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Alice Munro
艾麗絲·門羅
The English language's Chekhov
英語文學(xué)中的契訶夫
The Nobel prizewinning short-story writer has died, aged 92.
曾獲諾獎的短篇小說家門羅逝世，享年92歲。
“Promise me you'll boil the water you drink. And you won't marry a farmer," says a character in“The Love of a Good Woman".
“答應(yīng)我，喝的水要燒開。還有，你不會嫁給一個農(nóng)民。”《好女人的愛情》中的一個人物說。
Instantly, the reader is in Alice Munro territory: spinsters with lingering illnesses and stifled passions, jealous married women scrubbing floors, inky veins protruding from their legs.
讀者立刻就進入了艾麗絲·門羅的語境：疾病纏身、激情被抑制的老姑娘，正在擦洗地板的善妒的已婚婦女，她們腿上凸出的靜脈血管像用墨水畫上去的一樣。
Light falls constantly on the domestic: a gas stove in the kitchen fed with quarters, a dining-room table with a lace cloth on it, a ceramic swan reflected in an octagonal mirror.
作者的筆觸不斷落在家庭生活上：廚房里需要投入25美分硬幣才能使用的煤氣灶，餐廳里鋪著蕾絲布料的餐桌，八角鏡里映出的一只陶瓷天鵝。
But there is always something savage lurking beneath the veneer of gentility.
但在溫馨的外表下，總潛藏著一些兇殘的東西。
Certain themes recur -- of drowning, regret, longing and the cruelty of lovers.
某些主題反復(fù)出現(xiàn)：溺水、悔恨、渴望和戀人的冷酷。
The daughter of a silver-fox and mink farmer, Ms Munro was brought up in rural Ontario.
門羅是一個銀狐和水貂養(yǎng)殖場主的女兒，在加拿大安大略省的農(nóng)村長大。
As a girl, she was told that the worst thing you could do was to “call attention to yourself” or “think you were smart”.
作為女孩，她被告知，你能做的最糟糕的事情就是“引起人們對你的關(guān)注”或“認(rèn)為自己很聰明”。
She enrolled at the University of Western Ontario to study journalism but dropped out when her scholarship money dried up.
她進入西安大略大學(xué)學(xué)習(xí)新聞學(xué)，但在獎學(xué)金用完后輟學(xué)。
Ms Munro married young and moved to Vancouver, where her husband worked as a manager in a department store.
門羅很早就結(jié)婚了，并搬到了溫哥華，她的丈夫是那里的一家百貨公司的經(jīng)理。
She had four daughters.
她有四個女兒。
One, born with defective kidneys, died in infancy.
其中一個孩子出生時腎臟有缺陷，在嬰兒時期就去世了。
It was not the housework that dragged her down; it was the assumption that women who tried to do something as challenging as writing were unseemly.
拖累她的并不是家務(wù)，而是一種觀點，即認(rèn)為女性試圖做一些像寫作那樣具有挑戰(zhàn)性的事情是不得體的。
She wrote while her daughters napped.
她在女兒們午睡的時候?qū)懽鳌?/p>
It was in those stories that she tried to fathom the bargains people make“for lust”, recording the cycle of excitement and despair and the bitterness of those who fear they have missed the boat.
正是在這些故事中，她試圖洞察人們?yōu)椤坝倍_成的協(xié)議，記錄了興奮和絕望的循環(huán)，以及那些擔(dān)心錯過機會的人的苦澀心情。
For years she thought short stories were practice.
多年來，她一直認(rèn)為寫短篇小說是一種練習(xí)。
Deep in domesticity in suburban Vancouver, she dreamed up plots.
在溫哥華市郊的家庭生活中，她想象了一些情節(jié)。
She was as consumed by the minutiae of daily life -- cooking, cleaning, taking care of her children -- as by the stories she was writing in her head in the deadness of early afternoon.
她沉浸于日常生活的瑣事中--做飯、打掃衛(wèi)生、照顧孩子，也同樣沉浸于她在寂靜的午后在腦海中構(gòu)想的故事中。
Each story has layers, from the mundane (embroidered napkins, liquorice drops, bus depots) to the sublime (a man touching a woman's waist, a look of recognition and encouragement, daydreams that wear themselves out with the passage of time).
