The Tender Narrator by Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Lecture)

The Tender Narrator

Olga Tokarczuk – Nobel Lecture

1.

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it’s a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes. The light is soft, and rainy, likely a springtime light, and definitely the kind of light that seeps in through a window, holding the room in a barely perceptible glow. My mom is sitting beside our old radio, and it’s the kind with a green eye and two dials—one to regulate the volume, the other for finding a station. This radio later became my great childhood companion; from it I learned of the existence of the cosmos. Turning an ebony knob shifted the delicate feelers of the antennae, and into their purview fell all kinds of different stations—Warsaw, London, Luxembourg and Paris. Sometimes, however, the sound would falter, as though between Prague and New York, or Moscow and Madrid, the antennae’s feelers stumbled onto black holes. Whenever that happened, it sent shivers down my spine. I believed that through this radio different solar systems and galaxies were speaking to me, crackling and warbling and sending me important information, and yet I was unable to decipher it.

我有意识经验的第一张照片是我母亲生我之前拍的。可惜照片是黑白的，也就是说好多细节都失去了，只留下灰的形状。光线柔和、湿润，像春天时节，显然是从窗户渗进来的那种光线，刚好能照亮屋子。我妈妈坐在老收音机旁，收音机带绿眼睛和两个调钮——一个调节音量，另一个调台。这个收音机往后会是我童年难得的伙伴；从它那里我知道了宇宙的存在。旋转乌木旋钮调节天线脆弱的触角，在其所及的范围里有各种不同的电台——华沙、伦敦、卢森堡、巴黎。有时候，声音会变弱，好像在布拉格和纽约，或莫斯科和马德里之间，天线的触角掉在了黑洞里。一旦声音变弱，颤抖就会顺着我的脊柱往下。我深信不同的太阳系和星系通过天线在跟我说话，噼啪噼啪地给我发送重要信息，而我无法解码。

When as a little girl I would look at that picture, I would feel sure that my mom had been looking for me when she turned the dial on our radio. Like a sensitive radar, she penetrated the infinite realms of the cosmos, trying to find out when I would arrive, and from where. Her haircut and outfit (a big boat neck) indicate when this picture was taken, namely, in the early sixties. Gazing off somewhere outside of the frame, the somewhat hunched-over woman sees something that isn’t available to a person looking at the photo later. As a child, I imagined that what was happening was that she was gazing into time. There’s nothing really happening in the picture—it’s a photograph of a state, not a process. The woman is sad, seemingly lost in thought—seemingly lost.

当我是个小女孩时，我会看向那张照片，我确定地感到妈妈转动收音机的旋钮时，曾寻找过我。像敏锐的雷达那样，她刺透宇宙无尽的领域，试图找出我什么时候、从哪里到达。她的发型和着装（船领）显示出照片拍摄的时间，是六十年代初。注视着画面外的某个地方，背带点拱着的她看到了一些东西，后来看照片的人感觉不到。作为孩子，我想象那是她在朝着时间注视。其实照片里没发生什么——照片拍的是一个场景，而非一个过程。里面的女性有点悲伤，好像陷入了沉思——好像有点迷失。

When I later asked her about that sadness—which I did on numerous occasions, always prompting the same response—my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn’t been born yet, yet she already missed me.

后来当我向她问起那悲伤——我在无数场合问起过，总是得到同一个反应——我母亲会说，她悲伤是因为我还没出生，可是她已经想我了。

“How can you miss me when I’m not there yet?” I would ask.

“你怎么会想我，在我还没生下来的时候？”我会问。

I knew that you miss someone you’ve lost, that longing is an effect of loss.

我知道你想念的是你失去的某个人，那种渴望是失落感。

“But it can also work the other way around,” she answered. “Missing a person means they’re there.”

“不过换种方式也行得通，”她回答。“想念一个人意味着他们在那里。”

This brief exchange, someplace in the countryside in western Poland in the late sixties, an exchange between my mother and me, her small child, has always remained in my memory and given me a store of strength that has lasted me my whole life. For it elevated my existence beyond the ordinary materiality of the world, beyond chance, beyond cause and effect and the laws of probability. She placed my existence out of time, in the sweet vicinity of eternity. In my child’s mind, I understood then that there was more to me than I had ever imagined before. And that even if I were to say, “I’m lost,” then I’d still be starting out with the words “I am”—the most important and the strangest set of words in the world.

