【英文原声版45】Alexander Key: Dalā’il al-Iʿjaz

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A scholar from the southern shore of the Caspian Sea

生于里海南岸的学者

Zachary Davis: When I was a moody teenager, I often escaped the troubles and stresses of high school by reading poetry. I especially liked William Wordsworth, and one of my favorites of his poems was one called Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. It’s a gorgeous poem about place, memory and the relationship between nature and self. Here’s a few lines to give you a feeling of the words:

扎克里·戴维斯：当我还是一个多愁善感的少年时，我经常阅读诗歌来逃避高中学校的烦恼和压力。我特别喜欢威廉·华兹华斯。他的所有诗中，我最喜欢《廷腾寺上游几英里处的诗行——记重游怀河河岸》。这首诗非常美，描绘了当地的景象，回味了自己的记忆，探讨了人与自然之间的关系。我来朗诵几行，大家可以感受一下：

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies.

“当这些心醉神迷的狂喜成熟为

一种恬静的怡悦，当你的心胸

成为一切良辰美景的邸宅，

你的记忆里寓居着无数美妙而

和谐的弦管鸣奏。”

Zachary Davis: When you read this poem, you just can’t help but be carried to a different place, a different state of being. But why does good poetry take us places? What is it about sentence structure and word order that triggers emotion and transports readers and listeners? In the 11th century, one Persian grammarian demystified the beauty of poetry and revealed what makes great language great. He wrote about it in a text that is virtually unknown in the Western world.

扎卡里·戴维斯：读这首诗的时候，你的思绪会不由自主地被带到另一个地方、呈现出不同的状态。为什么好的诗歌可以带我们走进不同的世界？为什么这些句子结构和词语的排列能打动读者和听众、让他们身临其境？十一世纪的时候，一位波斯语法学家揭示了诗歌之美，展现了语言为何变得美妙。他在一本书中阐述了自己的观点。在西方，这本书鲜为人知。

Alexander Key: So, the text that we're going to discuss today is called Dalā’il al-Iʿjaz, and it's by Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. My name is Alexander Key. I teach comparative literature at Stanford. I mostly work on Arabic, and I mostly work on older Arabic from like a thousand years ago.

亚历山大·基：这本书叫《修辞奥秘》，作者是阿卜杜·卡希尔·朱尔吉尼。我叫亚历山大·基，在斯坦福大学教比较文学。我主要研究阿拉伯语言文学，特别是一千年前的古代阿拉伯语言文学。

Zachary Davis: The title of this text can be translated as “Indications of Inimitability.” At its essence, this is a book about how language works. More specifically, it’s about syntax, the order of words. In the text, Jurjānī explains what exactly makes beautiful language beautiful on a technical level.

扎克里·戴维斯：这本书的书名被翻成《修辞奥秘》。从本质上讲，这本书探讨了语言是如何出效果的。具体来讲，它探讨了句法结构，也就是句子中词语的排列顺序。在书中，朱尔吉尼从技巧层面解释了什么造就了语言之美。

Alexander Key: He's the first person to connect syntax and affect. Like, he's the first person to connect word order to emotion.

亚历山大·基：他是第一个把句法结构（也就是句子中的词序）和情感联系起来的人。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Alexander Key to discuss Jurjānī’s Indications of Inimitability. Let's start with learning about the author. Tell us about what we know about his biography.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和斯坦福大学教授亚历山大·基一起讨论朱尔吉尼的《修辞奥秘》。我们先来了解一下作者吧。您能和我们讲讲他的生平吗？

Alexander Key: Yeah, we're not hugely luxuriating in information when it comes to his lifetime. Jurjānī is basically how he tends to get known because he's from Jurjan, which is Gorgan, which is now in modern day Iran, and it's like the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. When he was living there—so this is in the 11th century. He dies in 1078. When he was living there, it was you know, a rich, prosperous, reasonably central part of a large Islamic empire, split into different political units, but part of one big sort of civilizational whole. It was well-established. And when he was working, everybody like him, so sort of intellectuals, academics, scholars, everybody wrote in Arabic. So, he spoke Persian at home, wrote in Arabic.

