第13届韩素音青年翻译比赛英译汉原文及参考译文
原文

On Going Home

Joan Didion

I am home for my daughter’s first birthday. By “home” I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital although troublesome distinction. My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways. We live in dusty houses (“D-U-S-T,” he once wrote with his finger on surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it) filled with mementos quite without value to him (what could the Canton dessert plates. mean to him? How could he have known about the assay scales, why should he care if he did know?), and we appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property, particularly about property, land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access. My brother does not understand my husband’s inability to perceive the advantage in the rather common real-estate transaction known as “sale-leaseback,” and my husband in turn does not understand why so many of the people he hears about in my father’s house have recently been committed to mental hospitals or booked on drunk-driving charges. Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire. My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal.

Or perhaps it is not any more. Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home,” to find in family life the source of all tension and drama. I had by all objective accounts a “normal “and a “happy “ family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from. The question of whether or not you could go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home in the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation after World War II. A few weeks ago in a San Francisco bar I saw a pretty young girl on crystal take off her clothes and dance for the cash prize in an “amateur-topless” contest. There was no particular sense of moment about this, none of the effect of romantic degradation, of “dark journey,” for which my generation strived so assiduously. What sense could that girl possibly make of, say, Long Day’s Journey into Night? Who is beside the point?

That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room. I decide to meet it head-on and clean out a drawer, and I spread the contents on the bed. A bathing suit I wore the summer I was seventeen. A letter of rejection from The Nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954. Three teacups hand-painted with cabbage roses and signed “E.M.,” my grandmother’s initials. There is no final solution for letters of rejection from The Nation and teacups hand-painted in 1900. Nor is there any answer to snapshots of one’s grandfather as a young man on skis, surveying around Donner Pass in the year 1910. I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own. I close the drawer, and have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

Days pass. I see no one. I come to dread my husband’s evening call, not only because he is full of news of what by now seems to me our remote life in Los Angeles, people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because he asks what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out, drive to San Francisco or Berkeley. Instead I drive across the river to a family graveyard. It has been vandalized since my last visit and the monuments are broken, overturned in the dry grass. Because I once saw a rattlesnake in the grass I stay in the car and listen to a country-and-Western station. Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills. The man who runs his cattle on it asks us to the roundup, a week from Sunday, and although I know that I will be in Los Angeles I say, in the oblique way my family talks, that I will come. Once home I mention the broken monuments in the graveyard. My mother shrugs.

I go to visit my great-aunts. A few of them think now that I am my cousin, or their daughter who died young. We recall an anecdote about a relative last seen in 1948, and they ask if I still like living in New York City. I have lived in Los Angeles for three years, but I say that I do. The baby is offered a horehound drop, and I am slipped a dollar bill “to buy a treat.” Questions trail off, answers are abandoned, the baby plays with the dust motes in a shaft of afternoon sun.

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

译文

回家 琼·狄迪恩

我回家给女儿过周岁生日。我所说的“家”，并非指丈夫，我和小宝宝在洛杉矶的家，而是指位于加州中央谷地的娘家。这样区分，尽管麻烦，却很重要。丈夫不是不喜欢我娘家的人，但是在我娘家却颇不自在。因为我一回去，就染上了娘家人的习惯，说起话来故意吞吞吐吐、拐弯抹角、令人费解，完全有别于丈夫的习惯。我们住在灰蒙蒙的屋子里（丈夫曾用手指在落满灰尘的地方都写上了“灰——尘”两个大字，只是没人注意），里面还摆满了纪念品，可在丈夫眼里这些东西毫无价值（粤式细瓷点心盘对他来说能有什么意义？他怎么可能了解分析天平？即使他了解，他又何必在意？）。在他看来，我们好像尽在那谈熟人，哪个被送进了精神病院，哪个被控酒后驾车。还谈财产，特别是地产、土地和地价，C-2区制规划及评估，还有高速公路的出入口，等等。弟弟弄不明白，我丈夫怎么连很平常的“售后回租”这种房地产交易的好处也不懂？丈夫也觉得奇怪，在我娘家为何听到这么多人最近被送进了精神病院，或是因酒后开车被控？其实丈夫不明白，我们谈售后回租和依法征用公共用地的时候，是在用娘家人特有的语言谈论最来劲的东西，像金黄色的田野、棉白杨、时涨时落的河水，以及下大雪时封闭的山路。话不投机，索性接着喝酒，默默注视着炉火。弟弟当着我丈夫的面，称他为“琼的丈夫”。结婚啊，从古到今，都意味着背叛。

