南宁荷韵翻译公司

The Novelist's Complicity (Excerpt)
Zia Haider RahmanCHEN Jing

    [1l"ln my younger and more vulnerable years. my father gave me a word of advice that l’ve been turning over in my mind ever since"thus beains E Scoff Fitzaerald’s the Great Gatsby a novel that many reaard as one of the finest liferary works of the twentieth centuryit’s certainly one of the most popular The wods are uttered by Nick Carraway the narrator. throuah whom the entire story is told.His father's advice is to refrain from judging people because not everyone has had the advantages he has had But what of those who had all the same advantaaes and then some. the people who make up Carraway's milieu in the rovel?Carraway proceeds to condemn them. thouah perhaps pullina his punches when it comes to the eponvmous hero.

   [1]"在我年纪还轻，阅历不深的时候，父亲对我的一番教诲至今令我念念不忘。"就这样，"茨杰拉德开始了《了不起的盖茨比》的叙述。这本小说被许多人视作20世纪最优秀的文学作品之一。毫无疑问，它属干最畅销作品之列。这些话是通过尼克·卡罗维之口说出来的,而整个故事也是通过这个叙述者讲述的。他父亲教导他不要对他人评头论足，因为并不是每个人都具备他所拥有的优越条件。然而,该怎样对待小说中那些与自己条件同样优越的人呢?有些人甚至与卡罗维背景相同。卡罗维转而谴责他们，尽管这种批判态度在小说同名主人公身上或许有所保留。

    [2]No effort at putting Fitzgerald's novel on screen has ever been entirely successful, certainly not in terms of fidelity to his vision.The medium of film has a major obstacle to overcome if it is to provide a faithful rendering of a firstperson novel. such as the The Great Gatsby:in general, film cameras show everything in the third person. not from the vantage point of a particulan character but from a stance separated from any consciousness.lf our reading experience of a first-person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular nerspective of the character telling the story then recreating that reading exnerience throuah the
third person of film is impossible.

    [2]迄今为止，将菲兹杰拉德的小说搬上荧幕的诸多努力从未获得过完全的成功，特别是在忠实再现他的视角这点上，可以说更是个失败。如果电影媒介想要忠实地展现《了不起的盖茨比》这种以第一人称叙述小说的原貌。那么就面临着一个必须克服的主要障碍。即一般来讲 电影拍摄都会使用第三人称来叙述 采用一种超脱任何主观意识的立场来展现而不是从一个对特定鱼色有和的个人视鱼出发，如果我们在阅读第一人称叙述的小说时其木习惯了某个角色进述故事的特定视角 那么便不可能再通过观看第三人称视角表现的电影重塑那种阅读体验。

    [3]There are often other impediments.Time and causation are dealt with differently, flexibly, in novels.Take Fitzgerald's novel There's some doubt about how Jay Gatsby made his moneyin the end. Carraway can really only report half-heard hearsavand rumors of historical shady dealinas How could such antecedents be brouaht into a film narrative while retaining the auaity of doubt as to what precisely happened?That doubt or vaaueness is. after all essential in aivina us permission to reaard Gatshy sympathetically.

    [3]此外，通常还有一些来自其他方面的阻碍。在小说中，时间和因果关系是以不同而又灵活的方式处理的。以重茨杰拉德的小说为例，就盖茨比是如何发家这一点，读者是有一些疑惑的，到小说最后，卡罗维也,只能讲出一些他道听途说的黑幕交易传闻和谣言。怎样才能将这些故事在引入电影叙述的同时也能让观众对这些事情的真相保留一定程度的怀疑呢?毕意，怀疑或含糊对干以同情的眼光审视盖茨比是有必要的。

    [4]What I'm getting at with all this detail is that there's a basic difference between fiction grounded in the interiority of chanacters, on the one hand. and film and TV.on the otherNovels do interiority and the drama of the mind infinitely better than TV and film do.

   [4]对于这个细节,我的理解是，基于人物内在性虚构的作品有一个根本的不同，而电影和电视却是另外的情形。小说在处理内在性与思想的戏剧性方面比电视与电影要好得多。

   [5]The imminent death of the novel has been announced every year for as long as I can remember. (This doesn't mean thait the novel won't die it means that successive soothsavers haven't been very good at soothsaving )in 2009. the American nowelist Philip Roth predicted that within twenty-five years the readership of novels would amount to a cult.“I think people will always be reading them, "he said in an interview,“but it will be a small group of people.Maybe more people than now read Latin po etry, but somewhere in that range."

   [5]在我的记忆里，每年都有人在宣布小说濒临死亡(我并非说小说不会消亡，只是说前仆后继的预言家们都不太擅长预言罢了)。2009年，美国小说家菲利普·罗斯预测，在25年内，小说的读者群将只限干那些崇拜者。“我认为人们会一直将小说读下去，"他在一次采访中说道:“但只会是一小群人,或许比现在阅读拉丁语诗歌的人数要多一些，但也不会相差太大。”