[2014.04.26]The magician in his labyrinth 在自己迷宫中的魔术师
本帖最后由 gangangwen 于 2014-5-17 20:04 编辑 原文请猛戳这里》》》Gabriel García Márquez
加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯The magician in his labyrinth
在自己迷宫中的魔术师Gabriel García Márquez, Latin America's literary colossus, died on April 17th, aged 87
加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯，拉丁美洲文学巨匠，4月17日去世，享年87岁Apr 26th 2014 | From the print edition1 IN JULY 1965 Gabriel García Márquez—Gabo to all who revered him later—decided to lock himself away in a house on Calle de La Loma in Mexico City. He ordered his wife to sell the car and get credit from the butcher. For 15 months, using only his index fingers, he typed for six hours a day in a room he called “The Cave of the Mafia”. He survived on a diet of good Scotch and constant cigarettes. At five in the afternoon he would emerge into the fading light with his eyes wide, as though he had discoursed with the dead.
1965年7月，加夫列尔·加西亚·马尔克斯——也就是后来被所有尊敬他的人称为“加博”的人——决定把自己关在位于墨西哥城卡勒代拉洛马的一所房子中。他要求妻子卖掉了汽车，并从肉铺掌柜那里获得了赊帐的许可。之后，他开始在一间被他称为“黑帮的巢穴”的屋子里开始打字——只用食指，每天六个小时，这一过程一直持续了15个月。在这期间，他的食物除了上好苏格兰威士忌，就是一支接一支的香烟。每天下午5点，他会大睁着双眼出现在暮色之中，好像刚同死人吵过了一架似得。
2 Inside the four walls of that room lay the immense delta of the Magdalena river, the grey frothy sea of Colombia's Caribbean coast, the suffocating swamps of the Ciénaga, the interminable geometries of the banana plantations, and a long railway line that ran into the farthest territories of his heart. It ended at the village of Aracataca, now renamed by him Macondo, where his maternal grandparents had brought him up amid prospectors, fornicators, gypsies, scoundrels and virginal girls bent over their sewing frames. In that room where he had locked himself away he inhaled the sweet milk-candy and oregano of his grandmother and absorbed again the political venting of his grandfather, who had fought on the Liberal side in the War of a Thousand Days and who, at the book's beginning, took him to discover ice, a great block of infinite internal needles that boiled his hand when he touched it.
在那座房子的四壁之内有马格得连纳河那广阔三角洲，有哥伦比亚加勒比海岸边那泛着泡沫的灰色大海，有切纳迦那令人窒息的沼泽地，有香蕉种植园那没有尽头的几何图形，还有一条闯进他心灵最深处的漫长铁路线。终点是阿拉卡塔卡的村庄。如今，那里已经因为他而改名为马孔多——一个到处都是探矿者、通奸者、吉普赛人、无赖和俯身于自己织布框架的未婚女子，而他也就是在这些人中间被她的外公外婆养大的。他在那间把自己关在其中的房间里，吸入了牛奶糖和他祖母的牛至的香味，再一次吸收了他那曾经在千日战争中为自由派而战，并且曾在书一开始带他去发现冰块——一种在他触摸时即烫到了他的手，里面有着数不清的细针的大块东西——的祖父的政治气息。
3 “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the fruit of his self-imprisonment, sold 50m copies in more than 30 languages. Critics observed that its style, magical realism as they called it, was not new: Jorge Luis Borges, a blind Argentine poet, had felt his way through those labyrinths before. But its fame was startling. The world was seduced by a Latin America where the Buendía family feuded internally and externally, with rifles or with silence, for generations; where death gave its female victims instructions to sew their own shrouds; where the blood from a suicide by shotgun flowed all through Macondo, carefully avoiding the carpets; and where Remedios the Beauty was taken up to heaven as she hung out sheets on the washing line.
作为他自我囚禁的果实，《百年孤独》已经被翻译成30多种语言，卖出了5000万册。评论家指出，其风格——他们称之为魔幻现实主义——并不新鲜：在此之前，阿根廷双目失明的诗人豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯已经凭着他的感觉穿越了那些迷宫；但是其名声是响亮的。这个世界已经被书中的那个拉丁美洲给诱惑住了。在那里，布恩迪亚家族为了内部的和外部的世仇，或用武力或用沉默，争斗了数代之久；在那里，死亡给与了女性受害者如何编织织自己寿衣的建议；在那里，来自用短枪自杀的鲜血淌遍了马孔多，但偏偏绕过了各种地毯；在那里，美女瑞米迪娥因为把床单挂在晾衣绳上而被带上了天堂。
4 And it was all true. So Gabo insisted, to those who found his world outmoded and impossible. What seemed fantastical and extraordinary was merely reality in its local guise. Between novels he kept up his first profession, journalism, fearlessly reporting government scandals and narcoterrorism. When he had become hugely famous the government of Colombia sent him to mediate with the FARC guerrillas. That was surely as surreal as anything he wrote in the house on Calle de La Loma.