六十年代末，在波兰西部农村的某个地方，我母亲和我，也就是她的小孩，进行了一次短暂的交流，这种交流一直留在我的记忆中，给了我一生的力量。因为它使我的存在超越了一般的物质世界，超越了偶然，超越了因果和概率法则。她把我放在时间之外，放在永恒的甜蜜附近。在我孩子的脑海里，我明白了我有比我以前想象的更多的东西。即使我说“我迷路了”，我还是会从“我是”开始——这是世界上最重要、最奇怪的一组词。

And so a young woman who was never religious—my mother—gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s greatest tender narrator.

因此，一位从不信教的年轻女子——我的母亲——给了我一个曾经被称为灵魂的东西，从而为我提供了世界上最伟大、最温柔的叙述者。

2.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of these looms is enormous—thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully, for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world. In this sense, the world is made of words.

世界是我们每天在信息、讨论、电影、书籍、流言蜚语和小轶事的织布机上编织的织物。今天，这些织布机的范围是巨大的——感谢互联网，几乎每个人都可以参与这个过程，或承担责任或不，或带着爱意或满怀恨感，或好或坏。当故事改变了，世界也就改变了。从这个意义上说，世界是由文字构成的。

How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.

因此，我们如何看待这个世界——也许更重要的是——我们如何叙述这个世界，因此就有巨大的意义。一件事发生了，如果没人讲述，那这件事就停止存在并消亡。这不仅是历史学家都知道的事实，而且(也许是最重要的)是每一个政客和暴君都知道。谁能讲故事编故事，谁就有掌控权。

Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.

今天，我们的问题在于——似乎在于这样一个事实：我们不仅没有准备好讲述未来，甚至讲述具体的当下、讲述当今世界的超高速转变也没准备好。我们缺乏语言、缺乏视角、缺乏隐喻、缺乏神话和新的寓言。然而，我们确实经常看到有人试图利用陈旧过时的叙述，这些叙述无法将未来融入对未来的想象，毫无疑问这是基于这样的假设，即旧的某个什么总比新的什么也没有强，要不就试图以这种方式来应对我们自身视野的局限。总之，我们缺乏讲述世界故事的新方法。

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

我们生活在众声喧哗的第一人称叙述的现实中，我们从四面八方听到多音杂音。我说到第一人称，指的是那种狭隘地围绕着讲述者自我的故事，讲述者或多或少直接地写她自己，或通过她自己而写。我们已经确定，这种个性化的观点，这种来自自我的声音，是最自然的、最人性的、最诚实的，即使它放弃了更广阔的视野。照此理解，以第一人称叙述是编织一个绝对独特的模式，是唯一的；它有一种作为个体的自主，意识到你自己和你的命运。然而，这也意味着在自我和世界之间建立一种对立，这种对立有时会让人感到疏离。

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world. Western civilization is to a great extent founded and reliant upon that very discovery of the self, which makes up one of our most important measures of reality. Here man is the lead actor, and his judgment—although it is one among many—is always taken seriously. Stories woven in first person appear to be among the greatest discoveries of human civilization; they are read with reverence, bestowed full confidence. This type of story, when we see the world through the eyes of some self that is unlike any other, builds a special bond with the narrator, who asks his listener to put himself in his unique position.

我认为第一人称叙事是当代光谱上的一大特色，个体在其中扮演着世界主观中心的角色。西方文明在很大程度上是建立在自我发现的基础上的，而自我发现正是我们衡量现实最重要的标准之一。在这里，人是主角，他的判断——尽管是众多判断之一——总是被认真对待。以第一人称编织的故事似乎是人类文明最伟大的发现之一；人们怀着崇敬的心情，满怀信心地读着。这类故事，当我们通过某个不同于其他的自我的视角看世界时，与叙述者建立了一种特殊的联系，叙述者要求他的听众把自己放在他独特的位置上。

What first-person narratives have done for literature and in general for human civilization cannot be overestimated—they have completely reworked the story of the world, so that it is no longer a place for the operations of heroes and deities upon whom we can have no influence, but rather a place for people just like us, with individual histories. It is easy to identify with people who are just like us, which generates between the story’s narrator and its reader or listener a new variety of emotional understanding based on empathy. And this, by its very nature, brings together and eliminates borders; it is very easy to lose track in a novel of the borders between the narrator’s self and the reader’s self, and a so-called “absorbing novel” actually counts on that border being blurred—on the reader, through empathy, becoming the narrator for a while. Thus literature has become a field for the exchange of experiences, an agora where everyone can tell of their own fate, or give voice to their alter ego. It is therefore a democratic space—anyone may speak up, everyone can create a speaking voice for herself. Never in the history of humanity have so many people been writers and storytellers. We have only to look at the statistics to see that this is true.

