through the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle. The romanticism of Wordsworth, skepticism of Montaigne, and the mysticism of the 18^th century Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg became part of the pattern. Emerson read widely and eclectically, culling from books whatever reinforced his own convictions. He was not always consistent, preferring flashes of insight to logical argument. Truth was a mystery to be trapped by metaphor. Truth, though single, had many approaches.

    爱默生说过的东西很少是使人惊奇的原创。他的思想是继承了那些阅读了柏拉图和新柏拉图主义，以及他对东方圣书的研究，带有一位论派色彩的清教徒观点的一种混合物。德国的唯心主义通过柯勒律治和卡莱尔的作品渗透到他的思想中。华滋华斯的浪漫主义，蒙田的怀疑主义，以及18世纪瑞典哲学家伊曼纽尔·斯韦登柏格的神秘主义成为了该模式的一部分。爱默生阅读广泛，且不拘一格，凡是能加强他自己信念的书他都选择。他并不总是始终如一，与逻辑论证相比更喜欢灵光一现的洞察力。真理是被隐喻困住的迷。真理，虽然形单影孤，但仍有许多接近它的途径。

   Prose. Emerson’s thought was in essentials little different from that of many of his transcendentalist contemporaries. What sets him apart from almost all of the others is that he phrased his thought so well. For Emerson was primarily a literary artist—a meticulous craftsman.

散文。在主要的方面，爱默生的思想与许多他同时的代先验主义者的思想并没有什么不同。使他与众不同的东西是他完美地表达了他的思想。因为，爱默生主要是一位文学艺术家---一位一丝不苟的工匠。

   The unit of his craft has often been thought to be the single sentence, polished and aphoristic. His essays are sometimes described as a string of jewels, attractive because of the brilliancy of each separate gem. This is partly true, for each sentence represents on insight that embraces all truth, a microcosm of the whole—all is in each. But also to be admired is Emerson’s skill in combining sentences to form paragraphs, paragraphs to form essays, and essays to form books, which are unified not by logic but by organic incremental repetition.

    他工艺的单元常常被认为是优美的，格言似的单个句子。他的随笔有时被描绘成一串珠宝，可每一颗宝石都闪耀着光芒，引人注目。这部分是正确的，因为每个句子都代表了对所拥抱的全部真理的洞察力，对整体的缩影---全部就在每个之中。但还值得钦佩的是爱默生将句子组合成段落的技巧，段落形成文章，而文章形成书籍，它们不是通过逻辑，而是通过有机的增量重复统一的。

   The first sentence of History, which is the first piece in the Essays of 1841, states, “There is one mind common to all mankind.” This thought is then rolled forward and becomes the core of what, by the end of the volume, resembles a gigantic snowball that has picked up new substance, enlarging and explicating the initial statement. “Of this mind,” the second paragraph begins, “History is the record.” And so the thought circles forward, identical but expanded, each essay contributing a new angle of vision or another layer of interpretation. “It is much to write sentences,” Emerson said in his journal, “it is more… to arrange many general reflections in their natural order [to] … make one homogeneous piece.”

    《论历史》的第一句，就是1841年《论文集》的第一篇，写道，“全人类都有一个共同的心灵”。然后，这一思想向前延伸，成了核心，到该书的末尾时就像卷起了新物质的巨大雪球，扩大并解释着最初的陈述。在第二段的开始写道，“历史就是这种心录的记录”。因此，该思想循环向前，虽是同一的但得到了扩展，每篇论文都贡献出一个新的视角或另一层面的解释。爱默生在日志中说“写句子很重要，但更重要的是… 将许多一般的反思以其自然的秩序[到]… 形成一篇同质的作品”。

   In his search for natural order, Emerson failed finally to bridge the gap between spirit and things. His thought remained dualistic to the end. Like the equestrian in the circus, he said, every man must ride two horses, one foot on each in precarious balance. Man is free to plunge in spirit to depths of truth, but man is also a creature controlled by fate. The best that any man can do, Emerson concluded in Representative Men, is to advance to the limit of his capacities so that he is prepared to respond if his times call for a person of his combination of skills and shortcomings. In English Traits he presented a not altogether pleasant portrait of Saxon supremacy, anticipating the racism of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and in other respects the approaches of the German philosopher Oswald Spengler and the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. The American psychologist William James recognized Emerson as a pragmatist who knew that what seems for the moment efficient will be replaced by what at another moment is equally useful and perhaps closer to truth.

