日裔英国作家石黑一雄获得了的诺贝尔文学奖。得奖之后对他的讨论也更多了起来，所以更有意思的是看看他得奖之前的文学评论。他较新的作品Buried Giant出版后，《纽约客》有这样一篇很深刻地探讨他的作品的评论文章，从他的“超无聊”开始说起。他的文字究竟有多么“无聊”呢？又能用怎样的语言，把一部作品表面的“无聊”和水面下的“汹涌”刻画出来？这篇评论的选段是个不错的模版。
解读文字量略大，本篇先放出上半部，下半部评论他的一本暗黑设定的克隆主题小说书评的部分，明后天放出，请一定关注。
原文阅读
难度指数： ★★★★☆
妙文指数： ★★★★★
背诵推荐指数：★★★★☆
（本篇先重点关注标色的部分）
Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium—sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.His previous novel, “Never Let Me Go” (), contained passages that appeared to have been entered in a competition called The Ten Most Boring Fictional Scenes. It began with dizzying dullness: “My name is Kathy. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for eleven years.” The stakes of the characters’ interactions with one another seemed fantastically small; a friend and I had a running joke in which we imagined Ishiguro murmuring with satisfaction to himself, after a morning of hard work, “Say what you want, but I own the scene where Kathy loses her pencil.”
Of course, the stakes are eventually revealed to be fantastically large, and “Never Let Me Go” achieves great and moving speculative power, not because of what it has to say about the dilemma of cloning but because of what it has to say about ordinary life’s unwelcome resemblance to the dilemma of cloning. We gradually learn that the fictional children we encounter, who attend an English boarding school called Hailsham, are clones, created by the state in order to be killed: their function is to provide healthy organs for normal British citizens. Once they have completed their donations, they will die.
The resignation of these children, who become aware of their fabricated function, is horrifying; most of the time, they seem sapped of rebellion. Ishiguro’s pithless, neutered prose is mimetically effective. It enacts a meek acceptance that finally may be our own, too. The children of Hailsham endure short, determined, and thus “pointless” lives; but are our lives—though generally longer—less pointless or less determined? The lives of the cloned children, who fall in love and read novels and bicker at school just as ordinary kids do, seem like parodies of real freedom, of real existence, because we know what will happen to them not long after they leave school. [1]
[1] Wood, James (). Uses of Oblivion [online]Available at< /magazine//03/23/the-uses-of-oblivion> (03/23/)
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精读解析
第一部分解析
本段开始这两句是在为整个个选段定基调，概述了石黑一雄的文风。这两句话，需要“语文”一样的咀嚼，是这个选段中的精华所在，让我们慢下脚步，细细品味。
Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium—sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.
