《倾城之恋》美国纽约首次翻译出版

这本 Love in a Fallen City 2006年10月10日由纽约书评出版社（New York Review Books Classics）出版，译者为美国女学者金斯柏里（Karen S. Kingsbury）。344页的平装书要价14.95美元。

　　《倾城之恋》主要包括了“倾城之恋”和“金琐记”等六篇小说，主要是张爱玲在四十年代走红上海的作品。这六部作品多是首次被翻成英文。

　 许多英文报章均对《倾城之恋》英文版的出版大加赞赏。《纽约时报书评》称张爱玲为中国文学的巨人，《出版人周刊》（Publishers Weekly）也对《倾城之恋》英文版的出版进行了大力推介。

　　本书的翻译者金斯柏里早年毕业于哥伦比亚大学，获得博士学位，其毕业论文便是以张爱玲为主题。金斯柏里先后在中国大陆和台湾生活过近20年，包括在重庆教英文，在台北学中文，更在台湾东海大学教英语语言文学达14年之久。

金斯柏里之前也曾翻译过一些张爱玲的作品，出版在一些专业性刊物上。她目前居住在西雅图。

　　最初“发掘”出《倾城之恋》的是纽约书评经典图书系列的编辑Edwin Frank。他在一本书的脚注里发现了张爱玲这个名字，决定把这个作者的书找来看一看，于是他从图书馆借来了《金琐记》，看完之后被深深吸引，于是决定以经典图书的类别来翻译出版《倾城之恋》。

　　下面是纽约书评网站上对张爱玲、《倾城之恋》和译者 Karen S. Kingsbury的介绍：

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. Her father, deeply traditional in his ways, was an opium addict; her mother, partly educated in England, was a sophisticated woman of cosmopolitan tastes. Their unhappy marriage ended in divorce, and Chang eventually ran away from her father—who had beaten her for defying her stepmother, then locked her in her room for nearly half a year. Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghia; where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. In 1944 Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer whose sexual infidelities led to their divorce three years later. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She remarried (an American, Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967) and held various posts as writer-in-residence; in 1969 she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. Two novels, both commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Information Service as anti-Communist propaganda, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella, "The Golden Cangue." Chang continued writing essays and stories in Chinese, scripts for Hong Kong films, and began work on an English translation of the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older. Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995.

Karen S. Kingsbury has lived in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades. She taught English in Chonquing on the Whitman-in-China program, studied Chinese in Taipei and, for fourteen years, taught English language and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung. Her Columbia University doctoral dissertation was on Eileen Chang, and she has published previous translations of Chang's essays and fiction in Renditions and in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. She lives in Seattle.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

还有其他一些媒体（还有李安？）对张和张的小说的评说：

... A giant of modern Chinese literature...
— The New York Times

Chang's obsession with privacy made her known as the 'Garbo of Chinese letters,' and photographs reveal a woman whose elegance and contemplative introspection justify that title. Nevertheless, from out of the frenzy of renown that surrounded her, the sheer quality of Chang's prose emerges clearly,and her voice...has a sound like none other in the canon of Chinese, or for that matter, American prose stylists.
— Boston Review

With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few who could see on both sides of that divide, into which her heroines so often disappeared. Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere.
— Ang Lee

These six stories, most available in English for the first time, were published to acclaim in China and Hong Kong in the '40s; they explore, bewitchingly, the myriad ways love overcomes (or doesn't) the intense social constraints of time and place.... In these eloquent tragedies, Chang plunges readers in medias res. She expertly burdens her characters with failed dreams and stifled possibilities, leads them to push aside the heavy curtains of family and convention, and then shows them a yawning emptiness. Their different responses are brilliantly underplayed and fascinating.
— starred review, Publishers Weekly

This posthumous collection contains six vibrant stories that depict life in post-WW II China...Evocative and vivid, Chang's stories bristle with equal parts passion and resentment.
— Booklist

A major rediscovery.
— Kirkus Reviews

网站上还有《白玫瑰，红玫瑰》的节选：

On the day he was to move in, Zhenbao left work just after dusk. He and his brother were busy supervising the coolies as they carried the trunks in, and Wang Shihong was standing arms akimbo in the doorway, when a woman walked in from the room behind. She was washing her hair, which was all lathered up with shampoo, the white curls standing high on her head like a marble sculpture. “While the workmen are here,”
she said to Shihong, holding her hair with her hands, “have them arrange all the furniture and things. It’s no use asking our majordomo to help: he’ll just make excuses—if he’s not in the mood he won’t do anything.”

