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中国当代作家观察(一)
Jia Pingwa: From Dihua to
Xi’an and Back Again
贾平凹:从棣花到西安后的回归
(英)罗宾•吉尔班克
胡宗锋
译
For my
family
家人
One evening in March
of 2016,
the veteran Mongolian broadcaster Siqin Gaowa took to the stage in
CCTV 1’s ‘Reading Room’ series and left her audience red-eyed and
spellbound. Her ten-minute recitation began in plaintive
fashion:-
2016年三月的一个晚上,著名蒙古族演员斯琴高娃出现在了中央电视台的系列节目《朗读者》上,她的朗诵迷倒了哭红了眼睛的观众。十分钟的朗诵在忧伤中娓娓道来:
When people are alive,
they are not so mindful of day and night because they can only
occupy themselves with a finite number of matters. Once a person
has passed away, the days pile up: according to my reckoning, in
twenty days’ time it will be the third anniversary of my mother’s
death.
人活着的时候,只是事情多,不计较白天和黑夜。人一旦死了日子就堆起来:算一算,再有二十天,我妈就三周年了。
During these three years,
I have been seized by a queer sensation, namely I have felt that my
mother is not actually gone. I have also felt that my mother shares
the sense that she has not departed. It is said that dying is like
going to sleep, but while the sleeper knows he must slumber on a
bed he does not know when exactly he will drift
off.
三年里,我一直有个奇怪的想法,就是觉得我妈没有死,而且还觉得我妈自己也不以为她就死了。常说人死如睡,可睡的人是知道要睡去,睡在了床上,却并不知道在什么时候睡着的呀。
The
speaker’s voice remained crisp as a leaf as she described the
terminal decline of an octogenarian widow, who was sent back from
the city apartment where she lived for fourteen years to the
country village she knew best of all. The bound-footed, illiterate
woman left no final words, only instructing her younger daughter to
rinse her facecloth as she lay her head down for the last time. The
oratory of Ms. Siqin, who was wrapped in a baize green shawl and
seated at a desk meant to simulate a writer’s study, never once
quivered or cracked as she approached the final
paragraph:-
在讲述这位耄耋之年老人的最后时光时,朗读者的声音像一片易碎的枯叶。老人离开她最熟悉的乡下,在城里的单元房里生活了十四年。这位目不识丁的小脚女人没有任何遗言,当她最后一次躺下的时候,她只是让小女儿为自己洗一下搽脸的毛巾。朗读者斯琴高娃围着一条绿色的围巾,坐在仿佛是作家书房里的一张写字桌前,声音没有一丝颤抖或嘶哑,一直朗诵到最后一段:
The date of the third
anniversary is drawing near. According to the custom of the
countryside we should hold a special ceremony. I am preparing
candles, incense, and fruit, ready to go back to Dihua. But once I
return to Dihua, I have to visit her grave. The reality is that my
mother has passed away. I am on the ground and she is beneath it.
Life and death separate us. The mother and son can never cross
paths again. Tears cascade down my face accompanied by a long
wail.
三周年的日子一天天临近,乡下的风俗是要办一场仪式的,我准备着香烛花果,回一趟棣花了。但一回棣花,就要去坟上,现实告诉着我,妈是死了,我在地上,她在地下,阴阳两隔,母子再也难以相见,顿时热泪肆流,长声哭泣啊。
The words alone carried the sentiment. This was
no small relief for the production values of the show (a stringed
ensemble accompaniment and an empty wicker rocking chair to one
side of the stage) came off as clumsily cloying.
Overnight
Some one told
Jia Pingwa that every time he watch it he would
moved to tears, he had cried for three times. Jia Pingwa said:
“this does not mean I write well, everybody put their true emotions
into the words when they write about their parents. They might
think of their own parents when they read my words, the most
important is that Siqin
Gaowa did read it
wonderfully. ”
光是那文字就够感人的了,而播出的场景(伴随背景音乐的也只有舞台旁边一把空荡荡的柳条摇椅)更让人动容。
有人告诉贾平凹说,他看一次哭一次,都哭了三次了。贾平凹说:“这不是说我写的有多好,每一个人写他的父亲母亲的时候,他们都是有真情实感的东西,他们在读的过程中,可能是想到了自己的父亲母亲,最重要的就是斯琴高娃朗读的好。”
Had she not mentioned the name
of the author of the essay at the outset, few viewers would have
likely guessed straight off that this was the work of Jia Pingwa.
