The New Republic

In his strange and bewitching book The Poetics of Space, postman turned physicist turned philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that houses are our storage containers our memories and imaginations.

邮递员、物理学家、哲学家加斯顿·巴什拉德（Gaston Bachelard）在他那本奇怪而迷人的书《空间诗学》中认为，房屋是我们的记忆和想象力的储存容器。

They are metaphysical and contain the cosmos—the poetry of life.

它们是形而上的，包含着宇宙——生命的诗意。

He explains it thus, “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

他这样解释：“我应该说：房子庇护着白日梦，房子保护着做梦的人，房子让人安心地做梦。”

Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond —which was marketed as a collection of short stories upon its celebrated debut last year in Britain, but was packaged as a novel upon its celebrated debut in America—makes much of Bachelard’s metaphysical reasoning.

克莱尔·路易丝·贝内特的《池塘》——去年在英国首次亮相时以短篇小说集的形式销售，但在美国首次亮相时被包装为长篇小说——大量采用了巴什拉的形而上学推理。

Bennett even gives a clue about what similarly strange and surreal stuff she is up to in Pond by quoting Bachelard in her epigraph: “Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.” Gnaw on that bone for a while.

贝内特甚至通过在她的题词中引用巴什拉的一句话来暗示她在《池塘》中所做的同样奇怪和超现实的事情：“带壳的狼比流浪的狼更残忍。”咬那根骨头一会儿。

Pond’s focus is on the house, inside and out—traditionally considered the domain of the wife and her servants, and historically disregarded as a territory of fiction written by women.

庞德的重点是房子的内部和外部——传统上被认为是妻子和她仆人的领域，并且历史上被视为女性小说的领域而被忽视。

The book is comprised of twenty stories or chapters—whatever the reader prefers, perhaps—of the narrator in her cottage and on its grounds, making a case that she, the natural world, and the house are a part of the same ecosystem—even co-evolved organisms.

这本书由二十个故事或章节组成——也许读者喜欢什么——叙述者在她的小屋及其庭院里，证明她、自然世界和房子是同一个生态系统的一部分——甚至是共同进化的有机体。

In “To A God Unknown” she describes this shared corporeality,

在《致未知的上帝》中，她描述了这种共享的肉体，

A leaf came in through the window and dropped directly onto the water between my knees as I sat in the bath looking out.

当我坐在浴缸里向外看时，一片叶子从窗户进来，直接落在我膝盖之间的水面上。

It was a thoroughly square window and I had it open completely, with the pane pushed back against the wall.

那是一扇完全方形的窗户，我把它完全打开，把窗玻璃推回墙上。

It was there, level with the rim of the bath—I didn’t have to stretch or lean; it was almost as if I were in the coniferous tree that continued upwards, how tall.

它就在那里，与浴缸的边缘齐平——我不需要伸展或倾斜；它就在那里。我仿佛置身于一直向上延伸的针叶树中，多么高啊。

Bennett isn’t the first to take this approach, certainly Virginia Woolf made her house alive in the “Time Passes” chapter of To the Lighthouse.

贝内特并不是第一个采用这种方法的人，当然，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在《到灯塔去》的“时光流逝”一章中让她的房子生机勃勃。

After the Ramseys have shut up the summer house for the season, the reader is given a nearly characterless chapter of the house as it breathes:

在拉姆齐一家关闭避暑别墅整个季节后，读者会看到这座房子的一个几乎毫无特色的章节：

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase.

客厅、餐厅、楼梯上都没有任何动静。

Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors.

只有通过生锈的铰链和被海水浸湿而肿胀的木制品，某些脱离风体的空气（房子毕竟摇摇欲坠）才爬过角落，冒险进入室内。

But unlike Woolf’s closed up summer house, Pond’s house is not empty.

但与伍尔夫封闭的避暑别墅不同的是，庞德的房子并不是空的。

The rented cottage is seemingly occupied by the same narrator, a nameless woman, a recluse who finds herself most at ease in the mundanity of her days.

租来的小屋似乎住着同一个叙述者，一个无名的女人，一个隐士，发现自己在平凡的日子里最自在。

She has set herself as apart as much as she can from the busy, commercial world.

她尽可能地将自己与繁忙的商业世界区分开来。

She composts, she gardens, she ruminates on how to fix the broken nobs on her hob and obsesses about how to properly sweep leaves.

