诗的妙用
〔英〕伊恩·麦克尤恩 作 张春柏 译
迈克尔·比尔德是个独子。他自己就会首先承认，他根本不懂手足之情为何物，对于这一点，谁也不会感到诧异。他的母亲安琪拉，是位骨感美人，对他千般宠，万般爱，她表达爱的渠道便是食物，她拼命给他喂食，远远超出了他的需要。早在他荣获诺贝尔物理学奖四十年前，就曾在科尔德诺顿 地区0至6个月组超级宝宝大赛中拔得头筹。在那战后的艰难岁月里，人们理想中漂亮宝宝的主要特征，就是脂肪多多、有着邱吉尔式的多重下巴。人们梦想结束配给制，梦想物质丰富的时代早日到来。在那些竞赛中，宝宝们如同一根根参赛的西葫芦，公开陈列，供人评判。1947年，五个月大的迈克尔，圆滚滚，胖嘟嘟，惹人疼，惹人爱, 横扫群婴，轻松夺魁。不过，要她这样的中产妇女、证券经纪人的太太，在村里难得的盛会上，不去光顾糕饼甜酱摊子，而带孩子去参加这种俗气的比赛，绝非寻常。她一准知道他注定会赢。正如她后来常说的，她早就料定他将得到牛津大学的奖学金。一待他断奶，她便以同样的激情，为他烧饭做菜，乐此不疲，终此一生。六十年代中期，她甚至不顾病痛，到蓝带烹饪学校学习, 为的是他偶尔回家时能一显身手，端上三五盘新菜。她丈夫亨利，每餐一荤两素，但忌食洋葱，不喜橄榄油。两人新婚不久，由于迄今没有公开的原因，安琪拉便收回了对他的爱。她活着只是为了儿子，她留下的遗产也同样一目了然：一个大腹便便的男人，一个不停地追逐会烧菜的美女的男人。
亨利·比尔德，瘦瘦的身材，一对八字胡，垂向下方，光亮的棕发，整齐地梳向脑后。他那深色的花呢外套略嫌肥大，领子更是过于宽松。对这个小家庭，他供妻养儿，尽心尽责。对于儿子，他则一如当时典型的严父，很少有身体上的接触。他从不拥抱迈克尔，很少亲昵地拍他的肩膀，但却给了他所有合适的礼物——从麦卡诺牌的拆装玩具，到自己动手装的无线电收音机、百科全书和飞机模型，以及军事史、地质学著作和名人传记，无所不包，应有尽有。二战期间他长期服役，当过步兵的低级军官，在敦刻尔克、北非和西西里打过仗，到了盟军进攻日 时，他已经是个中校，还获得了一枚勋章。贝尔森 集中营解放一周后，他到达那里，战后还在柏林驻扎了八个月。和许多同辈的男人一样，他对自己的经历绝口不提，只是尽情地享受着战后恬淡的生活，享受着那种宁静和整洁，以及日渐改善的物质条件。更重要的是，他享受着那种安全感 —— 一句话，后来令和平初期出生的人们感到窒息痛苦的一切东西，他都趋之若渴，甘之如饴。
1952年，迈尔尔五岁时，四十岁的亨利·比尔德放弃了他在伦敦老城商业银行的工作，重拾旧爱，干起了法律。他在不远的切姆斯福市 的一家老字号律师事务所当了合伙人，直到退休。为了庆祝这个重要的转变，庆祝自己从每天来往利物浦大街 的交通中解放出来，他买了辆二手的罗斯莱斯银云。 这台浅蓝色座驾，他一用就是三十三年，直到去世。他儿子成年后，回首当年，略有歉疚，他爱父亲的，就是这种手笔和气派。作为小镇上的初级律师，亨利?比尔德的生活很快便被财产转让、遗嘱检验之类的琐事所吞噬，此后的生活更加平淡，波澜不惊。每逢周末，他基本上就是种种花，养养车，或者和扶轮国际 的朋友打打高尔夫。他平静地接受了无爱的婚姻，那是为他的所得付出的代价。
也就是在这时候，安琪拉·比尔德开始了一系列长达十一年的婚外恋情。在家里，年轻的迈克尔，既粗心又麻木，对父母间的明争暗吵都毫无觉察。放学回家后，他常常关在家里，搭搭积木，做做功课，粘粘纸片。后来他开始沉迷色情，纵欲手淫，追逐女孩。十七岁时，他甚至没有注意到，他母亲在外面玩腻了，玩累了，撤回到了婚姻的庇护所。直到她五十多岁、乳腺癌晚期生命垂危之时，他才听到了她的婚外恋情。她似乎在恳求他原谅她毁了他的童年。那是他在牛津二年级即将结束的时候，脑子里装的除了数学物理，便是美酒靓女。一开始他云里雾里的，不明白她在说些什么。她躺在医院十九层的私人病房里，靠在枕头上。窗外，可以看到堪威岛边盐碱化的湿地上林立的工厂和泰晤士河的南岸。他已经成人，当然明白要是告诉她，说他什么也没注意到，说她的道歉搞错了对象，或者说他无法想象一个人三十多岁还能性交，那将是对她的莫大污辱。他只是抓住她的手，用力地握着，以此表达他的赤子温情，然后对她说，其实她没有什么需要他原谅的。
回家后，他和父亲喝了三杯威士忌，回到自己的房间，和衣倒在床上，回味良久，这才恍然大悟, 明白了她的非凡“成就”。天哪，短短十一年她竟有十七个情人！想当年，比尔德中校三十三岁时，经历过何等惊心动魄的战斗，何等险象环生的厮杀！可安琪拉也得有她的“惊”与“险”。她的情人便是她对隆美尔发起的沙漠之战、她的情人便是她的进攻日、她的柏林之战。她靠在医院的枕头上, 对迈克尔说，没有他们，她准会自怨自责的，她准会神经崩溃的。可结果她还是自责不已，只不过这种自责是因为她觉得亏欠了自己唯一的儿子。