每個故事都有層次，從平淡(刺繡的餐巾、甘草糖漿、公交站臺)到升華(一個男人觸碰了一個女人的腰，一個心領(lǐng)神會和鼓勵的眼神，一些在時間的磋磨中而破滅的白日夢)。
Her characters do anything to avoid confronting their pain.
門羅筆下的人物竭盡全力避免面對自己的痛苦。
“That's the trouble with linen,” says a woman at a funeral reception in “What is Remembered”, noting that another woman's dress has wrinkled up.
在《被記住的事》中，一位女士在葬禮接待儀式上看到另一位女士的裙子起皺了，然后說：“亞麻布就是有這個問題?！?/p>
In 1977 “Royal Beatings” was her first story to be published in the New Yorker; it was followed by many more.
1977年，《皇家式毆打》是她在《紐約客》上發(fā)表的第一篇小說，之后又發(fā)表了更多的故事。
Her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, won the Governor General's Award -- one of Canada's highest literary accolades -- yet still she was dismissed by many as a shy housewife.
她的第一本書《快樂影子之舞》獲得了加拿大最高文學(xué)榮譽之一的總督獎，但她仍被許多人輕視，說她不過是一個靦腆的家庭主婦。
In 2013 she became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel prize in literature, but was too unwell to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony.
2013年，她成為第一位獲得諾貝爾文學(xué)獎的加拿大女性，但她身體不適，無法前往斯德哥爾摩參加頒獎典禮。
Instead the Nobel Foundation visited her at her daughter's home in Victoria, British Columbia, and recorded an interview.
于是諾貝爾基金會前往她女兒的家中（位于英屬哥倫比亞省的維多利亞市）拜訪了她，并錄制了一次采訪。
In it she said she wanted her stories to move people.
在采訪中她說，她希望她的故事能讓人們有所觸動。
She wanted you to“feel you are a different person when you finish” reading.
她希望你們“讀完后感覺自己變成了一個不同的人”。
Fellow writers were some of her most devoted readers.
許多作家是她最忠實的讀者之一。
Cynthia Ozick, an American author, called Ms Munro “our Chekhov” and predicted she is “going to outlast most of her contemporaries”.
美國作家辛西婭·奧齊克稱門羅為“我們的契訶夫”，并預(yù)言她“將比大多數(shù)同時代作家活得更久”。
Like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, she evoked Canada but transcended it.
像瑪格麗特·阿特伍德和邁克爾·翁達杰一樣，門羅讓人想起加拿大，但又超越了加拿大。
Her greatest gift was probably her economy of style; she moved forwards and backwards in time and distilled multiple narratives into 30 pages.
她最大的天賦可能是她的簡練文筆，她在時間中回溯和前進，能將多條敘事線提煉成30頁的文字。
In“Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You”, a jilted woman tries unsuccessfully to kill herself by drinking laundry detergent.
在《我一直想要告訴你的事》中，一個被拋棄的女人試圖通過喝洗衣液自殺，但沒有成功。
Decades later, her sister is checking whether the level of rat poison on the kitchen shelf is going down, as her brother-in-law is withering away.
幾十年后，她的姐姐正在檢查廚房架子上的老鼠藥是否變少了，因為她妹夫的身體正日益衰弱。
Is he being slowly poisoned?
他是不是被慢慢下毒了？
Ms Munro leaves the reader guessing.
門羅讓讀者去猜測。
The Swedish Academy praised her ability to show “how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary.”
瑞典學(xué)院稱贊門羅能夠向人們展示“在被稱為‘平凡’的堆滿雜物的空虛中，可以容納多少非凡之物”。
Ms Munro's short stories -- the opposite of provincial despite their settings -- have the emotional depth of novels.
門羅的短篇小說--盡管背景設(shè)定為日常生活，但完全不狹隘--具有長篇小說的情感深度。
She wrote about the clamour of desire, the self-deception and destruction, without ever being sentimental.
她寫的是欲望的喧囂、自我欺騙和毀滅，并從來不為之傷感。
Sexual attraction is omnipresent in her writing, driving people to extremes, teasing them with the possibility of happiness.
在她的作品中，性吸引力無處不在，性吸引力將人們推向極端，用可能的快樂來逗引人們。
As she wrote in “The Beggar Maid”, “What made you wanted was nothing you did, it was something you had, and how could you ever tell whether you had it?”
正如她在《乞丐少女》中所寫的，“讓其他人對你產(chǎn)生渴望的不是你做了什么，而是你擁有的某個東西，而你怎么能知道自己是否擁有它？”