writes a prose of provoking equilibrium
首先，不要望文生义。很多人在大学四六级考试备考中就背过“prose”这个词，对应两个汉字：“散文”。提到“散文”，很多人想到的都是短篇抒情的文学作品，就像《荷塘月色》又或者《背影》。这个理解不能说错，但这是狭义的理解。prose从词典定义的角度来说，就是“language in its usual form, as opposed to poetry”，有的字典干脆直接解释为“not verse”，换句话说，就是“除诗歌以外的文学作品”，有的解释的复杂一点，但意思一样：“written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure”，用非格律语体，以白话文书写的作品。怎么，觉得英文prose和汉语的“散文”不是一回事？《辞海》对“散文”的解释是：中国六朝以来，为区别韵文与骈文，把凡不押韵、不重排偶的散体文章(包括经传史书)，统称“散文”。也就是说，英文的prose和汉语的“prose”一样，都有狭义和广义两种理解，本文中显然是取广义的理解，因为石黑一雄是位小说家，而这一段要说的正是他的语言是非常“everyday”的“白话”，并不注重形式和雕琢。
provoking equilibrium这句先放在这儿，这两句说完回头再说它，会更加清楚。
石黑一雄的“白话”，就如下一句中所说的，他：
avoids ornament or surplus
ornament和surplus在这里都是用来形容语言，避免过度的修饰和多余的笔墨，即：“返璞归真”。
回头再看前句中的这句点评：
sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below
表面上，如平静的海水般，波澜不惊；水面之下，却又“深不见底”。fathom原指“英寻”，是一个水下深度的计量单位，1英寻为6英尺，约合一米八三。一个重要的单词unfathomable（深不可测）就是un—fathom—able这样构成的。
而这句话，也为后面所说的teasingly and menacingly做了描述上的铺垫，稍后再详解。
welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk
“seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk”，这里“seems to”首先给评论者后来的笔锋一转留下了余地，“好似…”自带一种暗示。cliché、platitude、bland无疑在一般的语境下对于艺术作品都是负面的评价，就如“老套”、“陈词滥调”、“乏味”在中文语境下的意指。可石黑一雄呢？却是“seems to welcome”这样的平淡和老套。
episodes是喜欢看美剧的朋友非常熟悉的词，指电视剧具体的一集。但其实这是它的引申义，它的原意就是指一系列事件，或者一系列事件当中的某一二个事件，在文学作品里也是这样。
“episodes as bland as milk”译成中文处理成“平淡如水”就好了。
接下来是前两句中的点睛之笔，也是明显和“welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk”的表象有“冲突”的描写：
an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.
oddly vacated calm；mild persistence
前面所说的“无聊”与“平淡”，是一种“oddly vacated calm”的气氛，换句话说，是人为营造的，非自然而成的“平淡”，评论者在指出作者是有意而为之，好像是石黑一雄有意将一些东西给“排空”而腾出了calm的空间一样，自然是有种淡淡的不安和诡异之感。
而mild persistence，则使用了oxymoron的矛盾修辞法（如deafening silence，字面上是“震耳欲聋的寂静”，用来表达在某些情形下，比如明明出了某个很大的事件，而当地的媒体却全部噤声，这就是典型的deafening silence）。“温和的坚持“同样体现出了这种表面上似乎矛盾，但生活中其实并不罕见的情况，“坚持”不总是属于“强势”，“坚持”也属于“淡然”。评论者在表达，石黑先生坚持要这种平淡的意味，排除掉一些元素也要营造出的平静气氛，是让人能够感觉到背后酝酿的诡异的气场的，所以前面说他“welcome平淡”，就摆脱了那些词的“负面意味”，而成了为作者所用的元素。
teasingly or menacingly unreal
此时，前面所说的那种atmosphere，那种calm，在评论者的笔下，就已经是“unreal”的了，它不是真正的“平淡”、“平静”、“平庸”，这些都是“不真实的”，平静的水面之下，似乎有某种力量在挑衅着、在威胁着。
最后说回第一句里留下的没解读的“provoking equilibrium”，也是典型的oxymoron，equilibrium是在经济学、博弈论中经常提到的词，没错，就是“纳什均衡”的那个“均衡”，在说情绪的时候，它指的同样是“平静”。而此时再看“provoking”，就能和后文中的“teasingly or menacingly”找到某种契合。另外要注意此处容易出现的误读，“ a prose of provoking equilibrium”，不是“a prose provoking equilibrium”（如果是这样就等于a prose that provokes equilibrium），这个of说明了前后都是名词或名词短语，所以“provoking equilibrium”是一个偏正关系，而不是动宾关系。根据上下文的理解，这是一种“令人不安的安”、“使人不静的静”、“激发着情绪的没有情绪”，也就是这两句话传达的主题：表面上的平静，掩藏着巨大的暗波汹涌。
参考译文
Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium—sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.
