2020年11月CATTI一级笔译实务英译汉真题题源及参考译文¶
Alice Munro, named on Thursday as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”
爱丽丝·门罗(Alice Munro)于本周四获得2013年诺贝尔文学奖，她曾说过：“事物的复杂性，即蕴含在事物之中的事物，似乎无穷无尽。我的意思是，没有任何事是轻松简单的。”
That is also a perfect description of Ms. Munro’s quietly radiant short stories — stories that have established her as one of the foremost practitioners of the form. Set largely in small-town and rural Canada and often focused on the lives of girls and women, her tales have the swoop and density of big, intimate novels, mapping the crevices of characters’ hearts with cleareyed Chekhovian empathy and wisdom.
这番话亦是门罗那些宁静闪光的短篇小说的绝好写照，这些作品为她奠定了短篇小说界一流作者的地位。她的小说主要发生在加拿大的乡村小镇，描绘女孩与女人们的生活，带着契诃夫式洞悉一切的同情与智慧勾勒出笔下人物心灵的罅隙，亦有着长篇小说所具备的冲击力与厚重。
Fluent and deceptively artless on the page, these stories are actually amazingly intricate constructions that move back and forth in time, back and forth between reality and memory, opening out, magically, to disclose the long panoramic vistas in these people’s lives (the starts, stops and reversals that stand out as hinge moments in their personal histories) and the homely details of their day-to-day routines: the dull coping with “food and mess and houses” that can take up so much of their heroines’ time.
她的短篇小说行文流畅，文风表面质朴无华，实则结构精美复杂，在时间之中往复穿梭，在现实与记忆之间转换；故事神秘展开，揭开笔下人物生平的全貌景观（在关键的转折点中突出个体人物生活史中的开端、停顿与逆境），乃至日常生活中的平凡琐碎细节：她会平淡地描述 “食物、琐事与家务”，这些事占去了她笔下女主人公的大部分时间。
Ms. Munro’s stories possess an emotional amplitude and a psychological density that stand in sharp contrast to the minimalistic work of Raymond Carver, and to Donald Barthelme’s playful, postmodernist tales. Her understanding of the music of domestic life, her ability to simultaneously detail her characters’ inner landscapes and their place in a meticulously observed community, and her talent for charting “the progress of love” as it morphs and mutates through time — these gifts have not only helped Ms. Munro redefine the contours of the contemporary short story, but have also made her one of today’s most influential writers, celebrated by authors as disparate as Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Franzen, Deborah Eisenberg and Mona Simpson.
门罗的小说既有情感的广度，亦有心理的深度，与雷蒙德·卡佛(Raymond Carver)的简约风格，乃至唐纳德·巴塞尔姆(Donald Barthelme’s)戏谑的后现代主义故事形成鲜明对比。她深深了解蕴含在家庭生活中的音乐；在描绘笔下人物内心世界细节的同时，无微不至地勾勒出社区的状态，并点出人物在社区中的位置；此外她还擅长书写“爱的进程”，在时间的演进中为爱的变形与变异画出图谱。这些特质令她重新定义了当代短篇小说的外延，也使她成为当今世上最重要的作家之一，洛丽·摩尔(Lorrie Moore)、乔纳森·弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)、黛博拉·埃森堡(Edborah Eisenberg)与莫娜·辛普森(Mona Simpson)等风格各异的作家都对她赞不绝口。
In short fiction that spans four and a half decades — beginning with the collection “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), through classic volumes like “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “The Progress of Love”(1986), “Friend of My Youth”(1990) and “Open Secrets” (1994), up to “Dear Life” (2012), which she has said will be her last — Ms. Munro has given us prismatic portraits of ordinary people that reveal their intelligence, toughness and capacity to dream, as well as their lies, blind spots and lapses of courage and good will. Such descriptions are delivered not with judgmental accountancy, but with the sort of “unsparing unsentimental love” harbored by a close friend or family member.
