女性的职业 Professions for Women ⑴ (中英对照)

Professions for Women
女 性 的 职 业
By Virginia Woolf
文 / 弗吉尼娅·伍尔夫 译 / 王鑫昊

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage—fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago—by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot—many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and six pence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare—if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna,and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.
贵团体秘书请我来时告诉我，你们在关注女性就业问题。她建议我可以和你们聊聊我自己的职业经历。我确实是一名女性，我也确实有工作；但我的职业经历怎样呢？很难说。我从事文学创作；在该职业中，经历不像在其他职业中那么多，戏剧创作除外——我的意思是，很少有什么经历为女性所特有。很多年前，像范妮·伯尼、阿芙拉·班恩、哈丽雅特·马蒂诺、简·奥斯汀和乔治·艾略特——这些著名女性以及更多不知名、被遗忘的女性在我之前就开辟了道路，将路铺平，指引着我的脚步。因此，我开始写作时，在物质上几乎没有阻碍。写作是一份值得尊敬、没有伤害的职业。家庭和谐不会因动笔留痕造成破裂。也不需要什么家庭开销。花 16 便士就能买到一大堆纸，足以写完莎士比亚的所有戏剧——如果谁有那样的才智的话。一个作家不需要钢琴和模特，游巴黎、维也纳、柏林，当男主人、女主人。在成功从事其他职业之前，女性当作家先得以成功，当然因为可供写作的纸便宜。

But to tell you my story—it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month—a very glorious day it was for me—by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and six pence.
还是和你们讲讲我的故事吧——很简单。你们只需去想象卧室里有个女孩，手里握着笔。她只是将笔不断从左往右写——从十点写到一点。接着她想到，干脆做一件足够简单、足够省钱的事——撕下那几页纸塞进信封，在角上贴上一分钱邮票，把它丢进街角的红邮箱里。就这样，我成了一个新闻记者；次月的第一天——对我来说非常光荣的一天，我的努力得到了回报——收到一位编辑的来信，里面有张一英磅十先令六便士的支票。