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从许多方面来讲，写作这个行为就是说“我”，就是把自己的想法强加于其他人，就是说“听我说、用我的方法看问题、改变你的想法”…… 今天跟大家分享的是：Why I Write我为什么写作 Of course I stole the title from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:III 当然，这个标题是我从乔治 · 奥威尔那里剽窃过来的。我之所以剽窃这个标题，是因为我喜欢这几个词的发音：Why I Write。这三个词简短而明确，它们有一个共同的发音，这个共同的发音就是： III In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers andtentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but there is no getting around the fact thatsetting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the readers’ most private space. 从许多方面来讲，写作这个行为就是说“我”，就是把自己的想法强加于其他人，就是说“听我说、用我的方法看问题、改变你的想法”。它是一种带有进攻性甚至敌意的行为。你可以用各种手段对写作中的进攻性加以掩饰，用从句、修饰语、虚拟语气，用省略和回避，用暗示而不是断言，用间接提到而不是直接表达。但是有一个事实却不能回避，那就是写作是一种战术，它会暗中欺侮读者、侵犯读者、把作者的情感强加到读者最私密的空间。 I stole the title not only because the words sounded right, but because they seemed to sum up, in a nononsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers, I have only this one “subject, ” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested, ” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I do not think in abstracts. 我剽窃这个标题不仅因为这几个词发音好听，而且因为它们似乎直截了当地概括了我要告诉你的一切。和许多作家一样，我只有这一个“主题”，这一个“领域”：写作活动。我不能向你提供任何其他方面的信息。我也许有其他兴趣：比如说，我对海洋生物学“感兴趣”，但我不会自以为你会来听我对海洋生物发表高谈阔论。我不是学者，我不会抽象思维。 I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, theperipheral. I would try to contemplatethe Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military industrialcomplex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact. 我曾经试着去思考，但没有成功。我的注意力不由自主地转到了具体、有形的东西，转到了大家普遍认为无关紧要的东西，我那时认识的人以及此后认识的人都认为那些东西不太重要。我会试着思考黑格尔的辩证法，结果却发现自己的注意力停在窗外正在开花的梨树上，看着花瓣如何掉落到我的地板上。我会试着读语言学理论，最后却发现自己在想山上的高能质子同步稳相加速器里的灯是否还亮着。说到我想知道山上的高能质子同步稳相加速器的灯是否还亮着，只要你仔细想想，你可能会马上怀疑我在把高能质子同步稳相加速器当成一个政治象征，用简便的方式思考着军事工业综合体及其在大学社区中的作用，但你弄错了。我只是想知道高能质子同步稳相加速器里的灯是否亮着、它们究竟是什么样子。一个具体的事实而已。 I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of “Paradise Lost, ” to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in “Paradise Lost, ” but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco dining car, and the way the tintedwindows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. 我从伯克利毕业时遇到了麻烦，因为我落下了一门关于弥尔顿的课。由于一些现在听上去很奇怪的原因，那年夏季结束时我需要得到一个学位。英语系最后还是同意证明我掌握了关于弥尔顿的知识，条件是我每周五从萨克拉门托过来，讨论《失乐园》的宇宙论。我接受了。有的星期五我乘坐“灰狗”巴士，其他星期五我赶南太平洋的“三藩市”（即旧金山），搭乘它横穿大陆旅途的最后一段。现在我已经无法告诉你弥尔顿在《失乐园》中是把太阳还是把地球当成了宇宙的中心，但我仍然记得“三藩市”餐车里黄油散发的臭味，以及“灰狗”染了色的窗户如何把卡圭尼兹海峡附近的炼油厂变成灰蒙蒙、阴森森的颜色。总之，我的注意力总是在一些小事上，我只注意我能看到、尝到和摸到的东西，我注意到的是黄油和“灰狗”。那些年，我知道我用的旅行护照根本靠不住，因为文件都是伪造的。我知道，我在任何知识领域都不是合法居民。我知道我不会思考。那时，我只知道我不能做什么，只知道我不是什么，我用了好些年才弄清楚我到底是什么。 Which was a writer. 那就是我是个作家。 By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had mycredentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I am thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night-lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? 我所说的作家不是“好”作家或者“差”作家，仅仅是个作家而已，一个把大部分全神贯注、充满激情的时间用来舞文弄墨的人。要是当时我的文凭没有出问题，我就绝不会成为作家。如果我有幸能对自己有哪怕丁点儿了解，我都没有理由写作。我写作完全是为了弄清楚我在想什么、我在看什么、我看到了什么、我看到的东西是什么意思、我想得到什么、我害怕什么。为什么 1956 年夏天卡圭尼兹海峡附近的炼油厂似乎有一种阴森森的感觉？为什么高能质子同步稳相加速器里的灯在我的脑海中亮了二十年？我脑海里的这些画面中究竟发生着什么？ |
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