「今日荐书」这本《巴赫夫人传》出自巴赫第二任妻子玛格达莱娜之手，是一部妻子对已逝丈夫的温柔回忆。书中记录了玛格达莱娜和巴赫相识相知的点滴，尽管当时巴赫还尚未被世人知晓，但在这位妻子心中她的丈夫已是时代的巨人，拥有神赐的天赋。她希望通过创作本书，将她丈夫的宽厚善良的品性，对上帝的敬畏，以及创造音乐上的夺目天赋以另一种形式留存下来。
The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach
《巴赫夫人传》
By M.R.Bonavia
I have an ongoing ‘merry war’ with a friend of mine about whether Bach or Vivaldi is the better composer. Before you all splutter over your morning cups of Earl Grey, the squabble is primarily founded on an unjust comparison. I point out that Bach surely couldn’t have written a decent storm aria if he’d tried, whereas my friend quite reasonably argues that Vivaldi is nothing but a faint shadow of Bach when it comes to religious music. Anyway, when I spotted that this book was up for review, I thought I’d better show willing and try to understand a little bit more about (and here I quote my friend) ‘the best composer born in 1685’.
我和一位朋友之间持续进行着一场关于巴赫和维瓦尔第谁更棒的“欢乐对战”。在喷出你们的伯爵早茶前，我得说这场口角基本都是建立在不公正的比较之上的。我指出，巴赫如果有尝试过的话，绝对写不出像样的“风暴咏叹调”，而我朋友则很有道理地指出在宗教音乐方面，维瓦尔第不过是巴赫暗淡无光的影子。总之，当我发现这本书需要书评时，我想最好表示乐意并试着去了解更多“1685年诞生的最伟大的作曲家”。
（译者注：维瓦尔第生于1678年。意指巴赫要强于同年出生的亨德尔或多美尼科·斯卡拉蒂。storm aria：应当来自意大利语aria di tempesta，指歌唱家宛如风暴中颠簸不断的船只一般歌唱的咏叹调）
Magdalena is only nineteen when one day, while visiting her great-aunt in Hamburg, she hears someone playing the organ in the church of St Katherine’s. Ravished by the music, she runs away as soon as the organist spots her. However, when she tells her musician father about the experience, he realises that she must have overheard the Duke of C?then’s Capellmeister, who is due to give a concert on the organ the following day.
在汉堡拜访姑祖母时的一天，年仅十九岁的玛格达利娜听到有人在圣凯瑟琳教堂演奏管风琴。她被音乐迷住了，却在管风琴师发现她后马上逃走了。然而，当她把这段经历告诉她的音乐家父亲时，他认为她偷听到的一定是第二天就要在那台管风琴上演奏音乐会的克滕公爵的乐长。
An association gradually develops between Magdalena’s father and Master Bach and, a year after Bach’s first wife dies, he asks for Magdalena’s hand in marriage. She has longed and wished for nothing more and, from that moment, her entire life is devoted to creating a comfortable home for her much older husband, to caring for his numerous children and to cherishing his incomparable genius.
玛格达丽娜的父亲与乐长巴赫先生的联系日益紧密，而巴赫在第一任妻子去世的一年后，向玛格达利娜求婚了。再没有什么比这更让她向往渴求的了，而从此她就把全部生活投入到为年长的丈夫创造舒适的家庭环境，照顾他的众多儿女，以及珍爱他无可比拟的天赋之中。
Many years later, when Bach is dead and half-forgotten, his reputation overshadowed by those of his sons Friedemann and Emmanuel, Magdalena receives a visit from one of her husband’s former pupils, Caspar Burgholt. He encourages her to write down her memories of the great composer so that, when posterity is wise enough to recognise his brilliance, they will have a record by the one who loved him best. And so Magdalena sets to her task with determination, hoping to preserve her husband’s kindness and gentleness, his fear and love of God, and his dazzling gift for the creation of music.
多年之后，巴赫已经去世且被人淡忘，他的名声也在他儿子弗里德曼和伊曼纽埃尔的光环下显得逊色。这时，玛格达利娜受到丈夫曾经的学生Caspar Burgholt的拜访，他鼓励她写下她关于这位伟大作曲家的记忆，这样当后世有足够智慧领会巴赫的才华横溢时，他们能有一份由最深爱他的人写下的记录。于是玛格达利娜下定决心开始写作，希望将她丈夫的宽厚善良，敬畏上帝，以及创造音乐上的炫目天赋留存下来。
The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach, a novel based on a close study of documents and histories of Bach’s life, was first published in 1925. It’s one of numerous books recently rescued from oblivion and given a new lease of life, and it raises a slightly controversial question. I’m generally all in favour of books being made available for new generations, but why, I wonder, was this particular book chosen? It is certainly a subject of interest.
