*1*
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
萝莉塔，我的生命之光，我的欲望之火，我的罪孽，我的灵魂。萝—莉—塔，舌尖从上腭有层次的下滑，第三次轻轻的敲击在牙齿上。萝•莉•塔。
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
早晨的时候她是萝，一个普通的萝，四尺十寸高（一米四七，译者注）、只穿着一只袜子；穿好运动裤，她就成了萝娜；在学校她叫多莉；证件上她叫多萝列斯。但是在我的怀中，她永远都是萝莉塔。
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
在她之前的别人？哦，是的，的确有一个。事实上，如果在那一个很久以前的夏天，在那片辉煌的海滩，我没有爱上那个小女孩，也就不会有萝莉塔的故事了。什么，多久以前？那时离萝莉塔出生的时间大约正好等于我的年龄。你知道，坏蛋总是有独特的创作天赋的。
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
陪审团的各位先生和女士，即将要向你们展示的历史，将会令堕落天使——那个被误传为“单纯、高贵的六翼天使”都妒忌。来见识一下这些痛苦而纠缠不清的经历吧。
*2*
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects — paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
1910年，我出生在巴黎。我那慈祥和蔼的父亲是一个名副其实的混血儿：身为瑞士公民，是奥地利、法籍后裔，另外还夹杂着些许南欧血统。一会儿我会给大家传看一些精致美丽的明信片——我的父亲在地中海里维埃拉开有一家豪华的旅店。他的父亲和两个祖父是做葡萄酒、珠宝和丝绸生意的。三十岁的时候，他和一位英国姑娘结了婚。她的父亲，杰罗米•杜恩，是一位登山家；两位祖父在英格兰西南部多塞特任职牧师，专职古土学和管风琴——都是些过时的东西。我的极其漂亮的母亲在我三岁的时候以极其怪诞的方式离我而去（野餐，闪电）。除去在我不记事时所享受的温暖，母亲没有在我婴儿时期的记忆沟回中留下任何痕迹。如果你还能够忍受我的这种写作风格的话请继续（我的书信是受监视的）。唯一有印象的是，你知道，夕阳余晖尚挂在天边时，山脚下，爬满茂盛的藤蔓枝条的篱笆，和与其共生的小昆虫——夏日薄暮中，毛茸茸的金色的蠓。
My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity — the fatal rigidity — of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
我母亲的姐姐，赛比尔，无偿的为我的新家庭做着管家兼家教的工作。她曾经和我父亲的表兄结婚后又被离婚。后来我听人说起，她曾一度和我的父亲坠入爱河，而且在一个雨天我父亲不负责任的占有了她，尔后在天晴之前他又忘掉了此事。但我的确非常喜欢她，尽管她的有些规则严格得要命。估计她一心希望，如果我将来不幸成为鳏夫，也会是比我父亲好的鳏夫。赛比尔姑姑有一双蔚蓝的眼睛和粉红的眼眶，肤色蜡白。她会写诗，而且对诗歌很迷信。她曾经告诉我说她知道在我满十六岁生日后她会很快死去，结果不幸言中。她的丈夫，一个寻花问柳高手，绝大多数时间呆在美国，并且后来成立了一个公司并拥有了一些地产。
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misérables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.
在这个有着图画书、洁白的沙滩、橙子树、温顺的狗、海景和笑容的明亮的世界里我健康幸福的成长着。这个叫做“米兰纳”的豪华旅馆对我来说，就像是在这个蔚蓝的大宇宙中被粉刷成白色的个人的小宇宙。不论是围着围裙的陶艺大师还是穿着法兰绒大衣的政治家，每个人都喜欢我，都爱逗我玩。那些上了年纪的美国老太太拄着拐杖，排着队向我靠过来，就像参观比萨斜塔一样。落难的俄国王子无法支付我父亲房租，却给我买来昂贵的糖果。这位王子，蒙•切•皮提•巴巴，带着我划船、骑自行车，教会了我游泳、潜水和冲浪，给我读《唐•吉坷德》和《悲惨世界》。我非常地羡慕和尊敬他，并且每当他的仆人谈论起他的那些女性朋友们，我就为他感到高兴。她们美丽而温柔，细心的照顾我；她们对我丧母的遭遇非常同情，并曾因此流下她们珍贵的眼泪。
I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon's sumptuous Le Beauté Humaine that that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult.
