【经济学人】一部早该有的传记 | 2016.11.12 | 总第729期

Not your Earth-mother type

不是平常母亲的样子

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. By Edmund Gordon. Chatto & Windus; 525 pages; £25. To be published in America by Oxford University Press in March.

《Angela Carter的诞生》：一本传记。作者Edmund Gordon。Chatto & Windus; 525页；25英镑。美国牛津大学社三月份出版。

《The Invention of Angela Carter》

READERS and critics have tended to pigeonhole Angela Carter, or reshape her in their own image. Undergraduates often reduce the British novelist, whose stories are known for their magical realism and striking female characters, to a mouthpiece of feminism. Tributes when she died in 1992, at just 51, cast her as a “fairy queen”, a “benevolent white witch” and a “fairy godmother”. The novelist loathed being appropriated or misinterpreted; when an editor, believing Carter to be “an Earth mother”, asked her to write about the summer solstice at Stonehenge, she said: “You just haven’t got me, have you dear?”

读者和评论家一直倾向于给Angela Carter分类，或用自己的想象去改造她。大学生们常常将这位作品以魔幻现实主义和塑造显著的女性形象而闻名英国小说家简单归为女权主义者。当她在1992年51岁过世时，悼念词把她演绎成“仙女皇后”，“仁慈的行善女巫”和一个“仙女教母”。小说家讨厌被曲解。当一个认为Carter是“大地之母”的编辑请她写巨石阵的的夏至时，她说“你并没有懂我，不是吗？”

• overdue：adj.过期的;延误的，迟到的;未兑的;早应完成的

• detested：v.憎恶，嫌恶，痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 )

• pigeonholed：v.把…搁在分类架上( pigeonhole的过去式和过去分词 );把…留在记忆中;缓办;把…隔成小格

• fairy：n.仙女;小仙子;小精灵     adj.美丽的，可爱的;仙女似的

The true Carter emerges from the pages of Edmund Gordon’s expansive new biography thanks to a huge body of journals and letters. Her mother was infantilising, prudish and smothering; her father was a loquacious and much-loved journalist who treated Angela to expensive gifts, dresses and “a succession of cats”. Putty in his daughter’s hands, her father, Carter complained in 1983, “did not prepare [her] well for patriarchy”. At 17, Angela rebelled by taking up smoking, wearing tight skirts and swearing “openly and elaborately” (a colleague at the Croydon Advertiser said that he had “never heard a woman use the f-word in [his] life, but Angie did it all the time”). This early life—particularly the claustrophobic relationship with her mother—left an imprint upon her writing. In “The Christchurch Murder”, based on a true story, she considered why a teenager might be driven to matricide.

多亏有大量的期刊和信件，真实的Carter才从埃德蒙 高登的众多的新传记的页面里显现出来。她的母亲是幼儿化的，过分规矩而令人窒息的。他的父亲是一个十分健谈而且受喜爱的记者，经常给安吉尔买昂贵的礼物，裙子和猫；受制于女儿，Carter曾在1983年抱怨说“没有让女儿准备好适应父权社会”。17岁时，Angela因为吸烟，穿紧身裙和“公然而精心的”咒骂而受到非议（在克里登广告报的一位同事说他“有生以来从没有听到过一个女人用F开头的单词，但Angie却一直使用它”）。她的早年——尤其是与母亲及其糟糕的关系——在她作品中留下了印记。《克莱斯特彻奇谋杀》是由真实的故事改编的。Carter思索为什么一个青少年有可能被迫弑母。

• expansive：adj.易扩张的，膨胀性的;胸襟开阔的，豁达的;辽阔的;健谈的

• infantilism：n.幼稚型，幼稚症

• prudish：adj.过分拘谨的      adv.过分拘谨地

• smothering：v.抑制;（使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的现在分词 );覆盖;忍住

• loquacious：adj.贫嘴;爱说话的，多嘴的;嘴碎

• patriarchy：n.父权制（社会）;家长制，家长统治;族长政治;族长管区

• claustrophobic：adj.（患）幽闭恐怖症的，导致幽闭恐怖症的;令人不适地被关闭或被包围的       n.幽闭恐怖症患者

Carter felt that writing was a means to ask questions, “not to provide answers”. Her relationship with the feminist movement was one of “[sniping] from the sidelines” rather than active involvement. Her ego was stung by repeated snubs for the Booker prize, Britain’s biggest award for fiction. She hated being reduced to a “woman writer”, but felt deep down that men such as Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan were “very much more famous and very much richer and also regarded as…the right stuff”. Carter was kind and thoughtful, often championing emerging writers, but also capable of incredible cruelty and ugliness. She wished that the wife of one of her lovers would “kill or try to kill herself”.