门罗创作短篇小说已有45年，最早的作品集是1968年的《快乐影子舞》(Dance of the Happy Shades)，其间有《木星的卫星》(The Moons of Jupiter，1982)、《爱的进程》(The Progress of Love, 1986)、《青年时代的朋友》(Friend of My Youth, 1990)和《公开的秘密》(Open Secrets, 1994)等经典小说集，直到2012年的《亲爱的生活》(Dear Life)——她说《亲爱的生活》将是她的最后一本小说集。在这些作品中，门罗为普通人的生活描绘出五光十色的画像，展现他们的智慧、坚韧与梦想的能力，与此同时也有他们的谎言和盲点，乃至勇气和善意的偶尔缺失。她的描写不带评判色彩，只有“不夹偏私，冷静理性的爱”，如同来自亲密的朋友或家庭成员。
There is always an awareness in her fiction of the subjectivity of perception, and the kaleidoscopic permutations that memory can work on reality. In “Friend of My Youth,” the story of a twice-jilted woman named Flora is remembered by a friend, and that friend’s account, in turn, is framed by her daughter’s thoughts on the subject, turning Flora’s sad tale into a kind of Rorschach test for the pair of them.
她的小说也总是清醒地认识到认知能力的主观性，以及记忆对现实的各种丰富多彩的影响。《青年时代的朋友》讲述两次遭人遗弃的芙罗拉在一位朋友心目中的回忆，这位朋友的叙述也受到她女儿对芙罗拉看法的影响，芙罗拉悲哀的故事变成了母女之间的罗夏墨迹心理测验(Rorschach test) 。
Like Ms. Munro, many of the women in these stories grew up in small towns in Canada and, at some point, faced a decision about whether to stay or to leave for the wider world. Their lifetimes often span decades of startling social change — from a time and place when tea parties and white gloves were de rigueur to the days of health food stores and stripper bars.
和门罗一样，她小说中的女人们也多在加拿大小镇上成长，在某个时刻面临留在家乡还是奔赴广大世界的抉择。她们在数十年的人生中往往历经社会巨变，从举办茶会、社交场合必须戴白手套的年代和地点一路走到健康食品店与脱衣舞酒吧的时代。
For that matter, Ms. Munro’s women, much like John Updike’s men, often find themselves caught on the margins of shifting cultural mores and pulled between conflicting imperatives — between rootedness and escape, domesticity and freedom, between tending to familial responsibilities or following the urgent promptings of their own hearts.
因此，门罗笔下的女人很像约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)笔下的男人，经常发现自己被困在文化道德转型的边缘，在互相矛盾的义务中挣扎——坚守与逃避、家庭与自由，对家族的责任与内心冲动的迫切召唤。
The narrator of “Miles City, Montana” craves “a place to hide” from the demands of running a household; she wants to “get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself,” only to realize, after a swimming pool accident, that her self-preoccupation has endangered her daughter. In “Family Furnishings,” the heroine doesn’t stay home to take care of her ailing mother, but wins a college scholarship, moves away to the big city and sets about becoming a writer.
《蒙大拿迈尔斯城 》(Miles City, Montana)中的叙事者渴望“一个躲藏的地方”，可以逃避持家的义务；她想“忙于我真正的工作，有点像哄好我内心深处冷淡的部分，”但在一次游泳事故之后，她发现她对自我的关注令女儿置身危险境地。在《家居装饰》(Family Furnishings)中，女主人公没有呆在家里照顾生病的母亲，而是获取大学学位，搬到大城市，打算开始写作。
In story after story, passion is the magnet or the motor that drives women’s choices. Love and sex, and marriage and adultery are often mirrors that reveal a Munro heroine’s expectations — her fondest dreams and cruel self-delusions, her sense of independence and need to belong.
在一个个故事里，激情就像磁石或马达，吸引和驱动着女人们做出选择。对于门罗的女主人公们来说，爱情与性爱，婚姻与外遇通常就像镜子一样映照出她们的渴望——她们最美好的梦想与最残酷的自欺，她们的独立意识与对归属感的需求。
Ms. Munro is adept at tracing the many configurations that intimacy can take over the years, showing how it can suffocate a marriage or inject it with a renewed sense of devotion. She shows how sexual ardor can turn into a “tidy pilot flame” and how an impulsive tryst can become a treasured memory, hoarded as a bulwark against the banalities of middle age.
门罗还擅长描写多年亲密关系的多种复杂情况，显示这样的关系如何扼杀一段婚姻，或为婚姻注入新的奉献精神。她展示了性爱可以变为“蔓延的火势”；一时冲动的幽会可以成为珍贵的回忆，汇聚为对抗平庸中年生活的堡垒。
Illness and death frequently intrude upon these stories, and the reader is constantly reminded of the precariousness of life — and the role that luck, chance and reckless, spur-of-the-moment choices can play. Some of Ms. Munro’s characters embrace change as a liberating force that will lift them out of their humdrum routines, or at least satisfy their avid curiosity about life. Others regard it with fearful dismay, worried that they will lose everything they hold dear — or at least everything familiar.
