我读中文时更容易被情绪所影响。有时候在课堂上朗读时，如果读到关于死亡和丧亲的描述，我会因哽咽而难以继续。我还因此与几位老师增进了交流，虽然与另外几位已失联。在课堂上与老师一起读小说，至少于我而言，已是生活的一部分。

在周日早上的文学课上，我读完了路遥的《平凡的世界》：全三部，共1,270页。这本书是我离开北京时我的一位中文老师送的告别礼物，到广州之后，我便断断续续地在读。常常读起便爱不释手，不过在读完第二部之后，我先放了放，停下来读完了北岛的《城门开》，才继续读第三部。

在每周的课上，我通常能朗读《平凡的世界》中的两个章节。一小时读一章。有时候我觉得，每周末能有规律地学习，就像“用咖啡勺丈量我的人生。”—— 如J·阿尔弗瑞德·普鲁弗洛克 (J. Alfred Prufrock) 所说的那样。如果我没上课，我便会更多地外出，去认识更多人。如果要以实物展示我的文学课成果，只需拿出一小叠书，其中包括余华的《活着》和霍达的《穆斯林的葬礼》。我来中国已经七年了，也学了这么多年的中文。我读书所花的时间，比作者写书所花的还要长。而我自己则毫无创作。

然而从另一个角度说，或许没有几个7岁大的中国孩子能够像我一样欣赏这些书。一个55岁的人把闲余的时间花在课室里，这或许有些刻板无趣，甚至略微奇怪，但这些叙述了家族历史的小说着实为我大大地打开了眼界。《穆斯林的葬礼》和《平凡的世界》与英国维多利亚时期常见的“三部曲”系列小说十分相似，以多视角发展多线剧情。每周一点一点地读着，仿佛跟随一条条小支流汇入大河。有时候，也会有感性的体验。我发现比起读英文作品，我读中文时更容易被情绪所影响。有时候在课堂上朗读时，如果读到关于死亡和丧亲的描述，我会因哽咽而难以继续。我还因此与几位老师增进了交流，虽然与另外几位已失联。在课堂上与老师一起读小说，至少于我而言，已是生活的一部分。

对我来说，文学课既是语言课程，也是了解中国社会与人际关系的一扇窗。现在看周边的城市和人群，我或不再带有初到中国时那种毫未受影响的纯粹眼光，然而，通过阅读小说，我对人事的理解或许更多了几分雕琢。我对价值和道德情感有了更深刻的认识，其深刻程度甚至难以全然意会，更无法言传。畅读小说，更是有意无意间为我积累了语言的沉淀。我的中文表达能力依然有限，但我接触到了大量的词汇及表达方式，再遇到它们时常能加深印象。自学中文初始，我便逐渐获得了引经据典的意识，虽然还十分浅显。

想必如果我读的是译文，我能更快地读完这些书，然而阅读的主要动机和乐趣正来自于学会欣赏我正在学习的语言（当然，能读到好的翻译也是饶有趣味且获益良多的）。我在读赛珍珠的诺贝尔文学奖获奖作品《大地》时，尤为在这方面有反差的体会。赛珍珠在中国长大，会讲中文。根据她的传记作者希拉里·斯珀林 (Hilary Spurling) 的说法，赛珍珠读过中文版的《水浒传》和《红楼梦》，并且用中文构思了《大地》。作为一部家族史诗长篇，《大地》早于余华的《活着》，可谓其姐妹篇，其人物描写栩栩动人。然而，赛珍珠所用的语言源自于詹姆士王钦定版的《圣经》。她成长的环境是路德教会传教士的社区，这或许就是当时他们使用的语言。然而这样的语言用来描述一名中国农民在战争及天灾间遭受的命运多舛，便不免有些不合时宜且水土不服。

第一次读到译文版的中国文学是在英国念大学时，当时我读了企鹅出版社的《晚唐诗集》。虽然前言中简单介绍了中文行文的特点，但我还是难以想象这些诗句在原文中的意境。这也引发了我对学习中文的零星兴趣，还跟一位在学中文的朋友提起过，后来不了了之了。现在看来，某程度上来说，我当时的动机有些奇怪。我并不是想学来与人沟通，恰恰相反：我正是希望掌握一种在英格兰鲜有人使用的语言，像是去开启一种晦涩神秘的学识的大门。

2006年在北京，我第一次读到了中文的文学作品。当时我刚开始学习中文，因为有日文的底子，我认识不少汉字。我的一位老师布置我读苏轼的《水调歌头》（明月几时有？）。我把要读的内容摆放在面前。另外还有词文的译文，字典，以及标注着拼音和音调的词文。那次真是令我惊讶而感动的一次经历。我发现，在工具的帮助下，我不仅能理解词句的内容，还能欣赏韵律的结构。这种感受在我读《江城子》（十年生死两茫茫）的时候更为猛烈。这并不是一种晦涩的学识，而是串联智慧及人心的“电流”，跨越古今，连接中外。

我还未能成为研究中国古诗的学者，我对苏轼的赏析显然是粗浅的，而且或难有进展。虽然如此，我将继续缓慢地徜徉在中国当代小说的书林中，一次几小步，一周俩钟头。

In my literature class this Sunday morning I finished reading Lu Yao's Pinfan de Shijie (The Ordinary World): three volumes, 1,270 pages in total.  I have been reading the book, which I was given as a parting gift by one of my teachers in Beijing, off and on since I came to Guangzhou.  More on than off but, after finishing the second volume and before taking up the third, I had a break to read Bei Dao's Chengmen Kai.

