从隐含到可感：《文化苦旅》英译本中“苦”的情感重构

Making the Implicit Perceptible: Emotional Reconstruction of “Bitterness” in the English Translation of A Bittersweet Journey through Culture

摘要: 《文化苦旅》作为余秋雨文化散文的代表作，以“苦”为贯穿全书的核心情感基调，承载着作者对文化变迁、文人处境与文明发展的深层忧思，其情感表达高度依赖中文语境下的含蓄象征。本文通过对原作与英译本的文本对比分析发现，译文从人称转换、语义转化、语境显化、意象重构、情感强化与心理深化六个维度，对原文“苦”的象征表现方式进行了系统性重构，使原本依赖中文语境、需要读者自行领会的隐含情感，转化为英语读者可直接感知的表达。这一重构策略既实现了跨文化情感的有效传递，也体现出文学翻译中情感传达与审美忠实的固有张力，为文化散文的英译实践提供了有益参照。

Abstract: Yu Qiuyu’s A Bittersweet Journey through Culture, a landmark of Chinese cultural prose, is anchored in a keynote of “bitterness”, conveying the author’s deep-seated lament for cultural changes, literati circumstances, and the development of civilizations. Its emotional expression relies heavily on implicit symbolism embedded in the Chinese linguistic context. Through a comparative textual analysis of the source text and its English translation, this paper demonstrates that the translation systematically restructures the symbolic rendering of “bitterness” along six dimensions: narrative person shift, semantic transformation, contextual explicitation, imagistic reconstruction, emotional intensification, and psychological deepening. Implicit emotions that originally depended on the Chinese context and required readers’ active interpretation are transformed into expressions directly perceivable by English readers. This restructuring strategy enables effective cross-cultural emotional transfer while also revealing an inherent tension between emotional communication and aesthetic fidelity in literary translation, thereby offering a useful reference for the practice of translating cultural prose into English.