名人小故事 文人骚客4：Autobiography of Hemingway 海明威传

Autobiography of Hemingway

海明威传

Ernest Hemingway is a giant of modern literature. Among twentieth-century American fiction writers, his work is most often compared to that of his contemporaries William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Combined with his outstanding short stories, Hemingway’s four major novels — The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) — comprise a contribution to modern fiction that is far more substantial than Fitzgerald’s and that approximates Faulkner’s.

海明威是现代文学巨匠。在二十世纪的美国小说作家之中，他的作品常常被人们和与他同时代的福克纳和菲茨杰拉德相提并论。海明威的四大小说，《太阳照常 升起》（1926年），《永别了，武器》（1929),《丧钟为谁 而鸣》（ 1940)和《老人与海》（ 1952年），加上他出色的 短篇小说故事，对现代小说的贡献远远超过斯科特.菲 茨杰拉德的小说，可以和福克纳相提并论。

Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years before Hemingway received this recognition, but their respective approaches to fiction are dissimilar. When set alongside Faulkner’s Mississippi novels, Hemingway’s major works feature simpler structures and narrative voices.

福克纳被授予诺贝尔文学奖，比海明威早几年获得 这样的认可，但他们各自小说的表现方式截然不同。和 福克纳的小说《密西西比》相比，海明威的主要著作表 现出更简明的结构，语气和人物角色也显得更具叙事的 特征。

As or more important, Hemingway’s style, with its consistent use of short, concrete, direct prose and of scenes consisting exclusively of dialogue, gives his novels and short stories a distinctive accessibility that is immediately identifiable with the author. Owing to the direct character of both his style and his life-style, there is a tendency to cast Hemingway as a “representative” American writer whose work reflects the bold, forthright and rugged individualism of the American spirit in action. His own background as a wounded veteran of World War I, as an engaged combatant in the fight against Fascism and as a “he-man” with a passion for outdoor adventures and other manly pursuits reinforce this association.

与此同样重要，甚至比这更重要的是，这种以坚 持使用简短、具体而直接的平铺直叙的文体和完全由对 话构成的场景为主要特点的写作风格，使海明威的小说 和短篇故事具有一种独特的、能够立即被确认是作者本 人所写。由于他写作的风格以及他个人的生活风格，人 们倾向于把他当作一群美国作家中的代表性人物，这些 作家的作品反映了美国人所特有的一种寓于行动中的精 神，即勇敢、直率以及坚定的独立精神。他本人是一个 曾经参加一战的负过重伤的老兵，一名直接参战的反法 西斯战士，同时还是一位热爱户外活动、有着诸多人生 追求的“硬汉”，这样的背景加深了他和他作品之间的 这种联系。

But this identification of Hemingway as a uniquely American genius is problematic. Although three of his major novels are told by and through Americans, Hemingway’s protagonists are expatriates, and his fictional settings are in France, Italy, Spain, and later Cuba, rather than America itself.

但是，这种把海明威仅仅作为一个美国式的独特天 才的认定方式是值得商榷的。虽然他的主要小说中有3 部是通过美国人并且是在美国人中叙述的，但是海明威 小说中的主角是旅居国外的人，而且小说的背景是在法 国、意大利、西班牙和后来的古巴，而不是美国。

While Hemingway’s early career benefited from his connections with Fitzgerald and with American novelist Sherwood Anderson, his aesthetic is actually closer to that shared by the transplanted American poets that he met in Paris during the 1920s; In this context, we must realize that Hemingway’s approach to the craft of fiction is direct but never blunt or just plain simple.

尽管海明威早期的创作生涯从他与菲茨杰拉德和美 国小说家舍伍德•安德森的联系中获益，但实际上他的 美学和20世纪20年代他在法国遇见的那些移居巴黎的 美国诗人所拥有的审美观更为接近。在这样的背景下,我们必须认识到，海明威的小说创作技巧的确是直接 的，但并不是简单平淡的。

Hemingway’s text is the result of a painstaking selection process, each word performing an assigned function in the narrative. These choices of language, in turn, occur through the mind and experience of his novels’ central characters whether they serve explicitly as narrators of their experience or as focal characters from whose perspectives the story unfolds. The main working :orollary of Hemingway’s “iceberg principle” is that the full meaning of the text is not limited to moving the plot forward: there is always a web of association and inference, a submerged reason behind the inclusion (or even the omission) of every detail.

海明威的作品是一个艰苦的挑选的结果，作品中每 个单词都承担确定的叙事任务。语言上的精雕细琢，反 过来又会在作品中主角的思想和经历上体现出来，不论 这些角色是单纯的讲述者，或是逐步揭示情节的焦点角 色。海明威的“冰山原则”在作品中的必然表现就是， 作品的全部意义并不仅仅局限于推动情节发展：作品背 后总是有一个联系和逻辑性的世界，作品中包含的每个 细节（甚至是省略的细节）背后都有潜在的原因。

Hemingway is direct. But he is also quite subtle, and subtlety is not a trait that we ascribe to the American way. In the end, Hemingway is an international artist, a man who never relinquished his American identity but who entered new territories too broad and too deep to fit within the domain of any national culture.
 

海明威是率直的。但同时，他又非常细心和敏锐， 这种细心和敏锐不能认为是美国文学特色所致。总之， 海明威是一位国际艺术家，他从没有放弃他作为美国人 的标志性身份，但他所进入的艺术领域太深远也太广 大，根本不能用任何单一国家的文化去界定它。