Unit 6B - To Make Papa Proud
To Make Papa Proud
Gregory H. Hemingway
That summer in Havana I read papa's favorites, from Huckleberry Finn to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: like him, I sometimes had two or three books going at the same time. Then papa steered me to the short story masters, Maupassant and Chekhov. “Don't try to analyze — just relax and enjoy them.”
“Now,” papa said one morning. “Try writing a short story yourself. And don't expect it to be any good.”
I sat down at a table with one of papa's fine-pointed pencils and thought and thought. I looked out the window, and listened to the birds, to a cat crying to join them, and to the scratch of my pencil, doodling. I let the cat out. Another wanted in.
I went to papa's typewriter. He'd finished with it for the day. Slowly I typed out a story and then took it to him.
Papa put his glasses on, poured himself another drink, and read, as I waited. He finished it and looked up at me. “It's excellent, Gig. Much better than anything I could do at your age. Only change I'd make is here,” and he pointed to the line about a bird falling from its nest and finding, miraculously, that if it flapped its wings, it wouldn't crash on the rocks below.
“You've written ... ‘All of a sudden he realized he could fly.' Change ‘all of a sudden' to ‘suddenly'. Never use more words than you have to — it detracts from the flow of action.” Papa smiled. I hadn't seen him smile at me like that for a long time. “But you've won the lottery, pal. Writing takes study, discipline, and imagination. You've shown me with this that you have the imagination. And if you can do it once, you can do it a thousand times. Imagination doesn't leave you for a long time, maybe never. Dostoyevsky was fifty-seven when he wrote Crime and Punishment .
“God, I used to get sad in Key West when people sent me their work and I could tell after reading one page that they didn't have it and never would. I answered every goddamn letter, usually saying that writing well was mainly a matter of luck, that to be given a great talent was like winning a million-to-one lottery; and if you weren't blessed, all the study and self-discipline in the world wouldn't mean a thing. If their letter had something like ‘Everybody says I'd make a great engineer but what I really want to do is write,' I'd answer, ‘Maybe everybody isn't wrong and you'll probably make an excellent engineer and then forget all about writing and be delighted you never went into it.'
“I wrote hundreds of letters like that and I was getting a dollar a word in those days.
“Later, when there were even more letters, I shortened my answers to ‘Writing is a tough trade. Don't get mixed up in it if you can help it.' They probably thought, ‘That conceited son of a bitch probably hasn't even read my stuff. But because he can write, he makes a big exclusive thing of it.'
“The important thing is, Gig, that now I can teach you because you have the tools. And, in all immodesty, I know a lot about the trade.
“I've wanted to cut down for a long time. The writing doesn't come so easily for me anymore. But I'll be just as happy helping you as doing it myself. Let's have a drink to celebrate.”
Only once before can I remember papa being as pleased with me — when I tied for the pigeon-shooting championship. And he was confident that there was another winner in the family when I entered the short story for a school competition and won first prize.
Turgenev should have won the prize. He wrote the story. I merely copied it, changing the setting and the names, from a book I assumed papa hadn't read because some of the pages were still stuck together.
I didn't feel like a winner and wondered how long it would be before papa found out that the only creative contribution I had made to the story was to alter “suddenly” to “all of a sudden.”
Fortunately I wasn't around when papa discovered my plagiarism. It got back to me that someone asked him if his son Gregory wrote. “Yes,” he replied, with gusto and sparkle, flashing that “say cheese” smile he sometimes affected. “Gregory writes an occasional bad check.” And, of course, everyone laughed.
Someone in that crowd might have thought, “What a brutal bastard to make such a callous wisecrack about his son. I guess all those stories I've heard about him being a hard-shell bully are true.”
Hard-shelled, yes, but I helped make that shell.