亚历山大·基：其实我们对他的生平所知甚少。朱尔吉尼之所以姓这个，是因为他来自朱尔坚，也就是如今里海南岸、伊朗境内的戈尔甘。他生活在十一世纪，1078年去世。在他生活的那个年代，朱尔坚位于阿拉伯帝国繁荣富饶的中心地区。当时阿拉伯帝国已经分裂成多个政权，不过朱尔坚地区仍然文化昌明、欣欣向荣。朱尔吉尼写这本书时，阿拉伯的知识分子与学者都像他一样用阿拉伯语写作。他在当地说波斯语，但写作的时候用阿拉伯语。

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī was a successful and well regarded scholar. He specialized in grammar.  And in his time, grammar was a huge deal.

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼是一位成功的、备受尊敬的学者。他专门研究语法。在那个时代，语法问题很受人们关注。

Alexander Key: For people of my generation, like growing up in England and teaching from 18 to 21 year old in America today, grammar is not a big deal. We don't know it. We don't study it. It's not a big, prestigious part of our intellectual worldview. But for Jurjānī, it was.

亚历山大·基：我们这代人，比如我们这代英国、美国18到21岁的年轻人都不怎么重视语法。我们不了解，也不怎么研究。在我们这些学者看来，研究语法无关紧要，也带不来什么声誉。但朱尔吉尼不这么看。

Zachary Davis: In Jurjānī’s time, grammar was a highly sophisticated discipline. Grammarians used a descriptive approach. They aimed to find the common and sometimes unconscious rules that language tends to follow. They looked at what they considered the most beautiful language: poetry. At the time, poetry was much more culturally relevant than it is today.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在他那个时代，语法是一门非常复杂的学科。语法学家采取描述性的方法，意在找到语言有意或无意间共同遵循的规则。他们研究了他们认为的最美的语言，那就是诗歌。和如今相比，诗歌在当时对文化的作用更大。

Alexander Key: Yeah, it was like—I often I say to the to my students undergraduate students—it was like TV, you know, there's good and bad TV right at the moment. There's like high class, like serious TV and there's trash TV. It's the same for poetry. Like if you’re Jurjānī, there’s trashy poetry that you would joke about and not get really into in the same way as like reality TV. You know you just watch it for fun. And then there was serious poetry and then it was old classic poetry where, you know, everyone's always like, oh, the Orson Welles’ films are like the best. So it was really like TV and movie. If you think of how central that is to our culture, both our intellectual culture and popular culture, poetry was like that, right? That's the role that poetry played.

亚历山大·基：诗歌就像电视节目。我经常跟我的本科学生说，现在的电视节目有好有坏，有的很耐看、很严肃，有的却很垃圾。诗歌也一样。如果你是朱尔吉尼，你也会像看电视一样，有些诗歌你拿它们开玩笑，其实没有半点兴趣，只是图个乐呵。但有的诗歌就很严肃、很经典，大家都很喜欢，读完就像是看了奥森·威尔斯的电影一样，觉得没有比它更好的了。所以诗歌真的很像电视、电影。想想电视和电影对我们如今的知识界和大众文化有多大影响，你就不难理解诗歌在当时发挥着怎样的作用。

What makes great language great?

是什么造就了语言之美？

Zachary Davis: What is the book that he wrote? What is it saying?

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼写了什么？这本书讲了什么内容呢？

Alexander Key: So, the first and one of the most fun things about the book is that he's writing in a world of books where paper has been readily, cheaply available in high quality since the technology was imported from China, you know, in the 800s. So, paper is an established technology. And people have kind of a choice of how structured you make your book. Do you have it in chapters? And there's a well-established tradition of people saying, “Yeah, it’s going to have Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and then those are going to divide sub-chapters.”

亚历山大·基：关于这本书，有个很有意思的点。当时书籍已经非常多了。公元八世纪，造纸术从中国传到了阿拉伯，纸张变得物美价廉、易于获取。造纸术在当时非常成熟。人们可以选择如何编排自己的书，比如决定是否分成几大章。当时人们习惯划分章节，先把整本书分成一二三四章，再在每一章下面划分各个小节。

Alexander Key: And Jurjānī just says, “Hey, I'm going to write this book.” And he says it near to the beginning, “I'm not putting a table of contents in. You've got to read the whole thing. You've got to read the whole thing, all kind of 300-400 pages of it, start to finish. And then you'll get it. Hopefully.” So, it has this sort of self-conscious structure. It knows it's going to take up a lot of your time. It knows you're going to have to keep working through the ideas over and over again. And it's okay with that.

