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发帖数: 141625 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 LeisureTime 讨论区 】
发信人: bos (Bart), 信区: LeisureTime
标 题: Re: 中日作家“刺刀见红”争夺本届诺贝尔文学奖
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Fri Oct 5 15:39:58 2012, 美东)
我也懒得详细说哈金了，给你贴个review吧
John Updike写的
Books
Nan, American Man
A new novel by a Chinese émigré.
by John Updike December 3, 2007
Ha Jin
Ha Jin
A critic cannot but be impressed by the courage and intellect of the Chinese
-American writer Ha Jin. Born in 1956 of parents who were both military
doctors, he volunteered for the People’s Liberation Army at the age of
fourteen and served five and a half years, near the northeast border with
Russia. He began to take a keen interest in reading in his late teens, by
which time the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had closed down China’s
educational institutions and made any books but Mao’s “little red book”
suspect. In 1977, Heilongjiang University, in Harbin, admitted Ha Jin but
assigned him to study English, even though it was his last choice on a list
of preferences. After receiving a master’s degree in American literature
from Shandong University, in 1984, he came to the United States to do
graduate work at Brandeis University. His plans to return to China as a
teacher or a translator were changed by the Tiananmen Square massacre, in
1989: he decided to stay in America and to try to become a writer in English
. A year later, he published his first book of poems, “Between Silences”;
during the nineteen-nineties, he published five more volumes in English,
including two collections of short stories, one of which, “Ocean of Words”
(1996), won the PEN / Hemingway Award and the other, “Under the Red Flag”
(1997), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His busy
decade—in the course of which he was hired, in 1993, by Emory University,
in Atlanta, as an instructor in poetry—was capped by a first novel, “
Waiting,” which received the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN /
Faulkner. His prize-winning command of English has a few precedents, notably
Conrad and Nabokov, but neither made the leap out of a language as remote
from the Indo-European group, in grammar and vocabulary, in scriptural
practice and literary tradition, as Mandarin.
“Waiting” is impeccably written, in a sober prose that does nothing to
call attention to itself and yet capably delivers images, characters,
sensations, feelings, and even, in a basically oppressive and static
situation, bits of comedy and glimpses of natural beauty. The very modesty
of the tone strengthens the reader’s belief that this is how private lives
were conducted amid the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, as ancient
customs worked with a fear-ridden Communist bureaucracy to stifle normal
human appetites. Every simple, bleak detail has the fascination of the
hitherto unknown; not a word of Ha Jin’s hard-won English seems out of
place or wasted. And the first-person, rather documentary prose of a
subsequent prize-winning novel, “War Trash” (2004), flows as smoothly.
His new novel, “A Free Life” (Pantheon; $26), is a relatively lumpy and
uncomfortable work, of which a first draft, he confides in a brief afterword
, was completed in the year 2000. In an interview that same year, with
Bookreporter.com, he declared, “I plan to write at least two books about
the American immigrant experience, but not my own story.” However, his
dedication to “A Free Life” reads, “To Lisha and Wen, who lived this book
”; Lisha and Wen are the names of Ha Jin’s wife and son. Nan Wu, the hero
of “A Free Life,” also has a wife and son, Pingping and Taotao, and shares
with Lin Kong, the protagonist of “Waiting,” a cautious, bookish nature
and a nagging indecision in regard to a basic emotional choice. Lin, a
military doctor, vacillates between a homely wife, chosen by his parents,
back in his village, and a nurse in the hospital where he is posted; Nan, a
graduate student adrift in America, cannot stop longing for an adored early
love, Beina, who spurned him. Ha Jin, not an author averse to flat statement
, spells out on an early page the dilemmas facing his hero, as he welcomes
his six-year-old son to the United States:
He was uncertain of his future and what to do about his life, not to mention
his marriage. The truth was that he just didn’t love his wife that much,
and she knew it. Pingping knew he was still enamored of his ex-girlfriend,
Beina, though that woman was far away in China. It seemed very likely to Nan
that Pingping might walk out on him one of these days. Yet now he was all
the more convinced that they must live in this country to let their son grow
into an American. He must make sure that Taotao would stay out of the cycle
of violence that had beset their native land for centuries. The boy must be
spared the endless, gratuitous suffering to which the Chinese were as
accustomed as if their whole existence depended on it.
