英语世界的契诃夫爱丽丝·门罗 | 经济学人文化
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思维导图：
琚儿，女，QE在职，梦想能仗翻译/音乐/健康走天涯
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Culture | A literary life
经济学人文化 | 文学人生
Culture | A literary life
经济学人文化 | 文学人生
Alice Munro was the English language’s Chekhov
爱丽丝·门罗是英语世界的契诃夫
The Nobel prizewinning short-story writer died on May 13th, aged 92
这位曾斩获诺贝尔文学奖的短篇小说家于5月13日逝世，享年92岁
“Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer,” says a character in “The Love of a Good Woman”. Instantly, the reader is in Alice Munro territory: spinsters with lingering illnesses and stifled passions, jealous married women scrubbing floors, inky veins protruding from their legs. Light falls constantly on the domestic: a gas stove in the kitchen fed with quarters, a dining-room table with a lace cloth on it, a ceramic swan reflected in an octagonal mirror. But there is always something savage lurking beneath the veneer of gentility. Certain themes recur—of drowning, regret, longing and the cruelty of lovers.
“答应我，水要烧开再喝，千万别嫁给农民。”《好女人的爱情》（The Love of a Good Woman）中的一个人物如是说。读者随即进入了爱丽丝·门罗笔下的世界：情感压抑的老姑娘病痛缠身，妒火中烧的已婚妇女在擦洗地板，她们的腿上都青筋突起。门罗通常从家庭用品处着墨：厨房里投币式的煤气炉，铺着蕾丝桌布的餐桌，八角镜中映照出的陶瓷天鹅。而在平静古朴的表面之下，总有一丝野性潜伏其中。恋人的沉沦、遗憾、渴望和残酷等某些主题总是在她的作品中反复出现。
The daughter of a silver-fox and mink farmer, Ms Munro (pictured) was brought up in rural Ontario. As a girl, she was told that the worst thing you could do was to “call attention to yourself” or “think you were smart”. She enrolled at the University of Western Ontario to study journalism but dropped out when her scholarship money dried up. Ms Munro married young and moved to Vancouver, where her husband worked as a manager in a department store. She had four daughters. One, born with defective kidneys, died in infancy.
门罗女士（如图）的父亲经营着一家银狐和水貂饲养场，她从小在安大略省的农村长大。小时候，人们告诉她，女孩最糟糕的就是“太引人注目”或“自以为聪明”。她后来进入西安大略大学主修新闻学，但在奖学金用完之后就辍学了。门罗很年轻就结婚了，婚后搬到温哥华，她的丈夫在百货公司担任经理。她有四个女儿，其中之一因先天性肾脏缺陷在婴儿时期夭折。
It was not the housework that dragged her down; it was the assumption that women who tried to do something as challenging as writing were unseemly.She wrote while her daughters napped. It was in those stories that she tried to fathom the bargains people make “for lust”, recording the cycle of excitement and despair and the bitterness of those who fear they have missed the boat.
困住她的并不是家务，而是人们认为“女性尝试像写作这样具有挑战性的事情有失体面”的臆断。她会趁着女儿们午睡时写作。正是在那些故事中，她试图理解人们“因为欲望”而做出的妥协，记录下兴奋与绝望的循环，以及那些害怕已错失良机的人的痛苦。
For years she thought short stories were practice.Deep in domesticity in suburban Vancouver, she dreamed up plots. She was as consumed by the minutiae of daily life—cooking, cleaning, taking care of her children—as by the stories she was writing in her head in the deadness of early afternoon. Each story has layers, from the mundane (embroidered napkins, liquorice drops, bus depots) to the sublime (a man touching a woman’s waist, a look of recognition and encouragement, daydreams that wear themselves out with the passage of time). Her characters do anything to avoid confronting their pain. “That’s the trouble with linen,” says a woman at a funeral reception in “What is Remembered”, noting that another woman’s dress has wrinkled up.
多年来，她把创作短篇故事当成练习。在温哥华郊区，深陷家庭琐事的门罗构思出许多故事情节。她的精力一半给了日常的琐碎家务，一半给了她的故事——既要做饭、打扫、照顾孩子，也会在死气沉沉的午后于脑海中编撰故事。每个故事都层层递进，从平凡之物诸如刺绣手帕、甘草糖、巴士站台，到一个男人触碰一个女人的腰、一个认可和鼓励的眼神和那些被时光耗尽的白日梦。她创造的角色都会竭尽所能避免直面痛楚。“这就是亚麻不好的地方”，《留存的记忆》（What is Remembered）中的一场葬礼招待会上，一位女士注意到另一位女士皱巴巴的连衣裙时如是说。
In 1977 “Royal Beatings” was her first story to be published in the New Yorker; it was followed by many more.Her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, won the Governor General’s Award—one of Canada’s highest literary accolades—yet still she was dismissed by many as a shy housewife. In 2013 she became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel prize in literature, but was too unwell to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. Instead the Nobel Foundation visited her at her daughter’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, and recorded an interview. In it she said she wanted her stories to move people. She wanted you to “feel you are a different person when you finish” reading.