亚历山大·基：但朱尔吉尼说：嘿，我要写这本书了。他在差不多开头的时候就说：我不会放目录进去，你会一下子读到所有的，差不多三四百页，然后你就能明白了。希望如此吧。他清楚这种结构的结果，清楚它会占用你很多时间，让你一直反复咀嚼书中的观点，不过他觉得这样无可厚非。

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī explains the technical aspects of good poetry in an almost scientific way. He breaks down something that’s seemingly organic into a series of rules and structural tendencies. The same way physicists develop theories about the laws of nature, Jurjānī sought to develop similar statements about language. But he didn’t just want to scientifically analyze language. He wanted to create theories of language that were themselves beautiful.

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼以近乎科学的方式分析了好诗的技巧。他把看似统一的东西拆分成一系列规则和结构化的偏好。就像物理学家得出关于自然规律的理论一样，朱尔吉尼试图得出关于语言的类似结论。但他不仅仅想要科学地分析语言，他希望自己的理论本身在语言表述上也很优美。

Alexander Key: There’s this kind of scientific discussion about theoretical minimalism that exists in the sciences today. It’s the way that sometimes programmers talk about code where they say, you know, some code works, some code doesn't, some code is nice and beautiful, and some code isn't. Like, there's a, if it's concise and elegant, it's better computer code. And you hear people in physics saying the same thing, like, “Does this equation… Like is this an elegant, concise equation to explain an incredibly complex, like, physical reality or not?”

亚历山大·基：如今学术界仍然有人在探讨理论是否要简洁。这有点像程序员探讨代码，他们觉得代码有好有坏，有的很优美，有的很差劲。如果这个代码更简洁、更优美，那它显然更好。物理学界的人也一样。他们会说，这个方程式有没有简洁优美地解释这个复杂的物理现象。

Alexander Key: Jurjānī makes exactly the same point, not about physics or about computer code, but he makes it about grammar. You know, this linguistic science. He’s like, look, can you make scientific statements about human language that are themselves elegant and concise whilst still being rational and accurate? And he says that if you can, then that's going to be kind of the most successful science.

亚历山大：基：朱尔吉尼也提出了类似的观点，当然他针对的不是物理学或者计算机代码，而是语法这种语言学层面的东西。他在思考，能不能理性准确、同时又简洁优美地阐述人类语言的科学准则。他觉得，如果能做到，那么这会是最成功的科学成就。

Zachary Davis: At one point in the text, Jurjānī asks the reader to do a kind of self-experiment. He asks them to read a beautiful line of poetry and notice how they feel before and after reading.

扎克里·戴维斯：在书中，朱尔吉尼让读者开展一次自我试验，阅读一行优美的诗歌，并注意阅读前后的感受。

Alexander Key: And you're in a particular condition, before you read the line of poetry. Then you read it, and then you're in a different state afterwards. Like, that's the impact that poetry has on you.

亚历山大·基：阅读前你处于某种状态，读完后你的状态会不一样。这就是诗歌对你的影响。

Alexander Key: And really the argument he makes is that what's happening here is the syntax, so the order of the words in the sentence, is messing with your mind and readjusting the connections that your mind is making. So, like, the sentence goes along, “word word word word word, the dog is in the house.” And as that goes along, your brain is doing all these calculations.

亚历山大·基：他指出，造成这一影响的正是句法结构。句子中单词的顺序影响了你的思维，重新调整了你脑海中事物与事物间的联系。比如这句话：“巴拉巴拉巴拉，这只狗在屋子里。”读这句话的时候，你的脑子在推算所有这些信息。

Alexander Key: You hear the word “the” and you're like, “Oh, it's a specific thing.” You hear the word “dog,” and you’re like, “Oh, it's a specific dog.” And then you have like some expectations for what's going to happen next. So, for a nice, simple sentence like “the hat is on the wall”, not much happens.

