Saul Bellow’s Revenge Novel
“Even his egocentricity added to his charm,” one of his editors said.
“甚至他的自我中心也增加了他的魅力，”他的一位编辑说。
Photograph by Richard Meek / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty “Herzog” is the book that made Saul Bellow famous.
摄影：Richard Meek / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty 《赫尔佐格》是索尔·贝娄的成名之作。
He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964.
1964 年，这本书问世时，他已经四十九岁了。
He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954.
自从 1944 年出版第一部小说《晃来晃去的人》以来，他就一直受到评论界的尊重，并于 1954 年凭借《奥吉·马奇历险记》获得了国家图书奖。
But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J.
但《赫尔佐格》把他变成了一个公众人物，一个连不读书的人都知道的作家——一个“作家”。在贝娄的家乡芝加哥市政厅举行的纪念《赫尔佐格》成功的仪式上，一名记者向市长理查德·J·
Daley, whether he’d read the novel.
戴利，他是否读过这本小说。
“I’ve looked into it,” Daley said.
“我已经调查过了，”戴利说。
You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller.
当你有足够多的人这么说时，你就会有一本畅销书。
“Herzog” sold a hundred and forty-two thousand hardcover copies and remained on best-seller lists for forty-two weeks.
《赫尔佐格》售出了十四万二千册精装本，并在畅销书排行榜上保持了四十二周。
Paperback rights to that novel and Bellow’s earlier books were bought for big advances, and, for the first time in his life, Bellow had money.
该小说和贝娄早期书籍的平装本版权是用大笔预付款购买的，贝娄一生中第一次有了钱。
A house he owned in upstate New York that he had complained about for years as a white elephant he gave away, to Bard College, to get the tax deduction.
他在纽约州北部拥有的一栋房子多年来一直被他抱怨为无用之物，他把它送给了巴德学院，以获得税收减免。
“Herzog” also marks the moment when, in terms that Bellow’s son Greg later used to describe his father, “young Saul” began to turn into “old Saul.” Authors are objects of cathexis, some of it idolizing, some of it envious, a fair amount both.
《赫尔佐格》也标志着贝娄的儿子格雷格后来用来形容他父亲的那一刻，“年轻的扫罗”开始变成“老扫罗”。作者是精神贯注的对象，有些人崇拜，有些人嫉妒，两者兼而有之。
Their names are on every short list; their views are solicited on every topic.
他们的名字出现在每一份候选名单上；每个主题都会征求他们的意见。
Bellow ended up with the most impressive trophy haul in his generation of American writers: three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Nobel.
贝娄最终获得了他这一代美国作家中最令人印象深刻的奖杯：三项国家图书奖、一项普利策奖和一项诺贝尔奖。
He also got drawn into political, generational, and culture-war-type disputes of the sort that, as a young man, he had been careful to avoid.
他还卷入了政治、代际和文化战争类型的争端，而作为一个年轻人，他一直小心翼翼地避免这种争端。
Bellow was sharp, well read, and observant, and he prided himself on his street smarts.
贝娄很敏锐，博览群书，观察力敏锐，他为自己的街头智慧感到自豪。
But he was a fictionalist, not an editorialist—a bird, as he liked to say, not an ornithologist.
但他是一位虚构作家，而不是一位社论作家——正如他喜欢说的那样，他是一只鸟，而不是一位鸟类学家。
Recognition magnifies idiosyncrasies.
认可会放大特质。
Personality traits affectionately condoned “in the family” display differently on the big stage.
在“家庭”中被深情宽恕的人格特质在大舞台上表现得不同。
A characteristic of Bellow’s mentioned by nearly everyone who knew him was his touchiness.
几乎所有认识贝娄的人都提到他的一个特点就是他的易怒。
He cut people who commented critically on drafts he sent them for comment, and he imagined conspiracies operating behind negative reviews or press coverage that he regarded as less than flattering.
他把那些对他发给他们征求意见的草稿提出批评的人删掉，他想象负面评论或新闻报道背后隐藏着阴谋，他认为这些评论或新闻报道并不讨人喜欢。
He broke with old friends after political disagreements over dinner.
晚餐时发生政治分歧后，他与老朋友决裂了。
These reflexes did not serve him well out in the arena.
这些反应在竞技场上并没有给他带来很好的帮助。
After he got in trouble with multiculturalists for asking an interviewer “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?,” he published a Times Op-Ed piece in which, while attempting to distance himself from the remark, he called his critics Stalinists.
在他因向采访者询问“谁是祖鲁人的托尔斯泰，巴布亚人的普鲁斯特？”而与多元文化主义者陷入麻烦后，他发表了一篇《泰晤士报》专栏文章，在文章中，他试图与这种言论保持距离，但称他的批评者是斯大林主义者。
This did not clear the air.
这并没有消除误会。
There’s something else that people who knew Bellow almost always mention, which is that he was uncommonly good-looking.
认识贝娄的人几乎总是提到一件事，那就是他长得异常英俊。
Also charming, seductive, and totally game: he fell for beautiful women and beautiful women fell for him.
而且迷人、诱人，而且完全是游戏：他爱上了美丽的女人，美丽的女人也爱上了他。
Sexual attention matters to everybody; it mattered exceedingly to Bellow.
性关注对每个人都很重要；这对贝娄来说非常重要。
He was described by women who knew him intimately as domineering but needy.
熟悉他的女性形容他专横跋扈，但又穷困潦倒。
Successful seduction seems to have been a form of validation, and a prescription refillable as necessary.
成功的诱惑似乎是一种验证，也是一种可以根据需要补充的处方。
In short, Bellow was a man who liked to be stroked, and who was suspicious of strokers.
简而言之，贝娄是一个喜欢被抚摸的人，同时又对抚摸者持怀疑态度。
Factor in brains and an exceptional gift and you get a fairly complicated piece of work.
考虑到大脑和非凡的天赋，你会得到一份相当复杂的工作。
And every book that has been written about Bellow by someone who was close to him is to some degree hostile toward its subject.
与贝娄关系密切的人所写的每一本书都在某种程度上对其主题怀有敌意。
This is true of books by Bellow’s literary agent Harriet Wasserman (“Handsome Is”: title says it all), his son Greg (“Saul Bellow’s Heart”), and his first biographer, James Atlas.
贝娄的文学经纪人哈里特·瓦瑟曼（《英俊是》：标题说明了一切）、他的儿子格雷格（《索尔·贝娄的心》）和他的第一位传记作者詹姆斯·阿特拉斯的书都是如此。
Two biographers-in-waiting, Mark Harris and Ruth Miller, eventually admitted defeat and published books in which Bellow figures as an enchanting but exhausting tease.
