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| NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, by Haruki Murakami | Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen |
| 《我的职业是小说家》，村上春树著|菲利普·加布里埃尔与特德·古森译 |
| Since 2007, success as a novelist settled comfortably upon him, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has, in his eccentric way, been writing an autobiography. Without advertising itself as such, it nevertheless keeps arriving, piecemeal: first a short, brilliant book about his habits as a daily runner, later a long essay about his father, most recently an illustrated compendium of his T-shirt collection. |
| 自2007年以来，村上春树以成功的小说家生涯为依靠而高枕无忧，一直在以自己古怪的方式书写一部自传。虽然没有大肆宣传，但还是以零散的方式不断出现：首先是一本关于他每天跑步习惯的精彩小书，后来是一篇关于他父亲的长文，最近又是一本关于他的T恤收藏的附图汇编。 |
| And now he’s written “Novelist as a Vocation,” a reflection on his career. It blends writing advice and memoir, tracking his early triumphs — in typically magical Murakamian fashion, he won a prize for his first novel after submitting his only copy of the manuscript to the judges — through his years as an international star, his work translated into more than 50 languages, his betting odds for the Nobel Prize very short each October. |
| 现在他写了《我的职业是小说家》，这是对他职业生涯的反思，其中融合了写作建议和回忆录，记录了他早期的成功——他在向评委提交了小说处女作的唯一一份手稿后获了奖，堪称典型的村上春树式神奇事件——还记录了他成为国际明星的岁月，他的作品被翻译成50多种语言，每年10月，他获得诺贝尔奖的赔率都非常低。 |
| The result is a book that’s assured, candid and often — never meet your heroes, they say — deeply irritating. |
| 结果是，这本书自信、坦率，而且往往——人们说，永远不要亲眼见到你的偶像——让人觉得非常恼火。 |
| Murakami’s greatness as a novelist is incontestable. Of his 14 novels published in English, at least three are masterpieces, and all are worth reading. The finest of them is “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” first published in 1994, which represents the apotheosis of his early style: a first-person narration, in lucid, unassuming sentences, that reveals dreamlike depths within its protagonist’s modest Tokyo life. The sublime tension of Murakami’s work is that his writing is simple and open (Hemingway and Carver are among his heroes) while the world it depicts gets only more mystifying, an uncanny naturalism that augured writers such as David Mitchell and Jesmyn Ward. |
| 作为小说家，村上春树的伟大是毋庸置疑的。他的14部有英译本的小说都值得一读，而且至少有三部是杰作，其中最精彩的是1994年首次出版的《奇鸟行状录》，代表了他早期风格的巅峰：以第一人称叙述，用清晰、不做作的句子揭示主人公朴素的东京生活中那梦境般的纵深。村上春树作品令人惊叹的张力在于，他的写作简单而开放（海明威和卡弗是他的偶像），而笔下的世界却更加神秘，一种神秘的自然主义，令人想起大卫·米切尔和杰斯迈恩·沃德那样的作家。 |
| In its strongest passages, ably translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen, “Novelist as a Vocation” shares these qualities of transparency and deep thought. There’s a wonderful account of the epiphany that led Murakami to become a novelist, which took place at a Tokyo baseball game in 1978. “The sky was a sparkling blue,” he remembers, “the draft beer as cold as cold could be, and the ball strikingly white against the green field. … In that instant, and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.” |
| 通过菲利普·加布里埃尔和泰德·古森精彩的翻译，《我的职业是小说家》中最有力的段落呈现了这些透明而又深邃的特质。其中有一段精彩的描述是关于村上春树决定成为小说家的顿悟，它发生在1978年东京的一场棒球比赛中。“天空是闪闪发光的蓝色，”他回忆道，“生啤酒要多凉就有多凉，绿色的球场上，棒球格外洁白……就在那个瞬间，毫无根据地，我突然想：我也许可以写一部小说。” |
| But aside from these rare moments, the book makes for a weird, cranky document. Its chapters focus on subjects that should be useful to any aspiring or working writer — originality, literary prizes, publishing abroad — yet each somehow collapses in on Murakami’s experience, leaving only traces of practical advice, and a narrator who seems at once proud, complacent, tone-deaf and aggrieved. |
| 但是，除了这些罕见的时刻，这本书是一份古怪、暴躁的记录。书中各章的重点是对任何有抱负或正在创作的作家应该会有用的主题——原创性、文学奖、海外出版——但每一章都以某种方式淹没在村上春树自身的经历中，只留下少量的实用建议，以及一个似乎骄傲自大、缺乏洞察而又忿忿不平的叙述者。 |
