杜拉斯的情人(英文 )

THE LOVER

Part I

ONE DAY, I was already old, in

the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said:'I've known yo u for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young,

but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I perfer your face as it is now. Ravaged.'

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize my self, in which I delight.

Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone. I've never asked. But I believe

I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship

between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving

great creases in the forehead. But instead of being

dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest i might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I've kept it ever

since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, comparati vely, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but

its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

THE LOVER

Part II

So, I'm fifteen and a half. It's on a ferry crossing the Mekong river. The image lasts all the way acro ss. I'm fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just one season, ho t, monotonous, we're in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.

I'm at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school. My mother's a teacher and wants her girl

to have a secondary education. 'You have to go to

high school.' What was enough for her is not

enough for her daughter. High school and then a

good degree in mathematics. That was what had

been dinned into me ever since I started school. It never crossed my mind I might escape the mathe- matics degree, I was glad to give her that hope.

Every day I saw her planning her own and her children's future. There came a time when she

couldn't plan anything very grand for her sons

any more, so she planned other futures, makeshift ones, but they too served their purpose, they

blocked in the time that lay ahead. I remember my younger brother's courses in book-keeping. From

the Universal Correspondence School - every

year, every level. You have to catch up, my mother used to say. It would last for three days, never four. Never. We'd drop the Universal School whenever

my mother was posted to another place. And begin again in the next. My mother kept it up for ten years. It wasn't any good. My younger brother became an accountant's clerk in Saigon. There was

no technical school in colonies; we owed my

elder brother's departure for France to that. He

stayed in France for several years to study at the technical school. But he didn't keep it up. My

mother must have known. But she had no choice,

he had to be got away from the other two children.

For several years he was no longer part of the family. It was while he was away that my mother bought the land, the concession. A terrible business, but for us, the children who were left, not so ter-

rible as the presence of the killer who would have been, the child-killer of the night, of the night of the hunter.

The Lover-Duras

The Lover (French title: L'Amant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Les éditions de Minuit. It has been translated to 43 languages. It was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt. The Lover is also a 1992 movie based on this novel, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai. The cast also included Lisa Faulkner. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Summary of the movie

Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl (Jane March), from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka-Fai). The story is narrated by Jeanne Moreau, portraying a writer looking back on her youth. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the village of Sadec, to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of a 32 year old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a tidy fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic-depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair. For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it isn't until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings. Duras' real-life Chinese lover was named Lee. The last she heard of him, he became a born again Christian and loved his family very much. He died and was buried in the same city in Vietnam where Duras first met him. Duras was only 15 at the time of her love affair, which is the age of the heroine in the novel.

Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras (French IPA: [ma?g?'?it dy'?as]) (April 4, 1914 – March 3, 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born in Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam), her father died,her mother raised her with her two brother , they were very poor,the mother went practicly mad, she ( the mother) use to beat her children and even made marguerite a sort of prostitute.when she got 18 she went to France, her parents' native country, to study law, but became a writer instead. She changed her name in 1943 for Duras, the name of a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films and short narratives, including her best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover. Following the making of a film of the same name(s) (1992, L'Amant, The Lover) based on her work, Duras then published a slightly different work, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Other major works include Moderato Cantabile, also made into a film of the same name, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and her film India Song. She was also the screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais. Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form (their

Cantabile she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the Nouveau roman French literary movement. Her films are also experimental in form, most eschewing synch sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story over images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less tangential. She died at 81 from throat cancer and is interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

In The Lover and The North China Lover, Marguerite Duras writes about first love. Both novels are autobiographical, reflecting Duras’ adolescent experience in the then French colony of Vietnam where she was born in 1914. Her father died in 1918, leaving her mother, a teacher occupying one of the lowliest positions in the colonial hierarchy, to tend for Duras and her two brothers.

Both of these novels paint a poignant picture of Duras’ miserable upbringing. Her family was pitted into dire poverty after her mother was lured by the corrupt colonial administration into putting all her savi ngs into the purchase of a worthless plot of land, subject to flooding by the sea. ‘It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society’, Duras writes, ‘We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves’. Feelings of shame and anger towards one another and the outside world, enveloped in the fear of not having enough to survive on economically, thereafter tarnished the lives of Duras and her siblings.