As Nan’s search for security takes him from Massachusetts to New York City
and then to the Atlanta area, he encounters a colorful variety of Chinese
expatriates and relatively native Americans, and copes with a series of
lowly jobs, but the reader follows him for more than six hundred and fifty
pages in pursuit of resolutions to the issues posed in the sentences above.
Will Nan get over Beina? Will he start to write poetry in English? Will
Pingping ever be loved by Nan as she deserves? What kind of American will
Taotao become? Will the Wus get to own two cars and pay off their mortgage?
It’s a long trudge, but then so is assimilation.
In an interview with Powell’s Books, Ha Jin said that “the core of the
immigrant experience” was “how to learn the language—or give up learning
the language!—but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is
impossible for an immigrant.” A striking typographical device conveys the
inside and outside of the linguistic problem. Conversations in Mandarin are
rendered in italicized English, and we observe Nan’s brain and tongue
functioning at a sophisticated level. When he applies to an Italian-American
supervisor called Don for the job of night watchman at a factory in
Watertown, we hear him speak as he sounds to Americans:
“I worked for one and a half years at zer Waltham Medical Center, as a
cahstodian. Here’s recommendation by my former bawss . . . . My bawss was
sacked, so we got laid all together.”
“You got what?” Don asked with a start. A young secretary at another desk
tittered and turned her pallid face toward the two men.
Realizing he’d left out the adverb “off,” Nan amended, “Sorry, sorry,
they used anozzer company, so we all got laid off.”
And Nan’s English isn’t that bad; how else do you pronounce “boss”? But
he is tripped up here by a peculiarity of English that Dr. Johnson noted in
the preface to his dictionary:
There is [a] kind of composition more frequent in our language than perhaps
in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty. We
modify the signification of many verbs by a particle subjoined; as to come
off [and] innumerable expressions of the same kind, of which some appear
wildly irregular, being so far distant from the sense of the simple words,
that no sagacity will be able to trace the steps by which they arrived at
the present use.
Nan agrees: “Compared with written Chinese, English was indeed a language
of common people, despite being hard to master, its grammatical rules too
loose and its idioms defying logic.” Elsewhere, becoming a handy American
householder, he thinks, “Now he loved hand tools—oh, the infinite
varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the
vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.
” This exacting language is “like a body of water in which he had to learn
how to swim and breathe, even though he’d feel out of his element whenever
he used it.”
Reaching to encompass the American scene, Ha Jin’s English in “A Free Life
” shows more small solecisms than in his Chinese novels. We get a character
“licking his compressed teeth,” a tennis court “studded with yellow
balls,” “a giant disk [the sun] flaming a good part of the eastern sky,”
“the lobby was swarmed with people,” a victim of violence “booted half to
death,” eyes that “shone with a stiff light like a crazed man’s,” a “
hilly gravel road filled with doglegs,” a swimmer “crawl-stroking to the
shore.” Complicated facial maneuvers challenge our ability to visualize: “
Unconsciously she combed her upper lip with her teeth”; “His eyebrows were
tilting as he kept pushing his flat nose with his knuckle”; “His eyes
turned rhomboidal and his face nearly purple.” Metaphorical overload can
occur: “In his arms, she was like a meatball with love handles.” Some
expressions feel translated from the Mandarin: Pingping says, “You shouldn
’t have mixed our decision with his fault,” and Nan thinks, “If his wife
had been of two hearts with him, this family would have fallen apart long
ago.” Rare words wander in from the hinterlands of the English dictionary:
“a short-haired barmaid in a lavender skong,” “It was mizzling,” “
empleomaniac.” Taotao’s vocabulary has grown to the point where he
exclaims, in the midst of a family tussle, “Ow! Don’t break my humerus!”
Anxiously, Nan keeps seeking verdicts on his use of English: one consultant
pronounces it “fluid, elegant, and slightly old-fashioned,” whereas
another, an editor of a little magazine called Arrows, testily tells him, “
The way you use the language is too clumsy. For a native speaker like myself
, it almost amounts to an insult.”