疾病与死亡也是她小说中经常出现的主题，读者经常会感受到生命的珍贵，以及运气、机遇和轻率莽撞的选择在人生中扮演的角色。门罗笔下的一些人物把改变视为解放自身的力量，可以让他们摆脱一成不变的生活，或者至少能满足他们对人生敏锐的好奇心。另一些人则将改变视为可怕的不幸，担心会失去手中珍贵的一切，至少那是他们所熟悉的一切。
In “A Wilderness Station,” an orphan named Annie marries a gruff frontiersman and after his mysterious death, finds herself in jail for his murder. And in “A Real Life,” a woman who has led a marginal existence, trapping muskrats for their fur in the Ontario countryside, meets a visitor from Australia, begins corresponding with him and after he proposes, moves to Queensland, where she finds herself flying airplanes and shooting crocodiles.
譬如《旷野车站》(A Wilderness Station)讲述孤女安妮嫁给一个性情冷漠的拓荒者，丈夫神秘死亡后，她却莫名其妙地被控谋杀他，进了牢房。《真实生活》(A Real Life)里，一个住在安大略乡村的女人靠捕捉麝鼠贩卖皮毛勉强维生，她遇到一个澳大利亚游客，开始和他通信，后来他向她求婚后，她移居昆士兰，过上了开飞机和猎杀鳄鱼的生活。
Some of Ms. Munro’s more recent tales have exchanged the elliptical narratives she pioneered years ago for a more old-fashioned, stage-managed approach. Compared to her earlier work, many of the stories in “Dear Life” feature tightly plotted — even contrived — narratives and more closure than in the past.
门罗早年的作品开创了委婉的叙事风格，近年来的作品则走向传统的、舞台化的方式。和早期作品相比，《亲爱的生活》中的许多小说有着构思更为严密的叙事（甚至有些不真实），比以往的小说更有如释重负的宽慰之感。
The highlights of that volume were four final entries, which she described as “the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life,” a comment that cannot help but remind the reader of how closely many of Ms. Munro’s stories have followed the general contours of her life: from a hardscrabble childhood in an Ontario farming community, to early marriage and a move to British Columbia, followed by divorce, a new marriage and a move back to rural Ontario.
这本小说集的亮点是最后四篇小说，她称它们是“关于我的人生，我要说的最初与最终的话，也是最亲密的话。”这样的评语会令读者们联想到，门罗的很多小说都与她本人的人生大致历程相吻合：在安大略农场度过贫苦的童年、早早结婚、移居卑诗省、离婚、再婚，搬回安大略乡村。
In the last paragraph of the last of those semi-autobiographical pieces, Ms. Munro writes, “I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.”
在这些半自传小说的最后一段里，门罗写道：“母亲生病临终之际我没有回家，也没有出席她的葬礼。当时两个孩子还小，在温哥华无人可以替我照看他们。我们几乎付不起旅费，丈夫又一向鄙弃正统的礼数，但为什么要怪他呢？我也是这么想的。我们说过一些不能被原谅的话，也说过我们将永远不能原谅自己。但我们就是这样做的——我们一直都是这样做的。”
Writers and artists make quite a few appearances in Munro stories, but storytelling remains important to all her characters, no matter their vocation — in fact, it’s an essential tool for ordering and making sense of their lives. Sometimes, it’s a way of reimagining the past in order to manufacture an identity or mythologize one’s family. Sometimes it’s a way of foregrounding certain events, while smudging over others. Sometimes it’s a way of finding patterns in the chaos of the everyday. And sometimes, as in Ms. Munro’s own wonderful stories, it’s a way of connecting time past, present and future — not in conventional terms of beginnings, middles and ends, but in surprising new ways that leave readers with a renewed appreciation of the endless “complexity of things — the things within things.”
门罗的小说中也经常出现作家与艺术家们的身影，但不管她笔下的人物从事什么样的职业，“讲故事”对于他们来说都很重要——事实上，讲故事是他们为人生赋予意义和秩序的重要工具。它有时是重新想象过去，为自己建立身份或书写家族神话的方式；有时是凸显某些具体事件，模糊其他事件的工具；有时是在日常生活的混乱中确立规范的手法；有时又是连接过去、现在与未来的桥梁——在门罗精彩的小说中，过去、现在与未来并不意味着传统的开始、过程与结局，而是一种惊人的全新方式，令读者可以以崭新的眼光去欣赏无穷无尽的“事物的复杂性，即蕴含在事物之中的事物”。
注：较真题内容有所改编