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Dear Nick,
親愛的尼古拉斯，
I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you’ll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking.
我希望一切安好。去年夏天，我的確想到你遭受到一股奇怪的壓力。我想，和許多人一樣，你的一生都將在跌宕起伏的感情里搖擺不定，這種感情會變成隧道的陷阱，當整個世界似乎都在等待你去感知的時候，卻突然逃向了廣闊的自由中去。
Nobody’s solved it. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you’ve tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
旁人愛莫能助。待你年齡漸長，你會解決這個問題，當你嘗盡世間的冷暖，直到可以輕易地犧牲某些東西時，你會更加寬容地對待占有欲(你自身的)等欲望，更包容地接納痛苦和失去。
I came to America, when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock — I lived in there with your mother. We made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do.
我27歲的時候來到美國，在那里住了三年，好似藏身于達馬特襪子里一樣——你媽媽亦是如此。我倆幾乎沒有結交什么朋友，更別提密友了，我們倆也從沒有做過對方完全沒心思做的事情。
(It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girlfriends, in case one of them set eyes on me — presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable. But most people are the same. I was quite happy to live like that, for some years.)
(這意味著，尼古拉斯，遇到在17歲到39歲之間的女性簡直天方夜譚。你媽媽將她所有的老友、女性朋友都“一趕而盡”，以防哪個跟我看對眼兒——我是這么推測的。如果她看到我和女學生交談，我一定會被送上法庭。她傻得可愛，而我傻的天真，竟然鼓勵她這種做法是合情合理的。大多數人誰不這樣呢。我很高興以這樣的模式過了這么些年。
Since the only thing we both wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I wanted to. I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.
我倆唯一想做的事情就是創作，我們的生活枯燥的像一張白紙。在美國生活的三年時光，就像瑞普·凡·溫克爾打盹一樣轉瞬即逝。之后我為什么不探索美國？我倒是想。我知道這個念頭觸手可及。十年后我們可能會這么做，因為那時我們可能已經意識到，一個人無法像被施了魔法的囚犯那樣生活在另一個人的魔法圈內。
譯文為可可英語翻譯，未經授權請勿轉載！
