| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| In 1991, a little-known writer in Beijing named Wang Xiaobo mailed the manuscript of a novel to the eminent historian Cho-yun Hsu, his former professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The book was about China’s Cultural Revolution, the political purge from 1966 to 1976 that killed more than a million people and sent scientists, writers, artists and millions of educated youths to labor in the countryside. |
| 1991年，名不见经传的北京作家王小波把一本小说的手稿寄给自己在匹兹堡大学的教授、著名历史学家许倬云。这是一本关于中国1966年到1976年的“文化大革命”的书，那场政治清洗杀死了一百多万人，把科学家、作家、艺术家和数百万受过教育的青年送到农村劳动。 |
| At the time Wang was writing, novels about the Cultural Revolution tended to be fairly conventional tales of how good people suffered nobly during this decade of madness. The system itself was rarely called into question. Wang’s book was radically different. THE GOLDEN AGE (Astra House, 272 pp., $26) — the title itself was a provocation — told the tragic-absurd story of a young man who is exiled, witnesses suicide, endures bullying and beatings by local officials … and spends as much time as possible having sex. |
| 在王小波写作的年代，有关文革的小说往往是相当中规中矩的故事，讲述好人在这疯狂的十年中如何高贵地忍受苦难，体制本身则很少受到质疑。王小波的书完全不同。《黄金时代》（阿斯特拉书屋，272页，26美元）的书名本身就是一种挑衅，它讲述了一个被流放的年轻人悲剧性的荒谬故事，他目睹他人自杀，忍受了当地官员的欺凌和殴打，并且……抓住一切机会做爱。 |
| Professor Hsu forwarded the manuscript to the judges of one of Taiwan’s most prominent literary prizes. Wang’s story of lust and loss won, stunning China’s literary world and turning the author into one of the country’s most influential and popular novelists. |
| 许倬云将手稿转交给台湾一个著名文学奖的评委。这篇关于欲望与伤逝的小说获了奖，震惊了中国文坛，并使王小波成为中国最有影响力和最受欢迎的小说家之一。 |
| Wang’s position in China’s literary canon is remarkable because he was never part of the state-sponsored writers’ association — unlike better-known figures such as the Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, Yu Hua or Jia Pingwa. Wang seemed to have come out of nowhere, and he left nearly as quickly, dying of a heart attack in 1997, at age 44. In just a few years he wrote an avalanche of novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles, many of them published posthumously. |
| 王小波在中国文学界的地位格外引人注目，因为与诺贝尔文学奖得主莫言、余华和贾平凹等更为知名的人物不同，他从未加入过政府背景的作家协会。王小波似乎是横空出世的，而且离开的速度也差不多同样快——他于1997年死于心脏病发作，享年44岁。短短几年时间里，他创作了大量长篇小说、短篇小说、散文和报刊文章，其中许多是在他死后发表。 |
| Only one section of “The Golden Age” had been published in English until a new translation by Yan Yan came out this year. The novel recounts the coming-of-age of Wang Er, whose life closely parallels Wang Xiaobo’s. Like the author, he is born in 1952, grows up in Beijing, participates in the Cultural Revolution as a teenager and is sent to work in the countryside. |
| 《黄金时代》此前的英译本只节选了全书的一部分，直到今年Yan Yan的新译本问世。小说讲述了王二的成长历程，他的生活与王小波十分相似。和作者一样，他出生于1952年，在北京长大，十几岁时参加了文化大革命，后来被下放到农村劳动。 |
| But while Wang Er ends up in a series of failed relationships back in the capital, Wang Xiaobo in 1980 married one of China’s most formidable academics, Li Yinhe, who had a profound impact on him and remained with him until his death. Part of the first generation of sociologists to be trained after Mao’s ban on the field was lifted, Li went to Pittsburgh to earn her Ph.D., accompanied by her husband, who earned a master’s in Asian studies. Back home, the couple published an early (for China) study of homosexuality, and Li later went on to become a champion of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement. |
