PortraitofanActress女演员肖像

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Portrait of an Actress 女演员肖像 (2012-11-16 15:37:35)

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Portrait of an Actress

女演员肖像

By Virginia Woolf

弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫

    When she came on to the stage as Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, the stage collapsed like a house of cards and all the lime-lights were extinguished. When she spoke it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned ‘cello’; it grated, it glowed, and it growled. Then she stopped speaking. She put on her glasses. She gazed intently at the back of a settee. She had forgotten her part. But did it matter? Speaking or silent she was Lady Cicely — or was it Ellen Terry? At any rate, she filled the stage and all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out in the sun.

当她扮演的《布拉斯庞德上尉的转变》中西塞莉夫人一角出现在舞台上时，那舞台好象忽然间不存在了，她就是中心人物，她的光彩遮蔽了其他所有的演员。她说着台词就像风干硬木制成的大提琴发出的声响；声音激昂、热情而响亮。然后她停止了说话，戴上眼镜。她聚精会地神凝视着长椅的靠背，她忘词了。但这重要吗？说话或沉默她都是西塞莉夫人，会变成爱伦·泰瑞吗？不管怎样，她出现在舞台上，便成为了观众的焦点，所有的其他演员都黯然失色了，正如电灯在阳光下失去了光亮一样。

Yet this pause when she forgot what Lady Cicely said next was significant. It was a sign not that she was losing her memory and past her prime, as some said. It was a sign that Lady Cicely was not a part that suited her. Her son Gordon Craig, insists that she only forgot her part when there was something uncongenial in the words, when some speck of grit had got into the marvelous machine of her genius. When the part was congenial when she was Shakespeare’s Portia, Desdemona, Ophelia, every word, every comma was consumed. Even her eye-lashes acted. Her body lost its weight. Her son, a mere boy, could lift her in his arms. ‘I am not myself,’ she said. ‘Something comes upon me… I am always-in-the air, light and bodiless.’ We, who can only remember her as Lady Cicely on the little stage at the Court Theatre, only remember what, compared with her Ophelia or her Portia, was a picture postcard compared with the great Velasquez in the gallery.

然而她忘记了西塞莉夫人接下来要说什么这一停顿意味深长。正如一些人说的那样，没有迹象表明她正在失去她的记忆力，而且过了自己的全盛时期。这表明西塞莉夫人这一角色不适合她。她的儿子戈登·克雷格，坚持认为她只是在台词不适宜的时候忘了她的角色，那不过是几颗小砂砾掉入了她那天才的、非凡的机器之中。当角色适宜时，她就是莎士比亚剧中的波西亚、苔丝狄蒙娜、奥菲莉娅，每句词，每个停顿都使人着迷，甚至她的眼睫毛都会表演。她的体重下降了很多，她儿子，只不过一个男孩而已，用双手就能把她提起来。‘我不行了。’她说。‘我遇到一些事…… 我总是飘浮在空中，轻而无形。’与她饰演的奥菲莉亚或波西亚相比，我们谁能只记住在宫廷剧院的小舞台上她出演的西塞莉夫人？正如与画廊中伟大的委拉斯凯兹相比，谁又会只记住那些个美术明信片呢？

It is the fate of actors to leave only picture postcards behind them. Every night when the curtain goes down the beautiful colored canvas is rubbed out. What remains is at best only a wavering, insubstantial phantom—a verbal life on the lips of the living. Ellen Terry was well aware of it. She tried herself, overcome by the greatness of Irving as Hamlet and indignant at the caricatures of his detractors, to describe what she remembered. It was in vain. She dropped her pen in despair. ‘Oh God, that I were a writer!’ she cried, ‘Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry Irving’s Hamlet and say nothing, nothing,’ it never struck her, humble as she was, and obsessed by her lack of book learning, that she was, among other things, a write. It never occurred to her when she wrote her autobiography, or scribbled page after page to Bernard Shaw late at night, dead tired after a rehearsal that she was ‘writing’. The words in her beautiful rapid hand bubbled off her pen. With dashes and notes of exclamation she tried to give them the very tone and stress of the spoken word. It is true, she could not build a house with words, one room opening out of another, and a staircase connecting the whole. But whatever she took up became in her warm, sensitive grasp a tool. If it was a rolling-pin, she made perfect pastry. If it was a carving knife, perfect slices fell from the leg of mutton. If it were a pen, words peeled off, some broken, some suspended in mid-air, but all far more expressive than the tapping of the professional typewriter.