《玛格达莱娜·巴赫的编年小传》是一部基于对巴赫生平的文献与历史深入研究的小说，首次出版于1925年。这是近期从遗忘中被抢救过来并予以新生的众多书籍中的一本，而且它还产生了一个略有争议性的问题。我通常对为新一代再版的书籍怀有偏爱，但我好奇为什么这本书被选中了？这肯定是个有趣的主题。
Bach has, of course, been recognised by posterity for the great musical genius that he was, and I suppose the novel also buys into the current vogue for books about the wives or daughters of great men. The insurmountable problem about Meynell’s book, however, is that it doesn’t transcend its era in the same way that, for example, Elizabeth von Arnim's refreshing and humorous books manage to do. Meynell’s book, in fact, felt old-fashioned even on its publication in 1925. I unearthed a review published at the time in The Spectator, which is worth quoting because it identifies the problems that bedevil the book even more to a modern reader’s eye:
巴赫自然是因其卓越的音乐才华而驰名后世，而且我想此书也属于时兴的那类关于伟大男人的妻子或女儿的书籍。可梅内尔这本书难以克服的问题不在于没有超越其写作的时代，像作者阿尼姆写的令人耳目一新而富于幽默的书设法做到的那样。梅内尔的书，说实话，在1925出版的那一年就已经显得老套了。我找到了一篇当时发表在《观察者》杂志上的书评，它甚至比现代读者更多地指出了困扰着本书的问题所在，因而值得我摘录如下：
In the absence of any more dramatic material, however, the author has woven out of the facts of Bach’s life a tender and graceful domestic idyll. Whether, at any rate among musical geniuses, there have ever been husbands so perfect as Sebastian appears in these pages to Magdalena, and whether, even in eighteenth-century Leipzig, wives were ever quite so flawless in self-effacement, are matters for conjecture.
然而，由于缺少任何更戏剧性的材料，作者用巴赫生平为材料编织出一部柔和雅致的家庭生活田园诗。在众多音乐巨匠中，是否可能存在像玛格达莱娜笔下的塞巴斯蒂安那样的完美丈夫，即使在十八世纪的莱比锡，又是否存在那样在恭敬谦卑上无可指摘的妻子，全都源自猜想。
The main issue is that Bach, for all his musical brilliance, led a very quiet life. The book records a few disputes with the philistines on the board of the Thomasschule in Leipzig, where Bach serves as Cantor, and occasional tidings of composers who think they’re better than Bach – who swiftly realise their error and flee in ignominy when threatened with a direct comparison – but the brutal fact of it is that very little happens.
关键在于音乐上才华出众的巴赫却过着十分平静的生活。书中记录了巴赫在莱比锡的托马斯学校担任乐监时与校董会里毫无艺术修养的市侩们的几次争执，还有偶尔几个认为自己强于巴赫的作曲家——他们很快意识到自己错了，并且在面对面较量的挑战下落荒而逃——但残酷的事实表明这很少发生。
Domestic harmony is a wonderful thing in real life, but not so much in fiction. Even when events do happen, they occur off-stage, because Magdalena rarely ventures beyond her hearth and, when she does ask her husband about work, is more often than not told not to bother her pretty little head about it.
家庭和谐是现实生活中的妙事，可对小说而言就不尽然了。即使真的有什么事件发生，那也是在幕后进行的，因为玛格达利娜很少冒险离开她的壁炉旁，而当她问丈夫工作上的事的时候，他不仅不说，还不想让她漂亮的小脑袋瓜为此操心。
And Magdalena is perfectly happy with this. She considers herself weak, foolish and a clumsy musician and in all ways inferior to her paternalistic, multi-talented, wise husband. She makes throwaway comments like, 'a woman’s brain is hardly fitted for these high matters', regrets that her 'weaker mind' makes her unfit to play some of her husband’s compositions, and confesses that ‘only once do I recall when I had the temerity to think he was in the wrong’.
而玛格达莱娜对此完全满意。她把自己看作一个无力、愚笨而拙劣的音乐家，在任何层面上都远逊于她那大家长一般、多才多艺而富有智慧的丈夫。她半开玩笑地认为，“女人的大脑难以处理这些高层次的问题”，为自己“较为无力的心智”难以演奏丈夫的一些曲目感到遗憾，并承认“我只能回想出一次我胆敢认为他错了的时候”。
Such sentiments evoke a pious, godly, angel-of-the-hearth style of Victorian moral writing. We have no sense of Magdalena as an individual, as a woman: all her thoughts and desires are focused on her husband and on making a little home for him so that he can be happy. I know that this has been the lot of women throughout history and that perhaps some women genuinely want nothing more than to worship their spouse and to sit on his knee in the evening and absorb the glory of his being, but it doesn’t make for a particularly scintillating novel.