亚历山大・基：听到“这只”，你就会想：“嗯，这是特指什么东西。”听到“狗”，你就会想：“哦，原来是一只特定的狗。”然后你会猜测接下来会听到什么。如果一个句子很漂亮、很简洁，比如像“这顶帽子挂在墙上”这种，接下来的内容就不多了。

Zachary Davis: But to see what happens with a more involved sentence, Jurjānī presents the following metaphor: “The reins of the morning are in the hand of the North Wind.”

扎克里·戴维斯：为了研究阅读更复杂的句子会出现什么情况，朱尔吉尼举了一个比喻句的例子：“清晨的缰绳攥在北风手里。”

Alexander Key: It takes you so long to think what on Earth that metaphor is talking about. Like, “the North Wind doesn't have hands”. And so what happens in that line is your brain does so much work to unpack the metaphor. Or even if it's just, you know, “my love is like a red, red rose”, you have to work it out. And for Jurjānī, it's that working it out that makes language beautiful.

亚历山大·基：你要想很久才能明白这个比喻在说什么。比如你会想：“北风没有手哎。”于是读这行文字的时候，你的大脑会不停地运转来理解这个比喻。就算是“我的爱人就像朵红玫瑰”这种比喻，你的脑袋也必须运转起来。在朱尔吉尼看来，正是大脑的运转与理解让语言如此美妙。

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī believes the beauty of language lies in the balance of complexity and clarity. Language would be too boring if all you had were simple sentences that create simple images in the minds of the readers. But at the same time, he doesn’t want the metaphors to be so complicated that they stall the reader. For Jurjānī, beauty means getting the right combination of the two, the balance of complexity and clarity.

扎卡里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼认为语言之美在于既不过于复杂、也不过于浅显。如果仅仅用简单的语言在读者心中勾勒出简单的意象，那么语言就会了无生趣。但同时，他也不希望比喻太过复杂，把读者难倒。他认为美意味着将二者相融合，在复杂与简洁之间取得平衡。

Alexander Key: The language that does that best is the best language, whether it's the Quran or whether it's a poet talking about, like, wine and beautiful women.

亚历山大·基：能最好地平衡这二者的语言就是最优美的语言。不论是《古兰经》，还是谈论美酒佳人的诗歌，标准都是如此。

Finding a nice and neat answer

寻找一个美妙且简洁的答案

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī lived in an intellectual culture that appreciated finding truth through rationalism and reason. He applied these techniques in his examination of language. Jurjānī wasn’t one for quick, easy answers. He wrestled to find the truth behind what makes some language beautiful. So, you said the text is about language, and it’s about what makes language good. But tell us a little more. What is the book actually like?

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼置身于一种学术文化中，这种文化鼓励人们通过理性和推理来发现真理。于是他运用这些方法来探索语言。他不喜欢触手可及却浮于表面的答案，使劲寻找着语言之所以美妙的真正原因。您刚刚说这本书探讨了语言，讲述了什么让语言变得美妙。您可以跟我们进一步讲讲这本书的内容吗？

Alexander Key: When you read the whole book, you get the sense that he's like, “On the one hand, I know that I want a concise, elegant theory. On the other hand, I know that people have had concise, elegant theories that are just kind of simple slogans.” Form and content have to be in balance. And that is just a complete simplification. But he wants to get to theoretical minimalism without falling into sort of oversimplification.

亚历山大·基：读完整本书，你会觉得朱尔吉尼仿佛在说：“一方面，我想要得出一个简洁、美妙的理论；另一方面，我又清楚人们已经有了一些简洁又美妙的理论，但它们仅仅是简单、空洞的口号。”必须实现形式与内容的平衡，而现有的仅仅是彻底的简化。他想让理论简洁，但又不至于过度简化。

Alexander Key: What makes it fun to read is—of course, he's not redescribing gravity over and over again or forces or anything else—Poetry, he’s describing poetry. So, he keeps quoting it. And that's, again, that's what makes it fun to read, is it's both a literary critical monograph where he's trying to do science, and it's an anthology of the absolute best poetry that a great connoisseur of poetry knew and loved.