马克·哈里斯（Mark Harris）和露丝·米勒（Ruth Miller）这两位候任传记作家最终承认失败，并出版了书籍，贝娄在书中将贝娄描绘成迷人但令人筋疲力尽的戏弄者。
Zachary Leader met Bellow only once.
扎卡里·利德只见过贝娄一次。
That was in 1972, at a party near Harvard, where Leader was a graduate student and Bellow was being awarded an honorary degree.
那是 1972 年，在哈佛大学附近的一次聚会上，利德还是一名研究生，贝娄正在被授予荣誉学位。
Leader says that Bellow seemed bored, and he remembers nothing of what Bellow said.
里德说贝娄看起来很无聊，而且他不记得贝娄说了什么。
In the genre of Bellow biography, this counts as a credential.
在贝娄传记体裁中，这算是一种凭证。
Leader’s “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune” (Knopf) is the story of young Saul.
利德的《索尔·贝娄的一生：名利双收》（克诺普夫出版社）讲述了年轻的索尔的故事。
It opens in Russia, where Bellow’s parents and his three siblings were born, and it closes with “Herzog.” (A second volume is promised.) As a piece of research and writing, the book is worthy in multiple ways.
它以俄罗斯开始，贝娄的父母和他的三个兄弟姐妹出生在那里，并以“赫尔佐格”结束。 （承诺出第二卷。）作为一部研究和写作作品，这本书在很多方面都是有价值的。
The best thing about it is that Leader understands literature—he is a professor of English who teaches in London—so he’s interested in Bellow for the right reasons, and his critical assessments are informed and disinterested.
最棒的是，利德了解文学——他是一位在伦敦任教的英语教授——所以他对贝娄的兴趣是有正当理由的，而且他的批判性评估是明智且公正的。
He knows his way around the inbred worlds of the little magazines where Bellow made his name and the college literature departments where, for many years, he earned his living.
他熟悉贝娄成名的小杂志和多年来他谋生的大学文学系的近亲世界。
Not the best thing about the book is the length.
这本书的优点并不是篇幅。
Together with the unusually informative notes, the text is more than seven hundred and eighty pages, and there are forty years still to go.
加上内容异常丰富的注释，文本长达七百八十多页，距离发布还有四十年。
That’s over a hundred pages longer than Atlas’s biography—which is also well researched and well written, and which Leader cites and acknowledges frequently.
这比阿特拉斯的传记还长一百多页——这本书也经过了充分的研究和写得很好，并且领导者经常引用和承认。
The trouble is not that Leader is verbose.
问题不在于 Leader 太冗长。
The trouble arises from the central problem of Bellow criticism, which is how to pull the life apart from the art.
问题的根源在于贝娄批评的核心问题，即如何将生活与艺术分开。
Leader is alive to the problem; he devotes much of his introduction to it.
领导者对问题很敏感；他用了很多篇幅来介绍它。
But he hasn’t entirely solved it.
但他还没有完全解决这个问题。
“I am an American, Chicago born” begins the famous first sentence of “The Adventures of Augie March.” The author of that sentence was actually an illegal immigrant, Canada born, and the words were written in Paris.
《奥吉·马奇历险记》著名的第一句话是“我是美国人，出生在芝加哥”。这句话的作者实际上是一名非法移民，出生于加拿大，而且这句话是在巴黎写的。
Bellow’s father, Abraham Belo, was born in a shtetl inside the Pale of Settlement.
贝娄的父亲亚伯拉罕·贝洛出生在定居点内的一个棚屋里。
He began his career in St. Petersburg as a produce broker, specializing in Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit.
他在圣彼得堡开始了自己的职业生涯，担任农产品经纪人，专门从事埃及洋葱和西班牙水果。
The family seems to have been quite well off.
看来一家人过得还不错。
Abraham had used a forged document to work in St. Petersburg, and, when this was discovered, he was arrested and convicted.
亚伯拉罕使用伪造的文件在圣彼得堡工作，当这一情况被发现时，他被捕并被定罪。
He may have gone to prison.
他可能进了监狱。
But he managed to escape and, in 1913, to get his family to Canada.
但他成功逃脱，并于 1913 年带着家人来到了加拿大。
They settled in Lachine, outside Montreal, where Abraham tried farming, and where, in 1915, Saul was born.
他们定居在蒙特利尔郊外的拉欣 (Lachine)，亚伯拉罕在那里尝试务农，1915 年扫罗也在那里出生。
When the farm failed, the family moved into the city and Abraham took up bootlegging, a venture that ended even more disastrously.
当农场破产后，全家搬到了城市，亚伯拉罕开始从事走私生意，这次冒险的结局更加灾难性。
In 1924, he moved again, to Chicago, and engaged some bootlegging associates to smuggle his wife and children across the border to join him.
1924 年，他再次搬到芝加哥，并聘请了一些走私同伙将他的妻子和孩子偷渡过边境与他团聚。
Abraham spent the rest of his life in Chicago, and he ended up running a retail coal business.
亚伯拉罕在芝加哥度过了余生，最终经营了一家零售煤炭企业。
But he never really learned English—Yiddish was the language at home—and he never became a citizen.
但他从未真正学过英语——意第绪语是家里的语言——而且他从未成为公民。
He had no passport and no driver’s license (which didn’t prevent him from driving).
他没有护照，也没有驾照（但这并不妨碍他开车）。
Saul did not become an American citizen until 1943.
索尔直到 1943 年才成为美国公民。
But Chicago was a city of immigrants.
但芝加哥是一座移民城市。
It also had a large Jewish population—by 1931, according to Leader, nearly three hundred thousand in a city of 3.3 million.
据 Leader 称，到 1931 年，这座拥有 330 万人口的城市中已有近 30 万犹太人口。
All the Bellow children assimilated happily and all became well off.
贝娄家的孩子们都快乐地融入了社会，一切都变得富裕起来。
Saul is often associated with the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years as a member of the legendary Committee on Social Thought.
索尔经常与芝加哥大学联系在一起，他作为传奇的社会思想委员会的成员在那里任教多年。
He was a student there, but for less than two years.
他是那里的学生，但不到两年。
He had to withdraw for financial reasons (a truck driver was killed in an accident at his father’s coal yard and the insurance had lapsed), and he transferred to Northwestern, from which he graduated in 1937.
由于经济原因，他不得不退出（一名卡车司机在他父亲的煤场发生事故，保险失效），他转学到西北大学，并于 1937 年毕业。
In his Op-Ed about the Zulu Tolstoy, Bellow made much of his academic training in anthropology.
在他关于祖鲁·托尔斯泰的专栏中，贝娄大量介绍了他在人类学方面的学术训练。
After leaving Northwestern, he did become a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin.
离开西北大学后，他确实成为威斯康星大学人类学研究生。
But he completed just one course before dropping out and returning to Chicago, where he married a woman, Anita Goshkin, who was studying for a master’s degree in social work, and began his career as a fiction writer and itinerant college teacher.
