翻译

New fiction
新小说
Window on the world
世界之窗
Aug 17th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Claire Messud's new novel will make her name
克莱儿 梅苏德的新小说会让她出名

CLAIRE MESSUD has always been one for surprises. Whereas many novelists start out writing semi-veiled autobiographies dressed up as coming-of-age stories, Ms Messud, at the age of 28, brought out a novel called “When the World was Steady”, about two middle-aged British sisters who discover that they are not at all the people they thought they were. When she did finally get around to writing her coming-of-age story, “The Last Life”, it was not her own but that of a French teenager trying to come to terms with her fatherland after her family are forced to flee Algeria during the troubles that preceded its independence.
克莱尔 马修总是一个能带来惊喜的人。正当许多小说家开始创作半自传体式的成年故事时，马修女士，在她28岁时，推出了一本名为“When the World was Steady”的小说，这本小说讲述了两位英国中年妇女如何发现她们根本不是自己想像中的人。等到她终于有时间创作自己的成年故事“The Last Life”时，这也不是讲她自己的，而是讲一个法国青少年，在法国的前殖民地阿尔及利亚独立后，一家人逃离了那里，之后如何忍受陌生的祖国的故事。

Ms Messud's new novel is yet again a surprise---a comedy of manners set in the months immediately before and after the September 11th 2001 attacks and involving three bright young things who work in the media in New York. As the judges of the Man Booker prize recognised this week when they placed “The Emperor's Children” on the long list for the 2006 award, the surprise here is that such an obvious and overworked cliché can be transformed into so intelligent and unsparing a piece of fiction.
马修女士的新小说仍然是一个惊喜---这部生活喜剧发生在911前后几个月里，故事中有三个工作在纽约媒体界的年轻人。本周当布克奖的评委把“国王的孩子”列入了2006年长长的获奖名单时，让人惊奇的是，这么明显的老掉牙的故事居然能被写成一部如此聪明与犀利的小说。

Marina Thwaite, Danielle Minkoff and Julius Clarke met at Brown University, and left believing they were destined to do important things. But as they approach 30, they are struggling: Danielle to make television documentaries and Julius to bolster his meagre earnings as a freelance critic by temping in secret in his only good suit. “This is New York, guys. And people without money aren't noble, they're beggars.” Marina, the beautiful only daughter of a celebrated social pundit, has gone back to living with her parents on the Upper West Side, unable to finish “The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes”, her book on how children's apparel mirrors changes in society, which a publisher commissioned mostly because of her father's fame.
马莲娜 斯维特， 丹尼尔 明柯夫和朱利叶斯 克拉克 同在布朗大学上学，毕业时都认为各自会干一番大事。可到了他们快30岁的时候，他们还在和命运苦斗：丹尼尔要制作电视记录片，自由评论家朱利叶斯穿着唯一的西服打工，苦苦维系着自己绵薄的收入。“这就是纽约，哥儿们。没钱的人就是卑贱的，是乞丐。”漂亮的马莲娜是一位著名的社会评论家的独生女，没能完成“国王的孩子没有衣裳”，她也不得不回到西海岸上流社会的父母家中生活，书里讲的是关于童装试衣镜如何随社会变化，不过出版商答应出版这本书主要还是因为她父亲的名望。

Straddling this trio is the celebrated journalist himself, Marina's father, Murray Thwaite, the emperor. Tall, with leonine hair and smelling vaguely of gin-and-tonic---his favourite cologne is Christian Dior's Eau Sauvage---Thwaite is a popular commentator on television and on campus. “He loved to talk...he loved to teach”. Thwaite made his name young, studying France's wartime resistance movement while on a Fulbright scholarship to Paris, and is devoted to his wife of many years, a saintly lawyer who represents the “battered housewife or burly, knuckleheaded truant”. To many people he is a hero.
横跨在这三重唱之上的还是那位记者本人，马莲娜的父亲，莫里 斯维特，书中的国王。高高的个子，留着狮型发，身上有股淡淡的杜松子酒和香味饮料的味道---他最喜欢的古龙香水是Christian Dior's Eau Sauvage---斯维特是一个颇受欢迎的电视和校园评论员。“他健谈…他爱教育”。斯维特的公众形象生气勃勃，他曾享受着富布莱特奖学金在巴黎研究法国战时抵抗运动，他多年来深爱着自己的妻子，这位律师妻子一直为“受家庭暴力迫害的妇女，或者是四肢发达的愚蠢落魄逃避者”提供法律辩护。