From achieving notoriety and censorship in the 1990s to finding
countrywide acclaim in recent years with Shaanxi Opera,
Lao Sheng and Pole Flower, Mr. Jia’s novels have
overshadowed consistently his shorter fiction and prose. This
should be a matter of some regret for, as Siqin Gaowa’s timely
intervention goes some way to proving, he retains an undiminished
capacity for compressing heartfelt emotion into one or a few
thousand words. This knack is still there in his sixties. Those
with long-term memories may discern how much ‘Written for my
Mother’ is of a piece with early prose like ‘The Fountain,’ a
lament on the felling of a cherished tree in front of his old
family home.
斯琴高娃开始朗诵的时候没有提文章的作者,而有的观众可能一下子就猜到了这是贾平凹的作品。从上个世纪九十年代遭遇世人皆知的作品被禁,到后来以《秦腔》《老生》《极花》等作品红遍中国,贾平凹的小说风头一直盖过了他的短篇小说和散文,此实乃一大憾事。斯琴高娃恰逢其时的干预证明,贾平凹具有无以伦比、用千把字的作品凝练动人情感的能耐。年过花甲的他依旧宝刀未老,记性好的人可以看出“写给母亲”像他早年的作品“泉”,那是在惋惜老家门前一棵他喜欢的树被伐倒了。
Mr. Jia’s biography is well-known, not least
through his memoirI am a Peasant. As a child in
Danfeng County, Shangluo, he bore the privations of coming from a
large extended family overseen by an older paternal uncle. His
primary school years saw him take classes while balancing on a
couple of logs on the earth since the Jia clan could not afford a
proper stool for every one of its children. And yet despite the
constant chafing of the bark against his thighs and posterior, the
immediate environment fuelled his imagination. Many years later in
the essay ‘My Primary School’ he would recall the peculiar sense of
reverence that was instilled in him while being taught in that
classroom. A deconsecrated temple loft, images of dragons still
capered about the timbered firmament.
贾平凹先生的传记很有名,那到不是因为他的自传《我是农民》。
幼年在商洛丹凤县被伯父看管的时候,他就领略到了在一个大家族里的滋味。小学上课时,他不得不把“家里的劈材拿来一根,在前后的柱墩上掏出窝儿架好,骑在上边。”因为家里没法给上学的每个孩子都做一个像样的板凳。虽然大腿和屁股时不时的被树皮磨得疼,但独特的环境却激起了他丰富的想象。多年后,在散文“我的小学”里,他忆起的就是在那间教室里上课时的独特感受。一间还俗的祠堂,木制的苍穹上依旧跳跃着龙的影子。
On reaching adolescence, Jia purposefully altered
the final character of his name, so that instead of being an
“ordinary lad,” he now possessed the trough-like character
wa. A letter he is still fond of slipping into
his essays and prose, the meaning is somewhat inscrutable, as it
can be used to evoke rising and falling fortunes or a circuitous
route through life. Two of his close literary friends have come up
with their own explanations as to why his title is so fitting. Mu
Tao once observed how the pictogram Jia consists of a
combination of the characters Xi (“west”) and below it
Bei
(“treasure”), suggesting that
the holder might be destined to enjoy good fortune should he make
his career in the West of China. Meanwhile, rather more coarsely,
the late Lu Yao pointed out that the Ping is distinctly
phallic in shape, whereas the wa resemble a woman’s private
parts.
[1] In other words,
in his character there should be preserved the perfect balance
between the forces of yin and
yang.
进入青少年时代,贾平凹有意把自己名字的最后一个字改了。他不再是“平娃”,而是槽型的“凹”了。这个字他现在依旧爱在作品里用,意思颇为神秘,可以指命运起伏,也可以说是人生有峰回路转。这个字为什么适合他,他的两个知己文友各有解释。穆涛注意到
“贾”字的象形是由“西”和“贝”(西部之宝)二字组成,故意味着若要成大器,命中注定要呆在中国的西部。而较为俗一些的是路遥,“路遥在世的时候,批点过我的名字,说平字形如阳具,凹字形如阴器,是阴阳交合体。”(见《土门》后记)
The balancing of
opposites which are (apropos the laws of
Taoism) mutually dependent but irreconcilable is a recurring theme
in his prose. Whereas his mother warranted a brief eulogy, entirely
apt for an unlettered housewife, Jia’s essay written on his
father’s passing (‘In Memory of My Father’) runs to almost six
times the length. The former is centred on loss and the small
gestures of compassion which bound parent and child together, while
the latter evokes the peaks and pits of a life turbulently lived.
