In 1996, Angier was asked to review The Emigrants, the first book of Sebald’s to be translated into English, and read it in a single night. [qh]
1996年,安吉尔被要求评论塞巴尔德的第一本被翻译成英文的书《移民》(The Emigrants),她在一个晚上就读完了
The book consists of four stories about men who die from the delayed effects of catastrophe. [qh]
这本书由四个故事组成,都是关于死于灾难延迟效应的人的故事
Three are Jewish. Two of them had their lives upended by the Nazis. [qh]
三人是犹太人
The fourth man is the German valet, traveling companion, and lover of the scion of a Jewish banking family from New York.[qh]
第四个男人是德国贴身男仆、旅伴,是来自纽约的一个犹太银行家族的后裔的情人
Sebald disavowed the term Holocaust writer, and indeed the Holocaust forms just one piece of his vision of modernity as an ongoing disaster and a march toward the total destruction of nature. [qh]
塞巴尔德否认了“大屠杀作家”这个词,事实上,大屠杀只是他将现代性视为一场持续的灾难和走向彻底毁灭自然的一部分
Yet the Holocaust holds a privileged place in Sebald’s worldview. [qh]
然而,大屠杀在塞巴尔德的世界观中占有特殊的地位
He told interviewers that it “cast a very long shadow over my life” because he grew up in an Alpine corner of Germany, blissfully unaware of the past (he was born in 1944, just before the end of World War II), and “I don’t really know how I deserved it.”[qh]
他对记者说,这个词“给我的生活蒙上了一层厚厚的阴影”,因为他在阿尔卑斯山的一个角落长大,幸福地不知晓过去(他出生于1944年,就在二战结束之前),“我真的不知道我怎么应该得到这一切
Angier agrees that Holocaust writer is inadequate, even as she anoints him “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust”[qh]
安吉尔同意,大屠杀作家是不够的,尽管她称赞他是“最深切地承担了德国对大屠杀责任的德国作家”[qh]
—a “survivor’s guilt” that, as the daughter of Jewish parents who barely escaped from Nazi Vienna, she thinks “all Germans should feel.” [qh]
—一种“幸存者的罪恶感”,作为犹太父母勉强逃出纳粹维也纳的女儿,她认为“所有的德国人都应该感到内疚”
Shortly after reading The Emigrants, she went to Sebald’s office at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where he had been teaching on and off for more than 20 years, to interview him for The Jewish Quarterly. [qh]
读完《移民》后不久,她来到位于诺里奇的东英吉利大学(University Of East Anglia)塞巴尔德的办公室,塞巴尔德在那里断断续续地教了20多年书,她为《犹太季刊》采访了他
She had questions. Was The Emigrants fact or fiction? Who was this German who wrote about the tragedy of Jews?[qh]
她有问题
A quarter of a century later, Angier, the author of biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi, has produced a suitably unorthodox life of this singular writer.[qh]
25年之后,安吉尔,这位为简·里斯和普里莫·利瓦伊写传记的作家,为这位非凡的作家创造了一种恰如其分的非正统生活
That was the only kind circumstances permitted. [qh]
这是唯一允许的情况
Sebald’s widow refused access to any material relating to his family.[qh]
塞巴尔德的遗孀拒绝了使用任何与他家庭有关的材料
Without permission from his estate, Angier couldn’t quote directly from some privately held sources, even certain letters to which she had access, or cite his published works at any length. [qh]
在没有得到他的遗产许可的情况下,安吉尔不能直接引用一些私人拥有的信息来源,甚至是她能接触到的某些信件也不行,也不能引用他发表的任何长度的作品
Angier’s solution is to cut back and forth among the usual portrayal of an artist’s ascent, in which she captures glimpses of the man; [qh]
安吉尔的解决办法是,在一个艺术家成长过程中的常见描绘中来回切换,她捕捉到那个男人的一瞥; [qh]
astute critical assessments of the work; and vivid accounts of her quest for the people and places that appear in his writing, many of them barely disguised. [qh]
对工作进行敏锐的批判性评估; 在他的作品中,她生动地描述了她对人物和地点的追求,其中很多都毫不掩饰
Her strategy pays off: This is an insightful, compulsively readable book.[qh]
她的策略得到了回报:这是一本富有洞察力、让人读来欲罢不能的书