| 不过，王二回到首都后经历了一系列失败的恋情，王小波却在1980年与中国最杰出的学者之一李银河结婚，后者对他产生了深远的影响，并一直陪伴着他直到他去世。在国内，这对夫妇发表了一份关于同性恋的早期（相对于中国而言）研究报告，李银河后来成为LGBTQ运动的倡导者。 |
| For Wang, gay people were just one of many groups whose voices were drowned out by the state’s monopoly over media. His thinking crystallized in a hugely influential 1996 essay, “The Silent Majority,” which argued that the state silences not just people of different sexual orientations, but most Chinese people, from migrants and miners to farmers and students. It is a call to action for civil society, for an end to silence — and it remains an inspiration for many Chinese today in a new era of overwhelming state control. |
| 对于王小波来说，同性恋者只是因国家垄断媒体而被淹没的众多群体之一。他在1996年发表的一篇极具影响力的文章《沉默的大多数》中详细阐述了自己的想法。文章认为，国家不仅让不同性取向的人保持沉默，还让大多数中国人保持沉默，从农民工、矿工到农民和学生。文章呼吁公民社会采取行动，结束沉默——在今天这个国家实行压倒性控制的新时代，这篇文章仍然激励着许多中国人。 |
| The idea of how to stand up to power underlies “The Golden Age.” At the start, Wang Er is stationed in the tribal border region of Yunnan, herding oxen and smitten with a doctor working in the same commune. He’s 21, buoyant and hungry. “In the golden age of my life, I was full of dreams,” he says. “I wanted to love, to eat and to instantly transform into one of those clouds, part alight, part darkened.” |
| “如何对抗权力”是《黄金时代》的基础。小说一开始，王二被分配到云南边境的村寨放牛，和在同一公社工作的一位医生产生了感情。他21岁，精力充沛，饥肠辘辘。“在我一生的黄金时代，我有好多奢望，”他说。“我想爱，想吃，还想在一瞬间变成天上半明半暗的云。” |
| But he quickly contrasts these dreams with the harshness of life under a powerful state, comparing it to a local method of castrating oxen. For most bulls, it was enough to simply slice the scrotum. Temperamental ones, however, had their testicles pulled out and beaten to a pulp with a wooden club. “It was only later that I understood — life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed,” our narrator observes. “Day by day, you get older. Day by day, your dreams fade. In the end you are no different from a crushed ox.” |
| 但他很快将这些奢望与强权国家下的严酷生活进行了对比，将这种生活比作当地阉割公牛的方法。大多数公牛仅仅切开阴囊就足够了。然而，性情格外暴躁的公牛需要把睾丸扯出来，用木锤砸个稀烂。“后来我才知道，生活就是个缓慢受锤的过程，”我们的叙述者评论道。“人一天天老下去，奢望也一天天消失。最后变得像受了锤的牛一样。” |
| One way to read “The Golden Age” is to focus on the sex — and there is a lot of it. But little of it is described in realistic detail; instead it becomes a device through which the hero and his lover, Chen Qingyang, stand up to the state. Outed for having a premarital affair, which was taboo in the Mao era, they are forced to write erotic “confessions” for horny Communist Party officials and ascend stages to describe their acts to crowds of bug-eyed farmers. |
| 阅读《黄金时代》的一种方式是关注其中的性爱——有很多关于性的内容。但很少有写实的细节描述；相反，性爱成了主人公和他的爱人陈清扬反抗国家的手段。他们被发现有了婚前性行为，这在毛泽东时代是一种禁忌。他们被迫为好色的共产党官员写情色的“交代材料”，并登上舞台，向台下一群目瞪口呆的农民描述自己的行为。 |