亚历山大·基：这本书读起来妙趣横生。当然，他可不是在重新描述引力、力这些东西。他描述的是诗歌。这本书读起来很有意思，因为它既是一本文学评论作品，又是一部优质诗歌的选集——这位伟大的诗歌评论家选出了他知道并喜爱的诗歌。

Zachary Davis: So, what arguments does he end up coming to? What are the simplest theories that he's able to feel comfortable advocating about how language works?

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼最后得出了什么结论呢？他得出了怎样的让他满意的、最简洁的语言理论？

Alexander Key: I think in this book in particular, the answer is that you feel the way you do because the words were chosen and put in a particular order. Like, that's what poetry does.

亚历山大·基：在这本书中他指出，你之所以觉得语言很美，是因为这些词被挑选出来，按照一定的顺序排列。诗歌就是这么打动你的。

Zachary Davis: Does he think that the power of those poetic choices is universal or is it cultural or is it revealed? You know is there a connection to the divine?

扎克里·戴维斯：他觉得这种诗情画意的感染力是普遍的，还是阿拉伯语言文化所特有的，又或是真主所赋予的呢？它和真主有没有什么关系？

Alexander Key: He says very, very clearly that this is a universal theory of language. He's like, “A metaphor is a metaphor, whether it's in Persian or whether it's in Arabic.” That’s not specific to Arabic at all. The thing that he does think is specific to Arabic is the Quran. He's like, “Hey, you know, the Quran is a miracle because it's miraculously good Arabic that nobody can imitate.” And there's this strong kind of theological discussion of where all the different religions have different miracles.

亚历山大·基：他很清楚地说道，这是语言的通用规律。他说：“比喻就是比喻，不管是在波斯语里还是阿拉伯语里都是这样。”比喻并不是阿拉伯语所特有的，阿拉伯语所特有的是《古兰经》。他说：“《古兰经》简直就是一本奇书，里面的阿拉伯语写得太棒了，简直无人企及。”他还进行了一场神学大讨论，探讨各个宗教在哪些地方都有什么不同的奇迹。

Alexander Key: So, there's an Islamic discourse in which each monotheistic kind of religion in this area of the world gets the miracle it deserves, as it will. The miracle that would, you know, that’s going to persuade it. So, the Jews are particularly interested in magic, so they got the burning bush, you know, the parting of the waves. The Christians are particularly interested in medicine, so they get the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead. The Arabs, in Saudi Arabia, what's now Saudi Arabia, are particularly interested in language. So, they got the miracle of the Quran, which is inconceivably beautiful and can't be replicated.

亚历山大·基：所以伊斯兰文化中有一种说法，说这个地区的每个一神教都见证了其应当见证的奇迹。这些奇迹会劝使他们相信该宗教。犹太人对魔法特别感兴趣，于是他们的宗教故事中会有燃烧的荆棘、分开的海水。基督教徒对医药特别感兴趣，于是他们的宗教故事中病人得以治愈、死者得以回生。沙特的阿拉伯人对语言特别感兴趣，于是他们有了《古兰经》这部优美得无与伦比的书。

Becoming famous in the Arabic world

在阿拉伯变得赫赫有名

Zachary Davis: So, let's move now to the impact of this work. What was the reception like at the time, and what influences have you tracked in the longer term?

扎克里·戴维斯：我们来谈谈这本书的影响吧。当时读者反响如何？您发现它有哪些长期影响呢？

Alexander Key: I don't think it's an over-exaggeration to say this is one of the two most important books of literary criticism in Arabic. And the other one was also written by Jurjānī at the same time. It's a book about metaphor.

亚历山大·基：它是阿拉伯世界两本重要的文学批评著作之一。我觉得这么说毫不夸张。另一本著作也是朱尔吉尼在那个时候写的，讲的是比喻。

Alexander Key: What I would say is that at the time, these books don't change Jurjānī’s life. Like he is famous in his century and in the centuries thereafter as a grammarian, as someone who wrote these great, highly technical works of grammar, linguistic science. And he wrote sort of short teaching manuals of grammar that were very great for sort of introductory students, and that's what made his name.

