经济学人下载:了不起的黑人女作家托尼·莫里森(2)

Those 18 years as an editor at Random House had not been for nothing. She knew exactly what was needed to lead, sometimes throw, the reader into an alien world. It was not merely words but the silences between them, the unsaid things and the smoke they sent up, that gave her phrases their rhythm and their power. Hers was a work to reclaim lost black voices.
托尼在兰登书屋当编辑的18年可不是白做的。她清楚地知道需要用什么把读者引导至一个陌生的世界，有时是让读者突然陷入那个世界。不仅仅是文字，而且是文字间的沉默，那些没有说到的事情和它们带来的迷雾让她的语句有了节奏和能量。她的作品是为了找回失去的黑人声音。

Slaves in wagons singing under their breath, ghosts and haints staring silently from tree stumps, ancestors whose names were hidden in children's chants. Or simply girls like herself raised to womanhood in the Midwest, beside a steel mill, in a small house obsessively painted and sluiced with Fels-Naptha as though at any moment they might be forced to leave. Read as she might, there were no books about this world, in which someone like her took centre-stage. She determined to write one, whether or not it sold; this became "The Bluest Eye".
马车上的奴隶们低声歌唱，鬼和海雀在树桩上默默地凝视，祖先的名字隐藏在孩子们的圣歌中。或者仅仅是像她一样在美国中西部长大成人的女孩们，她们生活在钢厂旁边，在一所小房子里，他们痴迷地涂着颜料，用毡子冲洗着，好像随时都可能被迫离开。尽管她可能会阅读，但这个世界上还没有像她这样的人占据中心舞台的书籍。她决定写一本书，不管它能不能卖出去；这本书就是《最蓝的眼睛》。

Along with the voices she recovered black experience, but through culture, not the easy, lazy colour-fetish: through the sweet smell of Nu Nile Hair Oil, the sharp tang of mustard greens cooking, the inevitability of entering by back doors. The protagonist of "The Bluest Eye" longed to be like Shirley Temple, but in this book and those that followed her creator rejoiced in dark eyes, thick lips, flared noses. Who had instructed blacks in self-loathing? Who told them they were not beautiful? When she cleaned house for a richer woman as a girl, and paid her for cast-off clothes, she still felt proud. When she wrote, she felt magnificent.
伴随着她的发声，她寻回了黑人的经历，但她是通过文化，而不是简单的、懒惰的对肤色的迷恋：她是通过尼罗河发油的芬芳，芥菜烹调时的辛辣味道，不可避免地走后门做到的。《最蓝的眼睛》的主人公渴望像秀兰·邓波儿一样，但在这本书中，以及那些追随她的创造者的人们，却以黑眼睛、厚嘴唇和鼻孔大的鼻子为乐。谁教导黑人自我厌恶？谁说她们不漂亮？她是个小女孩的时候，为一个有钱的女人打扫房子，那人给她买旧衣服，她仍然感到自豪。当她写作时，她觉得自己很了不起。