但他只完成了一门课程，然后就退学并返回芝加哥，在那里他与一位正在攻读社会工作硕士学位的女人安妮塔·戈什金结婚，并开始了他作为一名小说作家和巡回大学教师的职业生涯。
His first job was at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, on South Michigan Avenue, in downtown Chicago.
他的第一份工作是在芝加哥市中心南密歇根大道的裴斯塔洛齐-福禄贝尔师范学院。
He also worked for a time at the Encyclopædia Britannica, on the fifty-two-volume “Great Books of the Western World,” under the editorship of Mortimer J.
他还曾在大英百科全书工作过一段时间，负责编写五十二卷的“西方世界伟大书籍”，由莫蒂默·J·莫蒂默 (Mortimer J.
Adler.
阿德勒。
Bellow was in charge of editing part of the “Syntopicon,” a two-volume digest of the Great Ideas composed by Adler.
贝娄负责编辑《Syntopicon》的部分内容，这是阿德勒撰写的两卷本伟大思想摘要。
He had taken one of Adler’s courses at the University of Chicago and had concluded that it was “tomfoolery,” but he seems to have liked the job.
他在芝加哥大学修读了阿德勒的一门课程，并得出结论认为这是“愚蠢的”，但他似乎很喜欢这份工作。
“In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me,” Bellow later said.
“在大学里，我的表现就好像我的职业就是成为一名作家，这指导了我，”贝娄后来说。
There was also the fact that his principal interest was literature, and, until after the war, Jews were rarely hired by English departments.
还有一个事实是，他的主要兴趣是文学，而且直到战后，英语系很少雇用犹太人。
“You weren’t born to it” is the way the chairman of the department at Northwestern clarified the matter when Bellow inquired about graduate school.
当贝娄询问研究生院的情况时，西北大学系主任澄清说：“你生来就不是这样的”。
Leader thinks that this encounter “produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English departments.” It’s true that there was antipathy.
利德认为，这次遭遇“对英语系产生了终生的反感，虽然温和但真实。”确实存在反感。
But Bellow would have been interested in a university career only as a means to support his writing.
但贝娄对大学生涯的兴趣只是为了支持他的写作。
Fiction was his calling.
小说是他的使命。
“He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning,” David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, told Leader.
“他很专注，从一开始就致力于成为自己的样子，”贝娄最老的朋友大卫·佩尔茨 (David Peltz) 告诉《Leader》。
“I mean, he never veered.”
“我的意思是，他从来没有改变方向。”
Bellow published his first short story in 1941.
1941年，贝娄发表了他的第一篇短篇小说。
It came out in Partisan Review —marking the start of a relationship that was key to establishing Bellow’s reputation as the intellectuals’ chosen novelist.
它发表在《党派评论》上——标志着一段关系的开始，这段关系对于贝娄确立知识分子首选小说家的声誉至关重要。
Bellow visited New York frequently, and lived there at various points, but he was never comfortable in the city.
贝娄经常访问纽约，并多次在那里居住，但他在这座城市从来都感到不舒服。
“I congratulated myself with being able to deal with New York,” he told Philip Roth near the end of his life, “but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”
“我庆幸自己能够与纽约打交道，”他在生命即将结束时对菲利普·罗斯说，“但我从未在那里赢得过任何斗争，也从未对那里发生的任何事情做出充满人性的热情回应。”
Still, in New York and at Princeton, where he spent a year teaching creative writing, Bellow made friends with many of the critics who dominated literary life in the nineteen-fifties.
尽管如此，贝娄在纽约和普林斯顿大学花了一年时间教授创意写作，并与许多在十九世纪五十年代主导文学生活的批评家结识了朋友。
They found him bright, congenial, and sufficiently bookish, and especially admired what they took to be his poise and real-world savvy.
他们发现他聪明、和蔼可亲，而且很有书卷气，尤其钦佩他的冷静和现实世界的悟性。
Irving Howe thought Bellow “very strong-willed and shrewd in the arts of self-conservation.” “Even his egocentricity added to his charms,” said William Phillips, the co-editor, with Philip Rahv, of Partisan Review .
欧文·豪认为贝娄“意志坚强，在自我保护方面非常精明”。 “甚至他的自我中心也增加了他的魅力，”《党派评论》的联合编辑威廉·菲利普斯和菲利普·拉夫说。
“Stunning—the ultimate beautiful young Jewish intellectual incarnate,” Alfred Kazin’s wife, Ann Birstein, remembered.
“令人惊叹——终极美丽的年轻犹太知识分子的化身，”阿尔弗雷德·卡津的妻子安·伯斯坦回忆道。
Bellow maintained the allure by cultivating just the right amount of aloofness.
贝娄通过培养恰到好处的冷漠来保持魅力。
“I was the cat who walked by himself,” as he put it.
正如他所说，“我是一只自己走路的猫”。
In the culture of little magazines, friendship is the last thing to prevent one writer from reviewing the work of another.
在小杂志的文化中，友谊是阻止一位作家评论另一位作家作品的最后因素。
As a novelist happy to have well-disposed reviewers, Bellow had an obvious stake in these friendships.
作为一名乐于拥有友善评论家的小说家，贝娄显然对这些友谊有利害关系。
But the friends had a stake in Bellow, too.
但朋友们也持有贝娄的股份。
As Mark Greif points out in his important new study of mid-century intellectual life, “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” Bellow came on the scene at a time when many people imagined the fate of modern man to be somehow tied to the fate of the novel.
正如马克·格雷夫在他对本世纪中叶知识分子生活的重要新研究《人类危机时代》中指出的那样，贝娄出现在许多人想象现代人的命运与小说的命运有某种联系的时候。
Was the novel dead or was it not?
这本小说是死了还是没有？
Much was thought to depend on the answer.
人们认为很大程度上取决于答案。
And for people who worried about this Bellow was the great hope.
对于那些担心贝娄的人们来说，这是一个巨大的希望。
Atlas quotes Norman Podhoretz: “There was a sense in which the validity of a whole phase of American experience was felt to hang on the question of whether or not he would turn out to be a great novelist.”
阿特拉斯引用诺曼·波德霍雷茨的话：“从某种意义上说，美国整个经历阶段的有效性都取决于他是否会成为一名伟大的小说家的问题。”
So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task.
因此，即使是《晃来晃去的人》这本写得很笨拙的书（贝娄后来说，“我读不到一页都不感到尴尬”）也被认为是这部小说最终能够胜任其历史任务的标志。
“Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review .
德尔莫·施瓦茨在《党派评论》中写道：“我认为，这是第一次抓住了新一代的经验。”
In The New Yorker , Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary , explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life .