参考译文——为了让父亲高兴
为了让父亲高兴
格雷戈里·H·海明威
那年夏天在哈瓦那，我读了爸爸最爱看的那些小说，从《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》到《一位青年艺术家的肖像》。像他一样，有时我两三部小说同时看。后来爸爸指导我阅读短篇小说大师莫伯桑和契诃夫。“不要劳神去作分析—只管身心放松，好好欣赏就行。”
“听着，”一天上午爸爸说。“你自己试着写一篇短篇小说。可别指望会写得怎么好。”
我拿起爸爸的一支笔头尖尖的铅笔，在桌前坐了下来，想了又想。我望着窗外，听着鸟儿鸣唱，听着一只想要和鸟儿待在一起的猫拼命叫着；还听着铅笔在纸上乱涂乱画的磨擦声。我把猫放出去。另有一只猫想进来。
我走到爸爸的打字机旁。那天他已经用过打字机，不会再用了。我慢慢地打出了一篇小说，随后拿去给他看。
爸爸戴上眼镜，给自己又倒了杯饮料，接着读小说，我等在一旁。他读完小说，抬头看着我。“太棒了，吉格。比我在你这个年龄时能写的任何东西都好得多。我想改的唯一地方在这儿，”我指着一行文字，描写的是一只鸟从巢里跌落下来，却惊奇地发现只要振动双翅，就不会撞落在下面的岩石上。
“你写道……‘All of a sudden（突然之间）它意识到自己会飞了。'把‘all of a sudden（突然之间）'改成‘suddenly（突然）'。决不用不必要的字—否则会妨碍故事情节的自然展开。”爸爸笑容满面。我好长时间没见到他这么对我笑了。“不过你交上好运了，伙计。写作需要学习、训练，还有想象力。你已经用这篇小说向我表明，你具有想象力。如果你能有一次发挥想象力，你就能上千次地去发挥它。想象力在很长时间内都不会离开你，也许永远也不离开。陀思妥耶夫斯基写《罪与罚》时已经57岁了。
“天哪，过去在基韦斯特，人们给我看他们的作品，每当我读了一页，便能断定他们没有想象力，永远也不会有想象力时，我真感到悲哀。我回了每一封该死的信，常常写道，要写得好主要得靠运气，拥有某种了不起的才能就好比是中了机率仅为百万分之一的大奖；要是你没这个福分，人世间所有的研习和自我约束都不会管用。要是他们信中有‘人人都说我会成为一个杰出的机械师，可我真正想干的是写作'这类话，我就会回信说，‘也许有人没有说错，你可能会成为一个优秀的机械师，所以忘了写作这回事，庆幸自己从未涉足其间吧。'
“我写了上百封这样的信，那些日子里我的稿酬可是1美元一个字啊。
“后来信越来越多，我就把回信缩短为‘写作是个艰苦的行当。尽可能不要卷进去。'他们可能想，‘那个自以为是的混蛋也许压根儿没读我写的东西。就因为他自己会写，就拼命排斥别人。'
“重要的是，吉格，现在我可以教你了，因为你具备了必要的工具。我可以毫不谦虚地说，我很了解这一行。
“很久以来我就想少写一些了。写作对我来说不再是那么轻而易举了。可帮助你学习写作，我就跟自己写作一样高兴。让我们来喝一杯，庆祝一下。”
我只记得一次爸爸对我这么满意—当时我跟别人获得并列射鸽子冠军。后来我用这篇短篇小说参加学校作文比赛，并获得一等奖的时候，他自信地以为家里又出了个文坛高手。
得那个第一名的应该是屠格涅夫。他写了那篇短篇小说。我不过是从一本书里抄袭了这个故事，把背景和人名改了，我猜爸爸还没读过这本书，因为有不少页仍粘连在一起。
我没觉得自己是个获奖者，而是在想，不知什么时候爸爸会发现，我对那篇小说所作的唯一创造性贡献便是将“suddenly”改成了“all of a sudden”。
爸爸发现我的剽窃行为时，我很幸运地不在场。我听说是有人问他，他儿子格雷戈里搞不搞写作。他兴致勃勃、神采飞扬地回答说“写的，”脸上闪现出一种拍照时做出来的笑容，他有时会做出这种笑容。“格雷戈里偶尔会写张空头支票。”当然，大家都哈哈大笑。
那群人中也许有人会想，“真是个狠心的家伙，竟然对自己的儿子开这种冷酷的玩笑。想来我听说过的那些说他是个执迷不悟的恶棍的传闻都是真的。”
执迷不悟，没错，可我帮着造成了这种执迷不悟。
Key Words:
typewriter ['taip.raitə]
n. 打字机，打字员
portrait ['pɔ:trit]
n. 肖像，画像
discipline ['disiplin]
n. 训练，纪律，惩罚，学科
vt. 训练，惩
conceited [kən'si:tid]
adj. 自负的，幻想的
lottery ['lɔtəri]
n. 彩票
exclusive [iks'klu:siv]
adj. 独占的，唯一的，排外的
championship ['tʃæmpiənʃip]
n. 锦标赛，冠军，拥护
check [tʃek]
n. 检查，支票，账单，制止，阻止物，检验标准，方格图案
affected [ə'fektid]
adj. 受影响的，受感动的，受疾病侵袭的 adj. 做
alter ['ɔ:ltə]
v. 改变，更改，阉割，切除
bastard ['bæstəd]
adj. 私生的，错误的，混蛋的 n. 私生子，混蛋
merely ['miəli]
adv. 仅仅，只不过
callous ['kæləs]
adj. 麻木的，无情的，硬结的，起老茧的
shell [ʃel]
n. 壳，外壳
v. 去壳，脱落，拾贝壳
plagiarism ['pleidʒiərizəm]
n. 剽窃，剽窃物
celebrate ['selibreit]
v. 庆祝，庆贺，颂扬
参考资料：
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