(单词翻译:单击)
The great german author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, 13 years after he’d published his first work of literature and five short years after the English translation of a book of stories set in motion his rise to international renown.
德国伟大的作家温弗里德·塞巴尔德于2001年因一场车祸离世,享年57岁
(Months before his death, he was rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.)
(在他去世前几个月,有传言称他是诺贝尔奖的候选人
Throughout his career and afterward, critics struggled to find words to describe the hallucinatory quality of his deceptively sober prose.
在他的整个职业生涯以及之后的时间里,评论家们都在努力寻找词语来描述他那看似严肃的散文的迷幻特质
Sebald tells tales, that much one can say—ghost stories of a sort, as dark and translucent as smoky glass.
塞巴尔德讲的故事,很多人都会说这是幽灵般的故事,像烟雾弥漫的的玻璃一样黑暗而又透明
Displaced Jews haunt some of these narratives; the shades of literary figures—Kafka, Stendhal, Nabokov—materialize in others.
流离失所的犹太人经常出现在这些故事中; 这些故事中的人物体现着卡夫卡、司汤达、纳博科夫等文学人物的影子
And yet Sebald writes like a man typing up case histories, and he accompanies his narratives with something like documentation—photographs of people, facades, notes, newspaper articles, train tickets.
然而,塞巴尔德的写作手法就像一个人在录入病历一样,他在叙述时还会加上一些类似文档的东西——人物的照片、外观、笔记、报纸文章、火车票
These have no captions, and you don’t always see how they relate to the text.
这些没有说明文字,而且你并不总是能理解它们与文本之间的联系
But because photographs testify to the onetime existence of things, they give the weight of the real to stories that may or may not be made up.
但因为照片证明了事物曾经的存在,它们赋予了故事真实性的厚重感,而这些故事可能是虚构的,也可能不是
Sebald’s refusal to respect the line between fact and fiction has become commonplace, especially among younger writers.
塞巴尔德拒绝尊重事实和虚构之间的界限,这已经成为一种普遍现象,尤其是在年轻作家中
But his adroitly artless synthesis of fable, history, photography, and artifact is still jarring.
但他将寓言、历史、摄影和历史文物熟练地而朴实地结合在一起,依旧突兀
The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte called Sebald’s method bricolage, which can mean both “collage” and “tinkering.”
塞巴尔德的学者乌维·史诸特将塞巴尔德的方法称为修补术(bricolage), 既可以表示“拼贴”,也可以表示“修补”
The critic James Wood speaks of “fictional truth,” and also offers this aptly mournful phrase: “cinders of the real world.”
评论家詹姆斯·伍德在谈到“虚构的真相”时,也恰如其分地用了这个悲伤的短语:“现实世界的灰烬”
The poet Michael Hamburger came up with “essayistic semi-fiction which gives rope to both observation and imagination.”
诗人迈克尔·汉布格尔提出了“随笔式的半小说,这为观察和想象提供了便利
In her new biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, the first life of the writer, Carole Angier calls that “the neatest summary” of Sebald’s method that “anyone ever managed.”
卡萝·安吉尔在她的新传记《讲述,沉默:寻找塞巴尔德》---作家的第一个生命中称,这是对塞巴尔德方法的“最简洁的总结”,是“任何人都不曾做到的”
I like “periscopic,” which Sebald used, because it captures the subaqueous stillness of his worlds, and his disorienting angle of vision.
我喜欢塞巴尔德用的“潜望镜”,因为它捕捉到了他的世界中水下的静止,以及他迷幻的视角
Every great writer founds a new genre, Walter Benjamin decreed.
瓦尔特·本雅明断言,每一位伟大的作家都开创了一种新体裁
“The twentieth-century writer who best passes that crazy test,” Angier writes, “is W. G. Sebald.”
“最能通过这种疯狂测试的二十世纪作家,”安吉尔写道,“是塞巴尔德