第二天他回到医院，任由她虚汗润湿的手紧紧攥住自己的手，告诉她说，他的童年最幸福了，他的童年最安全了，他从没觉得受过冷落，更没有怀疑过她的母爱，况且他吃的又是那么好，他甚至为她“对生活的胃口”感到骄傲，希望能出于蓝，胜于蓝。这是他有生以来第一次、也是最好的一次“演讲”，其中四分之三绝对是真情流露。
六星期后，她去世了。对于她的情史，父子俩自然讳莫如深。可是此后许多年，迈克尔每每驶过切姆斯福市或附近的村子，看到某个在人行道上蹒跚前行、或者在公交站边颓然瘫倒的老头，就禁不住想，他会不会是那十七分之一？
第七届CASIO 杯翻译竞赛原文
The Use of Poetry Ian McEwan
It surprised no one to learn that Michael Beard had been an only child, and he would have been the first to concede that he’d never quite got the hang of brotherly feeling.His mother, Angela, was an angular beauty who doted on him, and the medium of her love was food.She bottle-fed him with paion, surplus to demand.Some four decades before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, he came top in the Cold Norton and District Baby Competition, birth-to-six-months cla.In those harsh postwar years, ideals of infant beauty resided chiefly in fat, in Churchillian multiple chins, in dreams of an end to rationing and of the reign of plenty to come.Babies were exhibited and judged like prize marrows, and, in 1947, the five-month-old Michael, bloated and jolly, swept all before him.However, it was unusual at a village fête for a middle-cla woman, a stockbroker’s wife, to abandon the cake-and-chutney stall and enter her child for such a gaudy event.She must have known that he was bound to win, just as she later claimed always to have known that he would get a scholarship to Oxford.Once he was on solids, and for the rest of her life, she cooked for him with the same commitment with which she had held the bottle, sending herself in the mid-sixties, despite her illne, on a Cordon Bleu cookery course so that she could try new meals during his occasional visits home.Her husband, Henry, was a meat-and-two-veg man, who despised garlic and the smell of olive oil.Early in the marriage, for reasons that remained private, Angela withdrew her love from him.She lived for her son, and her legacy was clear: a fat man who restlely craved the attentions of beautiful women who could cook.