卡特感觉到写作就现在询问，“并不是在给出回答”。她与女权主义运动的关系是“旁敲侧击”而不是正面参与的形式。多次布克奖，这一英国最高级别的科幻小说奖失之交臂，她的信心受到了打击。她讨厌被打上“女性作家”的标签，但同时她又对于萨尔曼卢迪西和伊恩麦克尤斯之类的男性作家“更加出名更加富有并且也更加权威”而感到沮丧。卡特待人和善并且考虑周全，常常是冠军的有力竞争作家，但同样能表现出难以置信的残忍与丑陋。她希望某个情人的妻子能够“杀死或者尝试杀死她自己”。

• Snub     n.(c) 冷落，拒绝

• Cruelty    n.(u) 残忍，虐待

• Ugliness   n.(u) 丑陋

Mr Gordon is especially strong on the myriad influences on Carter’s writing, all the while noting her uniqueness. “Shadow Dance” bears a “Nabokovian hue”, “The Magic Toyshop” grew out of a single line in André Breton’s “First Surrealist Manifesto”, and Manhattan in the time of the Black Panthers and the Stonewall riots offered the dystopian backdrop for “The Passion of New Eve”. Mr Gordon calls much of her work “symbolic autobiography”. She found it funny that no one thought to read her in the character of Lee in “Love”: “I even put in clues like knocking out his front tooth, dammit, and nobody guessed!”

戈登先生在卡特的作品中发挥着各种各样深远的影响力，这一切都表明着她的独一无二。“影之舞”承载着“Nabokovian hue”，“魔法玩具商店”则是出自于安德烈布勒东的“第一次超现实主义宣言”其中一条线索，黑豹中的曼哈顿以及Stonewall riot则是提供了“新夏娃受难记”的反乌托邦似的背景。戈登先生常常将卡特的作品称为“象征化的自传”。 卡特认为没有人用“爱”的角色——李去解读他，这是很滑稽的：“我放在那里的线索就像打落了门牙一样明显，但是该死的没人猜到啊！

• Myriad    adj.  无数的，多种的，各式各样的

• Dystopian  adj.  反乌托邦的

• Backdrop   n.(u) 背景

Yet there are some disappointing omissions. There is no explanation or suggestion as to why Carter returned again and again to certain images—the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, for example. Conversely, some of the detail can swerve into tedium; the reader is informed not only that Carter paid $300 a month in rent when living in Providence, Rhode Island, but that the figure included utilities. Mr Gordon makes a grating imaginative leap by suggesting that Carter’s support for four female writers aged between 60 and 80 is symbolic of a “new-found peace with the idea of motherhood”.

然而这本书里有些令人失望的遗漏对于卡特为什么一次又一次的想到一些故事——例如希腊神话《丽达与天鹅》，他并没有做任何解释和暗示。相反，相反有些细节显得冗长了；读者被告知卡特每月支付的300美元不仅包括在普罗维登斯罗得岛的租金,还包括公众事业。期待您的翻译，您可以将翻译留言到文章底部，第二天会有详细解析哦。

• Omissions：n.省略；遗漏

• Tedium：n. 沉闷；单调乏味；厌烦

These are momentary flaws. Mr Gordon’s elegant blending of research, analysis and Carter’s own testimony is all the more impressive given that this is his debut book. It is surprising, too, that Mr Gordon’s is the first full-length biography of Carter, whose novels continue to populate Vintage Classics’ bestseller list. She once wondered why “anyone [should] be interested in my boring, alienated, marginal, messy life”. Reading this book, it seems clear that more readers and biographers should devote their time to this complex, intelligent and thoroughly un-boring woman.

这些都是短暂的缺陷。戈登先生简练的将自己的研究、分析与卡特的证词糅合在他的第一本书里，这才是令人印象深刻的。同样使人感到惊讶的是，戈登先生第一本长篇传记的主角——卡特的小说在古典小说畅销榜持续走热。她曾经想知道为什么“别人(应该)对我无聊,疏远,边际,混乱的生活感兴趣”。读了本书, 很显然应该要有更多的读者和传记作家将时间投入到这个复杂，机智但又不至于乏味的女人身上了。

翻译 ▍栏目四第三组

审核 ▍薄荷凉

编辑 ▍澜意