纽约时报,石黑一雄 纽约时报

 

今天将要介绍的是诺奖得主——石黑一雄~...



您的假期余额还剩1天~准备好迎接上班或上学的暴击了吗?~今天将要介绍的是诺奖得主——石黑一雄

~

Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel Winner Whose Characters Are Caught Between Worlds



When Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976, he remarked that “the child in me is delighted” but “the adult in me is skeptical.” Bellow found there was a “secret humiliation connected with the prize,” he later said, because “some of the very great writers of the century didn’t get it.”

1976年索尔·贝娄获得诺贝尔奖时,“我心中的孩子感到愉悦”,但“我心中的成人感到怀疑”。贝娄发现“奖项背后让人感到某种私下的屈辱”,他后来说,那是因为“本世纪某些最伟大的作家未能获奖”。

The child in many readers was delighted, if the adult skeptical, when Bob Dylan took home last year’s Nobel in Literature. There was further skepticism when it was learned that Dylan apparently plagiarized some of his acceptance speech from SparkNotes.

去年鲍勃·迪伦捧回诺贝尔文学奖时,许多读者的孩子心得到愉悦,尽管心中的成人感到怀疑。得知迪伦的获奖词显然部分剽窃了SparkNotes,这种怀疑就更进一步了。

This year there will not be that sort of bickering: Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan and raised in England, is a safe choice — he’s been a blue-chip literary stock for nearly four decades — but a formidable and not uninteresting one.

今年就不会出现那种争议:出生在日本、成长在英格兰的石黑一雄是个安全的选择,近四十年来,他是一流的文坛巨匠,可这也是艰难的、绝非稀松平常的选择。

Ishiguro, the first writer of Japanese birth to win the Nobel since Kenzaburo Oe in 1994, is an artist of restraint and equipoise. None of his novels is the same as the last, yet he has achieved over the course of his career a remarkable consistency of affect.

石黑一雄是1994年大江健三郎获诺贝尔文学奖以来第一位出生于日本的获奖作家,他主张节制与平衡,没有哪部小说与上一部雷同,可他在整个文学生涯中实现了卓越的情感连续性。

He creates worlds that are clear in a sentence-by-sentence way, but in which the big picture recedes against the horizon. His novels are about discovery and revelation, and how slowly they arrive even for the most meticulous observer.

他创造的世界,逐字逐句,清晰可辨,可整个图景却融入地平线中。他的小说有关发现和揭露,即便最细心的观察者也只能缓慢接近真相。

Ishiguro is best known for his third novel, “The Remains of the Day” (1989), which is related from the perspective of Stevens, a punctilious English butler. A teacup of strong Earl Grey, it won the Booker Prize and was made into an indelible film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

石黑一雄第三部小说《长日留痕》最具名气,一丝不苟的英国管家史蒂文斯讲了他的故事。那是一杯浓郁的伯爵红茶,获得了布克奖,安东尼·霍普金斯和爱玛·汤普森将其演绎成不朽的电影。

It escaped no one’s notice that an immigrant to England had written the most moving, witty, ironic and British book of its time. Ishiguro’s fluid command of Stevens’s idiom never faltered.

一个英格兰移民写出当代最感人、睿智、反讽和有英国范儿的作品,这逃不出任何人的注意。石黑一雄纯熟地掌控着史蒂文斯的语言风格,没有丝毫犹豫。

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost,” Stevens tells us. “They will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They were their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone.” Stevens’s sang-froid was matched by Ishiguro’s own.

“伟大的管家所以伟大,因为他们发挥了专业能力,并将其发挥到极致,”史蒂文斯告诉我们。“他们不会被外部事件干扰,无论有多么令人惊讶、惊恐或沮丧。他们的专业素养就像得体的绅士身着正装:他不会在众目睽睽下让无赖或境遇将其撕下;只有他自愿丢弃时,他才会丢弃,而这总是发生在他独自一人时。”史蒂文斯的镇定堪比石黑一雄。



Ishiguro — his friends call him Ish — became a public figure in 1989, but to anyone paying attention he seemed to have arrived fully formed as a writer. His excellent first two novels, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982) and “An Artist of the Floating World” (1986), were set in Japan. One turns to “A Pale View of Hills” today and realizes how resonant it is from its first sentences:

石黑一雄——朋友们称他“石”——1989年成为公众人物,可对任何注意到他的人看来,他不过就是个作者。他两部出色的处女作《群山淡影》和《浮世画家》以日本为背景。今天人们再读《群山淡景》,第一句就让人深感共鸣:

“Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I — perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past — insisted on an English one.” The book’s tone never slips.

