Edward FitzGerald, Aestheticism, and the Poetry of Nonentity

本研究通过将诗人兼翻译家爱德华·菲茨杰拉德（1809-83）置于19世纪后期美学运动的先锋地位，引起了批评界的关注。他的《奥马尔·海亚姆的鲁拜亚特》（1859年）是一部畅销书，经常被美学/颓废派作家引用;然而，尽管如此，菲茨杰拉德在维多利亚文学的研究中一直处于边缘地位，他对美学运动的影响仍然没有得到充分的探讨。作为对唯美主义和颓废的更广泛的批判性重新评估的一部分，作为对个人在社会中的地位的焦虑所驱动的存在主义运动，我的研究通过展示这些反应是如何预示的，甚至被菲茨杰拉德超越，作为一个诗人，他对身份和自我的根本性非实体性有着独特的直觉。这种阅读通过从菲茨杰拉德那里获得一种根本上非--自我与他人关系的等级模式。关于《鲁拜亚特》翻译性质的讨论最初是一个学术准确性的问题;最近，随着后殖民研究的出现，对他的翻译的批评已经采取了更多的伦理角度，引用了爱德华·赛义德的“东方主义”框架。一个代表性的例子是芭芭拉·J·布莱克的《展览：印第安人和他们的博物馆》（2000年），其中她将菲茨杰拉德描述为“大众帝国主义”的代理人，他驯化了海亚姆的“异国情调”诗歌。这是一种过于简单化的解释，它没有考虑到菲茨杰拉德个人的反殖民情绪，也没有考虑到他的基本的，自我毁灭的冷漠挑战了支撑东方主义跨文化交流叙事的假设。从这个意义上说，他的翻译作品更多的是表达了他自己的诗性本能。因此，现在是我们超越把他仅仅当作一个翻译者，而把他作为一个主要作者来阅读的时候了。本研究将首次全面阅读菲茨杰拉德的诗歌个性，以“美学的虚无”为原则，对菲茨杰拉德的冷漠进行批判性的重新评价，对于我们这个身份和情感备受关注的时代具有重要意义。如果我们这个时代的一个特征，正如韩秉哲（Psychopolitics，2017）和汉斯-乔治·穆勒（Hans-Georg Moeller，2021）等评论家所观察到的那样，是对自我优化和自我暴露的需求越来越多，清空了优先权，以利用关怀和欲望，那么菲茨杰拉德提供了一种生活哲学，这种生活哲学在其不可利用的对自我的漠视和对关怀本身的放弃方面是真正颠覆性的。

This study raises the poet-translator Edward FitzGerald (1809-83) to critical attention by placing him at the vanguard of the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th Century. His Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) was a bestselling phenomenon, and frequently referenced by Aesthetic/Decadent writers; yet despite this, FitzGerald has been consistently sidelined in studies of Victorian literature, and his impact on the Aesthetic movement remains underexplored. As part of the wider critical revaluation of Aestheticism and Decadence as existential movements driven by an anxiety about the individual's place in society, my study intervenes by showing how these responses were presaged, even transcended by FitzGerald, who stands as a poet uniquely intuitive of the fundamental insubstantiality of identity and selfhood.This reading opens new avenues in translation studies by deriving from FitzGerald a radically non-hierarchical mode of relation between self and other. Discourse on the Rubáiyát's nature as a translation was originally a question of scholarly accuracy; more recently, with the emergence of postcolonial studies, criticism of his translation has taken a more ethical angle, invoking Edward Said's framework of 'Orientalism'. A representative example is Barbara J. Black's On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000), wherein she describes FitzGerald as an agent of 'popular imperialism' who domesticated the 'exotic' poems of Khayyám. This is an oversimplistic interpretation that does not account for FitzGerald's personal, anti-colonial sentiments, nor does it reckon with the ways in which his fundamental, self-annihilating apathy challenges the very assumptions that underpin orientalist narratives of intercultural exchange. In this respect, his translations are more expressions of his own poetic instincts. Thus, it is time we move beyond treating him simply as a translator and read him as a major author in his own right. My study will provide the first comprehensive reading of FitzGerald as a whole poetic personality unique within the canon of English poets.A critical revaluation of FitzGerald's apathy, premised on a principle of 'Aestheticist Nonentity', has a radical significance in our identity- and affect-charged contemporary age. If a feature of our age, as observed by critics like Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics (2017)) and Hans-Georg Moeller (You and Your Profile (2021)), is the increasing demand to self-optimise and self-expose, emptying interiority to exploit care and desire, then FitzGerald offers a philosophy of living that is truly subversive in its unexploitable disregard for selfhood and the relinquishing of care itself.