評論
打印
Books and Arts; Literature and its influences；Mother, may I
文藝；書評；文學及其影響力；媽媽，我能不能...
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. By Colm Tóibín.Viking;
《弒母新法》：講述作家及其家庭的文獻。科爾姆·托賓著。
When the mother of Henry James, a 19th-century American novelist, appeared at a seance with a message for him, he was not surprised. As in life, so too in death, did his "dear Mother" have an uncanny knack of "pouncing upon the first occasion ... to get at me".
當十九世紀美國小說家亨利詹姆斯的媽媽出現在降神會上，給他留句話，詹姆斯并不感到驚奇。活著的時候，“親愛的母親”有神秘的能力能夠“在第一時間沖出來……修理我”，死后亦然。
"New Ways to Kill Your Mother", the latest collection of essays from Colm Toibin, an Irish novelist and critic, is full of such moments when a writer and his family "get at" each other. Fractious family relations may not be uncommon, yet the extent to which these writers-including W.B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, James Baldwin and John Cheever-managed to fight with their parents, siblings and children make arguments over the dinner table seem like a specialised art form.
《弒母新法》是科爾姆托賓，愛爾蘭小說家評論家最新的散文集，書中充滿這樣的細節，作家和他的家人如何“修理”對方。家人之間的劍拔弩張也許并不少見，但是和一些大師，包括葉芝，托馬斯曼，鮑德溫和約翰契福等，曾和父母兄弟姐妹子女動手的程度相比，在晚餐時拌拌嘴就像是種特殊的藝術形式。
Mann justified spoiling his eldest child over his five others with the line, "One should get the children used to injustice early." ].M. Synge, an Irish playwright, was similarly pampered by his mother, and another, Samuel Beckett, admitted that he was what his mother's "savage loving has made me". Georgie Yeats implored a friend of hers not to speak with her mother, because she "loves to make a whirlpool and especially if she can suck me in to it", and W.B. Yeats was busy dissuading his father from trying his hand at writing, an effort inspired in old age by his son's success.
托馬斯曼溺愛長子超過其他五個孩子，他為自己辯護道，“人們應該讓孩子在小時候就對不公平習以為常”。愛爾蘭劇作家辛格也曾經得到過母親如此的溺愛。荒誕派作家貝克特承認，他是母親“野蠻的愛造就的”。詩人葉芝的夫人Georgie曾經請求她的一位朋友不要告知其母，因為她“喜歡制造混亂，特別是那種能把我吸走的混亂漩渦”，葉芝曾經忙于阻止父親嘗試寫作，這股勁頭是他在晚年因為兒子的成功而激起的。
Mr Toibin writes in muscular prose and has a keen eye for detail. Dividing his book in two, "Ireland" and "Elsewhere", he places these family wranglings within the larger context of trying to find an Irish voice, and of the struggle for writers such as Tennessee Williams to work out their identities as gay men in America. In Mr Toibin's opinion, "killing your father or your mother" is a necessary precursor to becoming an original writer.
托賓散文筆道剛勁，擁有對細節敏銳的觀察力。他將自己的書分成兩部分：“愛爾蘭”和“其他”，他將這些家庭爭吵融入更廣闊的背景中，那就是找尋一種愛爾蘭式的創作，以及為如田納西威廉姆一樣的作家，為在美國尋求同性戀的作家身份而斗爭。在托賓看來，“弒父弒母”是稱為一個原創作家的必要前提。
For most of his book, this argument is persuasive. However, not all of Mr Toibin's chapters hang together well. The essay on Beckett reads more like the book review it started out as, and the final piece on Baldwin only just about succeeds in comparing his literary style with the recent autobiographies by President Barack Obama.
對于托賓的大多數作品，這個觀點是有說服力的。但是，并不是托賓書中所有的章節都很好的結合在一起。關于貝克特的文章讀起來更像是他將著手寫的書評，寫鮑德溫的最后一部分只談及了他在文體上更勝一籌，是和總統奧巴馬新近出版的自傳之間做的比較。
Instead, the finest moments of Mr Toibin's book are when he focuses on the writers' prose and how they went about creating their "grim black marks on the page". Hart Crane, a young American poet who committed suicide aged 32 in 1932, writes with a syntax that has "something hard and glittering in it". Baldwin had "a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence."
反而，托賓書中最棒的章節是關于作家的文章本身，以及他們如何寫出“紙頁上的冷酷黑色文字”的。年輕的美國詩人哈特克萊恩于1932年自殺身亡，年僅32歲，他的寫作句法有種“堅硬閃光的東西在里面”。鮑德溫“對雄辯，高翔的措辭，迅猛推進的節奏，句子尖銳輝煌的回環很著迷”。
Such phrasing stands out and suggests the strength of Mr Toibin's writing style. In this respect, it is a shame that not more of Mr Toibin comes through. 0bviously fascinated with families, he has written eloquently elsewhere about his relationship with his mother, and has peopled his fiction with fractured family relationships. But in this volume his parents are never mentioned, and any personal recollection is brief. By concentrating only on the liberated voices of others, Mr Toibin has somehow managed to constrict his own.
這樣的措辭出類拔萃，也顯示了托賓行文的強有力。由此看來，非常可惜沒有更多托賓的作品取得成功。托賓顯然對家人入了迷，在別的地方，他富有表現力地道出和母親的關系，讓自己的小說充滿了折裂的家庭關系。但是在這卷書中，托賓的父母沒有被提及，個人回憶也一筆帶過。和著重描寫其他人的無拘無束的語言相比，托賓不知為什么對自己的故事如此壓抑。