亚历山大·基：不过我想说，当时这些书并没有改变朱尔吉尼的生活。在生前以及身后的几百年里，朱尔吉尼都很有名。他是一位语法学家，写了这些关于语法和语言科学的伟大专业著作。他还写了一些语法教学手册来帮助初阶学生学习。这些成果都让他声名远扬。

Alexander Key: The funny thing is that he writes these books just before the birth of the, or just at the birth of the Islamic University. The Islamic University needs textbooks. So, Jurjānī’s grammar textbook gets, his introductory grammar textbook is super, super popular. What happens to his linguistic theories written in these big kind of iterative—if you didn't like them you'd say rambling, like if you like them, you'd say iterative, like these big, long monographs—is that his peers and the people who come after him recognize the scale of the sort of theoretical achievement, and they write their own books of literary analysis that are better structured for a university curriculum.

亚历山大·基：有意思的是，这些书刚好写在伊斯兰大学建校前后。当时伊斯兰大学需要教科书，于是他的初阶语法书畅销一时。如果你不喜欢这些书，你会觉得它们不知所云；如果你喜欢，就会觉得它们像鸿篇巨制一样，一步步推演、夯实理论。后世的语言学者和大众承认书中的这些理论堪称斐然，同时也撰写了自己的文学批评著作。这些著作结构更加清晰，更适合用于大学课堂。

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī’s books became the foundation for Islamic literary criticism, and he became the person that all future literary critics referred back to.

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼的书成了伊斯兰文学批评的奠基石，后世所有的文学批评家都会站在他的肩膀上继续远眺。

Alexander Key: In just the same way as, you know, Newton appears in a present day physics textbook or Einstein appears in, you know, a children's TV show. So, it's that kind of... But the science itself has kept developing and exponentially.

亚历山大·基：这就像是牛顿出现在如今的物理教科书里、或是爱因斯坦出现在儿童电视节目里一样。科学仍然在以指数级的速度持续发展。

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī became hugely influential as his books spread throughout universities in the Arabic-speaking world.

扎卡里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼的书在阿拉伯语国家的大学里传播开来，他本人也变得非常有影响力。

Alexander Key: Then there's this fascinating moment when print becomes a really big deal, when you have all these manuscripts and you have these scholars in Egypt and elsewhere saying, “We need to edit and publish in print the great works of our heritage, and then which ones do we pick?”

So, they were very conscious that the model that Europe had grown up with was a model in which great theory comes in a book with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has one name on the cover: Kant, Hume, Plato. So, well, if you're in Egypt in the sort of 19th, 20th century, you want to, you know, you're working in a world where Europe is where all the money and the power is. You want to fit that model.

亚历山大·基：印刷术渐渐普及，你也有他的所有这些手稿。这时激动人心的时刻出现了。埃及等地的一些学者说：“我们需要编辑出版我们史上一些伟大的著作，选哪些呢？”他们了解到，欧洲逐渐形成的模式是：把某个伟大理论出版成书，有开头、中间部分和结尾部分，封面还会印上一个人名，比如康德、休谟、柏拉图。假设你生活在十九、二十世纪的埃及，当时就财富和影响力而言，欧洲独领风骚，所以你会想要模仿欧洲的出版模式。

Zachary Davis: The Egyptian scholars didn’t want to pick books that were commentaries on commentaries whose origins had to be traced back. They were looking for a book that looked like a European book, with one author.

扎克里·戴维斯：埃及学者并不想选那些可以往前追溯、对某个理论做二次解读的书。他们想要找一本像欧洲模式那样、只有一个作者的书。

Alexander Key: And Jurjānī is perfect for this: that he's a single author, monographs that are not written as commentaries, they're written in a sort of individual, expounding way that makes a lot of sense for the 19th, 20th century Egyptian context.

亚历山大·基：朱尔吉尼的书便完美地符合这些要求。作者只有他一个人，这些书也不是单纯的评论，而是带有个人的阐述性风格，这对十九、二十世纪的埃及文化圈来说很有意义。

Alexander Key: So, Rashid Rida, Mohamed Shaker, a number of influential publishers and intellectuals “rediscover” Jurjānī and find the manuscripts of his work scattered about. They find them, they edit them, they publish them. There are several editions, and their 18th, 19th century actions are fundamental to the reason why I would pick Jurjānī to answer your question of what’s a great and highly influential book.