我每天在离家几英里的一间英语学校学习，参加网球和手球训练，并取得了优秀的成绩，和同学以及老师的关系也很完美。我有记忆的，十三岁生日之前（也就是在认识安娜贝尔之前）有关性方面的事件仅有如下：在学校的玫瑰园与一个美国男孩进行的一次严肃而有分寸的关于青春期反应的纯理论的讨论——那个男孩的母亲是一位当时极其著名的电影演员，他们之间的交流常常不是在三维世界进行的（引申义：只有书信，电话等间接交流，译者注）；还有就是，我从旅馆图书馆中成堆的装订成册的《图形学》底下偷出来皮雄的那本装帧精美的《人性之美》中的有些照片、“珍珠”和有着柔和裂缝的影子引起过我的某些器官的有趣反应。后来，父亲热情而愉快的教导了我所有他认为我应该知道的，关于性方面的知识。不过那发生在1923年的秋天，在送我去我们准备度过三个冬天的利昂•利塞之前；但是，唉，在这之前的夏天，他在意大利与R.夫人和她的女儿旅游，而我，没有人给我提供指导，也没有人可诉苦……
*3*
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
安娜贝尔和作者本人一样，也是混血儿：她拥有一半英国、一半荷兰血统。仅仅在几年以前，我对她的特征的记忆比现在要详细的多——那是在认识萝莉塔之前。视觉记忆分两种：一是你睁着眼睛，在思维“实验室”中巧妙的重塑图像（就像我通俗的概括安娜贝尔为：蜂蜜色的皮肤、细细的胳膊、捆扎整齐棕色的短发、长长的睫毛、漂亮大方的嘴）；而另一种则是，当你闭上眼睛，在眼底的黑暗角落立即浮现出的，光学镜像一般完美的，深爱的面孔，色彩逼真的小精灵（而这，就是我所看到的萝莉塔）。
Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.
因此，请容许我谨慎的限制我对安娜贝尔的以下描述。她是一个比我小几个月的可爱的孩子。她的父母是我的姑姑的老朋友，也和她一样固执守旧。他们在离米兰纳旅馆不远的地方租了一个别墅。雷夫先生褐发秃顶、雷夫太太（出生在瓦雷萨•范•内斯）肥胖而且浓妆艳抹——我是多么的憎恶他们啊！一开始，安娜贝尔和我讨论着一些无关紧要的话题。她反复的用手抓起细细的沙子，让它们从手指的缝隙漏出。我们的思想都被扭曲并锁定，以符合当时“欧洲聪明少年”的标准——但我非常怀疑我们所感兴趣的社会复杂性问题、竞争激烈的网球游戏、无穷问题、唯我主义等等是否像标榜的那样具有“个人天赋”。但是幼小动物的脆弱使我们共同的感受到强烈的痛苦：她希望去亚洲的一些饥荒国家做护士，而我想做一个出名的间谍。
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.
突然之间，我们疯狂、笨拙、无羞耻而烦恼的相爱了。我必须遗憾的补充，尽管这狂乱的独占欲只能由我们心灵和身体间相互吸收、融合对方的每一个部分来平息，但事实是，我们根本无法像平民区的孩子一样容易的找到单独相处的机会。在一次疯狂的尝试夜晚在她家后院密会（这是后来的事了）失败后，我们仅有的隐私就剩下限定在人群众多的海滨谈话，可以不被偷听，但是会被监视。在软和的沙滩上，我们整个早晨都平躺在离大人仅有几英尺的地方，尽力压抑涌动的欲望，抓住每一次珍贵的时间和空间的机会来接触对方：她半埋在沙中的手，会慢慢的向我掘进，那棕色的瘦小的手指像梦游一样渐渐的走近；接下来，她乳白色的膝盖会开始一个小心翼翼的漫长的旅行；有时候，一些嬉戏的小孩修筑的沙堡会赐给我们足够掩护以遮住我们交接的咸腥的嘴唇……这些不完整的接触将我们健康且缺乏经验的幼嫩身体带入了邻近爆发的境地，就连掩盖着我们抓紧的双手的寒冷的蓝色海水也无法将其平息。
Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
在我成年后的流浪岁月里，我丢失的财物中有一件就是我的姑姑拍摄的照片，上面有安娜贝尔，他父母和一个老态龙钟、神色安详的簸足绅士，库柏医生。也是在那个夏天，他在一间路边咖啡厅里的圆桌前向我的姑姑求爱了。安娜贝尔照得并不好，因为她正在使劲地咬一块巧克力奶糖，她裸露的苍白的胳膊和她头发的分缝大概是她所有可以被辨认的标志（在我记忆中的照片），强烈的光线模糊了她那迷人的面容；但是我，坐在有些远的地方，却显出一种戏剧性的独特：一个皱着眉头、忧郁的男孩，穿着深色运动衣和做工精细的短裤。他叉着脚，侧坐着，看着别处。这张照片拍摄于那个致命夏天的终日，就在我们尽最后努力做出对命运的第二次，也是最后一次抗争的几分钟前。在和纸一样薄的借口的掩护下（这是我们最后的机会，其它的一切都不重要了），我们从咖啡厅逃到了海滩，找到了一片无人的沙地。在那里，一些红色的岩石的紫罗兰色的影子造就了一个洞穴，在那里只有一双被人遗失的太阳镜目击一切。在一阵短促而热切的爱抚后，我跪下去，正在准备拥有我的恋人时，两个长着胡子的浴客，“大海的老人”和他的兄弟，走上岸来，嘴里吼叫着下流的挑逗语……四个月以后，她在希腊科尔夫死于伤寒。
