【导读】《静园中的异乡人》是当代美国作家沃德·贾斯特于200g年发表的长篇小说，探讨了家庭、孤独与自我认同的主题。故事围绕主人公亚历克·马隆展开，讲述了他在充满社会和政治变革的背景下，如何挣脱家庭束缚、寻找生命的独立与意义。小说通过沉静的节奏、细腻的心理描写，描绘了亚历克与父亲的关系、他对家庭责任的逃避，以及对个人身份的探索，是一部关于成长、觉醒与寻求自我认同的作品。本篇节选自小说第一章开篇的内容。
Especially when he was alone Alec Malone had the habit of slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be confused with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while his reveries presented a kind of abstract grandeur,expressionist canvases in close focus,untitled. That was how he thought of them, and not only because of the score in the background, German music, voices, trumpets, metronomic bass drums,and now and again the suggestion of a tango or a march. The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old friends paying a visit.The friends aged as he did, becoming increasingly abstract now that he had begun to lose sight in his right eye, a hole in the macula that began as a pinprick but was now the size of an o. That eye saw only the periphery of things with any clarity. The condition was annoying, not disabling, since sight was a function not of one eye but of two and Alec's left eye was sound. However,driving at night was an adventure. He did not permit himself to drive in fog because objects had a way of vanishing altogether. And there was some amusement-when he closed his left eye and looked at a human face with his right,that face appeared as an expressionist's death's-head, an image very like Munch's" The Scream.
尤其在独处时，亚历克·马无隆总会陷人遐思，进人一种半梦半醒的恍惚状态。梦境本是庸常，而他的神游却呈现出抽象的壮丽，仿佛是一幅幅表现主义风格的油画，聚焦于细节，无题无名。他向来如此看待这些幻想，不仅因为脑海深处总有背景音乐的烘托：德式乐章、人声、喇叭声与节拍精准的低音鼓，以及时而闪现的探戈或进行曲的旋律。这些遐思自幼便伴随他，他待之如老友造访。与他一样，这些老友也逐渐苍老，变得愈发抽象朦胧，只因他的右眼视力开始减退—视网膜黄斑上原先仅针尖大小的病灶，现已扩张成字母0那般大的孔洞了。如今，这只眼睛只能看清事物的边缘轮廓。这状况令人恼火，但无大碍，毕竟视觉功能本就取决于双眼，而亚历克的左眼尚且状况良好。只是夜间驾车便成了冒险。他绝不在大雾天开车，因为雾气会让物体彻底遁形。当然，这其中也有些趣味——当他闭上左眼，只用右眼端详人脸时，那张脸竟如表现主义的骷髅画，活脱脱蒙克名作《呐喊》中的扭曲面容。
Alec had the usual habits of one who lived alone: a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour.He worked when he felt like it. He described himself to himself as leading a chamber-music sort of life except for the Wagnerian reveries. They were neutral fantasies, meaning they had nothing to do with the life he wished he had led--Alec was quite content with the one he had--or might lead in the future. He did not count himself a prophet. He returned often to his childhood but rarely lingered there. His childhood was so long ago that the events he remembered most vividly seemed to him to have happened to someone else and were incomplete in any case, washed-out colors side by side with ink-black holes, a half-remembered country governed by a grim-faced man with a long nose, a figure from antiquity,perhaps a bildnis from Durer's' sketchbook. Alec considered the long-nosed man a family heirloom, grandmother's silver or the pendulum clock on the mantel, the one whose ticks and tocks sounded like pistol reports. He lost his footing in those early years in which the domestic life of his own family was usurped by the civic life of the nation. That was the life that counted. The Malone dinner table, his father presiding, was a combination quiz show and news conference.
