Edward FitzGerald, Aestheticism, and the Poetry of Nonentity

本研究将诗人兼翻译家爱德华·菲茨杰拉德（Edward FitzGerald, 1809-83）置于19世纪末美学运动的先锋地位，从而引起评论界的关注。他的《Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám》（1859）是一种畅销书现象，经常被美学/颓废主义作家引用；尽管如此，菲茨杰拉德在维多利亚文学研究中一直被边缘化，他对美学运动的影响仍未得到充分探讨。作为对唯美主义和颓废主义的更广泛的批判性重估的一部分，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，我的研究通过展示菲茨杰拉德是如何预言这些反应的，甚至超越了这些反应，菲茨杰拉德是一位独特的诗人，他对身份和自我的基本非实质性有着独特的直觉。这种解读从菲茨杰拉德那里衍生出一种完全无等级的自我与他者关系模式，为翻译研究开辟了新的途径。关于Rubáiyát翻译性质的论述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，对他的翻译的批评采取了更伦理的角度，援引爱德华·赛义德的“东方主义”框架。一个典型的例子是芭芭拉·j·布莱克的《展览：维多利亚时代和他们的博物馆》（2000），她在书中把菲茨杰拉德描述为“大众帝国主义”的代理人，他把Khayyám的“异国情调”诗歌变成了自己的作品。这是一种过于简单化的解释，既没有解释菲茨杰拉德个人的反殖民情绪，也没有考虑到他根本的、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。在这方面，他的翻译更多的是他自己诗歌本能的表达。因此，我们是时候不再把他简单地当作一个翻译家，而是把他当作一个重要的作家来读了。我的研究将提供第一个全面的阅读菲茨杰拉德作为一个整体的诗歌人格独特的经典的英国诗人。在“唯美主义的虚无”原则的前提下，对菲茨杰拉德的冷漠进行批判性的重新评估，在我们这个充满身份和情感的当代具有根本性的意义。如果像韩炳哲（《心理政治学》（2017））和汉斯-格奥尔格·莫勒（《你和你的侧面》（2021））等评论家所观察到的那样，我们这个时代的一个特征是对自我优化和自我暴露的需求日益增长，掏空内心以利用关怀和欲望，那么菲茨杰拉德提供的生活哲学在其对自我的不可利用的漠视和放弃关怀本身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.