分分钟读完系列(3) 纳博科夫《征兆与象征》

这一点，以及其他种种，她都接受了，因为终究生活意味着要接受一个接一个快乐的丧失，在她这里，甚至不是什么快乐，只是生活改善的可能性而已。...





简介

弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫(1899-1977)，俄裔美国作家。使他在世界文坛扬名的主要是他在移居美国后创作的长篇小说，如《洛丽塔》、《普宁》和《微暗的火》等。

《征兆与象征》很像一篇寓言故事，这个寓言既是现代的，更是流亡者的。作者在伤感的氛围里讲述的这个令人心酸的故事，使人类看到了自身所承受的压抑有多么深重。Symbols and SignsBy Vladimir Nabokov

For the fourth time
in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday
present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires
he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a
malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no
use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of
articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line,
for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a
basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

这是他们这些年里第四次面临这样的难题，要给一个精神错乱、无药可救的年轻人送一件什么样的生日礼物。他倒是没有什么要求。人造的东西在他看来要么是邪恶的蜂箱，以只有他能看见的恶毒的行为在震动，要么就是粗俗的享受，这在他那个抽象的世界里是一无用处的。在排除了一系列有可能伤害他或是吓坏他的东西之后（任何小巧的机械一类的东西都属禁忌），他的父母挑选了一种精致且无害的小玩意儿：一篮子装在十个小罐子里的十种不同的果冻。

At the time of his birth, they had already been married for a long
time; a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray
hair was pinned up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women
of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink
and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she
presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring. Her
husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was
now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of
almost forty years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the
Prince.

他出生的时候，他们结婚已经很久了：二十年一晃而逝，现在他们都老了。她那浅棕灰色的头发只胡乱地收拾了一下，身上穿的是便宜的黑色衣衫。与同龄的其他妇人不同（比如索尔太太，他们的紧邻，她的脸上总是涂成粉红色和淡紫色，她的帽子就是一串小溪边的花朵），对着春日吹毛求疵的光亮，她总是露着一副未经修饰的苍白的面容。她的丈夫，在古老的村镇上曾经是一个相当成功的商人，现在却完全依赖于他的兄弟艾萨克，后者是一个有着近四十年身份的真正美国人。他们很少能见到他，戏称他为“王子”。

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The
subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter of an
hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the
rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take next was late and kept them
waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed
with garrulous high-school children. It began to rain as they walked up the
brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again, and instead of
their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen,
confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not
care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to
take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might
disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or
mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office
but to bring it to him next time they came.

那个星期五一切都错乱了。地铁火车在两个站台之间丧失了它的生命电流，在十五分钟的时间里，人们除了能听见自己的心脏恪尽职守的跳动以及报纸的唰啦唰啦声，就什么也听不见了。他们接下去必须乘坐的公共汽车又让他们等了几个世纪似的；当它终于到来时，里面已挤满了唧唧喳喳的中学生。他们走在通往疗养院的褐色小路上时，竟又下起了瓢泼大雨。在疗养院，他们还得等待；与以往不同，他们的儿子没像过去那样拖着脚步走进屋来（他可怜的脸上长满了污浊的粉刺，胡子胡乱剃过，神志阴郁又糊涂），最后是他们认识却并不太喜欢的一个护士出现了，坦白地解释说他又一次企图自杀。他现在还好，她说，不过探访可能会打搅他。那个地方，人员配备得真是太不足了，东西很容易就搞错或是搞混，他们决定不把他们的礼物放在办公室里，而是下次来时再带给他。

Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open his
umbrella and then took his arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did
when he was upset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the
street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and
dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.

那个星期五一切都错乱了。地铁火车在两个站台之间丧失了它的生命电流，在十五分钟的时间里，人们除了能听见自己的心脏恪尽职守的跳动以及报纸的唰啦唰啦声，就什么也听不见了。他们接下去必须乘坐的公共汽车又让他们等了几个世纪似的；当它终于到来时，里面已挤满了唧唧喳喳的中学生。他们走在通往疗养院的褐色小路上时，竟又下起了瓢泼大雨。在疗养院，他们还得等待；与以往不同，他们的儿子没像过去那样拖着脚步走进屋来（他可怜的脸上长满了污浊的粉刺，胡子胡乱剃过，神志阴郁又糊涂），最后是他们认识却并不太喜欢的一个护士出现了，坦白地解释说他又一次企图自杀。他现在还好，她说，不过探访可能会打搅他。那个地方，人员配备得真是太不足了，东西很容易就搞错或是搞混，他们决定不把他们的礼物放在办公室里，而是下次来时再带给他。

During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband
did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped
and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and
brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked
around, trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft
shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the
passengers—a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the
shoulder of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca
Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years
ago.