第一人称叙事对文学，普遍来说对人类文明所做贡献怎么高估也不为过——它完全改写了世界的故事，所以，世界不再是英雄和神明（他们对我们没有影响）行动的地方，而是为我们这样的人（带着各自的历史）准备的。我们很容易认同和我们一样的人，这就在故事的叙述者和读者或听众之间产生了一种基于同理心的情感理解。而这，就其本质而言，汇集并消除了边界；在一部小说中，叙述者的自我和读者的自我之间的界限是很容易被忽略的，“引人入胜的小说”实际上依赖于模糊边界——读者通过移情作用，暂时成为叙述者。因此，文学变成了一个交流经验的场所，一个人人都能讲述自己命运或表达自己的地方。因此，这是一个民主的空间——任何人都可以畅所欲言，每个人都可以为自己发出声音。在人类历史上，从来没有这么多的人成为作家和讲故事的人。我们只要看看统计数据就知道这是真的。

Whenever I go to book fairs, I see how many of the books being published in the world today have to do with precisely this—the authorial self. The expression instinct may be just as strong as other instincts that protect our lives—and it is most fully manifested in art. We want to be noticed, we want to feel exceptional. Narratives of the “I’m going to tell you my story” variety, or “I’m going to tell you the story of my family,” or even simply, “I’m going to tell you where I’ve been,” comprise today’s most popular literary genre. This is a large-scale phenomenon also because nowadays we are universally able to access writing, and many people attain the ability, once reserved for the few, of expressing themselves in words and stories. Paradoxically, however, this situation is akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out. We know everything there is to know about them, we are able to identify with them and experience their lives as if they were our own. And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial “self” hardly guarantees universality. What we are missing—it would seem—is the dimension of the story that is the parable. For the hero of the parable is at once himself, a person living under specific historical and geographical conditions, yet at the same time he also goes well beyond those concrete particulars, becoming a kind of Everywhere Everyman. When a reader follows along with someone’s story written in a novel, he can identify with the fate of the character described and consider their situation as if it were his own, while in a parable, he must surrender completely his distinctness and become the Everyman. In this demanding psychological operation, the parable universalizes our experience, finding for very different fates a common denominator. That we have largely lost the parable from view is
a testament to our current helplessness.

每次我去书展，我都能看到当今世界上出版的书有多少与作者本人有关。表达本能或许和其他保护我们生命的本能——它在艺术中得到了最充分的体现——一样强烈。我们想要被关注，我们想要与众不同。“我要告诉你我的故事”，或“我要告诉你我的家庭故事”，甚至简单地说，“我要告诉你我去过哪里”，构成了当今最流行的文学体裁。这是一个大范围的现象，也因为现在我们普遍能够获得写作，许多人获得了用文字和故事表达自己的能力，而这种能力以前只有少数人拥有。然而矛盾的是，这种情况类似于由独唱者组成的唱诗班，每个声音都在争抢注意力，都走着相似的路线，淹没了彼此。我们知道关于他们的一切，我们能够认同他们，体验他们的生活，就好像他们是我们自己的一样。引人注目的是，读者的体验往往是不完整和令人失望的，因为事实证明，表达作者的“自我”很难保证具有普遍性。我们所缺失的——似乎是——故事的维度，也就是寓言。因为寓言的主人公是他自己，一个生活在特定历史和地理条件下的人，但同时他也远远超出了这些具体的细节，成为一种“无处不在的普通人”。当一个读者读到一个人写在小说里的故事时，他可以认同这个人物的命运，并把人物的处境当作自己的处境来考虑，而在一个寓言故事里，他必须完全放弃他的独特性，成为一个“普通人”。在这个要求很高的心理操作中，寓言概括了我们的经验，为迥然不同的命运找到了一个共同点。我们很大程度上在观点中失掉了寓言，证明我们目前的无助。

Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature’s leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players.