埃德蒙·威尔逊在《纽约客》中称《晃来晃去的人》是“整整一代人心理的见证”。 1947 年，当贝娄的第二部小说《受害者》出版时，马丁·格林伯格在《评论》中解释说，贝娄成功地使犹太身份成为“一种影响所有现代生活的品质……”。
.
。
.
。
the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review , Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
现代性本身的品质。”伊丽莎白·哈德威克在《党派评论》中建议贝娄可能成为“那个时期的救赎小说家”。
This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition.
贝娄作为小说家的成就是对形式的救赎，这一观点是《赫尔佐格》之前评论中的一致主题。他的主角是现代状况代表的观念也是如此。
After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared.
在《赫尔佐格》之后，这些反应基本上消失了。
People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks.
人们不再为小说的消亡而烦恼，贝娄的主人公开始像往常一样被对待，古怪的人和怪人。
But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation.
但贝娄的书在他职业生涯的前半段受到的批评为他的声誉奠定了基础。
It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize.
最终，它兑现了诺贝尔奖。
Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
诺贝尔奖颁发给那些被认为使边缘现象普遍化的作家。
As everyone has said, Bellow not least, “Augie March” was the breakthrough book.
正如大家所说，尤其是贝娄，《奥吉·马奇》是一部突破性的书。
Bellow ascribed its origin to a visionary moment.
贝娄将其起源归因于一个有远见的时刻。
In 1948, he had gone with Anita to Paris for two years, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship.
1948 年，在古根海姆奖学金的资助下，他与安妮塔一起去了巴黎两年。
(Bellow hated Paris.) He was at work on a novel called “The Crab and the Butterfly,” which apparently concerned two men arguing in a hospital room.
（贝娄讨厌巴黎。）他当时正在写一本名为《螃蟹与蝴蝶》的小说，该小说显然讲述了两个男人在病房里争吵的故事。
In the version of the epiphany he told to Roth, he was walking to his writing studio one morning when he was distracted by the routine Parisian sight of the street gutters being flushed:
在他告诉罗斯的顿悟版本中，一天早上，他正走向写作工作室，当时他被巴黎人常见的街道排水沟被冲走的景象分散了注意力：
I remember saying to myself, “Well, why not take a short break and have at least as much freedom of movement as this running water.” My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life.
我记得对自己说：“好吧，为什么不短暂休息一下，至少像流水一样自由活动呢。”我的第一个想法是我必须摆脱那本医院小说——它正在毒害我的生活。
And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant.
接下来我认识到，这并不是小说家应有的含义。
.
。
.
。
.
。
I felt just now that I had allowed myself to be dominated by the atmosphere of misery or surliness, that I had agreed somehow to be shut in or bottled up.
我刚才感觉我已经让自己被痛苦或乖戾的气氛所支配，我已经同意以某种方式被关起来或封闭起来。
Into his head popped the memory of a friend from childhood, a boy named Charlie August—and Augie March was born.
他的脑海中突然浮现出童年好友的记忆，一个名叫查理·奥古斯特的男孩，奥吉·马奇就这样诞生了。
The novel poured out of him.
小说从他身上倾泻而出。
“All I had to do was to be there with buckets to catch it,” he said.
“我所要做的就是带着水桶去接它，”他说。
Being abroad, he thought, encouraged the sense of compositional freedom.
他认为，出国可以激发创作自由的感觉。
He wrote much of the novel in Europe—in Paris, Salzburg, and Rome.
小说的大部分内容是他在欧洲——巴黎、萨尔茨堡和罗马写成的。
He later boasted that not a single word of it was written in Chicago.
他后来夸口说，其中一个字都不是在芝加哥写的。
The subject of “Augie March” is the same as the subject of “Dangling Man” and “The Victim”: the danger of becoming trapped in other people’s definition of you.
《奥吉·马奇》的主题与《晃来晃去的人》和《受害者》的主题相同：陷入别人对你的定义中的危险。
In the case of “Augie March,” the person in danger of being trapped was Saul Bellow.
在《奥吉·马奇》的案例中，面临被困危险的人是索尔·贝娄。
“This was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant”: he is referring to the expectations of his intellectual backers.
“这不是小说家的本意”：他指的是他的知识分子支持者的期望。
He realized that he didn’t want to be the great hope of the novel or to give voice to a generation’s angst.
他意识到自己不想成为小说中的伟大希望，也不想表达一代人的焦虑。
He wanted to write up the life he knew in the way James Joyce had written up the life he knew, and to transform it into a fantastic verbal artifact, a book that broke all the rules.
他想以詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）写下他所知道的生活的方式来写下他所知道的生活，并将其转变成一本奇妙的语言作品，一本打破所有规则的书。
The first two hundred pages of “Augie March” are the best writing Bellow ever did.
《奥吉·马奇》的前两百页是贝娄写过的最好的作品。
He created an idiolect that had no model.
他创造了一种没有模式的白话。
“I am an American, Chicago born .
“我是美国人，出生于芝加哥。
.
。
.
。
and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Nobody speaks or writes that way—which is exactly what the sentence is telling us.
并按照我自学的自由风格去做事，并以我自己的方式创造记录：第一个敲门，第一个入场；有时是无辜的敲门声，有时是不那么无辜的敲门声。”没有人那样说或写——这正是这句话告诉我们的。
Augie is a street-urchin autodidact.
奥吉是一位自学者的街头顽童。
Never taught how to write a proper sentence, he invents a style of his own.
他从未教过如何写出正确的句子，但他发明了自己的风格。
He is an epigrammist and a raconteur, La Rochefoucauld in the body of a precocious twelve-year-old, a Huck Finn who has taken too many Great Books courses.
他是一位警句作家和健谈者，是一个早熟的十二岁孩子身上的拉罗什富科，是一个上了太多名著课程的哈克·费恩。
With this strange mélange of ornate locutions, Chicago patois, Joycean portmanteaus, and Yiddish cadences, Bellow found himself able to produce page after page of acrobatic verbal stunts:
通过这种奇怪的华丽辞藻、芝加哥方言、乔伊斯混成词和意第绪语节奏的混合，贝娄发现自己能够创作出一页又一页的杂技般的言语特技：
One day’s ordinary falsehood if you could convert it into silt would choke the Amazon back a hundred miles over the banks.
一天的普通谎言，如果你能将其转化为淤泥，就会将亚马逊河窒息到河岸上方一百英里处。
However, it never appears in this form but is distributed all over like the nitrogen in potatoes.
然而，它从来不会以这种形式出现，而是像土豆中的氮一样分布在各处。
Jack Kerouac is not the first or even the tenth writer you would normally put in a sentence with Saul Bellow, but “The Adventures of Augie March” is a lot like “On the Road,” a book written at the same time.
杰克·凯鲁亚克不是你通常会与索尔·贝娄放在一起的第一个甚至第十个作家，但《奥吉·马奇历险记》很像《在路上》，一本同时写的书。
Stylistically, they both stretch syntax to make the perspective zoom from ground level to fifty thousand feet and back again.
