學而時譯之：《複眼人》英譯者的學習札記

WhatILearnedTranslatingWuMing-yi'sTheManwiththeCompoundEyes

Wu Ming-yi(吳明益)‚s novel The Man With the Compound Eyes(《複眼人》,夏日出版社,2011)is a well-plotted ecological catastrophe narrative structured around a central symbol that, in a manner reminiscent of James Cameron's film Avatar (2009), combines myth and media technology, in the figure of a man with compound eyes. The novel develops an idea from an earlier short story of Wu's, also entitled“The Man With the Compound Eyes.”In the story, there is a butterfly preserve installed with a myriad video cameras. Each camera represents, in a static fashion (because the cameras do not move around like living creatures), the perspective of a single organism. A central computer compiles the video footage from the cameras into a multi-perspectival super-image for tourist consumption. One day, however, a video engineer goes wandering in the park and meets a man with compound eyes, taking the story into the surreal terrain. At any rate, the meaning of the metaphor is not hard to seek: the man with compound eyes is a figure for Nature from the perspectives of all the creatures that compose“Nature.”The short story initially seems to make a comment on the ommodification of nature by the tourism industry, but at the end we witness the destruction of the moon to promote agriculture in Siberia: the emphasis shifts towards the damage human beings inflict uponnature in the name of“development.”This shifted emphasis characterizes the novel as well.