Jia Yanchun scarcely knew a peaceful day in his sixty-six years,
for as a child his three brothers were each kidnapped by bandits,
compelling the family to sell every stick of furniture they owned
to pay the ransoms. As an elementary school teacher, he grew to be
regarded as the man of letters within his generation, though had
what was at times an agonizing relationship with the written word.
During the Cultural Revolution, Jia Senior was accused of being a
historical counterrevolutionary and imprisoned in a cattle shed.
For two years, he wrote an incessant stream of letters to the
authorities pleading that the unjust judgement be overturned. His
son’s stories from the 1980s, not least ‘How Much Can a Man Bear,’
contain petitioning for a cleared name as a major theme. One cannot
help but feel that the depiction of the wronged character
Liangliang being liberated by her emphatic apology for being maimed
by the Red Guards conveys some form of wish fulfillment on the part
of the author. In that tale the news spreads like wildfire
throughout Shangnan County and there is an air of optimism (albeit
tempered later on by tragedy) about how the country post-Mao might
be heading towards greater openness and accountability. Real life
proved more equivocal. In spite of largely regaining his status,
Jia Yanchun took to the bottle and was ever-anxious that the
up-and-coming Pingwa would not become a victim of his own pen. His
fears were proved unfounded as, notwithstanding a few scrapes with
authority, he garnered the National Short Story Prize for ‘Full
Moon’
[2] at the age of
twenty-six, and English translations of his writings appeared
regularly in the pages of Chinese Literature.
[3]
对立平衡(此乃道家思想),即相反相成乃贾平凹散文中常见主题。他悼念母亲的文章很短,这完全适合于一位目不识丁的家庭妇女;而父亲去世后他写的
“祭父”文字是“写给母亲”的六倍。“写给母亲”集中在失去亲人和把孩子与亲人拴在一起的琐碎感情细节上。“祭父”则叙述的是人生动荡的沟沟坎坎。他父亲贾彦春六十六年的岁月,几乎没有过过一天安然的日子。孩提时,三个哥哥被土匪绑票,为了凑赎金,家里不得不卖掉所有的家俱。上学吃了不少苦头,当上小学教师后才“成为贾家第一个有文化的人”。“文化大革命”期间,其父亲被诬陷为“历史反革命”,被关进了“牛棚”。两年里,他不停的给上级写信,要求为自己蒙受的冤屈翻案。二十世纪八十年代,他儿子的作品,至少在“人极”
里,就是以还人清白为主题的。读者不禁感慨,小说中蒙冤的亮亮
,受过红卫兵迫害后来被平反了,这从某种程度上说也是作家想到了自己的个人愿望。在小说中,这个消息一下子传遍了商南,人们乐观的认为毛主席以后的中国将会朝着更加开放和更加负责的方向发展。现实生活却显得更加琢磨不透,贾彦春虽然被平反了,但他却喝酒喝上了瘾,也越来越担心势头很好的平凹,怕手里的笔给他带来麻烦。后来证明他的担心不是没有根据的,虽然有些不合时局,但二十六岁那年,他的“满月儿”获得了“全国优秀短篇小说奖”。他的作品英译文也常常出现在英文版的《中国文学》上。(如1978年第3期刊登的“帮活”,1979年第4期刊登的“满月儿”,1979年第6期刊登的“端阳”,1980年第11期刊登的“林曲”,1983年第7期刊登的“七巧儿”和“鸽子”,1987年夏季号刊登的“蒿子梅”等)。
(汉语原文刊登《美文》2018年第2期,未完待续)
[1]
Quoted in the postscript to
The Earthen Gate.
[2]
Rather confusing the English
translation of this story is given as ‘Two Sisters,’ whereas
another piece of his ‘Liange ****’ should be rendered literally as
the same in English. See Chinese Literature 4 (April 1979),
pp. 64-74.
[3]
Including ‘A Helping
Hand,’ ‘the Young Man
and his “Apprentice”’ Chinese Literature 3 (March 1978), pp. 41-7; ‘Duan
Yang,’ Chinese Literature 6 (June 1979), pp. 79-82; ‘The
Song of the Forest’ Chinese Literature 11 (1980), pp. 100-7;
‘Qiqiao’er’ (trans. Shen Zhen) Chinese Literature 7 (1983),
pp. 5-25; ‘Shasha and the Pigeons’ (trans. Hu Zhihui), Chinese
Literature 7 (July 1983), pp. 26-39; ‘Artemesia’
(trans. Yu Fanqin), Chinese Literature (Summer 1987), pp.
3-26.