Yesterday, the writer Jennifer Egan was announced as the 2011 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her book, A Visit From The Goon Squad.
昨日，2011年普利策文学奖小说类的殊荣由詹妮弗·伊根(Jennifer Egan)所创作的小说《流氓来访》(A Visit From The Goon Squad )获得。
The interview project and website, The Days of Yore - a site that aims to inspire younger artists by interviewing more established creative icons about the days before they had money or success - published an extensive interview with Egan. In it, she digs deep into her early years of struggle and confusion and finding her way in New York City.
一个以访谈为主要内容的项目The Days of Yore在其网站上发布了一篇关于伊根(Egan)的详细访谈。这个网站致力于通过采访一些出色的标志性人物的成名前生活来鼓励较年轻的艺术家。在这篇访谈里，她深入地讲述了自己早年在纽约奋斗、迷失以及自我寻找的过程。
An excerpt of the interview is below. Click on over to the site for past interviews with the likes of Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, David Shields, and other award-winning writers and artists.
下面是访谈的一些摘录。点击可以进入网站浏览过去对萨姆·利普西特(Sam Lipsyte)、加里·施特恩加特(Gary Shteyngart)、乔治·桑德斯(George Saunders)、大卫·希尔兹(David Shields)等获奖作家及艺术家的专访。
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
你小时候希望自己长大成为一个什么样的人？
When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
当我还小的时候，我想当一个医生。当时我对流出来的血真的很感兴趣。我的爷爷是一个整形外科医师，而且在他的书房里有许多书我都经常会看，其中很多有十分可怕或畸形的图片在里面。
It attracted you?
这些很吸引你么？
It did, kind of. I was interested in corporeal strangeness. I wish I could tell you it was about making people well, but I think it was more about wanting to cut them open!
算是吧。我过去很喜欢肉体的陌生感。我希望能告诉你这种感觉是想去使人们变得更好，但实际上更多的是我想去把那些肉切开。
But you lost that interest?
但是你丢掉了这个兴趣？
I did. I would just add that I was deeply interested in biology and physiology. I would read about that on my own time. I felt like it wasn't covered enough at school-- I went to this girls' school and I was like, "I want to hear more about the human body!!"
是的。我想补充的是过去我对生物学和生理学很感兴趣。在私人时间我喜欢阅读相关的东西。我觉得在学校学的东西还不够，我那会儿读的是女校，而且当时我想：我想听到更多关于人体的东西！
This was probably nine to thirteen, fourteen. When I became a teenager I got very squeamish, and that interest totally disappeared. That squeamishness-- and I'm sure you could read lots of interpretations into that-- was almost a fear of the body. Just a fear of seeing what was in the body. I remember being really afraid of seeing blood. I'm not really like that anymore, but I don't feel neutral about it. I look away if I'm getting a shot.
这些事情大概发生在我九到十三、十四岁的时候。当我进入青少年时期，我变得非常神经质，而且这些兴趣完全消失了。那种神经质表现在我对身体的惧怕，我相信你可以添加更多解释。我记得当时我变得十分害怕见血。虽然我现在不像那样了，但是我也没有什么特别的感受。如果我看见血我会转头看别的地方。
No more doctor. Then what?
不再想做医生了。然后呢？
At that point I became really interested in anthropology and I really wanted to be an archeologist. I thought that was a for-real goal, actually. I applied to Penn. I got into the anthropology department, but I specifically wanted archeology. It was the seventies and a lot of exciting things were happening, discoveries in archeology. It was a moment when that felt more present in the culture than it is now.
那时候我开始对人类学十分感兴趣，而且我希望成为一个考古学家。我想，这是一个真正的目标。后来我申请了宾夕法尼亚大学并进入了人类学系，但是我很明确自己想学考古学。当时是七十年代，各种各样令人兴奋的事情、考古学的发现正在发生。比起现在，那是一个感觉这些事情在文化中更能有所体现的时期。
I took a year off between high school and college and it was kind of funny-- I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services. I think none of them answered me except for one, who said, "You know, our graduate students actually pay us to go on digs. So, obviously, this is not appropriate." It was a nice note, but basically saying: "This is never going to happen."
