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Sedaris doesn’t exaggerate his peculiarities on paper to earn a few laughs.
塞達里斯并沒有為博得讀者一笑而在作品里夸大自己的個性。
In person, he’s the same neurotic and charming guy that his faithful readers know so well.
他本人就是他的忠實讀者所熟知的那個神經質卻又十分迷人的家伙。
And yet in Calypso, he occasionally drops his trademark humor in favor of meditations on regret and mortality.
即便如此，在《卡利普索》里，他偶爾還是會放棄他標志性的幽默，轉而思索遺憾和死亡等問題。
Sedaris has previously written about his mother in reverent tones:
在那之前，賽達里斯也曾用虔誠的語氣描述過他的母親：
her six children vied for her attention, and she held court at the dinner table every night.
六個孩子個個都想得到她的關注，每天晚上她都是飯桌上的焦點。
She even coached a young Sedaris on how to tweak his anecdotes to make them funnier.
她甚至還指導過小賽達里斯如何添油加醋將軼事寫得更有趣。
But in the considered and brutally honest Calypso essay “Why Aren’t You Laughing?,”
但在《卡利普索》里那篇經過深思熟慮、下筆極其誠懇的文章“你為什么不笑？”中，
Sedaris admits that he regrets that he never confronted his mother about her alcoholism.
塞達里斯承認，他很后悔自己沒有就母親的酗酒問題和她當面對質。
In an essay titled “The Spirit World,” Sedaris remembers his last interaction with his sister Tiffany before she died by suicide.
在“精神世界”這篇文章中，塞達里斯回憶了妹妹蒂芙尼自殺前二人最后一次見面的情形。
The two had a difficult relationship and had not spoken for four years when she appeared unannounced at one of his readings in Boston.
兩人關系不好，四年不曾說過一句話，后來，她突然出現在了他在波士頓的一次閱讀會上。
She called to him from the stage door to the theater.
她在舞臺門口喊他。
Sedaris ignored her, turned to a nearby security guard and asked him to shut the door.
塞達里斯沒有理她，還轉向附近的一名保安，讓他把門關上了。
He never saw her again.
從那以后，他再也沒有見過她。
“I feel the audience giving me the appropriate reaction when I talk about shutting the door in her face,”
“聊到我當著她的面把門關上這事的時候，我覺得觀眾的反應是很合理的，”
says Sedaris of reading that essay aloud on his book tour.
塞達里斯談到自己在新書宣傳時大聲朗讀那篇文章時的情形時說道。
“They didn’t expect that, and then they have to recalibrate their feeling toward me.
“他們都沒料到我會那樣，他們得重新調整對我的感情。
When I read that the first time, I thought, Do I really want to admit this? But it seemed false not to.
我第一次讀那篇文章的時候，我也想過，我真的要承認這件事嗎？但不承認好像又有點虛偽。
If you try to make yourself look better than you are, that’s bad.
試圖美化自己是很糟糕的。
Especially if you’re making other people look bad, you have to be upfront about how bad you are.”
通過抹黑他人來美化自己就更糟了，你必須正視自己的問題。”
Sedaris says he doesn’t regret anything he’s ever written. But he does dislike his early work.
塞達里斯表示，他不后悔自己寫下的每一件事。但他并不喜歡自己早期的作品。
Back then, he didn’t have the luxury of reading stories aloud in front of an audience dozens of times and then tweaking the language before publication.
那時，他還沒有機會在觀眾面前大聲反復朗讀自己的故事幾十遍再在發表前對語言進行調整。
“Everything in my first four or five books I would completely rewrite,” he says.
“前四五本書我每個字都想改，”他說。
“I sign those books sometimes, and I think, whatever is in here cannot be good.”
“有時候簽名也會碰到那些書，碰到的時候我心里就會想，里頭的內容沒一點兒好。”
SEDARIS’ PERFORMANCES are essential to his craft.
這種表演對賽達里斯的寫作可謂至關重要。
During his years at the Art Institute of Chicago, he reveled in the laughs he would get from his fellow students during workshops.
在芝加哥藝術學院上學時，同學們在研討會上的笑聲就讓他頗為陶醉。
These days, he reads essays aloud on tour, marks down the audience’s reactions to certain sentences,
最近，他會在巡回宣傳中朗讀他的散文，然后記下觀眾對某些句子的反應，
returns to his hotel room to revise the story and then adjusts the delivery the next night.
回到酒店后對故事加以修改，繼而對次晚的交付做以調整。
He read each of the essays in Calypso onstage at least 50 times before the book was published.
《卡利普索》出版之前，書中的每一篇文章他都在觀眾面前讀過至少50遍。
He loves performing for an audience and even schedules tours when he doesn’t have a new book to promote.
他喜歡給觀眾展示他的作品，沒有新書宣傳的時候他也會安排巡演。
He also taps his audiences for material, chatting with every reader who stands in the book-signing line.
他還會到觀眾中間取材，與排隊等他簽名的每一位讀者聊天。
A week before we spoke, a woman in Calgary, Alberta, claimed that her boyfriend was planning to get a tattoo of a corn dog on his face,
就在本次訪談的一周前，阿爾伯塔省卡爾加里就有一名女子聲稱，她的男友打算在臉上紋一個熱狗，
which might make for a good anecdote in an essay if Sedaris could confirm it was true.
倘若塞達里斯能證實此言非虛的話，或許能寫成一個不錯的小故事。
A doctor he met at a reading in El Paso, Texas, volunteered to remove that benign tumor he later fed to a turtle.
他在德克薩斯州埃爾帕索的一場讀書會上還遇到了一位醫生主動請求切除他后來喂給了海龜的那個良性腫瘤。
Sedaris happily took her up on the offer, and in the wee hours of the morning he drove with her to a clinic for the surgery.
塞達里斯欣然接受了她的提議，凌晨時分，他就開車帶她去了一家診所做手術。
He never goes to Apple’s Genius Bar anymore;
他再也不去蘋果的天才吧了；
he simply asks from the stage whether any attendees can fix a MacBook and offers them a chance to skip the line in exchange for tech support.
他開始直接在臺上問臺下的觀眾有沒有人會修蘋果筆記本，作為回報，他會優先給他們簽名。
That’s no small offer.
這筆買賣可不虧。
The longest Sedaris book signing lasted over 10 hours.
要知道，賽達里斯最長的簽售會持續了足足10個多小時。
As we stroll through Manhattan, he shows off the Band-Aids covering his arms.
就在我們漫步在曼哈頓的路上時，他還對我炫耀了他手臂上的創可貼。
He was signing books for so long the night before that his elbows began to bleed through his shirt.
原來，前一天晚上，由于簽名時間太長，他的肘部都磨出血了，還滲到了襯衫上。
“Maybe that’s what I need,” he says. “A fatty shirt that also has elbow pads.”
“也許，我需要的是那種襯衫，”他說。“那種不僅寬松，還帶有護肘墊的襯衫。”
He looks at me. “Do you think they carry that?”
他看著我。“你覺得市面上會有這種襯衫嗎？”
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