亚历山大·基：拉希德・里达、穆罕默德・谢克等有影响力的出版商和知识分子重新找到了朱尔吉尼散落在各地的手稿，汇编成册，交付出版。总共印了好几版。多亏了他们的努力，今天在你们的节目上，当被问到书哪本书非常伟大、很有影响力时，我才能有底气地说出朱尔吉尼的名字。

Zachary Davis: Thanks to these 19th century Egyptian scholars, Jurjānī remains influential today.

扎克里·戴维斯：多亏了这些19世纪的埃及学者，朱尔吉尼时至今日仍然发挥着影响力。

Alexander Key: So, people who are writing literary criticism in Arabic today, they read Saussure, they read the classics of literary criticism in the West, they read Ricoeur, and they read Jurjānī. And these two things fit together, and this produces an Arabic literary critical discourse.

亚历山大·基：如今阿拉伯国家的文学批评家会读西方文学批评的著作，比如索绪尔、保罗·利科的著作。同时他们也会读朱尔吉尼。西方理论与本土理论融合在一起，催生出了阿拉伯文学批评话语。

Alexander Key: Really the only problem is in English and other European languages where Jurjānī has not been translated and is not really available. So, there's an abbreviated translation in French that I don't think many people use. And then there's the translation of the other metaphor book into German, and that's it.

亚历山大·基：唯一的遗憾是，在英语和其他欧洲语言国家中，朱尔吉尼的著作还没有被普遍翻译出来，也鲜为人知。倒是有个删减版的法语译本，但估计也没多少人读。他的另一本讲比喻的书有德语译本，但也仅此而已。

Zachary Davis: I suspect that there is something special about the place of the Quran in literature and in literary analysis. What is helpful to understand about the place of language and the Quran for Muslims that's different than like those of us in the West kind of even can intimate?

扎克里·戴维斯：我在猜测，《古兰经》在文学和文学分析中的地位非常特殊。您可以给我们讲讲语言和《古兰经》在穆斯林世界的地位吗？与在西方有哪些不同呢？可以透露一下吗？

Alexander Key: When, when you grow up in the north of England and you get taught the Bible at your elementary school, you know you're reading English, and you know the Bible was in some other language, and you may even know that Jesus spoke some other language.

亚历山大·基：假如你在英格兰北部长大，小学时你会学《圣经》，你知道自己读的是英语版，也知道《圣经》是用其他语言写的，甚至知道耶稣说的也是别的语言。

Alexander Key: Whereas if you grow up in America as a Muslim and you go to Sunday school and you learn the Quran, you know that it's God's actual words. Same for Jurjānī, you grow up speaking Persian in Gorgan in the 11th century. These are God's actual words. It's God's decision to put the “a” there and the “the” there, it's God's decision to switch the syntax around, God's decision to use this particular image.

亚历山大·基：但如果你是在美国长大的穆斯林，你会去主日学校学习《古兰经》，知道它记载了真主的教诲。朱尔吉尼也一样。十一世纪他在戈尔甘出生，长大后说波斯语。他知道这些都是真主的教诲，认为是真主决定这里应该用泛指、那里应该用特指、句法应该这样来、应该用这个意象。

Someone can be surly compared with Kant

与康德比肩也不为过

Zachary Davis: Jurjānī’s work is practically unknown in the West, partly because he remains untranslated. Professor Key is trying to change that. He’s currently in the process of translating this text into English. It is possible that this text’s major influence has yet to be fully realized.

扎克里·戴维斯：朱尔吉尼的作品在西方鲜为人知，因为基本上都还没有被翻译出来。不过亚历山大·基教授正在着手改变这个局面。他目前正在把《修辞奥秘》翻成英文。说不定未来这本书的影响力要远远超过当下。

Alexander Key: There are these big figures who have this sort of scale of intellectual achievement that institutions haven't spent as much time on. I mean, again, you think of the amount of work that the institutions that we engage with have put into certain big figures. Like, you think of how much Kant scholarship there is. You think about those people who have like 20 editions. There’s a whole, like a whole wall of books about somebody. There are these figures in the Islamic long millennium that just haven't had that much attention. There's a lot of work still to be done.

