本文探討十九世紀美國女作家凱薩琳‧薩菊克的情感小說《荷普．萊斯理》， 分析真相的政治性、同情的敘事策略、及翻譯的爭議性。當焦點放在邊緣的角色，即原住民女孩──瑪佳維絲嘉，我們發現，在種族上、性別上，做為「他者」的瑪佳維絲嘉，具有多重敘述功能。從邊緣發聲，她說出印地安屠殺歷史的另一面真相；為英國情人犧牲一條手臂，她贏得讀者同情眼淚；穿梭在英國殖民者與原住民族人之間，她也是語言、文化、種族差異的翻譯者。雖然作者形塑瑪佳維絲嘉的角色，突破原住民角色的刻板形象，但值得爭議的是，白人、女性作家的權威因為「他者」說出歷史真相而建立，而同時，原住民被剝奪土地的事實並未被質疑；此外，贏得讀者同情的印地安女孩，成為心甘情願為愛犧牲的角色，仍舊是情感小說的窠臼；更重要的，翻譯在小說中，凸顯「差異」如何被同質化，以便主流文化瞭解，又不斷被標示為無法理解而不被接受，正當化去除差異的目的。雖然薩菊克的小說具有時代進步性，但就種族文化差異而言，《荷普‧萊斯理》透露許多文本焦慮與擺盪不定：究竟差異可否透過同情而認同、經由翻譯而理解，或者，同情與翻譯終究導致根本不同的「他者」被排除。

This paper analyzes the politics of truth, the rhetoric of sympathy and the controversy of translation in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s sentimental novel, Hope Leslie. With the focus shifting to the marginal character, Magawisca, rather than the white heroine Hope Leslie, it is found that the Indian girl Magawisca is functional in many senses. Magawisca is the racial other, who speaks of the other side of the Pequot war, whose loss of one arm for love of the English boy, Everell, wins the reader’s sympathetic tears and whose role as a translator between the Indians and the English settlers negotiate the linguistic, cultural and racial differences. Granted that Sedgwick’s revisionary history of the Pequot war is progressive, Magawisca’s voicing of the suppressed “truth” endows the white, female author with authority, rather than leading to racial justice. Despite the fact that her representation of Magawisca subverts the literary stereotypes of the Indians, Sedgwick’s Indian story is still contentious, since the Indian removal is not challenged, and Magawisca’s sacrifice for love sentimentalizes the Indian girl and makes interracial romance tantalizing but impossible. More significantly, translation in Sedgwick’s novel is intended to cross the barrier of difference but ends up reiterating the untranslatability of otherness and justifying the removal of the other from social imaginings. Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie reveals its narrative anxiety and ambivalence about difference, sympathy and translation. Whether sympathy can be a vehicle for identification with the other and whether translation can be an ethical way of understanding difference are questions to ask. Or, after all, radical otherness is expelled in sympathy and translation.