亚历克有着独居者惯常的习性：保持固定饮食，每周必去书店一趟，分毫不差地记账，以及对美国职棒大联盟和职业高尔夫巡回赛情有独钟。他只在兴致来时工作。他暗自将生活比作一曲室内乐当然，偶尔也会响起瓦格纳式的恢弘乐章。这些幻想不涉现实，与他渴望拥有或未来可能拥有的。生活毫无瓜葛——亚历克对现状颇为满意。他从不以先知自居。他常重返童年记忆，却夜少驻足。童年已久远模糊，记忆中最为清晰的事情仿佛发生在别人身上，总是残缺不全褪色的画面与漆黑的空洞并存。那是个记忆模糊的国度，由一位面色阴郁的长鼻子男予统治，他的形象宛如古代雕像，也许是丢勒素描本中的一幅肖像。亚历克将这位长鼻男视作传家宝，譬如祖母的银器，又或壁炉架上的摆钟，每一下滴答声都像枪声一般脆响。他童年的根基从未稳固，那些年头里，他一家人的家庭生活被国家公共事务所占据，那才是有意义的生活。马隆家的餐桌上,父亲端坐主位，那场面活像知识竞赛兼新闻发布会现场。
Quick now, Alec. How many congressional districts in lowa? Which nations were signatories to the Locarno Pact? Who wrote "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. It is the function of specch to free men from the bondage of irrational fears'"?
快，亚历克，说说看！艾奥瓦州有几个国会选区？签署《洛迦诺公约》的国家有哪些？“对严重伤害的恐惧，不能单独成为压制言论与集会自由的正当理由。言论的功能正是让人摆脱非理性恐惧的束缚”——这是谁的名言？
What was Glass-Steagall? Who was Colonel House?
格拉斯-斯蒂格尔法案是什么？豪斯上校又是谁？
Where is Yalta?
雅尔塔在哪里？
Question: What's the difference between ignorance and indifference?
Answer: I don't know and I don't care.
问：无知与漠不关心有什么区别？
答：我不知道，也不在乎。
Hush, Alec. Don't disturb your father when he's talking to Mr. Roosevelt.Don't you know there's a war on?
嘘，亚历克！你父亲正在与罗斯福先生通话，别去打扰他。难道你不知道在打仗吗？
À la recherche du temps Roosevelt.The president inhabited the house in Chevy Chase like a member of the family or a living god, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Alec's father called him the Boss. The Boss wants this, the Boss wants that. The Boss sounded a little tired today but he's leaving for Warm Springs tomorrow. In his reveries Alec conjured the president in his White House office, talking into the telephone in his marbled Hudson River®voice, commanding an entire nationits armies, its factories and farms, all its citizens great and small. Yet Alec had no sense of him as a man-—-not then, not later--and when he tentatively asked his father, the reply was bromidic. He was great. He was the greatest man his father had ever met, and he had met many, many of the highest men in the land, shaken their hands, spoken tête-à-tête, worked with them, worked against them. The Boss was different. The Boss lived on a different level, deriving his strength and his courage from-and here his father faltered, uncomfortable always in the realm of the mystical. Finally he said, His legs are useless, you know. He can hardly walk. But he likes a martini at the end of the day just like the rest of us, and there the comparison ends. Alec, I'd say he's Shakespearean. That's the best I can do.
追忆罗斯福时代。总统就住在切维切斯的那座房子里，宛如家庭中的一员，或某个无所不在却从未现身的神祗。亚历克的父亲称他为“头儿”：头儿要这样，头儿要那样。头儿今天昕着有些乏，但他明天就要去温泉疗养了。在亚历克的遐想中，总统在白宫办公室里，用他那坚定有力、带哈得孙河谷口音的嗓音对着电话讲话，指挥着整个国家——统领军队，掌管工厂与农场，影响着所有不论尊卑的公民。然而亚历克始终无法将他视作凡人——当时如此，后来依然。他曾试探性地跟父亲提起这个问题，却只得到陈词滥调式的回答。他非常伟大，是他父亲见过最伟大的人。父亲见过太多国内的大人物，与他们握手，促膝长谈，并肩协作，也针锋相对。但头儿却不同。“头儿生活在另一重境界，他的力量与勇气源自……”—说到这里，父亲总是语塞，提到神秘莫测的东西时父亲总是不太自然。未了他说！“你知道，他的腿不行，几乎走不了路。但黄昏时他也爱喝杯马提尼，跟我们没什么两样，不过也就这点相似了。亚历克，要我说.他就像莎士比亚笔下的人物。我只能这么形容了。”
Alec nodded, wondering all the while which of Shakespeare's kings his father had in mind-Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus? Henry V, no doubt,though that comparison did not seem apt. Shakespeare's kings suffered the consequences of their will to power.The will to power was the evil in them.
