韦尔蒂短篇小说集

⑴ One writer's beginning 全文翻译

1 I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story.

She’d read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with “Cuckoo,”and at night when I’d got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story.

It was my ambition to have her read to me while I churned; once she granted my wish, but she read off my story before I brought her butter. She was an expressive reader. When she was reading “Puss in Boots,” for instance, it was impossible not to know that she distrusted all cats.

我从两三岁起就知道，家中随便在哪个房间里，白天无论在什么时间，都可以念书或听人念书。母亲念书给我听。上午她都在那间大卧室里给我念，两人一起坐在她那把摇椅里，我们摇晃时，椅子发出有节奏的滴答声，好像有只唧唧鸣叫的蟋蟀在伴着读故事。

冬日午后，她常在餐厅里烧着煤炭的炉火前给我念，布谷鸟自鸣钟发出“咕咕”声时，故事便结束了；晚上我在自己床上睡下后她也给我念。想必我是不让她有一刻清静。有时她在厨房里一边坐着搅制黄油一边给我念，故事情节就随着搅制黄油发出的抽抽搭搭的声响不断展开。

我的奢望是她念我来搅拌；有一次她满足了我的愿望，可是我要听的故事她念完了，她要的黄油我却还没弄好。她念起故事来富有表情。比如，她念《穿靴子的猫》时，你就没法不相信她对猫一概怀疑。

2、It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

当我得知故事书原来是人写出来的，书本原来不是什么大自然的奇迹，不像草那样自生自长时，真是又震惊又失望。

不过，姑且不论书本从何而来，我不记得自己有什么时候不爱书—— 书本本身、封面、装订、印着文字的书页，还有油墨味、那种沉甸甸的感觉，以及把书抱在怀里时那种将我征服、令我陶醉的感觉。还没识字，我就想读书了，一心想读所有的书。

4、Neither of my parents had come from homes that could afford to buy many books, but though it must have been something of a strain on his salary, as the youngest officer in a young insurance company, my father was all the while carefully selecting and ordering away for what he and Mother thought we children should grow up with.

They bought first for the future.

我的父母都不是来自那种买得起许多书的家庭。然而，虽然买书准得花去他不少薪金，作为一家成立不久的保险公司最年轻的职员，父亲一直在精心挑选、不断订购他和母亲认为儿童成长应读的书。他们购书首先是为了我们的前程。

5、Besides the bookcase in the living room, which was always called “the library,” there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand under windows in our dining room.

Here to help us grow up arguing around the dining room table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of Information, and later the Book of Knowledge.

In “the library,” inside the bookcase were books I could soon begin on — and I did, reading them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom. My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

The novels of her girlhood that had stayed on in her imagination, besides those of Dickens and Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, were Jane Eyre, Trilby, the Woman in White, Green Mansions, King Solomon’s Mines.

除了客厅里有一向被称作“图书室”的书橱，餐厅的窗子下还有几张摆放网络全书的桌子和一个字典架。这里有伴随我们在餐桌旁争论着长大的《韦氏大词典》、《哥伦比亚网络全书》、《康普顿插图网络全书》、《林肯资料文库》，以及后来的《知识库》。

“图书馆”书橱里的书没过多久我就能读了—— 我的确读了，全都读了，按着顺序，一排接着一排读，从最上面的书架一直读到最下面的书架。母亲读书最重要的不在获取信息。她是为了享受快乐而埋头读小说。她读狄更斯时的神情简直就像要跟他私奔似的。

她少女时代读的小说印在了她心头的，除了狄更斯、司各特和罗伯特?路易斯?斯蒂文森等人的作品之外，还有《简?爱》、《切尔比》、《白衣女士》、《绿厦》和《所罗门王的矿藏》。

6、 To both my parents I owe my early acquaintance with a beloved Mark Twain. There was a full set of Mark Twain and a short set of Ring Lardner in our bookcase, and those were the volumes that in time united us all, parents and children.

多亏了我的父母，我很早就接触了受人喜爱的马克?吐温。书橱里有一整套马克?吐温文集和一套不全的林?拉德纳作品集，这些书最终将父母和孩子联结在一起。

7、Reading everything that stood before me was how I came upon a worn old book that had belonged to my father as a child. It was called Sanford and Merton. Is there anyone left who recognizes it, I wonder?

