翻译天堂  2016-08-23

没人要我写小说

All young children, we know, are imaginative and creative; and while they remain young these qualities are usually fostered. The grubby but delightful paintings and naive verses are extravagantly admired, shown to visitors, tacked to the kitchen walls. But as children grow older, encouragement of imaginative creation is often quietly replaced by encouragement of what have begun to seem more important traits: good manners, good marks, good looks; athletic and social success; and a willingness to earn money mowing lawns and baby-sitting—traits that are believed to predict adult success. Children who seem unlikely to do well along these lines sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn’t have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, “too clever for her own good,” but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn’t seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.

我们都知道，小孩子富有想象力和创造力。只要他们还是孩子，这些品质通常会得到鼓励和培养。脏乎乎但妙趣横生的图画和天真幼稚的诗作会得到不遗余力的褒奖，展示给来访者看，钉在厨房的墙上。可一旦孩子长大，对他们富于想象的创造力的鼓励会在悄然间被替换成对另一些品质的鼓励，这些品质开始显得更为重要：彬彬有礼、成绩优秀、相貌出众；有运动天分，擅长社交；愿意靠修草坪和看孩子来赚钱——总之这些品质被认为能预示他们长大成人后的成功。在这些方面看起来没有多大发展前途的孩子，有时候会发现自己的作品在厨房墙上的时间要长一些。我就是这种清早。在过了小孩子的年龄后，我仍然受到大人对我创造力的鼓励，这是因为我没有其他的长处。我是个瘦骨伶仃、长相平平的小女孩，由于出生时受伤，一只耳朵严重受损，什么也听不到。后遗症还有面部肌肉萎缩，我只要张口说话，就会把嘴拉歪，或者把微笑变成一种冷笑。我很聪明，或者拿我一位老师的话来说，“聪明得过了头”，但我并不特别讨人喜欢，也不怎么温柔或帮得了别人。我好像总学不会骑车，唱歌总找不到调，无论哪个队挑人，我都是最不可能被挑到的。

I knew all about Old Maids from the Victorian and Edwardian children’s books that were my favorite reading. Old Maids wore spectacles and old fashioned clothes and lived in cottages with gardens, where they entertained children and Old Maids to tea. They were always odd in some way: absent-minded or timid or rude or fussy. Sometimes they taught school, but most of their time was devoted to making wonderful walnut cake and blackberry jam and dandelion wine, to telling tales and painting watercolors, to embroidery and kitting and crocheting, and to growing prize cabbages and roses. Occasionally they shared their cottage with another Old Maid, but mostly they lived alone, often with a cat. Sometimes the cat was their familiar, and they were really witches. You could tell which ones were witches, according to one of my children’s books, because there was always something wrong with them: They had six fingers on one hand, or their feet were on backward, and so on.

我喜欢读维多利亚时代和爱德华时代的儿童书，对书里的老姑娘知道一清二楚。她们戴眼镜，穿着老式的衣服，住在带花园的小房子里。她们招待小孩子和其他老姑娘喝茶。她们都有点怪：要么心不在焉，要么胆怯、粗鲁，或者大惊小怪。她们有时在学校教书，但是把大部分时间用来做好吃的胡桃蛋糕、黑莓酱和蒲公英酒，或是讲故事、画水彩画，或是绣花钩织，或是培育能得园艺奖的卷心菜和玫瑰。她们偶尔会和别的老姑娘合住一幢小屋，不过她们多半自己住，常有猫儿做伴儿。有时这只猫是她们的挚友，而她们实际上是女巫。你可以判断出谁是女巫，因为根据我的儿童书上说，女巫总会有什么地方不对劲儿：她们一只手上有六个指头，或者她们的脚是倒着长的，如此等等。

By the time I was 8 or 9 I was aware of these disadvantages, and it was my belief that as a result of them nobody would wish to marry me and I would never have any of the children whose names and sexes I had chosen at an earlier and more ignorant age. I would be an ugly old maid, the card in the pack that everyone tried to get rid of.

到了八九岁的时候，我开始意识到了自己的这些缺陷，我相信因为它们，没人愿意娶我，我也不会有孩子，虽然孩子的名字和性别的我更小更无知的时候就想好了。我会变成一个丑老婆子，一副牌里人人都想甩掉的那一张。

All right, that would be my future. I knew it was so because of the kind of positive reinforcement I was getting from adults. Just as with the Old Maids, all that I produced was praised: my school compositions, my drawings, my fudge brownies, my rag rugs and especially my stories. “Charming!” “Really beautiful.” “Perfectly lovely, dear.” Nobody ever told me that I was perfectly lovely, though, as they did other little girls. Very well, then: perfection of the work.

好吧，那将是我的未来。我知道这个是因为我总是从打人那里得到这样肯定的印象。就像人们对待老姑娘的那样，我做什么都会得到表扬：我在学校写的作文、画的画、做的巧克力兔子、碎步毯子、特别是我讲的故事。“太棒了！”“真好看！”“可爱极了，亲爱的！”从来没有人像跨别的小女孩一样，夸我长得可爱极了。那好吧：我的活儿干得漂亮。

Not that it seemed to me like work. Making up stories, for instance, was what I did for fun. With a pencil and paper I could revise the world. I could move mountains; I could fly over Westchester at night in a winged clothes basket; I could call up a brown-and-white-spotted milk-giving dragon to eat the neighbor who had told me and my sister not to walk through her field and bother her cows. And a little later, when I tried nonfiction, I found that without actually lying I could describe events and persons in such a way that my readers would think of them as I chose. “Dear Parents - We have a new English teacher. He has a lovely wild curly brown beard and he gets really excited about poetry and ideas.” Or, if he had written an unfavorable comment on my latest paper: “He is a small man with yellow teeth and a lot of opinions.” Or any two, three, 20 other versions of him, all of them the truth - if I said so, the whole truth. That was what you could do with just a piece of paper and a pencil; writing was a kind of witch’s spell.

对我来说，其实这些都不算干活儿。比如说，我编故事是为了开心。有一支笔和一张纸我就可以改造世界。我可以移动山脉；我可以晚上坐着长翅膀的洗衣篮飞过韦斯特切斯特；我可以叫来长着棕白斑点的产奶龙，让它吃掉告诉我和妹妹不能穿过她家田地打扰她家母牛的邻居。后来，等我尝试写非虚构的作品时，我发现实际上无需撒谎我也可以得心应手地描写人和事，让读者按我的意愿去感受。“亲爱的爸爸妈妈——我们有了一位新的英语老师。他留着可爱的乱蓬蓬打着卷的棕色胡子，特别喜欢诗歌，很有思想。”或者，如果他在我新交的作业上写了不好的评语，我就会这样描写他：“他是个小个子，牙齿发黄，总有一大堆意见。”也可以有任何两种、三种、二十钟其他关于他的说法，每个版本说的都是事实——如果我这么说的话，也就是全部的事实。这是你用一张纸和一支笔就能做到的；写作就是一种女巫的魔法。