Unfortunately, the novel rarely gathers the kind of momentum that lets us
overlook its language. The processes that Ha Jin is concerned to describe—
survival and adjustment in an alien land, the firming-up of a literary
vocation, the emergence of marital and family harmony after the shocks of
transplantation—are incremental, breaking into many small chapters but
yielding few dramatic crises. The central action consists of the Wus’
decision to buy a small Chinese restaurant, the Gold Wok, in a half-deserted
mall northeast of Atlanta, and their recipes (foreshadowed by some
knowledgeable descriptions of food preparation in “Waiting”) for success.
The sheaf of the fictional Nan Wu’s poems at the very end is meant to serve
, like Zhivago’s at the end of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” as the
narrative’s climax and triumph. Of the other Chinese literary aspirants Nan
meets in the United States, he alone commits to English-language production
; the others, after their overseas adventures, return to the Chinese
mainland and the constraints and rewards there. One returnee, Danning Meng,
achieves official approval and financial security, but tells Nan, when the
expatriate visits:
The higher-ups want us to write about dead people and ancient events because
this is a way to make us less subversive and more inconsequential. It’s
their means of containing China’s creative energy and talents. The saddest
part is that in this way we can produce only transient work.
Bao Yuan, who employs Nan for a time on his short-lived Mandarin quarterly
in New York, New Lines, becomes a painter and makes an American splash,
establishing himself in a studio near Nashville with students and a rich
patron, but Nan, nothing if not critical, “could find little originality in
these paintings” and distrusts the American sunniness and exuberance that
have replaced Bao’s old “depressive agitation, the jaundiced view of the
world, and the dark despair.” Sure enough, Bao’s paintings bring less and
less money, though he turns them out ever faster. When last seen, he has
taken a Chinese bride, a factory owner’s daughter, and cranked out a series
of bad paintings of Shanghai: “Obviously Bao, cashing in on his success,
had diffused his energy and lost his creative center. This troubled Nan.”
Not that Nan’s American friend, the poet Dick Harrison, is any more of an
inspiration, scrambling up the rickety ladder of grants and workshops and
prizes and influential acquaintances that enable ascent in a capitalist
versifier’s thoroughly academic career.
Ha Jin’s description of American life—laborious, money-mad, philistine,
and cheesy (there is apparently no cheese in China)—is not apt to trigger a
wave of immigration. Asked the difference between China and America, Nan
says, “In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone. . . .
Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don’t want to fight wiz
anyone, as eef I lost my spirit.” To himself, he thinks, “The louder I
shout, the bigger a fool I’ll make of myself. I feel like a crippled man
here.” Nevertheless, he elects to stay, in this “lonesome, unfathomable,
overwhelming land.” The Wus strive less to let America in than to squeeze
China out—“squeeze every bit of it out of themselves!” Nan tells Danning,
“I spit at China, because it treats its citizens like gullible children
and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands
nothing but obedience.”
Toward the end of “A Free Life,” our hero wins, in a supermarket raffle,
an airline ticket from Atlanta to Beijing and back. He visits his parents
and sees signs of the new prosperity but is unmoved: “He wondered why so
many overseas Chinese would retire to this mad country where you had to
bribe and feast others to get anything done. Clearly a person like him
wouldn’t be able to survive here. Now he wanted all the more to live and
die in America.” The flight reminds him of his first flight, in 1985, to
America, and
how he and his fellow-travellers, most of whom were students, had been
nauseated by a certain smell in the plane—so much so that it made some of
them unable to swallow the in-flight meal of Parmesan chicken served in a
plastic dish. It was a typical American odor that sickened some new arrivals
. Everywhere in the United States there was this sweetish smell, like a kind
of chemical, especially in the supermarket, where even vegetables and
fruits had it. Then one day in the following week Nan suddenly found that
his nose could no longer detect it.
His assimilation had begun.
Read more
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/03/071203cr
我还是张充和呢，那是正经住我们这边的，也是文人来往的集聚地，不过近几年身体不
好闭门谢客了。bos我上次问你哈金的英语好在哪里？感觉他用词挺普通，句子结构也
不复杂。我只看过waiting和white trash. |
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