| Their increasingly elaborate and lurid admissions, demanded again and again by their superiors, fall somewhere in tone between Harlequin romance and modernist poem: “Chen Qingyang and I committed innumerable crimes in the clearing behind Old Man Liu’s because his fallow, fertile land was almost effortless to clear.” Sex itself is “epic friendship,” as in: “We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breaths.” (The narrator is asked to clarify “what is commitment from the front and what is commitment from the rear.”) The confessions amount to an absurdist critique of unchecked state power, making a mockery of its instruments. |
| 在上级的一再要求下，他们的交代越来越详细和淫秽，在某种程度上介于哈利昆式小丑爱情故事和现代主义诗歌之间：“我和陈清扬在刘大爹后山上作案无数，这是因为刘大爹的地是熟地，开起来不那么费力。”性爱则是“伟大友谊”，比如：“在山上敦伟大友谊时，嘴里喷出白气。”（叙事者被要求解释“什么是正着敦，什么是反着敦”。）这些交代相当于对不受制约的国家权力的荒诞批判，是对国家权力工具的嘲弄。 |
| Later, Wang Er returns to Beijing in the late 1970s and becomes an obsequious academic, finally hammered into submission. But he is haunted by a suicide that he saw over a decade earlier, before his time in the countryside, when he lived with his family on a college campus. A faculty member had been tortured so much that he jumped out the window of a building. Officials carted off his body for an “autopsy” (diagnosis: no foul play, even though bruises showed how he had been tortured). But they refused to clean the chunks of brain on the pavement, claiming that this was the family’s responsibility. |
| 后来，王二在1970年代末回到北京，成为一名谄媚逢迎的学者，在重锤之下屈服。但他一直忘不了十几年前的一起自杀事件，当时他还没到农村，和家人住在一所大学校园里。一名教员经受可怕的折磨后，从一栋大楼的窗户跳了下去。官员们将他的尸体运走进行“尸检”（结论：并非谋杀，尽管瘀伤表明他受了折磨）。但官方拒绝清理人行道上的脑浆，声称那是家属的责任。 |
| The night after the suicide, Wang Er gets up at 2 in the morning thinking of the man’s brains. He walks to the site and sees that the pieces are lit up by flickering candles that seem to make them dance. Denied a chance to mourn, the children are keeping a wake over what is left of their father, a scene that the narrator recalls over and over in the novel. |
| 自杀事件发生的第二天晚上，王二在凌晨两点起床，想着那个人的脑浆。他走到现场，看到脑浆被摇曳的蜡烛照亮，仿佛翩翩起舞。被剥夺哀悼机会的孩子们在父亲的残留物前守灵，这是小说叙述者反复回忆起的一个场景。 |
| The author’s focus on these details is purposeful. At the end of the book, the narrator recalls that his generation was raised to do something heroic with their lives. When they were young, that meant imitating Mao and being zealous Communists, but their idealism only ended up bringing violence and suffering. Now middle-aged, Wang Er is unsure how to do anything meaningful. His girlfriend tells him he has to break out of the silence that has plagued him since his youth, to “write down everything, including the unbelievable things and the things you don’t dare to write about.” He must report what he has seen — not just the big issues but also the small, telling details that might let the past speak to the present. |
| 作者对这些细节的关注并非无的放矢。在全书最后，叙述者回忆说，他这一代人被教育要用生命去做一些英勇的事情。在年轻的时候，这意味着模仿毛泽东，成为积极的共产党人，但他们的理想主义最终只带来暴力和苦难。如今，已经步入中年的王二不知道应该如何去做有意义的事情。女友告诉他，他必须打破从年轻时就一直困扰他的沉默，“必须把一切事都写出来，包括乍看不可置信的事，不敢写出这样的事情，就是媚俗。”他必须写下自己看到的一切——不只是那些大问题，也包括那些可能让过去与现在对话的小细节。 |
| THE GOLDEN AGE, by Wang Xiaobo | Translated by Yan Yan | 272 pp. | Astra House | $26 |
| 《黄金时代》，王小波著 | Yan Yan译 | 272页 | 阿斯特拉书屋 | 26美元 |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们