It is within this context that ‘the girl’, i.e. Duras herself at age fifteen and a half, lounging on the ferry crossing the Mekong river, ‘wearing a man’s flat brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a black ribbon’, attracts the interest of the very elegant rich Chinese man inside the big black limousine. ‘... how important it was to be in my life, that event, the crossing of the river’, she relates. The sudden attraction is mutually shared and they instantly become lovers. ‘He’s a man who must make love a lot’, Duras reveals, ‘I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and wh at to say’. Day in day out, his formidable chauffeur diligently comes to fetch her from the boarding school. But the love story that develops is much more complex than what one might guess to be an older man’s fetishistic attraction for a ‘little white gir l’ or an ‘impoverished white lay-about’s scheme to exploit a Chinese millionaire. His bachelor’s quarters not only represent the locus of their boundless intimacy but also a safe haven which enables them to escape from their respective predicaments.

In The Lover, Duras’ Goncourt Prize (the Goncourt is the best-known French literary award) novel, one senses a strain of resentment in the author’s tone. It is as if she is telling the love story (her love story) without really wanting to, as though she felt compelled to write as an attempt to stop this experience from recurring in her mind. ‘I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken’, Duras relates at the outset, ‘It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight’. But she holds back from delving into the emotional breadth of their love story, choosing instead to depict it in a minimalist way: ‘Because of his ignorance she suddenly knows: she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone’.

him for the money, that I can’t love him’, she asserts, ‘it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on living. This is because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man’. When he takes her famished family out to dinner, for example, they all behave as though th ey have granted him a favour in accepting his invitation and treat him as though he were an inferior person, showing contempt for his envied wealth.

In The Lover, Duras resists from overtly acknowledging the strength of her great love. She abstains from revealing her emotions to her lover and sharing them with her readers. When, in tremendous desperation, he confronts her about the impossibility of their love as being against the marital arrangements set out for him by his family, she resists coming to grips with the grievous situation and simply says to him that ‘I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons’. In this version ‘the girl’ tastes and lives out the fruits of first love while tacitly accepting its annihilation. But at the end, as she bids farewell to the big black limousine majestically ‘gazing’ at her (with the lover inside) on the steam boat departing for France, she realizes how much she has withheld: ‘She’d wept without letting anyone see her tears, beca use he was Chinese and one oughtn’t weep for that kind of lover’.

And it is with the realization that The Lover simply scraped the surface of things that Duras resolved to do justice to the true colours of their love story in The North China Lover. Upon di scovery of his death, Duras explains in the prelude ‘I stopped the work I was doing. I wrote the story of the North China lover and the child: it wasn’t quite there in The Lover, I hadn’t given them enough time. This book is a novel containing many features of a screenplay, such as the meticulous visual descriptions of possible settings, since Duras hoped that it would ultimately be recaptured on film (which it was in 1992 by director Jean Jacques Annaud).

Still written in her typical disjointed style (for this is not an author for smooth transitions), in this version Duras handles their love story with great care and tenderness. Instead of objectifying her protagonists as ‘the girl’ and ‘the Chinese man’, Duras calls them ‘the child’ and ‘the North China lo ver’, identities that inevitably suggest the youth and innocence, the care and protectiveness enveloped in their intimacy. She comes to grips with her sorrow throughout the course of the novel and takes great pains to transcribe into words an ecstasy of love reduced to the harsh process of separation.

The North China Lover effusively articulates the emotional breadth of ‘the wild happiness of first love and the unrelieved, incurable pain of having lost it’. Realizing that ‘the two are merged in the pain of love’, the child ‘talks to him, she tells him she will always love him. She thinks she will love him all her life. It will be the same for him too. They have both ruined themselves forever’. It is no surprise, then, that at the moment of her departure, the child already mourns the sense of lifelong loss, ‘the strange tragedy of betraying the destiny they realize was theirs’. And when he does telephone her years later, this time she is brave enough to include her own reaction: ‘He heard her crying on the telephone. And then from further off, probably from her room —she hadn’t hung up —he could still hear her crying’.

Both of these novels are essential works of contemporary French literature; neither is necessarily

trajectory for the personal catharsis that awaits Marguerite Duras in the second when she tries to come to grips with the depth of her emotions.