| The first lesson he wants to impart is that writing is easy. “To tell the truth, I have never found writing painful,” he says. “What’s the point of writing, anyway, if you’re not enjoying it? I can’t get my head around the idea of ‘the suffering writer.’ Basically, I think, novels should emerge in a spontaneous flow.” What is a young writer to make of this? Murakami presses the idea again and again, and it no doubt explains his productivity and fluency, yet the fact remains that for nearly every writer other than him, the work is frequently awful, “a long, sunken fatigue,” in Proust’s words, a “bout with some painful illness,” in Orwell’s. |
| 他想要传授的第一课是：写作很容易。“说实话，我从不觉得写作是件痛苦的事，”他说。“无论如何，如果你不喜欢写作，那写作还有什么意义呢？我无法理解‘痛苦的作家’这个概念。基本上，我认为小说应该是一种自发的流动。”一个年轻的作家应该如何理解这些呢？村上春树一遍又一遍地强调这个想法，这无疑解释了他的创作效率和流畅性，但事实是，除了他之外，几乎所有作家都常常觉得这是份苦差事，用普鲁斯特的话说，是“漫长的、沉没般的疲劳”，用奥威尔的话说，是“与一些痛苦疾病的较量”。 |
| Of course, Murakami has only his own practice to summon. But in other matters as well he seems fatally limited by his experiences. Take his chapter on literary prizes, the book’s nadir. On never having served on a selection jury: “I am just too much of an individualist. I am a person with a fixed vision and a fixed process for giving that vision shape.” On critics: “One saving grace — or at least a possible salvation — for me is the fact that so many literary critics have harshly criticized my works.” “Being only Haruki Murakami is just fine with me,” he concludes. |
| 当然，村上春树只能根据自己的实践来写。但在其他方面，他似乎也受到自身经历所限。以书中关于文学奖的章节为例，这是本书的最低谷。他说，他从未担任过评委：“我只是太过个人主义了。我是一个有固定愿景的人，有固定的过程来塑造这个愿景。”关于批评家：“我有一个可取之处——至少让我没那么不可救药——就是有这么多文学批评家严厉批评过我的作品。”他总结道：“我觉得我只做村上春树就好。” |
| The accumulation of lines like these is punishing, but what’s worse is the strange anti-factuality of the whole endeavor — a huge central evasion, which is that Murakami is not just another professional novelist, but a titanic figure in Japanese and world culture, one of the few people, from all eight billion of us, whose stories draw a crowd up to the primeval campfire. The author himself seems delighted but incurious about the situation. “Apart from the fact that many of my women readers are quite beautiful — this is no lie — there’s no characteristic that they all share,” he says. Well, OK. |
| 大量这样的句子读来让人难受，但更糟糕的是整部作品中奇怪的反事实性——这其中回避一个关键，那就是村上不只是一个普通的职业小说家，而是日本文化和世界文化中的重要人物，全世界80亿人，只有那么寥寥几位讲的故事可以吸引人们围聚在远古的篝火边，他是其中之一。作者本人对此似乎很高兴，但是有点漫不经心。他说，“除了我的许多女性读者都非常美丽这一事实之外——这不是说假话——他们没有任何共同点。”行吧。 |
| The conundrum here is that Murakami’s generosity of spirit is such a central part of his fiction. Perhaps the difficulty is that this is a book full of prosaic explanations, unleavened by vision — the opposite of his fiction, which speaks finally for the truth of images more than language, until the setting sun, the thin moon, the curl of a wave, old friends in non-comprehension, seem to exist inside his characters. |
| 这里的难题是，村上的宽宏是他小说的核心部分。也许困难在于，这本书里充满了平淡的解释，没有经过画面感的提升——这与他的小说相反，直到下山的太阳、黯淡的月色、起伏的波涛与无法理解的老友，似乎都内化于他的人物之中，他的小说最终证明视像比语言更真实。 |
| When Hilary Mantel died recently, I thought with a pang of real sorrow — oh, there goes one. At any moment on our planet there are at most a few dozen novelists working with great power, for a broad audience, with the material of consciousness, which is what the novel is so uniquely good at handling, how it feels to be inside us, what it means, the devastations and beauties it brings. Murakami is one of them. If his book about that experience is fitful and odd, perhaps it reveals, rather than diminishes, the undomesticated radiance of his gifts. “I am not an ornithologist,” Saul Bellow once said. “I am a bird.” |
| 希拉里·曼特尔近日去世时，我怀着真切的悲痛想到——哦，又去了一位。在我们这个星球上，任何时候，至多只有几十位小说家能以强大的力量，面向广大的读者，以意识——这是唯有小说最擅长处理的东西——为素材进行创作，揭示我们内心的感受，它意味着什么，以及它带来的破坏和美丽。村上春树就是其中之一。如果说他关于这种经历的书显得反复无常而又且古怪，或许它恰恰揭示而不是削弱了他天赋中未经驯化的光辉。“我不是鸟类学家，”索尔·贝娄曾经说过。“我是一只鸟。” |
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