“尼基,我们最终决定给小女儿这个名字,它不是个缩写;这是我和他父亲妥协的结果。荒谬的是,倒是他想要给女儿一个日本名字,我,可能出于不愿想起过去的某种自私的冲动,坚持要起个英文名。”这种调调一贯到底。

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, where his father was an oceanographer, in 1954. His family moved to England when he was five. “If I wrote under a pseudonym,” he said in a 1990 interview, “and got somebody else to pose for my jacket photographs, I’m sure nobody would think of saying, ‘This guy reminds me of that Japanese writer.’”

石黑一雄1954年出生在长崎,父亲是海洋学家。他五岁时,家庭移民英格兰。“我用假名写作,”他1990年接受采访时说,“找别人替我拍半身照。我相信没人会想到:这家伙让我想到那个日本作家。”

His dual identity has made him alert to life’s dislocations; many of his characters are caught, in different ways, between worlds. There is a sense among his men and women that a single wrong move may be calamitous. He got at this feeling in “Never Let Me Go” (2005), when his narrator comments:

他的双重身份让他对生活的错位很敏感;他的许多人物撕扯于两个世界之间,以不同的方式。他笔下的男男女女让人感觉一失足就成千古恨。他的叙述者在《别让我走》(2005)中表达了这种感觉:

“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of the disaster you’ve left yourself open to.”

“就像你在走棋,手指刚从棋子上拿开,就发现自己犯了错,心中恐慌,因为你还不知道你给自己带来什么灾难。”

Several of Ishiguro’s novels feature artists as their protagonists, but his work will not be pinned down in terms of genre and setting. His follow-up to “The Remains of the Day” was “The Unconsoled” (1995), an inchoate novel about an aging and arrogant pianist in an unnamed European town.

有几部石黑一雄的小说以艺术家作为主人公,但他的作品不能用同一种体裁和背景定义。《长日留痕》的下一部小说是《无可慰藉》(1995),这是一部不算成熟的作品,讲述了一座未名的欧洲城市里,一个自大的、走向衰老的钢琴家的故事。

That novel has its detractors, of which I am one. James Wood said it “invented its own category of badness.” Even Ishiguro’s better novels have slack moments, when a certain flatness of phrase can creep in.

小说有很多批评者,我就是其中之一。詹姆斯·伍德说小说“发明了属于自己的糟糕之作”。即便石黑一雄写得不错的小说也有大意的时候,不乏让人感到用词单调。

“When We Were Orphans” (2000), about an Englishman who grew up in China, has subversive elements of the detective novel. His work has grown less predictable with time.

《我辈孤雏》(2000)的主人公是一名在中国长大的英国人,小说具有侦探小说的颠覆性特色。随着时间推移,他的作品日益难以预料。

Ishiguro tinkered again with genre in “Never Let Me Go,” a slice of dystopian science fiction about children raised so that their organs can be harvested. His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant” (2015), set in a mythical British past, was described by one English critic as “‘Game of Thrones’ with a conscience.”

石黑一雄在《别让我走》中再次借助其他体裁,这是一部反乌托邦科幻小说,孩子们被养大,人们旨在收割他们的器官。他最新一部小说《被掩埋的巨人》(2015),背景是神话中过去的英国,一个英国文评家将其形容为“有良知的《权利的游戏》”。

What links Ishiguro’s disparate novels is his voice, which is abstemious yet oddly lush and possessed of gyroscopic balance.

将石黑一雄风格各异的小说贯通起来的是他的声音,他出言克制,却丰盈若滔滔江水,有陀螺仪式的平衡感。

“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro — but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix, and then you stir, but not too much, and then you have his writings,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. His work rarely fails to cast a spell.

“你把简·奥斯汀和弗朗茨·卡夫卡混合起来,就能看到石黑一雄——但你还得加上点马塞尔·普鲁斯特,搅拌起来,但别太过,你就看到他的作品了,”瑞典文学院常务秘书萨拉·达尼乌斯说。他的作品无一例外可以施加魔法。

(文章来源:英文联播)

——阅读推荐——
杨绛先生 | 翻译的技巧
侃大山 | 最英俊也成就最高的翻译官——马英九
译者刘宇昆——大刘、郝景芳雨果奖背后的贵人
新译者访谈 | 黄灿然:其他工种或许存在天才,但翻译没有
他是朗读者,更是美的译者 | 许渊冲





    关注 有译思


微信扫一扫关注公众号

0 个评论

要回复文章请先登录注册