我在高中和大学间暂停了一年的时间，很有意思，当时我想我可以雇我自己当一名考古人员去进行考古探险和挖掘，并不需要任何训练！实际上我那会儿写了信给许多考古学的相关部门表达了我的愿望。我想，除了有一个地方说：“你知道，我们毕业的学生实际上都是付给我们钱去继续挖掘的。所以很显然，你这样是不行的。”，其他没有一个部门曾经回复我。那个唯一的答复是一张很好的通知单，但基本上表达的是：这件事永远不可能发生。
Then I actually paid to go on a little dig, which was in Southern Illinois. They were digging up Indian remains. It was essentially the kind of thing the professor was describing to me only it was open to the public. So I went, and what I discovered was that what I had imagined archeology to be bore little resemblance to the actual experience.
然后我真的付钱去进行了一些挖掘工作，当时是在伊利诺伊南部。他们正在挖掘印第安人的遗迹。这基本上就是那种只有公诸于众了之后教授才会给你讲的东西。所以我去了，而且我发现我之前想象的考古学与实际的经验基本没有什么相似之处。
How so?
为什么呢？
In my imagination, it was kind of digging up big chunky urns with a shovel! [Laughs.] But what one so often neglects to account for from the outside of any job is the tedium-- and I include writing in that. It was a square meter of earth, it was 99 degrees, it was the end of summer in Illinois. We used a scalpel. We couldn't unearth-- that was the thing that really bugged me. You had to lower the earth until the object was sitting on top of it! You couldn't dig it out! It's called a dig, but you couldn't dig!
在我的想象里，考古学就是用铲子挖出又大又粗的罐子（笑）。但是当人们提到任何工作的表象时总是忽略它的单调乏味，我考虑写写这方面的东西。那是一平方公尺大小的地方，99华氏度，伊利诺伊的夏末。我们用的是一把解剖刀，真正困扰我的是我们没办法把它挖出来，你必须要等挖掘目标在最上面露出来才能去降低周围的土地。你挖不出来！这是一个挖掘点，但你又不能挖！
By October I knew that I probably didn't want to be an archeologist.
在十月的时候，我知道了我可能并不想成为一个考古学家。
So I had to save up money since I really wanted to travel-- now that I wasn't going to Greece or Italy to dig! It took me a long time to save up the money. When I finally did have enough money, I got a backpack and went to Europe and bought a Eurail pass. I was eighteen.
所以我不得不存钱，因为我真的想去旅游，这次我不是想去希腊或者意大利去挖东西。我花了很长的时间存钱，当我终于存了足够的钱，我买了个双肩背包，去了欧洲，买了一张欧洲铁路通票，当时我十八岁。
I would recommend that to anybody. Although it would be different now because no one is really ever cut off from anybody anymore. To do that then was really to be severed from your ties. To make a phone call I had to wait in line at a phone place and it was not easy.
我会向任何人推荐这种经历。尽管现在不会出现真正与其他任何人完全隔离的情况，那时候这么做确实是把自己与你的所有关系都断绝了，我打一个电话必须在一个电话亭排队，这真的不容易。
Were you alone?
你是自己一个人？
Yes. It was actually really hard. Of course you met people along the way, it was a freewheeling summer, lots of European kids-- it's normal for European kids to do that. It was kind of incredible to be so isolated, and in a way to be thrown into this very old and different world. But what I found was that it was actually very tough. I started to kind of flip out to some degree. In retrospect, I think I was having panic attacks, but I had never heard that term. I think now people would know, but then I thought: "Drug flashbacks, insanity, Go Ask Alice!" It was the summer of 1981.
是的。那时候真的很痛苦。当然，你沿路会遇到不同的人，那真是一个随心所欲的夏天，所以有许多欧洲的孩子，在欧洲孩子这么做是很正常的。像那样自我隔离挺令我难以置信的，就像是被扔进了一个非常古老又完全不同的世界。但是我发现这样其实很困难，我开始有些失控了。回忆起来，我想我得了恐慌症，但是我那时候从来没听过这个词。现在人们知道了，但我那会儿想：“药物性闪回、精神错乱，去问爱丽丝！（此处似乎有典故，求解释）”那是1981年的夏天。
When would these panic attacks come on?