1977年，她发表了在《纽约客》（The New Yorker）上的第一篇小说《皇家式殴打》（Royal Beatings），随后又陆续发表多部作品。她的第一本书《快乐影子之舞》（Dance of the Happy Shades）获得加拿大最高文学奖项之一的加拿大总督奖，但对很多人来说，她只是一位害羞的家庭主妇，仍旧不值一提。2013年，她成为加拿大首位获得诺贝尔文学奖的女性，但因为身体欠佳，无法去斯德哥尔摩参加颁奖典礼。因此，诺贝尔基金会来到不列颠哥伦比亚省维多利亚市，在她女儿的家中拜访了她，并录制了访谈视频。她在访谈中说，希望自己的故事能打动人心。她希望读者“在读完之后觉得自己成为了一个不同的人”。
Fellow writers were some of her most devoted readers. Cynthia Ozick, an American author, called Ms Munro “our Chekhov” and predicted she is “going to outlast most of her contemporaries”. Like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, she evoked Canada but transcended it.
同行作家中有一些是她最忠实的读者。美国作家辛西娅·欧芝克（Cynthia Ozick）称门罗女士为“我们时代的契诃夫”，并预测她的影响“将超越她同时代的大部分作家”。像玛格丽特·阿特伍德（Margaret Atwood）和迈克尔·翁达杰（Michael Ondaatje）一样，她的作品植根于加拿大，其内涵却又超越了地域的限制。
Her greatest gift was probably her economy of style; she moved forwards and backwards in time and distilled multiple narratives into 30 pages. In “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You”, a jilted woman tries unsuccessfully to kill herself by drinking laundry detergent. Decades later, her sister is checking whether the level of rat poison on the kitchen shelf is going down, as her brother-in-law is withering away. Is he being slowly poisoned?Ms Munro leaves the reader guessing. The Swedish Academy praised her ability to show “how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary.”
她最大的天赋可能就是简练的写作风格；她在时间的跨度里前后腾挪，将多重叙事浓缩进30页纸中。在《我一直想要告诉你的事》（Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You）一文中，一位被抛弃的妇女喝洗衣液自杀未遂。数十载后，她妹妹检查着厨房搁板上的老鼠药是否在逐渐减少，因为她姐夫的身体一天不如一天。他是不是正在被一点点下毒？门罗将答案留给读者自己去想象。艾丽丝·门罗诠释了“在繁琐却空虚的平凡中能融入多少非凡”，瑞典学院对她的此项能力大为赞赏。
Ms Munro’s short stories—the opposite of provincial despite their settings—have the emotional depth of novels. She wrote about the clamour of desire, the self-deception and destruction, without ever being sentimental. Sexual attraction is omnipresent in her writing, driving people to extremes, teasing them with the possibility of happiness.As she wrote in “The Beggar Maid”, “What made you wanted was nothing you did, it was something you had, and how could you ever tell whether you had it?”
尽管门罗的短篇小说通常将背景设置在郊区或农村，其内容却并不狭隘保守，而是具有长篇小说的情感深度。她描写欲望的喧闹、自欺与毁灭，却从不故作伤感。在她的作品中，性吸引力无处不在，以获得幸福为引诱，驱使人们走向极端。正如她在《乞丐少女》（The Beggar Maid）中所言，“你的吸引力无关乎你做了什么，而在于你的内在特质，但你又怎么知道自己是否具备足够吸引人的特质呢？”
Alex，不务正业的理工男
Leon，驻外民工，经济学人读者
Alfredo，男，真实主义歌剧发烧友
UU，保持低调
Shulin，时间是个好东西
Colin，男，崇拜科比的一枚小翻译
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感想|观点
本期感想作者
Lee，爱骑行的妇女之友+Timberland粉
《我的阿泰勒》续
最近看了《我的阿泰勒》，后劲很大。从文章中女主的身上看到了李文秀的影子，那就给剧续中的人（动）物都安排一个结局吧
踏雪：经过三年，巴太终于回到了阿泰勒，巴太牵的那匹马就是踏雪的儿子，三年前他结束了踏雪的生命，同时利用IVF（类似试管婴儿）技术成功育种。
李文秀：和巴太一起留在草原上，继续写西北家乡出书成为了专业作家。
巴太：成为了一名职业驯马师，在家乡草原上开设了自己的马场。
张凤侠：西北旅游业的发展，把小卖部开成了连锁超市，把西北特产卖到了全国。
高晓亮：关了半年出狱，像找和田玉一样，在案发的那片草原上花了半年找那两颗子弹。获得了张凤侠的原谅，从此吃上了软饭。
苏力坦：挖虫草的人越来越多，村长把枪还给了他，和朝戈一起守护家乡的人文传统和自然风光。
脑洞一般，对剧中的人物各位有更好的想法吗？hhh……
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愿景
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