纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 069瓦斯特克女神雕像（1）（在线收听）

069：EPISODE 69 - Sculpture of Huastec Goddess 瓦斯特克女神雕像

Sculpture of Huastec goddess (made between tenth and fifteenth century). Stone statue; from Mexico

If you want to test the old clich that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal, then the internet automated translation services will give you lots of happy ammunition. I fed into it the sentence which is the theme for this week's programmes. "This week", I typed, "we're spinning the globe, looking at some of the world's religions around seven hundred years ago, and at how different cultures used objects to bring gods and humans nearer to each other." Once this sentence had been translated from English into French, from French into Greek and then from Greek back to English, it read: "This week we turn ball, that looks at certain of religions of world this there at about seven hundred years, and the way which different cultures has adopted objects to bring more almost gods and humans from each other."It's an amusingly crude exercise, but when it comes to translating complex ideas from a lost culture with no written language, we can't be confident of doing much better, as we work our way through layers of later interpretation by people with quite different ways of thinking.

To get anywhere near an original understanding of this programme's object, we have to go through a filter of two later cultures with two different languages - and even then, we're not quite sure where we stand. It's an object that's always intrigued me, and I'm less and less sure that I understand it - it's the statue of a woman, from what is now northern Mexico, but which around 1400, was the land of the Huastec people.

"It's absolutely essential that she should be female. One of the aspects of human experience that all myths and all religions address, is sex." (Marina Warner)

瓦斯特克女神雕像

石制雕像，来自墨西哥

公元900年至公元一五二一年

有一句古训说，翻译是一种背叛。想要翻译没有文字的失落文明的复杂思想，情况也一般无二：我们常常需要穿过后世的重重解读去找寻真相，而这些做出解读的人常有着与失落族群不同的思维方式，本族语言中也并没有能表达他们思想的现成词汇。

想理解这件文物最初的意义，首先要排除两种之后出现的、使用不同语言的不同文化的过滤作用，但即便如此，我们也无法肯定到底能探究出多少。这件物品一向使我着迷，但我越来越不确定自己是否了解它。它是一尊女性雕像，来自今墨西哥北部，而在公元一千四百年左右，这里是瓦斯特克人的土地。