所有这一切都是真实的。于是，面对那些认为他的世界已经过时和不可能存在的人，加博坚持了下来。看上去的虚幻和怪异不过是穿着本地外衣的真实。在创作小说的间隙，他还在继续着自己的第一职业——记者，无所畏惧地报道了政府的丑闻和毒品交易所带来的恐怖活动。当他名声大震时，哥伦比亚政府曾经派他去同哥武游击队谈判，此事之离奇就如同他曾经把自己关在卡勒代拉洛马的房子中写作一样确定无疑。
5 What the world could not grasp about Latin American literature, he told his Nobel prize audience in 1982, was the presence in it of the ghosts of the disappeared, as many as the population of Uppsala, and of émigrés and exiles, as many as there were Norwegians. These shadows, with their different reality, were as persistent as the continent's beauty, its violence and its pain. In the year after he was born a crowd of banana workers, their number as fluid and fleeting as memory, were killed by the army in Aracataca, the bodies taken so silently by train to the coast that the story at once became myth. It grew with him.
他在1982年的诺贝尔奖颁奖仪式上对听众说，这个世界对于拉丁美洲文学所不可能领会的是曾经存在与其中但现在业已消失的、数量如同乌普萨拉的人口一样多鬼魂，是同挪威人口一样多的移民和流亡者的鬼魂。这些各具真实感的阴影就如同这个大陆的美丽、暴力和痛苦一样持久不散。在他出生的那一年，一群人如像记忆一样流动和短暂的香蕉工人曾被驻扎在阿拉卡塔卡的军队屠杀，之后，他们的尸体被悄悄地装上火车运去了海边。整过过程之无声无息，使得这个故事立即变成了神话，伴随着他一起长大。
6 His sympathies stayed on the left-Liberal side of things. Under General Rojas Pinilla Colombia became uncomfortable; he took refuge in Mexico in 1961, and for years was refused entry to the United States. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez were proud to count themselves his friends. With Mr Castro he went fishing and talked books, he said, not politics.
But he had a weakness for the “halo of power”, of whatever colour, and a soft spot for old autocrats still carrying, like Simón Bolívar in “The General in his Labyrinth”, their bullet scars, their memories of past glories and their faded battle tunics, with buttons made from the gold of Atahualpa.他的同情心留在了事情的左翼自由主义一边。在罗哈斯·皮涅拉的治下，当时的哥伦比亚已经变得难以令人感到舒心；1961年，他避难墨西哥，并且很多年被拒绝进入美国。菲德尔·卡斯特罗和乌戈·查韦斯曾自豪地把他们自己当做是他的朋友。他说，他同卡斯特罗一起钓过鱼，一起谈论过书籍，但就是没有谈论过政治。
但是，他也有弱点。对他来说，“权利的光环”不管何种颜色，老独裁者仍旧带有的弱点，就像《迷宫中的将军》里的西蒙·玻利瓦尔一样，他们的枪疤，他们对于过去荣耀的记忆，他们已然褪色的、带有用出自阿塔瓦尔帕的黄金制成的纽扣的战袍。7 Writing was difficult; the words came as painfully as kidney stones. Nonetheless, there was nothing else he had wanted to do in life. He burned “to write so I would not die”. The desire began with “The Thousand and One Nights” in childhood and the tale of the fish, slit for frying, with a diamond as big as an almond in its belly. It was reinforced in his cub-reporter-student days in the cafés of Barranquilla and Cartagena, where he discovered Kafka, Faulkner, Woolf and Hemingway. His strongest influence, though, remained his grandmother, who had told him with the most deadpan face that the strangest things were true.
写作是艰难的；文字带给他给的痛苦同肾结石带给他的痛苦是一样的。但是，尽管如此，他还是不想在自己的一生中从事任何其他的工作。他焚膏继晷地写作，“因为只有这样我才不会死亡”。这种渴望始于孩提时代的《一千零一夜》和一个有关鱼的传说——在被刨开等待煎炸之时，一个杏仁一般大的宝石出现在它的肚子里；又因他在巴兰基亚和卡塔赫纳的咖啡馆中做见习记者的日子而得到强化——在那里他发现了卡夫卡、福克纳、(弗吉尼亚·)沃尔夫和海明威。但要说到给他影响最大的，还是他的祖母——她曾经面无表情地告诉他：最奇怪的事情都是真实的。
Taking the steamboat
蒸汽轮船之旅8 Those tales assumed no division between the waking and dreaming state. Like him, his characters were often insomniacs, terrified of the dark and plagued, as he was, by intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams. Their affliction was so acute that their days became seamless and infinite as winter rain. Yet his lovers too, in sheer happiness, were in the same suspended state. His last substantial novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, based on the forbidden romance of his own parents, ended with the aged lovers on the creaking Magdalena steamboat, pushing through purple lotus and past crocodiles with their mouths agape to catch butterflies, out to the mouth of the sea. But as his grandfather had told him, when they first saw that horizon, “There is no shore on the other side.”
这些故事都有这样一个假设：醒着和梦中是没有区别的。他的性格就如同他这个人一样：经常失眠，害怕黑暗，受着在子宫中的记忆和有预兆的梦的折磨。其痛苦之尖锐，使得受折磨日子变得如同冬雨一般，密无缝隙，绵绵无尽。然而，他所爱的人，尽管沉浸在纯粹的欢乐之中，也是处于同样的暂停状态。作为他最后一部内容详实的小说，《霍乱时期的爱情》就是以他的父母之间的被禁止的爱情写成的。结尾处，这对上了年纪的恋人，坐在轰轰作响的蒸汽轮船上，顺着马格达莱纳河沿河而下，汽船推开紫色的莲花，经过张着大嘴扑食蝴蝶的鳄鱼，向入海口驶去。但是，正如他的祖父曾经告诉他的那样，当他们第一次看到地平线的时候，“那一边根本没有岸”。
From the print edition: Obituary