也许为了不被纷繁复杂的头衔和姓名所淹没，我们开始把文学这个庞然大物划分成不同的类别，我们把它当作各种不同类型的运动，把作家当作经过特殊训练的运动员。

The general commercialization of the literary market has led to a division into branches—now there are fairs and festivals of this or that type of literature, completely separate, creating a clientele of readers eager to hole up with a crime novel, some fantasy or science fiction. A notable characteristic of this situation is that what was only supposed to help booksellers and librarians organize on their shelves the massive quantity of published books, and readers to orient themselves in the vastness of the offering, became instead abstract categories not only into which existing works are placed, but also according to which writers themselves have started writing. Increasingly, genre work is like a kind of cake mold that produces very similar results, their predictability considered a virtue, their banality an achievement. The reader knows what to expect and gets exactly what he wanted.

文学市场的普遍商业化导致了文学作品的分门别类——现在有这种或那种文学的集市和节日，各不相关，这就形成了一群渴望阅读犯罪小说、幻想小说或科幻小说的读者。这种情况的一个显著特点是，要做的仅仅是帮助书商和图书馆员摆放书架上数量巨大的出版物，给读者在浩瀚的作品提供指引，不仅现有的作品被归入抽象类别中，而且好多作家也据此开始写作。越来越多的，体裁作品就像蛋糕模子，生产极度相似的产品，它们的可预见性被视为一种美德，它们的平庸被视为一种成就。读者知道会发生什么，并确切地得到了他想要的。

I have always intuitively opposed such orders, since they lead to the limiting of authorial freedom, to a reluctance toward the experimentation and transgression that is in fact the essential quality of creation in general. And they completely exclude from the creative process any of the eccentricity without which art would be lost. A good book does not need to champion its generic affiliation. The division into genres is the result of the commercialization of literature as a whole and an effect of treating it as a product for sale with the whole philosophy of branding and targeting and other, similar inventions of contemporary capitalism.

我一直本能地反对这样的命令，因为这会限制作者的自由，会使我不愿实验或越界，一般来说这实际是创造的本质。而且他们完全将创作过程中的特立独行全部排除在外，没有这些怪癖，艺术便迷失了。一本好书并不需要捍卫其类属关系。把文学划分为不同类型是文学整体商业化的结果，也是把文学作为产品来销售的结果（还用上了销售、推广、目标等全套哲学），这种分类是当代资本主义的类似产物。

Today we can have the great satisfaction of seeing the emergence of a wholly new way of telling the world’s story that is purveyed by the on-screen series, the hidden task of which is to induce in us a trance. Of course this mode of storytelling has long existed in the myths and Homeric tales, and Heracles, Achilles or Odysseus are without doubt the first heroes of series. But never before has this mode taken up so much space or exerted such a powerful influence on the collective imagination. The first two decades of the twenty-first century are the unquestionable property of the series. Their influence on the modes of telling the story of the world (and therefore on our way of understanding that story, too) is revolutionary.

今天我们心满意足地见证了一种世界性故事的新叙述方式的诞生，这种叙述方式正是由银幕上的系列片提供的，其中的隐藏任务便是引导我们进入一种忘我之境。当然，这种讲故事的方式早已存在于神话和荷马史诗中，毫无疑问，赫拉克勒斯、阿喀琉斯或奥德修斯是这系列故事中的第一批英雄。但在此之前，这种模式从未覆盖如此大的空间，也未对集体想象产生过如此强大的影响。二十一世纪的前二十年是这一系列故事不容质疑的财产。它们对于讲述世界故事的模式（以及对我们了解这些故事的方式）是革命性的。

In today’s version, the series has not only extended our participation in the narrative in the temporal sphere, generating its various tempos, offshoots and aspects, but also introduced its own new orders. Since in many cases its task is to hold the viewer’s attention for as long as possible—the series narrative multiplies the threads, interweaving them in the most improbable manner so much so that when at a loss it even harks back to the old narrative technique, once compromised by classical opera, of the Deus ex machina. The creation of new episodes often entails the total, ad-hoc overhaul of the psychology of the characters, so that they will be better suited to the developing events of the plot. A character who begins as gentle and reserved winds up vindictive and violent, a supporting character turns protagonist, while the main character, to whom we have already grown attached, loses significance or actually completely disappears, much to our dismay.