这种情绪引发一种虔诚的，神圣的，炉边圣母般的，符合维多利亚时期女德的写作风格。我们无从了解作为一个个体，一个女人的玛格达利娜，她的全部思想与欲念全都围绕着她的丈夫和为他创造一个小家庭来取悦于他。我知道历史上大多数女性都是如此，而且可能有些女人的的确确除去崇敬她们的伴侣，夜里坐在他的膝头，专注于由他存在而带来的自豪之外别无他求，但单靠这些并不能写出一部引人瞩目的小说。
My rating doesn’t criticise the quality of the book so much as the fact that its spirit is out of kilter with our modern age. We’ve come to expect something slightly deeper from fiction, but by the same token I can’t really criticise Meynell for being a product of her own period. There must have been hundreds of similarly undemanding, polite, domestic novels written about women who had no greater desire than to make a cosy home and to love God, but most of them have fittingly faded away with the Victorian era.
相比本书的质量，我的评分（2/5）更着重强调的是其精神偏离了我们这个时代。如今的我们期待从虚构的小说中获得一点更深层次的东西，但因为同样的原因我并不能对梅内尔成为了她那个时代的产物而过多苛责。一定有成百上千部类似无欲无求，恭顺有礼，专注家庭的小说，描写那些除了营造温馨爱巢和侍奉上帝别无他求的女人们，但大部分这些作品都适时地随着维多利亚时代的终结推出了历史的舞台。
I feel that Meynell’s book doesn’t quite have the verve or sophistication to speak to a modern audience. I’m not suggesting that it would be better with bodice-ripping and tempestuous affairs: you know me better than that. But I think, if this story were written nowadays, it would have more psychological insight and would be more perceptive about the challenges of the different spheres of domestic and public life. One moment of liveliness comes with a visit from the composer Johann Adolph Hasse and his wife Faustina Bordoni, about whom Magdalena displays a rare and welcome flash of pique:
我感觉梅内尔的书不太具备向现代读者传递信息的活力或老练。我不是说这个故事最好加上诱拐情节或者混乱的私通：要知道我可不是那种人。但我想，如果这个故事是现在写成的，它应该具有更多心理上的洞察力，对于家庭生活与公共生活两个不同侧面带来的挑战更加敏感。有一瞬的活力迸发于音乐家Johann Adolph Hasse携妻子Faustina Bordoni造访的时候，玛格达利娜对此难能可贵地表现出了一刹那的恼火：
I think that people who have travelled a great deal and seen the world and received so much fame and applause as Frau Faustina Hasse, always seem to take up a great deal of room in any apartment where they may be.
我觉得那些像福斯蒂·娜哈太太那样到处旅行，见识甚广，芳名远扬的人，好像不论所到何处，总要占据房间里很大一部分空间。
If only we had seen a little more of Faustina! And yet, for the most part, Meynell’s novel flows very well. She does write beautifully, it’s just that she has little to say: the substance is a little dull. And there are occasions when, fitting the book’s description as a ‘chronicle’, she simply inserts letters or descriptions which I suspect are copied word-for-word from history books, which interrupt the flow a little.
要是我们能看到更多关于福斯蒂娜的事该多好呀！当然，大部分时候，梅内尔l的小说读起来还不错。她的确写得很漂亮，只不过她能写的非常有限，内容有些枯燥沉闷。有些时候，为了贴合“编年史”的书名，她简单粗暴地把来自史料中的书信或描述不加删改地插入文中，有点扰乱了文思。
Perhaps I’m being a little hard on the book, because its heroine felt so meek and so in awe of the wonderful husband with whom heaven had blessed her. It felt too homely and schmaltzy to be entirely satisfying. And it also glosses over the true hardships of the widowed Magdalena’s later life. While she refers to her ‘poverty’ in this novel, one gets the sense that it’s a rather genteel kind of poverty, but in reality I believe she was left so destitute that she was almost living on the street by the time she died.
或许我对此书有些过分苛责，因为女主实在是太温顺贤良，太敬畏上天赐予她的如意郎君了。全书过于舒适自在，耽于感性，难以让人完全满足。而且，它把寡居后玛格达利娜所面临的真实艰辛粉饰了过去。当她在小说中提到“贫困”时，读者会觉得那不过是那种更温和些的清贫，但事实上我认为她被一贫如洗地遗弃在世上，在死时几乎流落街头。
That’s a stroke of brutal reality that Meynell prefers to keep out of her ‘idyll’, I note. For those who are interested in Bach himself, a better bet would probably be John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven. I haven’t read this myself but I’ve seen good reviews of it, and I bought it as a birthday present for my friend last year. She hasn’t told me that she didn’t like it, so I presume it’s good.One good thing about having read this book, though, is that I feel encouraged to dip my toe into slightly more of Bach’s music. But don’t tell my friend that, because I’ll never hear the end of it.
我发觉，梅内尔情愿将这残酷的现实排除在她那田园牧歌以外。那些对巴赫本人更感兴趣的人，约翰·艾略特·加迪纳的《天空城里的音乐》是个更好的选择。我自己还没读过，但我看到了很多好评，而且我去年把它作为生日礼物送给了那位朋友。她没跟我说不喜欢这本书，所以我姑且认为还不错。不过，读过此书给我带来的一点好处就是，我敢于尝试去涉足更多一点巴赫的音乐了。但是别告诉我朋友，不然我又要听个没完没了啦。
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