从风格上来说，它们都扩展了语法，使视角从地面缩放到五万英尺，然后再返回。
Augie is walking with a character called Grandma Lausch into an old-age home:
奥吉正和一个名叫劳什奶奶的角色一起走进养老院：
We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale-sized to infusorial that collect into the labor of the nation.
我们走上小路，在那些缓慢的、沉思的、疲惫不堪的老头之间，肝斑，被窒息的陈年血盐和废物，硬而光秃秃的圆顶，或者肿胀，无领脖子上的十一根筋，疯狂地受到堪萨斯酷暑和怀俄明冰冻的袭击，以及厨房劳作的压力，远西挖掘，辛辛那提零售，奥马哈屠宰、贩卖、收获、劳力或钉子企业，从鲸鱼大小到纤毛体，都汇集到国家的劳动力中。
Both books are also “revolts into style,” protests against the formal and moral prudishness of highbrow culture.
这两本书也是“对风格的反抗”，抗议高雅文化的形式和道德拘谨。
They are not well-wrought urns, and they do not propose a chastening of the liberal imagination.
它们不是精雕细琢的瓮，它们也不建议对自由主义想象力进行惩罚。
If they propose anything, it is that the liberal imagination is too chastened already.
如果说他们提出了什么建议的话，那就是自由主义的想象力已经受到了太多的磨练。
Bellow must have guessed that “Augie March” would distress some of his admirers.
贝娄肯定猜到《奥吉·马奇》会让他的一些崇拜者感到不安。
It did.
确实如此。
He showed a hundred pages of the manuscript to Lionel Trilling.
他向莱昂内尔·特里林展示了一百页的手稿。
“It’s very curious, it’s very interesting,” Trilling told him, “but somehow it’s wrong.” When the book came out, Trilling wrote a positive notice in the newsletter of the book club he directed but registered concern about a dangerous notion he detected in the novel, the notion that one could have a meaningful life independent of one’s social function.
“这非常奇怪，非常有趣，”特里林告诉他，“但不知怎的，这是错误的。”当这本书出版时，特里林在他领导的读书俱乐部的时事通讯中写了一条积极的通知，但他对他在小说中发现的一个危险观念表示担忧，即一个人可以拥有独立于社会功能的有意义的生活。
Bellow wrote to Trilling to say (disingenuously) that he had written the novel without much of a moral purpose in mind.
贝娄写信给特里林（不诚实地）说，他写这部小说时并没有考虑太多的道德目的。
Trilling wrote back.
特里林回信说。
“You mustn’t ignore the doctrinal intention of your book,” he said.
“你不能忽视你的书的教义意图，”他说。
In Commentary , Podhoretz complained that the novel lacked development and that its exuberance was forced.
波德霍雷茨在《评论》中抱怨这部小说缺乏发展，其繁荣是被迫的。
He called it a failure.
他称之为失败。
Podhoretz was one of Trilling’s protégés, and Bellow always believed that Trilling was behind the review, although Podhoretz denied it.
波德霍雷茨是特里林的门生之一，贝娄一直相信特里林是这次审查的幕后黑手，尽管波德霍雷茨否认了这一点。
But Atlas says that the art critic Clement Greenberg, then an editor at Commentary , having recently come over from Partisan Review , claimed that the editors had put Podhoretz up to it.
但阿特拉斯说，艺术评论家克莱门特·格林伯格（Clement Greenberg），当时是《评论》杂志的编辑，最近刚从《党派评论》转来，声称是编辑们让波德霍雷茨干的。
It was felt in New York circles, Greenberg said, that Bellow had gone a little too far.
格林伯格说，纽约圈子认为贝娄有点太过分了。
Most reviews were enthusiastic, though.
不过，大多数评论都很热情。
“Augie March” was not a best-seller, but it sold well and won a major award.
《奥吉·马奇》虽然不是畅销书，但销量不错，并获得了重大奖项。
The year it came out, Bellow took a job at Bard College.
该书出版的那一年，贝娄在巴德学院找到了一份工作。
He and Anita were separated, and he had a new girlfriend, Sondra Tschacbasov, called Sasha.
他和安妮塔分居了，他有了一个新女友，桑德拉·察巴索夫，名叫萨莎。
She was sixteen years younger and strikingly attractive.
她比她年轻十六岁，而且非常有魅力。
They met at Partisan Review , where she worked as a secretary.
他们是在《党派评论》认识的，她在那里担任秘书。
At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig.
在巴德学院，贝娄与一位名叫杰克·路德维希的文学教授成为了亲密的朋友。
As Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator.
正如莱德所描述的那样，路德维希是一个个性特大的人，一个大人物，一个奢侈的人，一个无耻的坏意第绪语传播者，一个接线员。
Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow.
路德维希崇拜贝娄；认识他们的人说路德维希想成为贝娄。
He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life.
他奉承贝娄，和他一起散步，创办了一份文学杂志，并逐渐融入了贝娄的生活。
Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness.
贝娄接受了阿谀奉承的殷勤提议。
The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together.
夫妻俩（路德维希已婚）一起社交。
This was the period when Bellow wrote “Seize the Day,” which Partisan Review published in a single issue, in 1956, after The New Yorker turned it down, and “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, a novel whose hero was based on a neighbor of the Bellows in upstate New York.
正是在这个时期，贝娄写出了《抓住时机》（Seize the Day），《党派评论》于 1956 年在《纽约客》拒绝后以单期形式发表；以及 1959 年出版的《雨王亨德森》（Henderson the Rain King），这部小说的主人公是以纽约州北部贝洛斯家的邻居为原型的。
Saul and Sasha got married in 1956, after Bellow had obtained a Nevada divorce.
贝娄在内华达州离婚后，索尔和萨莎于 1956 年结婚。
Sasha accepted the domestic role that Bellow insisted on without demur.
萨莎毫无异议地接受了贝娄坚持的家庭角色。
She says that when they had a son, Adam, Bellow told her that the baby was her responsibility—he was too old to raise another kid.
她说，当他们有了一个儿子亚当时，贝娄告诉她，孩子是她的责任——他已经太老了，不能再养另一个孩子了。
In 1958, Bellow was offered a one-year position at the University of Minnesota.
1958年，贝娄获得明尼苏达大学为期一年的职位。
He insisted that Ludwig receive an appointment as well; the university obliged, and the families moved to Minneapolis together.
他坚持要求路德维希也接受预约。大学答应了，一家人一起搬到了明尼阿波利斯。
Saul and Sasha fought.
扫罗和萨沙打了起来。
Some of the strains were apparently due to sexual dissatisfaction.