在去往地铁车站长长的一段路中，她和丈夫互相一个字也没说；每次他瞧瞧自己那双苍老的手（鼓胀的血管，布满褐斑的皮肤），握紧并转动他那把雨伞的柄时，她都感觉到泪水涌出的压力。当她往四处看看力图转移她的思绪时，她看到一个过路人，一个有一头黑发、肮脏的脚趾甲涂成红色的女孩子，正伏在一个年岁大些的女人肩头哭泣，这让她产生了一种混杂着怜悯和好奇的无声的震惊。那个女人像谁？她很像丽贝卡·博里索夫娜，她的女儿嫁给了一个索罗韦契克人——那是多年以前，发生在明斯克的事了。

The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in
the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had
not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him
just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world
and escape.

上一次他们的儿子企图自杀，他的方法是，用医生的话说，一个创造发明的杰作；如果不是一个嫉妒的病友以为他是在学着要飞——而阻止了他，他就成功了。其实他真正想做的只是要在他的世界里撕开一个洞好逃出去。

The system
of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific
monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long
before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves.
“Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the
patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to
his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy,
because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.
Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky
transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information
regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual
alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form
patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept.
Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there
are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still
pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses,
lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the
point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely
misinterpret his actions. He must be
always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding
of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.
If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings,
but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in
volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a
million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains
of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning
firs, the ultimate truth of his being.

他的神经系统错乱曾经是一家科学月刊上的一篇论证详尽的论文的主题，但那是在她和她丈夫苦苦思索想把它弄明白之前很早的事了。赫尔曼•布林克把它称为“联想狂”。在这些很稀少的病例中，患者想象在他身边发生的每一件事情，其隐含的所指都是针对他的个性和存在的。他把真实的人都排除在这一阴谋之外——因为他认为自己比其他人要聪明很多。无论他走到哪里，想象自然都荫蔽着他。明朗天空上的云彩通过缓慢的示意方式互相传递着与他有关的、令人难以置信的详细消息。他内心深处的思想都是在夜幕降临时通过以手语示意黑暗的树木，按照手势符号加以讨论的。卵石或污点或太阳光斑以一种可怕的方式形成了一种模式，它象征着他应该截取的信息。一切都是密码，而他是一切的中心。这些间谍中，有些是公正的观察者，比如玻璃的表面以及平静的池水；其他的，比如橱窗里面的衣服，都是有成见的证人，內心里是以私刑处死他人的人；还有其他的（流动的水，暴风雨）也是歇斯底里几近疯狂，对他抱有扭曲的看法，还荒唐地曲解他的行为。他必须时刻警惕着，把生活的每时每刻和每个单元都致力于破译事物的波状曲线。他所呼出的气息都是被加了索引、归了档案的。如果他激发起的兴趣仅仅被限制在他附近的环境中那该——可是不然！远处野蛮的流言如洪水之滔滔增加。他血细胞的剪影成百万倍地扩大，并从大平原上飞过；更远处，令人无法忍受其坚硬和高度的崇山峻岭通过花岗石和呻吟的冷杉概括地说明了他存在的全部真实。

When they emerged
from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the day were
mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper, so she
handed him the basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home. Accordingly, he
returned to their tenement house, walked up to the third landing, and then
remembered he had given her his keys earlier in the day.

当他们从闹街灯哄哄的地铁里恶臭难闻的空气中走出来时，白日最后的残渣已经与相混合了。她想买点鱼好晚饭时吃，于是就把装着果冻罐的篮子递给了他，让他先回家。他走至楼梯的第三个拐弯处，才想起早晨把钥匙给了她了。

In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when, some
ten minutes later, she came trudging heavily up the stairs, smiling wanly and
shaking her head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room
flat and he at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his mouth
apart by means of his thumbs, with a horrible, mask-like grimace, he removed
his new, hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate. He read his Russian-language
newspaper while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale victuals
that needed no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent.