她堆肥，她园艺，她思考如何修理炉灶上坏掉的旋钮，并痴迷于如何正确地清扫树叶。

These are the minutiae the narrator shares, it’s the mud she wades through, and her path is murky and unclear; answers to who she is, where she is, why she is there, and how she manages to get by are not proffered to the reader.

这些是叙述者分享的细节，是她涉过的泥泞，她的道路是模糊不清的；关于她是谁、她在哪里、为什么在那里以及她如何度过难关的答案都没有提供给读者。

Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun’s rays hit.

泥泞通常不是一个正面的叙事描述，但这种泥巴闪闪发光，富含云母和矿物质，当阳光照射时，它们会闪闪发光。

It’s through this glistening mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language.

贝内特的读者正是通过这片闪闪发光的泥浆，在散文中胡思乱想，时而深思熟虑，时而清晰，时而超现实，时而不可知，寻找观察和语言的真正宝石。

Though the title and some of the narrator’s observations deliberately reach back to that other famous literary pond, Bennett’s Pond is an altogether different body of water from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden .

尽管标题和叙述者的一些观察故意追溯到另一​​个著名的文学池塘，但贝内特的池塘与亨利·大卫·梭罗的《瓦尔登湖》是完全不同的水体。

Pond is not about a prickish man throwing out the creature comforts of society for a brief and beautiful proto-hippy experiment—as the New Yorker ’s Kathryn Schulz hilariously detailed last year in her ponderance on Thoreau, bitingly titled, “Pond Scum” —nor is it about the same privileged man who lived in a shack but likely didn’t have to do his laundry, as Rebecca Solnit elucidated in her Pushcart Prize-winning Orion essay, “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unresolved.” Oh no, this is a pond as it relates to the overlooked, under-described, and often dismissed life of a woman as herself, alone in a domestic realm but rarely lonely.

《池塘》并不是关于一个多愁善感的男人抛弃了社会的物质享受，为了一个简短而美丽的原始嬉皮士实验——正如《纽约客》的凯瑟琳·舒尔茨去年在她对梭罗的沉思中滑稽地详细描述的那样，其尖刻的标题是“池塘浮渣”——也不是关于同一个住在小屋里但可能不需要洗衣服的特权男人，正如丽贝卡·索尔尼特在她的手推车中阐明的那样猎户座获奖论文《梭罗之谜，未解》。哦，不，这是一个池塘，因为它与一个女人自己的被忽视、未被充分描述和经常被忽视的生活有关，她独自在家里，但很少感到孤独。

Unlike Ruthie, the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s masterpiece of domesticity, Housekeeping , who has to find her way to her selfhood after a life of adapting to others , Pond ’s protagonist springs into the narrative fully formed.

玛丽莲·罗宾逊（Marilynne Robinson）的家庭生活杰作《家政》中的叙述者露丝（Ruthie）在经历了适应他人的生活后必须找到自我的道路，与此不同的是，庞德的主人公一跃进入了完整的叙事之中。

The narrator even remembers herself as a child on “on the cusp of female individuation”—in the opening vignette, she remembers sneaking into a neighbor’s yard as a child to fall asleep.

叙述者甚至记得自己小时候正处于“女性个性化的风口浪尖”——在开头的小插曲中，她记得小时候偷偷溜进邻居的院子睡觉。

She’s doesn’t seek permission or approval from anyone or any place to experience or find her place in the world—this alone is deeply satisfying and refreshing in a novel about a woman at home.

她不需要寻求任何人或任何地方的许可或认可来体验或找到自己在世界上的位置——仅此一点就足以在一部关于家庭妇女的小说中令人深感满足和耳目一新。

It is equally satisfying that Bennett stomps all over writing-dude-in-nature territory without having to set a foot off her main character’s property line.

同样令人满意的是，贝内特在大自然中的写作领域中跺脚，而无需将脚踩出主角的财产线。

Also different in Pond ’s ecosystem is that the protagonist’s natural world includes the world of household chores—the kitchen is her microcosm.

《Pond》生态系统的另一个不同之处在于，主角的自然世界包括家务世界——厨房是她的缩影。

In “Morning, Noon, and Night,” she places a bowl next to the sink and begins to collect compost,

在《早晨、中午和夜晚》中，她在水槽旁边放了一个碗，开始收集堆肥，

scraps and skins and teabags and rinds and stalks and weeping leaves and shells etc for the compost bin and the idea was to use a smallish bowl so that I would empty it often, daily in fact, but I don’t do that.