亚历山大·基：这些伟大的人物拥有令人叹为观止的学术成就，而我们的研究机构却对他们充耳不闻。想想看我们这些机构在其他一些大人物身上花了多少精力。就拿康德来说吧，研究他的学者出的书已经印了二十版了。关于某一个人的书都能堆满整面墙。然而在遥远的伊斯兰世界，一些伟大学者的作品一千年来一直为我们所忽视。所以说，我们要做的还有很多。

Zachary Davis: But even though his influence in the West may be just beginning, there’s no question that Jurjānī had a profound impact on Arabic culture.

扎克里·戴维斯：尽管在西方，朱尔吉尼的影响力才初步展现，但不可否认，他对阿拉伯文化影响深远。

Alexander Key: I'd say that after Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjānī literary criticism in Arabic was fundamentally different, more complex, and more rigorous. Literary criticism after Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjānī understood how the words on the page or the words in our ear fit together with the words in our brain in a much more effective and sophisticated way that's still relevant today.

亚历山大·基：不得不承认，阿卜杜勒·卡赫尔·朱尔吉尼让阿拉伯语言文学批评发生了质变，使其变得更复杂、更严谨。在他之后，文学批评家更深入有效地认识到了，人们看到或听到的语言文字如何与脑海中的语言文字相适应、相融合。这种认识时至今日仍然很有价值。

Zachary Davis: And is there a figure in the West who you think is the most apt comparison for maybe the kind of work they did and the kind of influence that they still have?

扎克里·戴维斯：您觉得西方有没有哪个人物的贡献和影响力，可以和朱尔吉尼相提并论？

Alexander Key: I would say Jurjānī is as important for Arabic and Islamic intellectual history as Kant is for European intellectual history. I mean, hey, you can do a whole undergrad degree and become a professor and have read very little of Kant, you know, but he...you still know how important it is, or how important everyone says it is.

亚历山大·基：我觉得，朱尔吉尼对阿拉伯和伊斯兰知识界的重要性，就好比康德对欧洲知识界的重要性。你或许读完了本科，或许成了教授，又或许对康德所知甚少，但你都会知道他很重要，或者至少知道大家都说他很重要。

Alexander Key: Yeah, I say that Jurjānī is at that kind of stature. But the big difference is that that long Islamic millennium cared so much more about language than our intellectual moment. The question we then have to ask is: who's right? Is language that important for us as human beings? Like, should we be devoting a large chunk of our institutional and academic resources to language, like, or not?

亚历山大·基：朱尔吉尼的地位和康德差不多。不过一个很大的不同在于，伊斯兰世界在这漫长的一千年间，对语言的关注程度远远超过西方自文艺复兴以来对语言的关注。于是我们就要问了：谁是对的呢？语言对我们人类来说有这么重要吗？我们是否需要把大量学术机构的资源用在语言上呢？

Zachary Davis: Well, it depends what you mean by “to language”, right? Because I mean, the humanities, much of it is actually appreciating and thinking about language, but it's not a linguistics department.

扎克里·戴维斯：这要取决于你如何定义“用在语言上”，因为我觉得人文学科中的很多领域都是在鉴赏、研究语言，但它们并不都隶属于语言学。

Alexander Key: I would add literary studies, English, linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing. Like if you take all those things that talk about language, are we paying language enough attention? Or should we be more like the context Jurjānī was working in, in which language was the fundamental way academics approached the world? On one hand, I’m like, language is the only tool we've got for communicating with each other, so maybe it is kind of important, maybe it is fundamental.

亚历山大·基：没错，比如文学研究、英语语言文学、语言学、计算语言学、自然语言处理等。如果把所有这些涉及语言的领域算进去，那我们对语言的关注是否足够多呢？我们是否应该像朱尔吉尼所处的阿拉伯世界一样，把语言看作学术界研究世界的基础？不过在某方面看，我觉得语言是人与人之间交流的唯一工具，或许它确实至关重要，甚至极为根本。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe, Jack Pombriant and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Liza French, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！