或许，现在情况变了。我有时想，我们这些三十几岁的人，注定成为承担“家”的重负、并经受家庭生活中种种紧张和冲突的最后一代人。在别人的眼里，无论从哪方面看，我都曾拥有一个“正常”而“幸福”的家。然而，直到将近三十岁以前，我与娘家人通电话后总是要哭鼻子。我们没吵过架，也没出过岔子。但一丝莫名的忧虑，浸染了我和生我养我的家之间的情感纠葛。五十年代我们离家时，背负着一个装着伤感、多半是书籍的行囊。还能回家吗？这个问题便是行囊中实实在在的一部分。我想，这个问题大概与二战后破碎家庭里出生的孩子无关。几个礼拜前，在旧金山的一个酒吧里，我看见一位吸了毒的漂亮姑娘，脱去衣服跳舞，仅仅是为得到一场“业余无上装”比赛的现金奖励！这没有什么特别的意思，与浪漫沉沦沾不上边儿，与我们这一代人所趋之若鹜的“黑暗之旅”也沾不上边儿。那位姑娘呀，你对《进入黑夜的漫长旅程》作何理解？到底是谁离题了？

这个不相干的问题困扰着我，在我返回老家后尤为明显。走过每个角落，打开每个食橱，转身驻足间，我一次次地面对过去，思绪不宁，及至疲乏不堪，我还是漫无目的地逐个房间走着。我决意正视过去，清理出一个抽屉，把东西摊在床上。一件我十七岁那年夏天穿的泳衣；一封《民族》周刊的退稿信；一张从空中拍摄的选址照片，1954年父亲曾打算在那里建购物中心；还有三只茶杯，上面有手绘的百叶蔷薇，并签有祖母名字的两个首字母E.M.。我不知道该如何处理1900年手绘的茶杯和《民族》周刊的退稿信，也不知道该如何处理祖父1910年的几张快照。照片里的祖父青春年少，踩着滑雪板，在察看唐纳山口。我抚平照片，注视着祖父的脸，依稀看到自己的影子，又似乎没有。我关上抽屉，陪母亲又喝了一杯咖啡。我们现在相处得很好，就像打过游击战的老兵一样，真不明白过去为何有龃龉。

日子一天天过去，我没拜访任何人。我开始对丈夫晚间打来的电话感到害怕，不光是因为他老是跟我讲洛杉矶的情况，见到谁啦，哪些信件该回啦，等等，而洛杉矶的生活距离我似乎已遥远了啊！还因为他问我在做什么，有点拘束地建议我出去走走，开车去旧金山或伯克利。我却驾车去了河对岸的一块家族墓地。自我上次来过之后，墓地被破坏了，墓碑断裂，翻倒在枯草丛里。以前我曾在草丛里见到一条响尾蛇，所以这次我待在车上，收听乡村与西部音乐台的广播。后来我同父亲开车去了他在山麓小丘上的农场。为他放牛的人请我们下周日来看他赶拢牛群。尽管我明明知道那时我已回到洛杉矶了，但我还是以家里人绕弯子的方式说要来。一回到家里，我就提起了墓地里的断碑。母亲耸了耸肩。

我去看望姑婆们。其中几位把我当成了我的堂妹，或她们早逝的女儿，我们回忆起一位亲戚的轶事，上次相见是在1948年。她们问我是否还喜欢住在纽约市。其实我在洛杉矶已经住了三年，但我还是说喜欢纽约。她们给我女儿带苦味的薄荷糖吃，还塞给我一块钱“再买点好吃的。”慢慢地，问题少了，回答也就省了。女儿在午后的一缕阳光里，欢快地抓弄着尘埃。

女儿的生日聚会开始了——有白蛋糕，草莓蜜饯冰激凌，和一瓶从别的聚会上留下来的香槟。晚上，女儿睡着后，我跪在小床边，面颊贴着她那紧挨着床栏的小脸蛋。女儿性情开朗，相信别人，对于家庭生活的陷阱既不知晓，也无防范。也许，我还是让她少过这种生活吧。我倒是愿意给与她更多别的东西。我倒愿意许诺让堂兄弟姊妹的手足之情、潺潺流淌的小河、以及外曾祖母的茶杯伴着她成长；愿意答应带她去河边野炊，认她披散着头发，啃炸鸡；愿意给她一个真正的家作为生日礼物。但是，我们的生活不同了啊，我无法许诺给予她这一切！我只给了她一把木琴和来自马德里的背心裙，还答应给她讲个有趣的故事。