堆肥箱里有边角料、果皮、茶袋、果皮、茎、哭泣的叶子和贝壳等，我的想法是使用一个小碗，这样我就可以经常倒空它，事实上，每天，但我不这样做。

I don’t do that and it piles up, it all piles up and sometimes, though this happens rarely, I tip it all into a bigger bowl and just carry on.

我不这样做，它就会堆积起来，全部堆积起来，有时，虽然这种情况很少发生，但我会把它们全部倒进一个更大的碗里，然后继续。

Carry on with what?

继续做什么？

Well for information there are always things that must be done—this, for one thing, after the fire has been lit of course.

好吧，对于信息来说，总有一些事情必须做——首先，这当然是在火被点燃之后。

The birds need feeding at least once a day this time of year.

每年的这个时候，鸟儿每天至少需要喂食一次。

And after a while I make the bed.

过了一会儿，我整理床铺。

I go up the steps and take a look in the post box.

我走上台阶，查看了邮箱。

I like a coffee first thing….

我首先喜欢喝咖啡……

This is the narrator’s life—the things to be done in the house—and that is where she is most comfortable.

这就是叙述者的生活——在家里要做的事情——也是她最舒服的地方。

But there are intrusions.

但也有入侵。

She becomes anxious and makes herself scarce when a wedding is hosted right outside her doors in “The Big Day”—it’s too much of an infringement on her seclusion, and routine.

当“大喜之日”中在她家门外举办婚礼时，她变得焦虑，让自己变得稀缺——这对她的隐居和日常生活造成了太大的侵犯。

She has friends who she thinks about, and men who she lusts after.

她有她思念的朋友，也有她渴望的男人。

There isn’t a hint of Thoreau’s puritanical transcendentalism in Pond— Bennett is far more direct.

《池塘》中没有一丝梭罗清教徒般的超验主义——贝内特则更为直接。

Nature and sex are not to be untangled from one another, and the woman is not the Victorian “Angel of the House.”

自然和性是不可分割的，女人也不是维多利亚时代的“家庭天使”。

Instead, Pond ’s narrator is one who knows herself, or at least knows her surroundings and that she is a part of them.

相反，池塘的叙述者是一个了解自己的人，或者至少了解她周围的环境，并且她是其中的一部分。

In “Morning, 1908” the narrator longs for a passerby, a young man, to notice her, take her even; she first feels “horror” which eventually recedes along with “fleshy reticence” to be replaced by feeling “like the most natural thing in the world.” She then lists some of these natural things of her world: Black trees, a humid bovine nostril, a sprawling chandelier, thin lace trim; her damp, unbrushed hair.

在《1908年的早晨》中，叙述者渴望有一个路人，一个年轻人，注意到她，甚至带走她；她首先感到“恐惧”，这种恐惧最终随着“肉欲的沉默”而消退，取而代之的是“就像世界上最自然的事情”。然后她列出了她世界中的一些自然事物：黑树、潮湿的牛鼻孔、蔓延的枝形吊灯、薄薄的蕾丝装饰；她湿漉漉、没梳过的头发。

These personal objects, house fixtures, handmade things, body parts, and trees, are all considered nature in Pond —everything is wild and alive.

这些个人物品、房屋固定装置、手工制品、身体部位和树木，都被认为是池塘中的自然——一切都是野生的和生机勃勃的。

Even though Pond is a book about the nature of selfhood, the narrator never fully emerges.

尽管《池塘》是一本关于自我本质的书，但叙述者从未完全显现出来。

The reader can only guess that the narrator wants to be alone for a multitude of reasons, but it’s never spelled out.

读者只能猜测叙述者出于多种原因想要独处，但从未明确说明。

For most books, holding back this much information about the main character’s backstory can feel stiff and gimmicky.

对于大多数书籍来说，隐瞒这么多关于主角背景故事的信息可能会让人感觉僵硬和花哨。

But it works here because of Pond’s interiority—the narrator explores her observations about what her life is like in the aloneness of the present, not how she might have come to the decision to be alone in the past.

但它在这里之所以有效，是因为庞德的内在性——叙述者探索了她对当下孤独中生活的观察，而不是她过去如何决定独自一人。

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Devers is a writer and editor at Longreads and A Public Space .

德弗斯是 Longreads 和 A Public Space 的作家和编辑。

She lives in London.

她住在伦敦。