Henry Beard was a lean sort with a drooping mustache and slicked-back brown hair, whose dark suits and brown tweeds seemed a cut too large, especially around the neck.He provided for his miniature family well and, in the fashion of the time, loved his son sternly and with little physical contact.Though he never embraced Michael, and rarely laid an affectionate hand on his shoulder, he supplied all the right kinds of present—Meccano and chemistry sets, a build-it-yourself wirele, encyclopedias, model airplanes, and books about military history, geology, and the lives of great men.He had had a long war, serving as a junior officer in the infantry in Dunkirk, North Africa, and Sicily, and then, as a lieutenant colonel, in the D Day landings, where he won a medal.He had arrived at the concentration camp of Belsen a week after it was liberated, and was stationed in Berlin for eight months after the war ended.Like many men of his generation, he did not speak about his experiences and he relished the ordinarine of postwar life, its tranquil routines, its tidine and rising material well-being, and, above all, its lack of danger—everything that would later appear stifling to those born in the first years of the peace.
In 1952, when Michael was five, the forty-year-old Henry Beard gave up his job at a merchant bank in the City and returned to his first love, which was the law.He became a partner in an old firm in nearby Chelmsford and stayed there for the rest of his working life.To celebrate the momentous change and his liberation from the daily commute to Liverpool Street, he bought himself a secondhand Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.This pale-blue machine lasted him thirty-three years, until his death.From the vantage of adulthood, and with some retrospective guilt, his son loved him for this grand gesture.But the life of a small-town solicitor, absorbed by matters of conveyancing and probate, settled on Henry Beard an even greater tranquillity.At weekends, he mostly cared for his roses, or his car, or golf with fellow-Rotarians.He stolidly accepted his lovele marriage as the price he must pay for his gains.
It was about this time that Angela Beard began a series of affairs that stretched over eleven years.Young Michael registered no outward hostilities or silent tensions in the home, but, then, he was neither observant nor sensitive, and was often in his room after school, building, reading, gluing, and later took up pornography and masturbation full time, and then girls.Nor, at the age of seventeen, did he notice that his mother had retreated, exhausted, to the sanctuary of her marriage.He heard of her adventures only when she was dying of breast cancer, in her early fifties.She seemed to want his forgivene for ruining his childhood.By then he was nearing the end of his second year at Oxford and his head was full of maths and girlfriends, physics and drinking, and at first he could not take in what she was telling him.She lay propped up on pillows in her private room on the nineteenth floor of a tower-block hospital, with views toward the industrialized salt marshes by Canvey Island and the south shore of the Thames.He was grownup enough to know that it would have insulted her to say that he had noticed nothing.Or that she was apologizing to the wrong person.Or that he could not imagine anyone over thirty having sex.He held her hand and squeezed it to signal his warm feelings, and said that there was nothing to forgive.
It was only after he had driven home, and drunk three nightcap Scotches with his father, then gone to his old room and lain on the bed fully dreed and considered what she had told him, that he grasped the extent of her achievement.Seventeen lovers in eleven years.Lieutenant Colonel Beard had had all the excitement and danger he could stand by the age of thirty-three.Angela had to have hers.Her lovers were her desert campaign against Rommel, her D Day, and her Berlin.Without them, she had told Michael from her hospital pillows, she would have hated herself and gone mad.But she hated herself anyway, for what she thought she had done to her only child.He went back to the hospital the next day and, while she sweatily clung to his hand, told her that his childhood had been the happiest and most secure imaginable, that he had never felt neglected or doubted her love or eaten so well, and that he was proud of what he called her appetite for life and hoped to emulate it.It was the first time that he had ever given a speech.These half and quarter truths were the best words he had ever spoken.Six weeks later, she was dead.Naturally, her love life was a closed subject between father and son, but for years afterward Michael could not drive through Chelmsford or the surrounding villages without wondering whether this or that old fellow tottering along the pavement or slumped near a bus stop was one of the seventeen.