It is the famous moral tale written by Thomas Day in the 1780s, but of him no mention is made on the title page of this book; here it is Sanford and Merton in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin.

Here are the rich boy and the poor boy and Mr. Barlow, their teacher and interlocutor, in long discourses alternating with dramatic scenes — anger and rescue allotted to the rich and the poor respectively.

It ends with not one but two morals, both engraved on rings: “Do what you ought, come what may,” and “If we would be great, we must first learn to be good.”

我一本接一本阅读摆在我面前的书，读着读着便发现一本又破又旧的书，是我父亲小时候的。书名是《桑福徳与默顿》。我不相信如今还有谁会记得这本书。

那是托玛斯?戴在18世纪80年代撰写的一本著名的进行道德教育的故事书，可该书的扉页上并没有提及他；上面写的是《桑福徳与默顿简易本》，玛丽?戈多尔芬著。书中讲的是一个富孩子和一个穷孩子与他们老师巴洛先生之间的冗长的谈话，其间穿插着戏剧性场面—— 分别写了富孩子和穷孩子如何发火、如何获救。

书末讲的道德寓意不是一条，而是两条，都印在环形图案里：“不管发生什么，该做的就去做”，还有“想做伟人，必须先学会做个好人”。

8、 This book was lacking its front cover, the back held on by strips of pasted paper, now turned golden, in several layers, and the pages stained, flecked, and tattered around the edges;

its garish illustrations had come unattached but were preserved, laid in. I had the feeling even in my heedless childhood that this was the only book my father as a little boy had had of his own. He had held onto it, and might have gone to sleep on its coverless face: he had lost his mother when he was seven.

My father had never made any mention to his own children of the book, but he had brought it along with him from Ohio to our house and shelved it in our bookcase.

这本书没了封面，封底用几条纸片粘牢，有好几层，如今都泛黄了，书页上污迹斑斑，边角处都破碎了；书中花哨的插图脱了页，但都保存良好，夹在书里。即使在少不更事的童年，我就觉得那是我父亲小时候拥有的惟一一本书。

他一直珍藏着这本书，或许还枕着这本没了封面的书睡觉：他7岁时就没了母亲。我父亲从来没跟自己的孩子提起过这本书，但他从俄亥俄一路把它带到我们的家，把它放进我们的书橱。

10、My mother had brought from West Virginia that set of Dickens: those books looked sad, too — they had been through fire and water before I was born, she told me, and there they were, lined up — as I later realized, waiting for me.

母亲则从西弗吉尼亚带来了那套狄更斯：那套书看上去也惨不忍睹—— 她告诉我，我还没出生，这些书就历经水火之灾，可现在它们还是整齐地排列在那儿—— 后来我意识到，是等着我去读。

11、My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

在写小说时，我也能听见文字落纸的声音，与我读书时听到的声音一样。我写着，那声音传入耳内，于是我闻声而动，加以修改。我一直信赖这一声音。

(1)韦尔蒂短篇小说集扩展阅读：

在美国文学界，尤多拉·韦尔蒂被人们誉为短篇小说大师，人们常把她和俄罗斯作家契诃夫相提并论。这一比较显示了韦尔蒂在美国当代文学界的地位。但是，韦尔蒂的作品在她文学生涯的早期却没有受到推崇。

但是，韦尔蒂的作品在她文学生涯的早期却没有受到推崇。

人们认为：她的作品地方性过于浓厚。在韦尔蒂进入晚年以后，美国文学界逐渐认识到了韦尔蒂作品的重要性，给予了她很大的荣誉。韦尔蒂对此则一如既往，处之泰然，谦逊依旧。

韦尔蒂女士的作品来源于她对美国南方生活细致入微的观察以及她对人性的感受。美国文学巨匠福克纳在1943年读了韦尔蒂女士的小说后写信给她。信中说：“你写的不错”。 直到韦尔蒂女士去世时，那封信还挂在她的卧室的床头。

⑵ 谁能把我教成作家

岂是一朝一夕练出来的？想一步登天的人决不会成功。注意留心身边的事物，应该会有收获。当你真正理解生活时，你就成功了。