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In her magnificence
了不起的托尼·莫里森
Toni Morrison, writer, died on August 5th, aged 88
作家托尼·莫里森于8月5日去世，享年88歲。
She did not look away. When Toni Morrison's clear imagining gaze met uncomfortable things, she faced them down. A poisoned dog jerking round the yard like a toy. Human placenta in a field. The transparent underskin of a bobcat gutted on a kitchen table. The greyish panties, still round her ankles, of an 11-year-old girl raped by her father as she washed the dishes. Especially she did not look away from the images of slavery she had been slowly, painfully dragged towards by the time she wrote "Beloved", in 1987.
她不會把目光移開。當托尼·莫里森的清澈的充滿想象力的目光看到令人不舒服的東西時，她會面對它們。在院子里轉來轉去的一只中毒的狗像玩具一樣。田野中人的胎盤。放在廚房桌子上被破壞的山貓的透明的皮膚。一名11歲的女孩在洗碗時被父親強奸，她的灰色內褲還繞著腳踝。尤其是1987年托尼寫《寵兒》的時候，她沒有將她的目光從自己被慢慢地、痛苦地拖向的奴隸的形象上移開。
A man hanged in a sycamore tree, known by his shirt, but with head and feet missing. A red ribbon, fished from the river, with a curl of wet woolly hair attached to it and, to that, its bit of scalp. A fugitive slave crunching the breast bone of a dove before its heart had stopped beating. The wildness that shot up in a man's eye when his lips were yanked back to take the bit. Sethe, her heroine in "Beloved", serenely continuing to hold on her baby's face after she had cut its throat to save it from a slave's life.
一名男子被吊死在一棵美國梧桐樹上，從他的襯衫就可以看出，但是他的頭和腳都不見了。一個從河里釣出來的紅絲帶，上面有一綹濕漉漉的毛茸茸的頭發，還有一點頭皮。一個逃亡的奴隸在鴿子的心臟停止跳動之前嘎吱嘎吱地啃著它的胸骨。當這個男人的嘴唇被拉回去咬一口時，涌上他的眼睛的野性?！秾檭骸分械哪兄鹘侨z，她割斷了自己的嬰兒的喉嚨，把他從奴隸的生命中救了出來，然后平靜地繼續捧著孩子的臉。
Because these scenes sometimes brushed against beauty—the sycamores tall and soughing, the dove eaten under flowering plum trees—and because her novels won prizes, notably the Nobel in 1993, critics tended to call them lyrical and poetic. Nothing made her madder. Lyricism meant that literary language was getting in the way. It had to be stripped down, freed up, opened up and teased to get the writerly-ness out. First drafts of her word-work, in number-two pencil on yellow legal pads, then went through as many as 13 revisions on the word-processor.
因為這些場景有時會與美擦肩而過-颯颯風吹的高大的梧桐樹，在開花的李子樹下被吃的鴿子-因為她的小說得了獎，尤其是1993年的著名的諾貝爾獎，評論家們傾向于稱其為抒情的和詩意的描述。沒有什么使她更加生氣了。抒情風格意味著文學語言的介入。它必須被剝離，被釋放，被打開，被戲弄，以獲得可寫性。她的文字作品的初稿是用二號鉛筆寫在黃色的便箋簿上，然后在文字處理器上經過了多達13次的修改。
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