“Let me introduce everyone,” said Wang Shihong. “Zhenbao, Dubao, my wife. I believe you haven’t met yet?”

The woman withdrew her hand from her hair to shake hands with the guests, but seeing the shampoo on her fingers, she hesitated. She nodded and smiled instead, then wiped her fingers on her dressing gown. A little shampoo splashed the back of Zhenbao’s hand. Instead of rubbing it off, he let it dry there. The skin puckered up slightly, as if a mouth were lightly sucking at the spot.

Mrs. Wang turned and went back into the other room. Zhenbao directed the workers as they moved the bed and wardrobe, but he felt troubled, and the sucking sensation was still there. His mind wandered as he headed to the bathroom to wash his hands, thinking about this Mrs. Wang. He’d heard that she was an overseas Chinese from Singapore who, when she was studying in London, was quite a party girl. She and Wang Shihong got married in London, but Zhenbao had been too busy to attend the wedding. Seeing her was much better than hearing about her: under her white, shampoo-sculpted hair was a tawny gold face, the skin glistening and the flesh so firm that her eyes rose at a long upward slant, like the eyes of an actress. Her striped dressing gown, worn without a belt, hugged her body loosely, and the black-and-white stripes hinted at her figure, each line, each inch, fully alive. People like to say that the wide, long-sleeved gowns of former times didn’t flatter curvaceous beauties, but Zhenbao had just discovered that this was not the case. He turned on the faucet. The water wasn’t very hot, though the water heater downstairs was certainly on, and yet the lukewarm stream seemed to have a lighted wick running through it. Twisting and winding, the water ran from the faucet, every inch of it alive, while Zhenbao’s mind went running off to who knows where.

Wang Shihong heard the sound of running water and came into the bathroom. “Do you want to take a bath? The water never comes up hot in this bathroom. The hot water pipe wasn’t connected properly. That’s one bad thing about this apartment. If you want to wash, come into our bathroom.”

“Oh no, please don’t bother,” Zhenbao said. “Isn’t your wife washing her hair?”

“She must be finished by now. I’ll go and have a look.”

“Oh, really, it’s not that important.”

Wang Shihong went to speak with his wife, and his wife said, “I’m just finishing. Tell the amah to draw him a bath.”

A little later,Wang Shihong told Zhenbao to bring his soap, towel, and clothes into their bathroom. Mrs. Wang was still in front of the mirror, struggling to get a comb through her tightly permed hair. The bathroom was full of steam, and the night wind blew in through the open window. On the floor, clusters of fallen hair swirled about like ghostly figures.

Zhenbao stood outside the door holding his towel and watching the tangled hair, in the glare of the bathroom light, drifting across the floor. He felt quite agitated. He liked women who were fiery and impetuous, the kind you couldn’t marry. Here was one who was already a wife, and a friend’s wife at that, so there couldn’t be any danger, but . . . look at that hair! It was everywhere. She was everywhere, tugging and pulling at him.

The couple stood in the bathroom talking, but the water filling the tub was loud and Zhenbao couldn’t hear what they said. When the tub was full, they came out so he could take his bath. After his bath, Zhenbao crouched down and started picking up stray hairs from the floor tiles and twisting them together. The permed hair had turned yellow at the ends; it was stiff, like fine electrical wire. He stuffed it into his pocket. His hand stayed there, and his whole body tingled. But this was too ridiculous. He extracted the hair from his pocket and tossed it
into the spittoon.