翻译天堂  2016-08-26

My Life’s Sentences

Jhumpa Lahiri

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

我生命里的美句

裘帕·拉希莉

上大学时，我常常划下那些让我为之震撼、为之深思的句子，但不一定是教授们指出来，或者会出现在考试中让我们进一步阐释的句子。我记下来，是因为这些句子集简洁、韵味、美感和魅力于一体。想来真是不可思议，就有那么一些词，巧妙地摆在一起，足以令时光停滞。变出个地名、变出个人名、变出个情景，真实而细腻。它们对我们影响之深、改变之大，与现实中人和物所起的作用无异。

I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. Rereading them, certain sentences are what greet me as familiars. You have visited before; they say when I recognize them. We encounter books at different times in life, often appreciating them, apprehending them, in different ways. But their language is constant. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

我记得读过乔伊斯写的一个句子，就在短篇小说《阿拉比》（Araby）的开头附近：“寒风咬，玩兴浓，玩到身上红彤彤。”我忘不掉，句子之完美，已臻极致。拿捏仔细、顺手溜出、直白质朴、卓尔不群，一股脑，这些感觉就都来了；充满动感，富于想象，凝聚为可感可知的氛围，意义闪着异彩，感觉真实自然。

复杂的故事或小说，主体宏大，情节众多，读来感觉似难连到一起。再读时会发现，某些句子就像老熟人向我热情打着招呼。我把它们认了出来，它们说我旧地重游。在我们的一生中，不同时期，会遇到不同的书籍，欣赏、理解各不相同。但语言是永恒的，美句就像夜空里的星星、像小道上的路标，引导我们前行。

They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

不管是不是真正进入阅读，美句都值得反复咀嚼。再怎么吸引人的故事，若用的句子不能让我产生共鸣或者令我反感，就会让我麻木。小说主要的任务是传递信息、制造悬念、刻画人物，并使他们开口讲话。但只有某些句子会呼吸、会变化，就像泥土里的生命。一本书的第一句话写好了，就是向读者伸出友好之手、敞开的温暖怀抱，无关风格和个性，可以正式，可以随意，高矮胖瘦，无所不能；或遵从规则，或打破常规，但一定要带着电，摄入魂魄，闪光发热。

Knowing – and learning to read in – a foreign tongue heightens and complicates my relationship to sentences. For some time now, I have been reading predominantly in Italian. I experience these novels and stories differently. I take no sentence for granted. I am more conscious of them. I work harder to know them. I pause to look something up, I puzzled over syntax I am still assimilating. Each sentence yields a twin, translated version of itself. When the filter of a second language falls away, my connection to these sentences, though more basic, feels purer, at times more intimate, than when I read in English.

了解并学会用外语阅读，加强了我对句子的亲近度，关系也由此变得复杂起来。最近一个时期，我主要阅读的是意大利语，并以别样的方式体验意大利语写就的小说和故事。我一句也不敢瞎猜，敏感有加，为了多一份了解，我更加用功。我驻足查询，对我在吸收学习的句法结构也困惑不已，每个句子都孽生出了个翻译版孪生兄弟。当第二语言这一过滤器消失时，我和这些句子的联系虽然直接，却比我读英语时感觉更纯，有时更加亲近了。

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

把经历变成语法联结的一组词，是本能的冲动，是我生命中持续不竭的动力之源，是呼是应的习惯使然。多数的日子是从敲日记里的句子开始的，外人不曾见过，因此也就多了一分自由，多了一分不想写那些绞尽脑汁东西的自由。下笔处，多无惊人之语，是练手、练脑而已。在我困苦、忧伤、语塞的日子里，我习惯性地造些句子，珍藏起来，便成了让我重新凝神聚气唯一可做之事。

Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but sentences. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.

造个句子，就像宝丽莱快照：按下快门，观察成像。动笔成句，则是集记录和冲洗于一体，并非所有的句子其归宿都在小说或故事里，但小说和故事除了句子，别无所有。句子是泥浆，是砖块，是燃料，是引擎，是机体的细胞，是衣服的针脚，它同时具备独居性和群体性的两面性，句子定调、定节奏，排着队，记录着行进的轨迹。

My work accrues sentences by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be tuned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

我的任务就是一句一句地积累美句。经过了第一个时期的耐心、浮躁、圈选、装订之后，句子就自然而然地涌进了我的脑海里。也不知是谁将句子诵读出声，我迷迷糊糊要入睡时便学会了倾听。就是我读的，我心里有数，虽然声音的源头让人觉得清醒独立、深不可测，特别在开始那会儿。打开灯，一两个句子就会快速、潦草地画到纸片上，早上起床拿到楼上，放在本子里。凝视窗外时心里听着句子，切菜时心里听着句子，在地铁的站台上候车时心里还听着句子，这些句子就是智力拼图玩具上的零件，递到我手上，并没按什么顺序，也没有明显的逻辑。凭我直觉，它们就是整个东西的一份子。

Over time, virtually each sentence I receive and record in this haphazard manner will be sorted, picked over, organized, changed. Most will be dispensed with. All the version I do – and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation – occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.

从长远看，我以这种随意的方式收集、记录的每个句子都要分类、挑拣、组织、改变，而很多还要删掉。我做的所有修正——该过程动手快，且加进了自己的思想——发生于句子层面。对句子的精雕细琢，会让刻画的人物呼之欲出，让描绘的情节展露无遗。执迷于此，或者说急于对收集的句子加工整理，是先树木后森林之为，可也实在找不到构想森林更好的办法了。

As a book or story nears completion, I grow acutely, obsessively conscious of each sentence in the text. They enter into blood. They seem to replace it, for a while. When something is in proofs I sit in solitary confinement with them. Each is confronted, inspected, turned inside out. Each is sentenced, literally, to be part of the text, or not. Such close scrutiny can lead to blindness. At times – and these times terrify – they cease to make sense. When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft. It is the absence of all those sentences that had circulated through me for a period of my life. A complex root system, extracted.

书或故事快要完稿时，我对每个句子都有一股强烈的、着魔般的敏感力，好句子融入了血液，似乎有那么一瞬间将其取而代之。到了该校对的时候，我与句子独处一室，看看这句，挑挑那句，颠来倒去。把这个句子判那儿，把这个句子判这儿。如此挑剔，难免导致盲目。有的时候，不免恐怖，句子竟不再传意。好不容易脱稿了，我却怅然若失，失去的是那些曾经在我生命中往复循环的美句，萎缩的是曾经维系枝繁叶茂的庞大根系。

Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively. This is why I avoid reading the books I’ve written. Why, when I must, I approach the book as a stranger, and pretend the sentences were written by someone else.

即使印在纸上，装订成册，句子还是漂泊不定之物。再过多少年，我总能伸手抚平一丝乱发，而有的时候，我需要走得远远的，相信那些句子能够独自行事。我兀自回头，想着我是不是还有可能将句子造得更好一些。我不想读自己写的书，若出于必须，便以陌生客近而审视，骗自己：那些句子可是别人写下的。