他静静地坐在了楼梯上，大约十分钟之后又静静地站起身，是她回来了。她脚步沉重地上了楼，疲惫地一笑，又摇摇头，对自己的糊涂不以为然。他们走进他们的两居室单元房，他立刻就走向镜子。用两个大拇指拉开他的嘴角，作出一副可怕的像面具一样的怪脸，他取出那副叫他难受不堪的新的假牙托，而后切断牙托从他口里带出的长长的分泌物。她来摆放餐桌的时候，他正读着他的俄语报纸，一边吃着那根本无需动用牙齿的软质食品，一边仍在读着。她了解他的脾气，也沉默不语。

When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her
pack of soiled playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow
courtyard, where the rain tinkled in the dark against some ash cans, windows
were blandly alight, and in one of them a black-trousered man, with his hands
clasped under his head and his elbows raised, could he seen lying supine on an
untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby,
he looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they
had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album.
She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin,
Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy
when he was four years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking
away from an eager squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous
world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until
the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried
about. The boy, aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands
and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a
famous chess player. The boy again, aged about eight, already hard to
understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture
in a book, which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside
and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree. Here he
was at ten—the year they left Europe. She remembered the shame, the pity, the
humiliating difficulties of the journey, and the ugly, vicious, backward
children he was with in the special school where he had been placed after they
arrived in America. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long
convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his, which his
parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted
child, hardened, as it were, into a dense tangle of logically interacting
illusions, making them totally inaccessible to normal minds.

他上床去睡时，她和她那盒脏污的扑克牌以及她的旧影集留在了起居室里。狭窄的院落对面，雨水在黑暗中滴在一些被砸烂的土灰桶上，窗口泛着惨淡的光；从一扇窗户里，能看见一个穿黑色裤子的男人，抬着裸露的胳臂肘，仰躺在一张乱糟糟的床上。她把百叶窗放了下来，看起那些照片。他还是个婴孩时，看上去就比大多数孩子让人惊奇。他们在莱比锡时用过的一个仆人和她那宽脸膛的未婚夫，从影集里的一个对折处掉了下来。明斯克，大革命，莱比锡，柏林，莱比锡，根本没有对好焦距的一座倾斜的房子的前景。四岁时，在一个公园里：闷闷不乐地，害羞地，皱着眉头，视线躲开了一只热切表现的松鼠，就像他躲开任何其他陌生人一样。罗莎姨妈，一个身材瘦削、两眼发直、很难取悦的老女人，她一直生活在一个充满坏消息的不安世界里，破产，火车事故，癌症——直到德国人把她以及她一直为之担心的所有人都弄死了为止。六岁时——那正是他画长着人的手和脚的神奇的鸟，并且像成年人一样遭受失眠痛苦的时候。他的表哥，现在已是一位著名的国际象棋高手。又是他，大约是八岁，已经产生了理解方面的困难，害怕过道里的糊墙纸，害怕一本书里的某幅插图，那不过是一幅田园诗般的风景，山坡上的岩石、悬在一根枯树枝下的一只旧马车轮子。十岁：他们离开欧洲的那一年。在那所特殊学校里，他和羞耻、可怜、不光彩的障碍，以及那些丑陋的、恶劣的、落后的孩子在一起。而后就是他生命里的那个特别时期，与他患肺炎之后的漫长的恢复期同时，他的那些被他的父母固执地认为是一个异常天才儿童的怪癖的小小恐惧症加重了，它变成了一种必然相互作用的、极度混乱的幻觉，这使他完全无法进入正常人的思维了。

All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living
does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her
case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of
pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of
the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the
incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this
tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of
neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds
that cannot hide from the farmer.

这一点，以及其他许多，她都接受了——因为生活终究意味着要接受一个接一个快乐的丧失，在她这里，甚至不是什么快乐——只是生活改善的可能性。她想着那一阵一阵无尽的痛苦，她和她丈夫不知为何必须承受；想着那以某种难以想象的方式伤害着她的儿子的隐身巨人；想着那包容在这个世界里的无数的温情；想着这种温情的命运或是被碾碎了，或是被浪费了，或是被转变成了疯狂；想着那被人丢弃的孩子在无人清扫的街角暗自沉吟；想着那躲不过农夫之手的美丽的草，只能在骇人的黑暗到来之际，无助地看着他像猿猴似的曲背的影子，以及随后的被残害的花朵。

It was nearly
midnight when, from the living room, she heard her husband moan, and presently
he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with the astrakhan
collar that he much preferred to his nice blue bathrobe.