Into this scene come two agents of change. One is Ludovic Seeley, a reptilian Australian journalist with a passion for the maxims of Napoleon, who is sent to New York to launch a new magazine of “questioning essays” which he hopes will distract the city's inhabitants from their perennial navel-gazing and revolutionise the place. The second is Thwaite's plump, proud nephew Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, who wears old-fashioned brown flannel pyjamas and holds the world to such impossible standards he turned down a place at Harvard in favour of becoming an autodidact.
在这样的故事背景下，来了两个改变现状的人。一个叫鲁道夫 斯利，澳大利亚的狗仔记者，信奉着拿破仑的格言，他被派到纽约来负责创办一个名为“质问小品文”的杂志，寄希望于这本杂志来扭转公众四季不变的阅读习惯并且完全改变当地的现状。第二个人是斯维特自傲的胖侄子弗雷德里克“毛线鞋”塔布。穿着老式棕色德法兰绒睡衣的他把世界定格的太过严格，为了成为一个自学成才的人，他拒绝了去就读哈佛。

Seeley sucks up to Thwaite, but secretly believes he is a fraud, a “Wizard of Oz, a tiny, pointless man roaring behind a curtain”, and he plots his ruin as he seduces his daughter. Bootie is one of the many who revere Murray Thwaite until he begins to uncover, after he becomes his uncle's amanuensis, that his hero may be no more than an “imposing fa?ade...a hollow monument”. Among other things, Thwaite rehashes old stories he has written before, sits in his study in the morning sipping from a bottle of whisky in the drawer of his desk and calmly blows away a commitment to speak at a fund-raising dinner for a Harlem youth programme in favour of a publisher's invitation to a dinner in honour of two well-known Palestinian activists. He may, Bootie suspects, even be having an affair.
斯利虽然拍着斯维特的马屁，但却认为他是一个骗子，一个“绿野仙踪里，矮小的，无足轻重的，在幕边叫喊的小角色”，并且要通过诱导斯维特的女儿来毁掉斯维特。布提也曾是一个敬仰莫里 斯维特的人，不过在他作为他叔叔的抄写员并揭露了他叔叔后就再也不是了，因为他的英雄可能只不过是“仪表堂堂的榜样…一座空洞的纪念碑”。除了别的事情，斯维特重新创作了一个自己曾经写过的老故事，清晨，他坐在自己的书房里一边喝着从抽屉里取出的威士忌，一边平静的吹走了一份关于在黑人青年计划的募款晚宴上发言的承诺书，为的是出席一个出版商举办的纪念两位巴勒斯坦激进分子的晚宴。布提怀疑，他甚至可能要惹事。

In the months between March and November 2001, the lives of these six characters?like those of so many in the city?are turned inside out. In fine, fluid brush strokes Ms Messud exposes their fears and their secrets. Two set pieces stand out: the death of the Thwaites' aged cat and the disintegration of Julius's gay love affair. Neither is essential to the plot, and yet each of these pieces of writing, the first no more than a page long, illuminates Ms Messud's particular gifts. She excels at depicting the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they are privileged but feel sorry for themselves anyway. But it is the finesse with which she satirises these people but still leaves you caring what happens to them that is the book's great achievement. “The Emperor's Children” is likely to be one of the most talked-about novels of the autumn, and not just by New York thirty-somethings in the media. Buy two copies; give one to a friend.
从2001年三月到十一月，这六个人物的生活??就像那座城市中的许多人一样??被彻底改变了。最后，梅苏德女士用接二连三的打击揭露了这些人的恐惧和秘密。有两件事显得十分突出：斯维特的老猫死了，还有朱利叶斯的同性恋爱吹了。这两件事都不是小说情节所必须的，也不是段落中不可或缺的，前一个故事还没有一页长，这显示出了梅苏德女士特殊的才华。她出色的描写了人们精神上的变化无常，这些人都以为自己很特殊，不过最后都还是对生活无可奈何。她讽刺这些人，然而依旧把他们命运的想象的空间留给你，这种灵巧的写作手腕是这本书最成功的地方。“国王的孩子”可能是这个秋天最值得探讨的小说之一，不仅仅局限于三十多岁的纽约媒体人。买两本：送一本给你的朋友。