在今日版本中，系列故事不仅扩大了我们对时间领域叙事的参与，产生了多样化的节奏、分支和角度，而且还引入了自己的新秩序。因为在很多情况下，系列故事的任务是尽可能长时间地吸引观众的注意力——系列故事增加了叙事线索，并以一种不可思议的方式交织在一起，以至于陷入迷局的时候，它甚至回到了古老的叙事技巧上，这种技巧曾在经典歌剧中被妥协采用，也就是所谓的“天降神兵”（Deus ex machina）【注：在古希腊戏剧，当剧情陷入胶着，困境难以解决时，突然出现拥有强大力量的神将难题解决，令故事得以收拾、有个好结局。扮演神的演员会利用起重机从舞台上方降下，或是起升机从舞台地板的活门抬上。这种表演手法是人为的，制造出意料之外的剧情大逆转】。新剧集的创作往往需要对人物的心理状态进行特别的全面修改，以便他们能更好地适应剧情中的事件发展。一个刚开始温和而保守的角色最后变得充满暴力和仇恨，配角摇身一变为主角；而我们原本渐生好感的主角，失去了意义或者实际上完全消失了，真是让人万分沮丧。

The potential materialization of another season creates the necessity of open endings in which there is no way that mysterious things called catharsis can occur or resound fully—catharsis, formerly the experience of the internal transformation, the fulfillment and satisfaction of having participated in the action of the tale. Such complication, rather than conclusion—the constant postponement of the reward that is catharsis—renders the viewer dependent, hypnotizes her. The fabula interrupta, created long ago, and well known from the stories of Scheherazade, has now made its bold return in series, altering our subjectivity and having bizarre psychological effects, tearing us out of our own lives and hypnotizing us like a stimulant. At the same time, the series inscribes itself into the new, drawn-out and disordered rhythm of the world, into its chaotic communication, its instability and fluidity. This story-telling form is probably the one most creatively searching for a new formula today.In that sense, there is serious work in the series on the narratives of the future, on reformatting the story so that it suits our new reality.

新一季的可能实施将开放式结局变得尤为必要，在这种开放结局中，所谓神秘的情感净化（catharsis）毫无发生或充分回应的可能——情感净化，以前是内部心理转变的经验，参与到故事行动中的充实感与满足感。这种情感实现，而不是结论——情感宣泄的持续性延迟——使观众产生依赖，催眠了她。成名于一千零一夜的契约中断型故事在很久以前就被发明了，如今在系列故事中大大胆回归，改变了我们的主观性，施以奇异的心理影响，它将我们从自己的生活中撕裂出来，像兴奋剂一样催眠着我们。同时，这种系列故事将自己投入到新的、旷日持久且无序的世界节奏中，投入到它混乱的交流、不稳定性和流动性中。这种讲故事的方式或许是当今最具创造性的寻找新公式的方式。从这个意义上说，系列故事中包含着关于未来叙事的严肃探讨，包含着重新编排故事以其适应我们新现实的努力。

But above all, we live in a world of too many contradictory, mutually exclusive facts, all battling one another tooth and nail.

但最重要的是，我们生活在一个充满了太多矛盾、事实相互排斥的世界里，一切事物都咬牙切齿地争锋相对。

Our ancestors believed that access to knowledge would not only bring people happiness, well-being, health and wealth, but would also create an equal and just society. What was missing in the world, to their minds, was the ubiquitous wisdom that would naturally arise from information.

我们的祖先相信，获得知识不仅会给人们带来幸福、福祉、健康和财富，而且还会创造一个平等和公正的社会。在他们看来，这个世界缺少的是来自知识的普遍智慧。

John Amos Comenius, the great seventeenth-century pedagogue, coined the term “pansophism,” by which he meant the idea of potential omniscience, universal knowledge that would contain within it all possible cognition. This was also, and above all, a dream of information available to everyone. Would not access to facts about the world transform an illiterate peasant into a reflective individual conscious of himself and the world? Will not knowledge within easy reach mean that people will become sensible, that they will direct the progress of their lives with equanimity and wisdom?