In my class each week I usually managed to read out loud two chapters of The Ordinary World.  One an hour.  I sometimes feel that in studying regularly each week-end I have, like J Alfred Prufrock, "measured out my life with coffee spoons".  If I had not had classes, I might have travelled more, met more people.  In a physical sense, all I have to show for my literature classes is a small pile of books that also includes Huozhe (Living) by Yu Hua and Musilin de Zangli (Muslim Funeral) by Huo Da.  I have now been in China seven years, learning the language for the same period of time.  It has taken me longer to read these books than it took the authors to write them.  I have created nothing myself.

On the other hand, there are probably few Chinese children born seven years ago who have already read these books with the appreciation that I have given them.  It may be orderly and dull, even slightly ridiculous, for a fifty-five year old man to spend his leisure time confined to a classroom, but the novels themselves are sagas of family life opening up very wide horizons. Muslim Funeral and The Ordinary World resemble the serially composed, triple-decker novels of Victorian England, with multiple strands and viewpoints. Reading them week by week is like moving slowly along different tributaries of a great river.  It is also at times an emotional experience.  I have found that I am more susceptible to sentiment when reading Chinese than I am when I read English. Sometimes, reading out loud  in class, my voice has been choked and I have found it hard to continue as I have read depictions of death and bereavement. I have also formed bonds with some of my teachers, though I have lost touch with others. Reading a novel in the classroom with a teacher is itself, for me at least, a formative part of life.

The literature class has been for me both a language class and an introduction to Chinese society and human relations.  I may no longer see the cities and people around me with the unsmutched, naive clarity of original vision that I sensed when I first arrived in China, but my understanding of people and things probably has a finer shading from the experience of reading fiction. I have absorbed a greater appreciation of values and moral sentiment than I could easily express, perhaps greater even than I am wholly conscious of. The flow of fiction has also deposited in my conscious and my unconscious mind a sediment of language. My Chinese powers of expression remain very limited, but I have a passive knowledge of a wide vocabulary and an awareness of varieties of expression, which resonate when I encounter them again.  I have an awareness too, though it is very dim and very shaky, of Chinese literary and historical references, which amounts almost to the beginning of an education.

I could, I suppose, have read these books much faster in translation, but (though there is certainly great pleasure and profit to be had from good translation) a key motivation and pleasure has been appreciating the language I have been trying to learn. I felt this most strongly, through contrast, when I read The Good Earth, the principal novel for which Pearl Buck won the Nobel prize for literature.  Buck grew up in China, speaking Chinese. According to her biographer Hilary Spurling, Buck read the classic stories Outlaws of the Marsh and Dream of Red Mansions in the original, and composed The Good Earth in her mind in Chinese. As a saga, it is almost a counterpart and predecessor to Yu Hua's Living, and is moving about the fictionalised characters it depicts. Buck's written language, however, is derived from the historical translation of the bible into English during the reign of King James. It may be that this also reflected the actual spoken language of the Lutheran missionary community in which she lived, but it now seems archaic and alien for the depiction of the changing fortunes of a Chinese peasant farmer, caught up in the turmoil of war and natural disasters.

My first experience of Chinese literature was in translation when, at university in England, I read a Penguin collection called Poems of the Late Tang. Although the introduction explained briefly some of the features of composition in Chinese, I found it hard to appreciate at all what the poems might be like in the original.  This awoke in me a weak, flickering interest in studying Chinese, and I spoke about this with a friend who was doing so, but then took it no further.  In part my motivation then seems a strange one now.  It was not so much a desire to communicate, but almost the opposite: a wish to master a language precisely because it was not widely spoken in England, like an initiation into some arcane and esoteric branch of learning.  

My first experience of Chinese literature in the original was in Beijing in 2006.  I had only just started learning the language, but because I had already learned Japanese, I started out with a pre-acquired knowledge of the meaning of many characters.  One of my teachers set me to read Su Shi's Shui Diao Ge Tou (Ming yue ji shi you?).  I had the text in front of me.  I had a literal translation and a dictionary, and I had a script in pinyin with the tones marked.  This was for me an astonishing and moving experience.  I found that, with these aids, I could not only understand the meaning of the poem, but I could appreciate the composition and the rhythm.  The impact was, if anything, even stronger when I repeated the process with Jiang Cheng Zi (Shi nian sheng si liang mang mang).  This was not arcane knowledge, but the electrifying charge of genius and of human contact across a thousand years and a world apart.

I have not become a scholar of Chinese poetry, and no doubt my appreciation of Su Shi was rudimentary and fumbling, and always will be. I intend, though, to continue my slow walk through modern Chinese fiction, just a few steps at a time, two hours each week.

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图说：终于读完了《平凡的世界》，很期待翻开下一本……