The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel HawthorneYilin Press2002

Rating 4.0
ISBN
9787805675879

Tags

Literature Foreign Literature Tragic RomancePsychological AnalysisPsychological PortrayalRomanticismClassic MasterpieceFull-Length NovelNew EnglandColonial RuleAmerican LiteratureAmerican Romanticism

Summary

The Scarlet Letter is the representative work of the nineteenth-century American Romantic writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in Boston, New England, under seventeenth-century Puritan colonial rule and drawn from a local love tragedy, the novel tells of the young woman Hester Prynne, who arrives in Boston alone before her husband and, in long solitude with her husband's fate unknown, falls in love with the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale and bears a daughter, Pearl. The Puritan authorities sentence her to public humiliation on the scaffold for adultery and to wear for life a scarlet letter "A" (for Adultery). She adamantly refuses to name the child's father and endures punishment and isolation alone. Hester's lost husband, Roger Chillingworth, appears at the scaffold, changes his name to conceal their marriage, and, posing as a physician, secretly hunts down and torments the minister destroyed by guilt. In this entanglement of sin and punishment, the novel portrays each character's struggle among faith, conscience, and revenge, until Dimmesdale publicly confesses everything before his death. Through abundant symbolism, psychological description, and a "psychological romance" manner, Hawthorne explores sin, shame, redemption, and the complexity of human nature, and the book is regarded as the opening work of the American psychological novel.

Editor's review

霍桑在《红字》里做了一件极为大胆的事：把一则殖民地时期被公开羞辱的丑闻，写成了关于罪、良心与救赎的幽深心理研究。全书围绕一枚红字“A”展开，这个字母的含义在故事中反复漂移，从通奸的耻辱标记，逐渐承载起坚韧、慈悲与疏离的多重意味；这种由符号承载意义的写法，使它成为象征主义文学的典范，也影响了麦尔维尔、亨利·詹姆斯以及后来的众多作家。麦尔维尔曾把《白鲸》题献给霍桑，称其天才难以摹仿。姚乃强的译本语言沉稳，叙事线索清晰，适合作为中文读者进入霍桑世界的首选版本。值得一提的是，霍桑为小说所写的长篇前言《海关》本身也是一篇出色的自传性散文，读时不妨一并细读；它交代了作者在海关任职的见闻，也交代了这部小说的由来。

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Reading tips

  1. 先读前言《海关》，理解霍桑的写作缘起与叙事立场，再进入正文。
  2. 注意记录红字“A”在不同章节中的含义变化，这是理解全书结构的关键。
  3. 每读完一章可以留意场景与光线的描写，霍桑常用明暗、森林与市场对照人物的内心。
  4. 若读译本，可以对照英文原文的关键段落，体会其长句与隐喻的节奏。

About the publisher

Yilin Press China · Founded in 1988

Yilin Press focuses mainly on translated foreign literature. Its current catalogue of 318 titles covers common categories such as mystery and detective fiction, foreign literature, world classics, biography, and social novels. Representative books include The Complete Sherlock Holmes 2: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Lives of the Artists: Michelangelo, often presented in bilingual or English-language editions that serve both original-text reading and language learning. Its author resources include foreign writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Romain Rolland, as well as translators including Li Jiazhen, Gao Fen, and Ma Ye. The catalogue also includes Chinese works such as Li Jieren's Ripples Across Stagnant Water. The press shows a concentrated publishing strength in foreign classics and bilingual readers; given limited public information, this overview is based only on catalogue data.

FAQ

《红字》讲的是一个什么故事？ 故事发生在17世纪清教统治下的波士顿。海丝特·白兰因通奸罪被罚终身佩戴红色字母“A”，她拒绝说出孩子的父亲；她的丈夫化名齐灵渥斯潜伏追查并折磨那位内心饱受煎熬的牧师，小说由此展开关于罪与救赎的探讨。
这本书的“红字”指什么？ 红字是绣在女主人公胸前的鲜红色字母“A”，代表英文 Adultery（通奸）。随着故事发展，这个字母的含义不断被重新赋予，成为全书最重要的象征符号。
这个版本是谁翻译的？ 此处条目对应的是译林出版社2002年版，译者为姚乃强，收入“译林世界文学名著·古典系列”，ISBN 为 9787805675879。
读《红字》需要先了解清教历史吗？ 不必须，但了解一些17世纪新英格兰清教殖民地的政教合一背景，会更容易理解审判、示众和牧师权威等情节的分量。译本内容本身已能支撑阅读。

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About the author

Nathaniel Hawthorne Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American novelist, best known to Chinese readers for his novel The Red Letter, a quiet and highly symbolic work about sin and redemption. The library holds eight of his works, including The Red Letter, The Blithedale Romance, Grandfather's Chair and Tanglewood Tales. His writing often draws on colonial New England history and the Puritan tradition, and he is skilled at using allegorical narrative to explore the hidden corners of human nature and moral dilemmas. In his later years he retold Greek myths for young readers in clear, accessible prose that has become children's literature. Chinese editions of his work appear in foreign-literary classics, English-Chinese bilingual readers and illustrated myth collections. Public information on his life available in the library is limited, so it is not detailed here.