    在爱默生寻求自然秩序的过程中，他最终未能弥合精神与事物之间的隔阂。他的思想始终是二元的。就像马戏团的骑手，他说，每个人必须骑两匹马，一只脚踩在一匹马上以保持不稳定的平衡。人可自由地将精神投入真理的深入，但人也是受命运控制的生物。爱默生在《代表人物》中总结说，人能做的最好的事就是准备好回应，如果他的时代需要一个结合了技能和缺点的人。在《英国人的特性》中，他呈现了一幅撒克逊人至上的，不是那么令人愉快的肖像，预料了德国哲学家弗里德里希·尼采的种族主义，以及在其它方面，德国哲学家奥斯瓦尔德·斯宾格勒和英国历史学家阿诺德·J. 汤因比的方法。美国心理学家威廉·詹姆斯认为爱默生是一位实用主义者，他知道一时看来有效的东西在另一个时刻就会被同样有效的，也许更接近真理的东西所取代。

   Poetry.  Emerson’s poetry, often derided in his day as rough and unintelligible, has come to be regarded as genuinely innovative. “It is not metres,” Emerson said, “but metre-making argument that makes a poem,---a thought so passionate and alive that… it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature like a new thing.” To Emerson, the poet was both seer and sayer, whose insights plunged directly toward truth, capturing it in word that “mount to paradise/ By the stairway of surprise.”

    诗歌。爱默生的诗，时常被其时代嘲笑为粗糙且莫名其妙，如今被视为真正的创新。爱默生说“它不是格律，而是创作一首诗的格律论证---一种充满激情和活力的想法… 它拥有其自身的一种架构，就如同装饰自然的一种新事物”。对爱默生而言，诗人既是预言家又是说话的人，他的洞察力直接奔向真理，用“登上天堂/凭借那惊奇的阶梯”的文字来捕捉它。

   His best-remembered poems include Concord Hymn; Each and all; Give All for Love; Days; and The Rhodora, which suggests that “if eye were made for seeing,/Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.” More difficult but equally characteristic are the symbolically autobiographical Uriel; The Sphinx, which Thoreau tried patiently to explicate but found that its total meaning eluded him; Bacchus, in which Emerson yearns for “wine which never grew/In the belly of the grape”; and Brahma, often anthologized and often parodied, in which the whole of Emerson’s mystic speculation is enigmatically condensed. The longer Threnody, an elegy on the death in 1841 of his son Waldo, restates the conviction that spirit is immortal.

他最著名的诗歌包括《康科特赞歌》；《个体与整体》；《为爱付出一切》；《日子》；以及《杜鹃花》，这些诗使人联想到“如果眼睛是为看见而创造，/那么美就是它自身存在的借口”。更难的，但同样有特点的是具有象征意义的自传体《乌列》；梭罗试图耐心地解释《斯芬克斯》，但发现他无法获得它全部的意义；《酒神巴克斯》，在诗中，爱默生渴望“葡萄酒从不生长/在葡萄的腹中”；《大神》，经常被收入选集，常被拙劣地模仿，爱默生全部的神秘猜想都让人捉摸不透地浓缩在其中。较长的《挽歌》，一首对他儿子沃尔多于1841年去世的挽歌，重新叙述了精神不朽的信念。

                                                    LEWIS LEARY

                                         University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

                                                    刘易斯·利里

                                                北卡罗莱纳教堂山大学

                                                     2022年8月18日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985年版，第10卷，第303页至305页）