石黑一雄常用质朴的语言形态，以平静的文笔令人心境躁动——就如海面平顺不惊，下面却有着深不可测的未知世界。他不喜雕琢浮华的词藻，看似更热衷于老套滥调，乐于记录平淡如水的琐事，而营造出的气氛却有几分诡异，这种有意为之的“空”和“静”淡然而不懈地贯穿始终，反倒开始让读者意识到这种平静的不真实，从而挑拨他们的情绪，刺激着他们的危机感。
（对于文学性较强的文章，译文仅作参考，还是以品味原文为主，文学的理解空间，始终是属于读者的。）
第二部分解析
下面这部分相对来说就要好理解多了，不过也有几处需要好好把握的：
His previous novel, “Never Let Me Go” (), contained passages that appeared to have been entered in a competition called The Ten Most Boring Fictional Scenes. It began with dizzying dullness: “My name is Kathy. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for eleven years.” The stakes of the characters’ interactions with one another seemed fantastically small; a friend and I had a running joke in which we imagined Ishiguro murmuring with satisfaction to himself, after a morning of hard work, “Say what you want, but I own the scene where Kathy loses her pencil.”
这部分就是举了一个例子，或者说，是例子的一半，趋于表面的那一部分。其中第一句话读起来没什么难度，本质上可以看成一句半真半假的吐槽。
It began with dizzying dullness
例子中所说的这本书（Never Let Me Go）实际上有一个让人不寒而栗的故事预设，这个稍后会说到。然而这本书的一开始，就有一种“dizzying dullness”…… 什么样的事情会令人头晕目眩？过山车？极限运动？恐怖电影？而这位评论家眼中，却是石黑一雄这本书开端的“无聊乏味”到了令他“头晕目眩”的程度。Oxymoron again? Perhaps.
stakes of the characters’ interactions；fantastically small
“The stakes of the characters’ interactions with one another seemed fantastically small”，注意这句话里说的是“seem”，而在之后的一段中另有回应。fantastically作为副词不要望文生义，总体上来说就是强调程度之大/小/高/好…达到了不可思议的地步，“极…”。本句接上句的“无聊得令人头晕目眩”，又接着说“角色之间的互动引发的利害影响看似微乎其微”。
紧接着又开了一个恶趣味的玩笑：
running joke；own the scene
a friend and I had a running joke in which we imagined Ishiguro murmuring with satisfaction to himself, after a morning of hard work, “Say what you want, but I own the scene where Kathy loses her pencil.”
running joke的running表示“一直持续的”，例如running debate，持续的争议。running joke就是我们说的百讲不厌的“老段子”。“murmuring with satisfaction to himself”这种恶趣味的想象也算是很毒舌了。
“own”在这里是一个关键的表达。own的类似用法最早起源于黑客圈和游戏圈，后来使用范围和表意范围都在扩大，在这里的意思是“to be better than someone or something at a particular task”，再结合语境说得具体一点，有点像“拿下”，“totally nailed it”。用这样的语气来说“丢铅笔”这样的琐事，当然是讽刺了。
连起来一读，嘴还是挺损的：
参考译文
His previous novel, “Never Let Me Go” (), contained passages that appeared to have been entered in a competition called The Ten Most Boring Fictional Scenes. It began with dizzying dullness: “My name is Kathy. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for eleven years.” The stakes of the characters’ interactions with one another seemed fantastically small; a friend and I had a running joke in which we imagined Ishiguro murmuring with satisfaction to himself, after a morning of hard work, “Say what you want, but I own the scene where Kathy loses her pencil.”
他的出版的上一部小说《别让我走》中有一些章节，似乎是入选过一个叫做“十大最无聊虚构文学场景”的赛事。小说一开始就无聊得令人头晕：“我的名字叫凯西。我今年三十一岁，做了十一年的看护。” 角色之间的互动引发的利害影响看起来微乎其微；我和一个朋友常讲一个老段子，我们想象石黑一雄一上午忙活完之后，神情满意地自己对自己咕哝道：“你们爱怎么说就怎么说，不过，凯西把铅笔丢了的那个场景，我写得简直不能更赞了。”
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