约翰·阿摩司·康米纽斯（John Amos Comenius）是十七世纪一位伟大的教育家，他创造了“pansophism”一词，以之表示可能达到的全知理念和普遍知识，这种知识包含了所有可能获得的认识。最重要的是，这也是一种所有人都能获得知识的梦想。如果不是接触到关于世界的事实，一个目不识丁的农民怎么会转变成一个对世界和自身具有反思的个体呢？唾手可得的知识是否意味着人们将会变得明智，将会沉着而智慧地指导他们自己的生活呢？

When the Internet first came about, it seemed that this notion would finally be realized in a total way. Wikipedia, which I admire and support, might have seemed to Comenius, like many like-minded philosophers, the fulfillment of the dream of humanity—now we can create and receive an enormous store of facts being ceaselessly supplemented and updated that is democratically accessible to just about every place on Earth.

当互联网刚出现时，这样的理念似乎将最终被完全实现。也许，像许多志同道合的思想家们一样，我赞赏和支持的维基百科，对康米纽斯来说亦是人类梦想的实现——如今，我们能够创造和接收大量事实，它们民主地到达地球上的几乎每个地方，并不断被补充和更新。

A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing.

梦想成真往往令人失望。事实证明，我们没有能力承受如此巨大的信息，这种信息不是团结，归纳和释放，而是分化，分裂，被包围在单个小气泡中，创造出许多彼此不相容甚至公开敌对，互相对立的故事。

Furthermore, the Internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behavior of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair. Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat. The famous Shakespeare quote has never been a better fit than it is for this cacophonous new reality: more and more often, the Internet is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

此外，互联网彻底且毫无反思性地服从于市场流程，并为垄断者们所掌握。互联网控制着大量的数据，这些数据并不是为了扩大信息访问范围而被用于广泛求知，相反，它主要是用来对用户的行为进行编程，正如我们在“Cambridge Analytica”事件之后所认识到的。我们没有听到世界和谐的声音，而是听到了刺耳的声音，这是一种难以忍受的静电，我们在绝望中尝试着捕捉一些安静的旋律，甚至是最微弱的节奏。这句著名的莎士比亚名言比以往任何时候都更符合于现在这刺耳的现实：互联网越来越像痴人说梦，充满了喧哗与骚动。

Research by political scientists unfortunately also contradicts John Amos Comenius’ intuitions, which were based on the conviction that the more universally available was information about the world, the more politicians would avail themselves of reason and make considered decisions. But it would appear that the matter is not at all so simple as that. Information can be overwhelming, and its complexity and ambiguity give rise to all sorts of defense mechanisms—from denial to repression, even to escape into the simple principles of simplifying, ideological, party-line thinking.

不幸的是，政治学家的研究也与约翰·阿摩司·康米纽斯的直觉相矛盾，他的直觉是基于这样的信念，即关于世界的信息越普及，则政治家越能发挥理性并做出经过深思熟虑的决定。但是，事情似乎根本不是那么简单。信息可能是压倒性的，其复杂性和模糊性导致了各种各样的防御机制——从拒绝到压制，甚至逃脱到简单化的、意识形态的和党派思维的简单原则中。

The category of fake news raises new questions about what fiction is. Readers who have been repeatedly deceived, misinformed or misled have begun to slowly acquire a specific neurotic idiosyncrasy. The reaction to such exhaustion with fiction could be the enormous success of non-fiction, which in this great informational chaos screams over our heads: “I will tell you the truth, nothing but the truth,” and “My story is based on facts!”

其中，虚假消息引出了关于虚构是什么的新问题。反复被欺骗，误传或误导的读者已开始慢慢获得特定的神经质特质。对虚构感到疲惫的反应可能是非虚构的巨大成功，在这种巨大的信息混乱中，我们的头顶充满了尖叫：“我会告诉你真相，只有真相”，以及“我的故事基于真实事件！”

Fiction has lost the readers’ trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool. I am often asked this incredulous question: “Is this thing you wrote really true?” And every time I feel this question bodes the end of literature.

自从撒谎已经成为一种危险的大规模毁灭性武器以来，虚构就失去了读者的信任，即使它仍然是一种原始工具。我经常被问到这个难以置信的问题：“你写的这句话是真的吗？”而每当此时，我都感到这个问题预示着文学的终结。

This question, innocent from the reader’s point of view, sounds to the writer’s ear truly apocalyptic. What am I supposed to say? How am I to explain the ontological status of Hans Castorp, Anna Karenina or Winnie the Pooh?