那些恐慌什么时候会出现？
It was usually when I was alone. The nature of a panic attack is that you're just terrified and you don't know why. Anyway, that became very tough. They would strike and I wouldn't know when they would. And I was desperate to be with people, and that's not a great way to be traveling.
经常是我单独一人的时候。恐慌发作的时候我就是感觉很害怕，不知道为什么。总之，这让我变得很艰难。这些症状会侵袭我而且我不知道什么时候它们会出现，我十分渴望人群，这对于正在旅游的人来说并不是一个好事儿。
But anyway, in the course of all of that it became very clear to me-- and I'm not quite sure how-- that writing was the thing that I needed to do. How that revelation wormed itself through the chaos of my mind at that time, I am not quite sure. I was writing a lot in a journal-- which was very helpful to me later because I've used a lot of that material. Maybe if I read through the journal I would understand how I came to realize that. Anyway, I know that when I came back, I was positive that I wanted to be a writer. If I was going to be sane-- which I wasn't sure of!
但总之，这所有的一切对我来说变得很明确，我不确定怎到底么去做，但写东西是我需要去做的。我不太清楚这个启示当时是怎么样穿过我心中的嘈杂慢慢衍生的。那时候我写很多日记，那些日记后来对我很有帮助，因为我用到了里面的许多东西作为材料。也许如果我读一遍日记我会明白我是怎么认识到的。总之，我知道当我回来的时候，我肯定自己想当为一个作家。如果我要变回正常，这点我倒不是很确定。
Well, luckily, you'd probably heard about all the crazy writers in history...
那么，幸好你可能已经对那些历史上疯狂的作家有所耳闻....
I literally thought: "Can I write in an insane asylum?" [Laughs.]
我当时真的想：“我能在一所精神病院里写作么？”（笑）
It is very uncomfortable to be alone, and I think that is why we, as a globe, have fetishized connection the way that we have. But I think that we are losing a lot by losing the experience of solitude. Many people have said that, but I feel that very viscerally. That was not the only time that I traveled that way. I went to China later, the former Soviet Union. I remember my birthday in China, I couldn't make a phone call. I couldn't speak to a single person I knew on my birthday.
独自一个人是很不舒服的，我想这就是为什么我们作为一个整体是如此迷恋我们所处的那种关系。但是我想我们在失去独处经验的同时也会失去很多。许多人都这么说过，但我发自那内心的有这种感觉。那样的旅行并不是仅有一次，我后来又去了中国和前苏联。我记得在中国到我生日的时候，我连个电话都打不了，我在生日当天连跟任何一个人说话的机会都没有
I will always remember those times because they were so extreme. I was lucky to have had those experiences. They made me know myself in certain ways that I might not have otherwise.
我会永远记得那些时光，因为它们太极致了。我很幸运自己能拥有那些经验，它们使我通过一些独有的途径认识我自己，这些认识可能是在其他途径中无法得到的。
And so, then you knew you wanted to be a writer.
所以后来你知道自己想成为一个作家。
From that point on, I can say that I did not waver. That is not to say that I had any great hopes of success. I really didn't. I always feel, and at this point I kind of hope that I always will feel, that I have no idea how things will work out. Because I think that is actually the fact. The minute you start thinking you have it made, you're in big trouble. Everything is in flux, always.
从那时候起，我可以说我没有动摇过了。并不是说我有任何对成功的巨大憧憬，我真的没有。我总是觉得，这一刻我似乎希望并且我希望永远会觉得自己不知道怎么去做。因为我想这才是真正的事实。当你开始思考你有成功的把握乐的同时，你就有大麻烦了。所有事情都永远是在变的。
If you've been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who's in and who's out changes by the year. It's really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn't having it a year or two from now.
如果你像我一样，当观察文坛是，你会知道谁流行谁过时了总是在变化。情况真的是十分不稳定的，那个正在走好运的人，不会一直走好运。
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