子夜已过，她听到从卧室里传来丈夫的呻吟；不久，他就蹒跚着走了出来，披着的睡袍是一件带有阿斯特拉罕①皮领子的旧外套，比起他那件不错的蓝色浴衣，他更喜欢这一件。

“I can’t sleep!” he cried.

“Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”

“I can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down on the
couch.

“Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”

“No doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors!
We must get him out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible....
Responsible!” He hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the
floor, thumping his forehead with
his clenched fist.

“All right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home tomorrow
morning.”

“I would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to the
bathroom.

“我睡不着。”他喊着。

“为什么，”她问道，“为什么睡不着？你刚才已经很累了。”

“我睡不着，因为我要死了。”他说着就躺倒在长沙发上。

“是因为你的胃吗？用我去叫索罗大夫吗？”

“不要大夫，不要大夫，”他呻吟道，“让大夫去见鬼吧！我们必须马上把他从那里弄出来。否则我们就得负责任。负责任！”他重复道，并猛地让自己变成坐立的姿势，两只脚都放在地上，用他攥紧的拳头捶着自己的脑门。

“好吧，”她悄声说道，“我们明天一早就把他接回来。”

“我想喝点茶。”她丈夫说道，然后隐没在盥洗室里。

Bending
with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph or two that
had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of
spades, the maid Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in high spirits, saying
in a loud voice, “I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each
of us will spend part of the night near him and the other part on this couch.
We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It does not matter what
the Prince says. He won’t have much to say anyway, because it will come out
cheaper.”

她困难地弯下身，拾起从沙发滑落到地上的一些扑克牌和一两张照片：红桃杰克，黑桃九，黑桃A。埃尔莎和她那兽性的情郎。

他精神振作地转了回来，高声说道：

“我把一切都设想好了。我们把卧室给他。我们两个人各在他身边守上半夜，另一半就在这沙发上打发。轮流。我们让医生至少一个星期来上两次。王子说什么都没关系。他无论如何不会说什么的，因为结果会更便宜的。”

The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring. He
stood in the middle of the room, groping with his foot for one slipper that had
come off, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Since she knew more
English than he, she always attended to the calls.

”Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her
now.

“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”

She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart.
“It frightened me,” she said.

电话这时响了起来。一般这个时间他们的电话是很少响的。他左脚上的拖鞋刚才掉了，他正站在屋子当中，用他的脚后跟和脚趾头摸索着它，这时他孩子般地目瞪口呆地凝视着他妻子，露出了没牙的嘴。她懂的英语比他多，她就去接听那电话了。

“我找查理。”一个女孩子低沉又细小的声音说道。

“你要的是什么电话号码？不是。那个号码不对。”

听筒被轻轻地挂上了。她的手放到了她那苍老又疲惫的心上。

“吓坏了我了。”她说。

He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited
monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection,
they would keep all the knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he
presented no danger to other people.

The telephone rang a second time.

The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.

“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are
doing. You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.

他急速地笑了一下，然后刻不容缓地重新开始了他那激动的独白。天一亮，他们就去接他。刀子要藏在一只上锁的抽屉里。即使在他最糟的情形下，他也不会对别人造成什么危险。

电话第二次响了起来。还是那个找查理的平板、焦虑的年轻的声音。

“你的号码是错的。我来告诉你怎么做吧：你拨字母O，不是拨0。”

They sat
down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face was
flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so as
to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald
head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The
birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea,
he put on his spectacles and reëxamined with pleasure the luminous yellow,
green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent
labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the
telephone rang again.

他们意想不到地像过节似的坐下来喝起了子夜茶。生日礼物就放在桌上。他大声地啜饮着，脸庞都红了，还时不时地把他举起的杯子摇一摇，好让糖更彻底地溶化。他的秃脑袋上有一块很大的胎记，头上的血管明显地凸了出来，而且，尽管他这天早上刮过脸了，下巴上还留着一根银白色胡髭。当她再给他倒了一杯茶时，他戴上了眼镜，愉快地重新察看了那些黄色的、绿色的、红色的小果冻夜光杯。他湿乎乎笨拙的嘴里拼出了它们动人的标签：杏、葡萄、李子、温梨。他还想去抓苹果，这时，电话又响了起来。

(译文原载于《世界文学》1995年第6期)

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