杜拉斯的情人(英文_)

1、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 you

2、0;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 

3、;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'

4、;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. Very ea

5、rly in my life it was too late. It was already  too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteenand twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew&#

6、160;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 pe

7、ople when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life.  My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread overmy features one by

8、0;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 dism

9、ayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest i might have taken in the reading of abook. And I knew I was right, that one day it  would&

10、#160;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 againtwo years later, at 

11、;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, comparatively, than it 

12、;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 

13、;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 

14、crossing the Mekong river. The image lasts all the way across. I'm fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that  part of the world, we have just on

15、e season, hot,  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 

16、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

17、60;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 di

18、nned 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

19、 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 plann

20、ed 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-keepi

21、ng. 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

22、.  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.

23、 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 depar

24、ture 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.

25、0;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&

26、#160;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

27、0;the killer who would have been,  the child-killer of the night, of the night of the  hunter.The Lover-DurasThe Lover (French title: L'Amant) is an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1984 by Le

28、s 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 fo

29、r the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.Summary of the movieSet 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 Chines

30、e 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.

31、 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

32、 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

33、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 V

34、ietnam 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: mag'it dy'as) (April 4, 1914 March 3, 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born

35、 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' na

36、tive 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-sel

37、ling, 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 inc

38、lude 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 &

39、#39;romanticism' was criticised by fellow writer Raymond Queneau); however, with Moderato 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

40、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 Chi

41、na 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

42、 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 savings into the purchase of a worthless plot

43、 of land, subject to flooding by the sea. Its here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mothers children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society, Duras writes, Were on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of whats b

44、een 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 c

45、ontext that the girl, i.e. Duras herself at age fifteen and a half, lounging on the ferry crossing the Mekong river, wearing a mans 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

46、 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. Hes a man who must make love a lot, Duras reveals, Im very lucky, obviously, its as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly wh

47、at to do and what 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 mans fetishistic attraction for a little white girl or an impoverished white lay-a

48、bouts scheme to exploit a Chinese millionaire. His bachelors 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 awar

49、d) novel, one senses a strain of resentment in the authors 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

50、, and of which Ive never spoken, Duras relates at the outset, Its always there, in the same silence, amazing. Its 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 in

51、stead 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.In this novel, Duras tends to defy her emotions its taken for granted I dont love him, that Im with him for the money

52、, that I cant love him, she asserts, its impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on living. This is because hes a Chinese, because hes not a white man. When he takes her famished family out to dinner, for example, they all behave as though they have granted him a fa

53、vour 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.

54、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 h

55、im. I didnt 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, sh

56、e realizes how much she has withheld: Shed wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtnt 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 l

57、ove story in The North China Lover. Upon discovery 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 wasnt quite there in The Lover, I hadnt given them enough time. This book is a novel containing many features of a screenplay, such as the meticulous visual descriptions o