亚历克点点头，心中却疑惑父亲究竟把罗斯福与莎士比亚笔下的哪位君王相比—麦克白？理查三世？科利奥兰纳斯？应该是亨利五世，尽管这个类比似乎不太恰当。莎士比亚的君王们都深受权力意志的折磨。这种对权力的渴望正是他们悲剧的根源。
For years Franklin D. Roosevelt figured in Alec's reveries but eventually faded as Alec drifted upward, forward to his young manhood and early middle age and beyond, what he considered his meridian years-when he was out of his father's house, out of his orbit, out from under, married to Lucia Duran and working in what his father dismissively called "snapshots" but which everyone else called photográphy. His father wanted his boy to follow him into poli.tics, commencing a dynasty; state attomey general, his father thought, then governor, and after that anything was possible. The Boss had been a governor.
多年来，富兰克林·D.罗斯福的身影常常出现在亚历克的遐想中，但随着年岁渐长一从青年步入壮年，直至后来被他视作盛年的岁月一那个身影终究渐渐淡去。此时，他早已搬出父亲的老宅，挣脱了父亲的掌控，彻底摆脱了桎梏；他娶了露西亚·杜兰，并开始从事父亲轻蔑地称作“拍快照”的工作，而世人皆称为摄影。父亲一心盼着儿子继承衣钵，进入政界，开创政治王朝；先当州检察长，他盘算着，再竟选州长，之后就前途无量了。“头儿”当年也是从州长起家的。
No, Alec told his father.
But-—why ever not?
亚历克对父亲说。
为什么不呢？
I don't believe in dynasties, Alec said, which was the truth but not the salient truth. The salient truth was that the civic life of the nation held no attraction.He preferred Shakespeare's life to the life of any one of his kings or pretenders,tormented men always grasping for that thing just out of reach. Deluded men.Men adrift on a sea of troubles, some of their own making, some not. In any case,the Fates were in charge, part of the human equation along with ambition and restlessness. Alec was satisfied with his photography and his reveries, including the mundane, the look of ordinary things and the time of day, what the weather was like outside and who was present at the occasion, a cat slumbering in a splash of bright sunlight, red and yellow roses proliferating. Life's excitement lay just outside the frame of reference, grandeur felt but not seen yet grandeur all the same. Alec's reveries were his way of bringing life down to earth, so to speak.
“我不相信什么政治王朝。”亚历克答道。这话不假，却并非关键。关键在于，他对国家公共事务毫无兴趣。比起莎翁笔下那些君王与僭主—那些永远徒劳追逐不可得之物、被妄念所困、在苦海上漂泊的可怜人（有些苦难是自找的，有些则不然）——他更向往莎士比亚本人的生活。总之，命运之神才是主宰，与野心和躁动一样，同属人性方程式中的常量。亚历克满足于自己的摄影和遐想，其中包括那些平凡琐碎、寻常事物的样貌与时光流转的美好，窗外的天气与出现在特定场合的人物，阳光下打盹的猫，恣意蔓生的红黄玫瑰。生命的激越就隐藏在视野之外，辉煌可感却不可见，但依然真实存在。亚历克的遐想算是他将生活带回现实的一种方式吧。
（译者单位：成都大学外国语学院）
