新小说”的两种解读：谈周桂笙译、吴趼人评点的晚清翻译小说《毒蛇圈》

周桂笙翻译、吴趼人评点的侦探小说《毒蛇圈》，是晚清翻译小说中一篇以传统中国小说点评本的形式翻译西方侦探小说的范例，原作者与小说本身虽然并不出众，但叙事技巧上对中国现代小说转型阶段有相当大的影响。以往对于这篇译作的研究只是根据吴趼人的评点来判断周桂笙译文对原作的取舍，而笔者近期则发现了周译《毒蛇圈》所依据的英文译本 The Serpents' Coils。将这两个中英文本比对可以更加清楚准确地判断周桂笙的翻译特色及吴趼人的选本原因。侦探小说在晚清时期被视作新小说，但在本文的分析中可见，晚清时期不同作家对新小说的作用看法不尽相同，周桂笙侧重其通过宣传西方文化来改良晚清社会的启蒙力量，而吴趼人则从新小说中看出了维护旧道德之必要。通过这两种自相矛盾的叙事者声音，我们可以看出侦探小说这一西方形式在中国本土的接收过程中是多么的“众声喧哗”，而也正是在这种喧哗声中构成了晚清翻译侦探小说的独特性之所在。<eng>Translated by Zhou Guisheng and annotated by Wu Jianren, the detective novel Du She Quan was a representative among the fiction translations of late Qing period, following the commentary tradition of the classical Chinese novels. The original author of this detective fiction, Fortuné Du Boisgobey was not a novelist of the first rank in the history of detective fiction and the novel itself was only about marriage conspiracy, but its narrative technique has a huge influence on the development of modern Chinese fiction. Comparing with its original English translation, The Serpents' Coils, this paper studied the different, and often conflicted narrative voices in this Chinese translation: its Chinese translator Zhou Guisheng intended to use this novel for social enlightenment, while its commentator Wu Jianren found the necessity of maintaining the traditional morals through this novel. These contradictory voices revealed the heteroglossia when Western detective fiction was first introduced into the late Qing China.