有些压力显然是由于性不满造成的。
Bellow began seeing a psychologist, a man named Paul Meehl; Meehl suggested that Sasha see him as well (a suggestion that Leader charitably calls “unorthodox”).
贝娄开始去看一位心理学家，一位名叫保罗·米尔（Paul Meehl）的人。米尔建议萨沙也见见他（利德慷慨地称这一建议为“非正统”）。
Ludwig served as a sympathetic confidant to both parties.
路德维希是双方富有同情心的知己。
Then, one day in the fall of 1959, Sasha told Bellow that she was leaving him.
然后，1959 年秋天的一天，萨莎告诉贝娄她要离开他。
There was no third party in the picture, she said.
她说，照片中没有第三方。
She just did not love him.
她只是不爱他。
Devastated, Bellow went to Europe on a cultural-diplomacy junket for the State Department.
贝娄悲痛欲绝，参加了国务院的文化外交之旅，前往欧洲。
While abroad, he engaged assiduously in what Leader calls “womanizing.” He returned to Bard, in the summer of 1960, and took up with a visiting French professor named Rosette Lamont.
在国外期间，他孜孜不倦地从事利德所谓的“女性化”活动。 1960 年夏天，他回到巴德，并结识了一位名叫罗塞特·拉蒙特 (Rosette Lamont) 的法国客座教授。
The divorce from Sasha went through in June.
与萨莎的离婚于六月办理。
For a while, Bellow and Sasha had the same lawyer, who was pleased to be representing both parties in the hottest divorce in town, but eventually Bellow was persuaded to retain his own attorney.
有一段时间，贝娄和萨莎有同一个律师，他很高兴在镇上最热门的离婚案中代表双方，但最终贝娄被说服保留了自己的律师。
In November, Bellow learned from a possibly overly conscientious babysitter that Sasha and Ludwig were sleeping together.
十一月，贝娄从一位可能过于尽责的保姆那里得知萨莎和路德维希睡在一起。
It turned out that the affair had been going on for two and a half years, since the summer of 1958.
原来，从1958年夏天开始，这段恋情已经持续了两年半。
And although Ludwig was still married, it continued.
尽管路德维希仍处于婚姻状态，但这种情况仍在继续。
Adam was living with Sasha while it was going on.
事情发生时，亚当和萨莎住在一起。
Given Bellow’s vulnerabilities, the double betrayal was his worst nightmare come to life.
鉴于贝娄的弱点，双重背叛是他最可怕的噩梦。
According to Atlas, he talked about getting a gun.
据阿特拉斯说，他谈到了获得一把枪的事。
I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend.
我刚刚向您介绍了《赫尔佐格》的背景故事和剧中人物。 《赫尔佐格》讲述了一位四十七岁的男人在得知他年轻得多的妻子突然离开他并与他最亲密的朋友欺骗后精神崩溃的故事。
The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman.
男人在一个充满爱心、耐心和理解的女人的怀抱中寻求帮助。
There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown.
这部小说至少在一个方面并非取材于现实生活：贝娄没有精神崩溃。
He wrote “Herzog” instead.
他改写了“赫尔佐格”。
He also got married again, in 1961, to Susan Glassman, another celebrated beauty, this time eighteen years younger.
1961 年，他与另一位著名美女苏珊·格拉斯曼 (Susan Glassman) 再次结婚，这次比他年轻 18 岁。
(Glassman was a former girlfriend of Philip Roth, who said that the transfer of affections “turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.” The marriage lasted five years; she was still taking Bellow to court in 1981.)
（格拉斯曼是菲利普·罗斯的前女友，他说感情的转移“对我来说是发生过的最好的事情，对索尔来说是发生过的最糟糕的事情。”这段婚姻持续了五年；1981年她仍在将贝娄告上法庭。）
“Herzog” is a revenge novel.
《赫尔佐格》是一部复仇小说。
The ex-wife, Madeleine, is a stone-cold man-killer.
前妻玛德琳是一个冷酷的杀手。
Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is described as a “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute.” Ludwig had a Ph.D. and a damaged foot; Bellow makes Gersbach a radio announcer with a wooden leg.
她的情人瓦伦丁·格斯巴赫（Valentine Gersbach）被描述为“大声、浮夸、紧握屁股的畜生”。路德维希拥有博士学位。和一只受伤的脚；贝娄让格斯巴赫成为一名长着木腿的电台播音员。
The Herzog character is passive, loving, an innocent soul who cannot make sense of a world in which people like his estranged wife and her lover can exist.
赫尔佐格这个角色是被动的、充满爱心的、天真的灵魂，他无法理解像他分居的妻子和她的情人这样的人可以存在的世界。
He is an ex-university professor, the author of a distinguished tome called “Romanticism and Christianity.” The Rosette Lamont character, called Ramona, is a sexpot with a heart of gold; she specializes in intimate candlelight dinners and lacy lingerie.
他是一位前大学教授，是一本名为《浪漫主义与基督教》的杰出著作的作者。罗塞特·拉蒙特饰演的角色叫雷蒙娜，是一位有着金子般的心的性感女郎。她擅长亲密烛光晚餐和蕾丝内衣。
She is a professor of love, not French.
她是一位爱的教授，而不是法国人。
“Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition.
尽管如此，《赫尔佐格》还是像贝娄所有小说一样受到人们的欢迎：作为对现代状况的报告。
Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce.
许多评论家——欧文·豪、菲利普·拉夫、斯坦利·埃德加·海曼、理查德·埃尔曼、理查德·波里尔——都认识贝娄，也了解离婚的一切。
(Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to.
（普瓦里尔是路德维希的老朋友；他在《党派评论》上发表的评论是一场恶作剧。）这些评论家都没有提到这本书的自传基础，其中一些评论家警告不要以自传方式阅读这本书，但没有解释为什么有人可能想要这样做。
The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
世人无法知道这个故事并非完全是编造的。
Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair.
豪写道，《赫尔佐格》是一部“由一个理念驱动”的小说——现代人能够克服疏离和绝望的理念。
Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained.
豪可以看到这个想法的吸引力，但他担心它可能没有“经过足够的谨慎制定”。 《泰晤士报书评》的评论家认为这部小说提供了“时代的信条”。 “这个时代充满了可怕的深渊，”评论家解释道。
“If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on.
“如果人们要前进，他们就必须进入并穿越这些深渊”，等等。
“If anyone’s interested in taking over Ed’s Instagram account, see me after the service.” Link copied
“如果有人有兴趣接管 Ed 的 Instagram 帐户，请在仪式结束后见我。”链接已复制
Bellow must have been tickled to death.
贝娄一定是被痒死了。
The inventive feature of “Herzog” is a series of letters that the protagonist, in his misery, composes not only to Madeleine and Gersbach but to famous people (like President Eisenhower) and philosophers (like Heidegger and Nietzsche).
