【閒作】吳爾芙〈自己的房間〉試節譯

受學妹之託幫忙看考古題譯文給意見，定睛一看不得了，是吳爾芙〈自己的房間〉其中的一小段：

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that it is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

且試譯如下：

女子鮮有橫空出世的文學創作，男子卻似乎都能吟詩作對，箇中謎團實在難解。我不禁自問，女性究竟居於何種境地？小說是揮灑想像、大膽創新，不似科學一板一眼，小說像輕巧架起的蛛網，經緯與人生緊密相連。這份聯繫不容易察覺，例如莎劇看似自成一個世界，層層翻轉檢視、抽絲剝繭，方知故事並非完全虛構，亦不由架空人物敘說，實為人類痛苦之結晶、紅塵俗世之寫照，如身體狀況、錢財收支、家務操持一類的事物。

文學翻譯一向不是我的專長，吳爾芙的文采似乎該對應中文的文白夾雜文體，我又更不在行了。就當做閒來無事消磨時間，堆砌也好玩。