《赫尔佐格》的创造性特征是主人公在痛苦中不仅写给玛德琳和格尔斯巴赫，而且写给名人（如艾森豪威尔总统）和哲学家（如海德格尔和尼采）的一系列信件。
These long letters, unfinished and unmailed, are sendups of an intellectual’s effort to understand human behavior by means of the conceptual apparatus of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books.
这些未完成、未邮寄的长信是知识分子通过莫蒂默·阿德勒名著中的概念工具理解人类行为的努力的讽刺。
Herzog is a comic figure, a holy fool, a schlimazel with a Ph.D. The whole point of his story is that when you are completely screwed the best you can hope for is a little sex and sympathy.
赫尔佐格是一个喜剧人物，一个神圣的傻瓜，一个拥有博士学位的傻瓜。他故事的要点是，当你完全被搞砸时，你所能期望的最好的就是一点性和同情。
The Western canon isn’t going to be much help.
西方经典不会有太大帮助。
The determination to consider the novel strictly as fiction extended even to its characters.
将这部小说严格视为虚构的决心甚至延伸到了它的人物身上。
Rosette Lamont reviewed the novel.
罗塞特·拉蒙特评论了这部小说。
She, too, treated the book as pure make-believe.
她也认为这本书纯粹是虚构的。
She breezed right by the Ramona character (“Her religion is sex, a welcome relief from Madeleine’s phony conversion .
她轻而易举地走过了雷蒙娜这个角色（“她的宗教信仰是性，这让玛德琳的虚假皈依得到了缓解……”
.
。
.
。
but Herzog is too divided in his mind, too busy with resentment to free himself from a heavy conscience.
但赫尔佐格的思想太分裂，太忙于怨恨，无法摆脱沉重的良心。
Besides he is suspicious of pleasure, having learned Julien Sorel’s lesson,” and so on).
此外，他吸取了朱利安·索雷尔的教训，对快乐产生了怀疑”，等等）。
She concluded with the thought that at the end of the novel Herzog enters into “a theandric relationship with the world around him.”
她的结论是，在小说的结尾，赫尔佐格进入了“与周围世界的神父关系”。
And it got even better.
而且它变得更好了。
Jack Ludwig reviewed the novel.
杰克·路德维希评论了这部小说。
He informed readers of Holiday that “the book is a major breakthrough.” By no means should it be read as autobiography—“as if an artist with Bellow’s enormous gifts were simply playing at second-guessing reality, settling scores.” No, in this book, Ludwig wrote, “Bellow is after something greater.” The greater something turns out to be “man’s contradiction, his absurdity, his alienation,” and so on.
他告诉《假日》杂志的读者，“这本书是一个重大突破。”它绝不应该被解读为自传——“就好像一位拥有贝娄巨大天赋的艺术家只是在玩弄现实、算账。”不，路德维希在这本书中写道：“贝娄追求的是更伟大的东西。”更大的东西被证明是“人的矛盾、人的荒谬、人的异化”等等。
It was pretty chutzpadik , as even Bellow had to admit.
这实在是太放肆了，连贝娄也不得不承认。
But by then he was laughing all the way to the bank.
但那时他一路笑着走到银行。
You can see the biographical problem.
你可以看到传记问题。
From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters.
从一开始，贝娄就利用了他认识的人来塑造他的角色，包括他的妻子、女朋友以及他自己的家庭成员。
In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart.
在《奥吉·马奇》中，几乎每个角色（有数十个）都直接基于现实生活中的某个对应角色。
Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef.
《赫尔佐格》的大部分内容都是罗马谱号。
Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life.
因此，利德决定将这些小说视为有关贝娄生活中的人物的权威信息来源。
When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing.
当莱德向我们讲述杰克·路德维希和桑德拉·察巴索夫时，他引用了《赫尔佐格》中对格斯巴赫和玛德琳的描述。就《奥吉·马奇》中的许多亲戚而言，这可能会让人感到困惑。
You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
你并不总是确定你正在阅读的是一个人的故事还是那个人的虚构版本。
One reason for reading biographies of writers like Bellow, who draw from people in their own lives, is to learn what those people were really like, or at least what they were like to someone who is not Bellow.
阅读像贝娄这样的作家的传记（他们从自己的生活中汲取灵感）的原因之一是了解这些人的真实情况，或者至少了解他们对贝娄以外的人的看法。
You often can’t do that with Leader’s biography.
对于领导者的传记，你通常无法做到这一点。
Leader also wants to assess Bellow’s accomplishment as a novelist.
利德还想评估贝娄作为小说家的成就。
He has to keep three balls in the air at once: the biographical story, an interpretation of the fiction as autobiography, and a consideration of the fiction as fiction.
他必须同时保持三个球：传记故事、对小说作为自传的解释以及对小说作为小说的考虑。
That’s why his book is so long.
这就是为什么他的书这么长。
Structure was always Bellow’s weak point.
结构一直是贝娄的弱点。
One of his first editors at Partisan Review , Dwight Macdonald, worried about what he called a “centerless facility.” Podhoretz was not wrong about the problem of shapelessness in “Augie March.” The novel’s antic style is like a mechanical bull.
德怀特·麦克唐纳 (Dwight Macdonald) 是《党派评论》的首批编辑之一，他对他所说的“无中心设施”感到担忧。波德霍雷兹对《奥吉·马奇》中无形问题的看法并没有错。小说的滑稽风格就像一头机械公牛。
For a few hundred pages, Bellow is having the time of his life, letting his invention take him where it will.
在几百页的篇幅中，贝娄享受着他一生中的时光，让他的发明带他去想去的地方。
By the end, he is just hanging on, waiting for the music to stop.
到最后，他只是坚持着，等待音乐停止。
It takes the story five hundred and thirty-six pages to get there.
故事花了五百三十六页才讲到这里。
Leader thinks that Bellow plunged into his books and wrote on sheer enthusiasm, then surfaced after a hundred pages or so and wondered how to get back to shore.
利德认为，贝娄一头扎进书里，纯粹是出于热情而写作，然后在写了大约一百页后又浮出水面，想知道如何回到岸边。
There is very little moral logic to his stories.
他的故事几乎没有道德逻辑。
Things just happen.
事情就这样发生了。
(A major exception is “Seize the Day,” which is formally perfectly realized.
（一个主要的例外是“抓住这一天”，它在形式上得到了完美的实现。
But that book is a novella, a day in the life.
但这本书是一部中篇小说，是生活中的一天。
It doesn’t require a plot.)
它不需要情节。）
“Herzog,” too, sags in the middle, a long episode in which Herzog reconnects with Ramona.
《赫尔佐格》也从中间开始下垂，在这一集很长的情节中，赫尔佐格与雷蒙娜重新建立了联系。
But Bellow came up with a brilliant solution for the second half.
但贝娄在下半场想出了一个绝妙的解决方案。
Waiting in a courthouse to see his lawyer, Herzog sits in on a trial.
赫尔佐格在法院等待会见律师，并旁听了审判。
A woman and her boyfriend are being tried for murdering her small child, whom they have tortured and beaten to death.
一名妇女和她的男友因谋杀她的小孩而受审，他们将孩子折磨致死。
The woman is mentally unfit; Herzog hears evidence that she has been diagnosed with a lesion on her brain.
该女子精神不健全；赫尔佐格听到证据表明她被诊断出大脑有病变。
(A diabolical touch: Sasha had been diagnosed with a brain lesion.)
（恶魔般的接触：萨莎被诊断出患有脑部病变。）
Horrified that Madeleine and Gersbach might be abusing his child (in the novel, a girl), Herzog rushes off to his deceased father’s house, finds a gun his father owned, and goes to Madeleine’s.
赫尔佐格害怕玛德琳和格斯巴赫可能虐待他的孩子（小说中是一个女孩），他冲到他已故父亲的家里，找到了他父亲拥有的一把枪，然后去了玛德琳家。
It is evening.
现在是晚上。
He creeps into the yard and watches Madeleine and Gersbach through the window, loaded pistol in hand.
他蹑手蹑脚地走进院子，透过窗户看着玛德琳和格斯巴赫，手里拿着上了膛的手枪。
What he sees is an ordinary domestic scene.
他看到的只是一个普通的家庭场景。
Gersbach is giving the little girl a bath.
格斯巴赫正在给小女孩洗澡。
Herzog creeps away.
赫尔佐格悄然离去。
Actually, these episodes were not entirely invented.
事实上，这些情节并不是完全杜撰的。
Bellow lifted them straight out of “The Brothers Karamazov.” A child tortured by its parents is Ivan Karamazov’s illustration of the problem of evil: what kind of God would allow that to happen?
贝娄将他们直接从《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》中提炼出来。一个被父母折磨的孩子是伊万·卡拉马佐夫对邪恶问题的诠释：什么样的上帝会允许这样的事情发生？
And Herzog with his gun at the window is a reënactment of Dmitri Karamazov, the murder weapon in his hand, spying through the window on his father.
赫尔佐格用枪指着窗户，这是德米特里·卡拉马佐夫的重演，他手里拿着凶器，透过窗户监视着他的父亲。
Dmitri is caught and convicted of a murder he desired but did not commit.
德米特里被捕并被判犯有他想要但没有实施的谋杀罪。
“Herzog,” though, is a comedy.
不过，《赫尔佐格》是一部喜剧。
The next day, Herzog gets in a minor traffic accident and the cops discover the loaded gun in his car.
第二天，赫尔佐格遭遇了一场轻微的交通事故，警察在他的车里发现了装有子弹的枪。
But, after some hairy moments in the police station, he is let go.
但是，在警察局经历了一些令人毛骨悚然的时刻后，他被释放了。
Desperately searching the Great Books for wisdom, Herzog briefly finds himself living in one.
赫尔佐格拼命地在伟大的书籍中寻找智慧，他短暂地发现自己生活在其中。
He can’t wait to get out.
他迫不及待地想出去。
The decorum in Bellow criticism is to acknowledge the original of the fictional character when the person is famous, and otherwise to insist on treating it all as fiction.
贝娄批评中的礼仪是，当虚构人物出名时，要承认该人物的真实性，否则就坚持将其全部视为虚构。
Thus everyone knows that, in “Humboldt’s Gift,” Von Humboldt Fleisher “is” Delmore Schwartz, and that, in “Ravelstein,” Abe Ravelstein “is” Allan Bloom, the Chicago professor who wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” and was a good friend of Bellow’s.
因此大家都知道，在《洪堡的礼物》中，冯·洪堡·弗莱舍“就是”德尔莫尔·施瓦茨；在《拉维尔斯坦》中，阿贝·拉维尔斯坦“就是”艾伦·布鲁姆，这位芝加哥教授，写过《美国思想的封闭》，也是贝娄的好朋友。
But “Ravelstein” is a revenge novel, too.
但《拉维尔斯坦》也是一部复仇小说。
It’s not really about Ravelstein/Bloom.
这与拉维尔斯坦/布鲁姆无关。
It’s about the narrator, a writer named Chick, who has been treated cruelly by his wife, Vela, a beautiful and brilliant physicist—a wicked caricature of Bellow’s fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea.
这是关于叙述者，一位名叫奇克的作家，他受到妻子维拉的残酷对待，维拉是一位美丽而才华横溢的物理学家——贝娄的第四任妻子、数学家亚历山德拉·约内斯库·图尔恰的邪恶漫画。
There are also a couple of drive-by take-downs along the way—of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion at Chicago rumored to have been involved in the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, and of the owner of a restaurant on St. Martin, in the Caribbean, where Bellow contracted a case of food poisoning that nearly killed him.
沿途还有几起驾车抓捕事件：米尔恰·埃利亚德 (Mircea Eliade)，一位芝加哥宗教历史学家，据传参与了法西斯罗马尼亚铁卫队；还有加勒比海圣马丁岛一家餐馆的老板，贝娄在那里患上了食物中毒事件，差点丧命。
He brings them into the story just to skewer them.
他把它们带入故事只是为了串烧它们。
Podhoretz told Leader that he considered all of Bellow’s characters puppets.
波德霍雷兹告诉里德，他认为贝娄笔下的所有人物都是木偶。
And there is something animatronic about them.
他们身上有一些电子动画的东西。
This is especially true in “Augie March,” where the extended procession of too vivid personalities is like a Wes Anderson movie.
在《奥吉·马奇》中尤其如此，其中过于生动的人物的延长游行就像韦斯·安德森的电影一样。
Bellow tended to make his characters look the way a child sees grownups, unalterable cartoons, weirdly unself-conscious in their one-dimensionality.
贝娄倾向于让他的角色看起来像孩子眼中的成年人，不可改变的卡通，在一维性中奇怪地不自觉。
But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow’s books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty.
但贝娄的书中通常有一个完全想象出来的人物，这个人物的冲动是作者理解和同情的，他的痛苦引起了他的同情，他的美德和缺陷、自私和自我怀疑、光荣的意图和不光荣的权宜之计都被以外科手术般的精确和坚定的诚实来审视。
That character is the protagonist—Augie, Herzog, Chick, even Tommy Wilhelm, in “Seize the Day,” who tries to leverage his pain to win respect.
这个角色就是《只争朝夕》中的主角——奥吉、赫尔佐格、奇克，甚至汤米·威廉，他试图利用自己的痛苦来赢得尊重。
Their real-life counterpart is, of course, Saul Bellow, whose greatest subject was himself.
当然，他们在现实生活中的对应者是索尔·贝娄，他最伟大的主题就是他自己。
♦
❖