从读者的角度来看，这个问题是无害的，但在作者的耳中，它听起来却是世界末日。我该怎么说？我该如何解释汉斯·卡斯托普、安娜·卡列尼娜或小熊维尼的本体论地位？

I consider this type of readerly curiosity a regression of civilization. It is a major impairment of our multidimensional ability (concrete, historical, but also symbolic, mythic) to participate in the chain of events called our lives. Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully. I believe that myth performs the function of that structure. Everyone knows that myths never really happened but are always going on. Now they go on not only through the adventures of ancient heroes, but rather also make their way into the ubiquitous and most popular stories of contemporary film, games and literature. The lives of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus have been transferred to Dynasty, and the heroic acts of the heroes are attended to by Lara Croft.

我认为读者的这种好奇心是文明的退化，它损害了我们的多维能力（具体的，历史的，也是象征的，神话的），我们以之参与到那称为生活的一系列事件中。生命是由事件创造的，但是只有当我们能够解释它们，尝试理解它们并给它们增添意义，才意味着它们已转化为经验。事件是事实，但经验却有着千丝万缕的区别。是经验，而非事件，构成了我们的生活素材。经验是已经被解释并存在于记忆中的事实。它也指我们脑海中的某种基础，指含义的深层结构，在此之上，我们可以展开自己的生活，并对其进行充分而仔细的检查。我认为神话履行了这种结构的功能。每个人都知道神话从未真正发生过，但一直在发生。现在，它们不仅继续在古代英雄的冒险中发生，而且也进入了当代电影，游戏和文学中，成为了无处不在且最受欢迎的故事。奥林匹斯山居民的生活已转移至《王朝》（Dynasty）【注：一部美剧】，而英雄的英勇事迹则得到了劳拉·克罗夫特（Lara Croft）【注：著名动作冒险类电子游戏《古墓丽影（Tomb Raider）》系列以及相关电影、漫画、小说的女主角】的支持。

In this ardent division into truth and falsehood, the tales of our experience that literature creates have their own dimension.

在对真理与谎言的坚定划分中，文学创造了我们的经验，这些经验所形成的故事具有其自身的维度。

I have never been particularly excited about any straight distinction between fiction and non-fiction, unless we understand such a distinction to be declarative and discretionary. In a sea of many definitions of fiction, the one I like the best is also the oldest, and it comes from Aristotle. Fiction is always a kind of truth.

我从未对任何关于虚构和非虚构的明确区分感到特别激动，或许我们没能意识到这种区分是宣判性和自我解释的。在虚构定义的海洋中，我最喜欢的一种也是最古老的一种，它来自亚里斯多德。虚构总是某种真理。

I am also convinced by the distinction between true story and plot made by the writer and essayist E.M. Forster. He said that when we say, “The king died and then the queen died,” it’s a story. But when we say, “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” that is a plot. Every fictionalization involves a transition from the question “What happened next?” to an attempt at understanding it based on our human experience: “Why did it happen that way?”

作家、散文家E.M.福斯特（E.M.Forster）对真实故事和情节的区分也使我信服。他说，当我们说“国王死了，不久王后也死了”时，这是一个故事。但是当我们说“国王死了，不久王后因伤心而死”时，那就是情节。每种虚构都涉及这样的过渡：从“接下来发生了什么？”的疑问到尝试根据我们的人类经验来理解它：“为什么会这样发生？”

Literature begins with that “why,” even if we were to answer that question over and over with an ordinary “I don’t know.”

文学以“为什么”开始，即使我们要用普通的“我不知道”来一遍又一遍地回答这个问题。

Thus literature poses questions that cannot be answered with the help of Wikipedia, since it goes beyond just information and events, referring directly to our experience.

因此，文学提出了无法借助维基百科回答的问题，因为它不仅限于信息和事件，还直接涉及我们的经验。

But it is possible that the novel and literature in general are becoming before our very eyes something actually quite marginal in comparison with other forms of narration. That the weight of the image and of new forms of directly transmitting experience—film, photography, virtual reality—will constitute a viable alternative to traditional reading. Reading is quite a complicated psychological and perceptual process. To put it simply: first the most elusive content is conceptualized and verbalized, transforming into signs and symbols, and then it is “decoded” back from language into experience. That requires a certain intellectual competence. And above all it demands attention and focus, abilities ever rarer in today’s extremely distracting world.

但是，与其他形式的叙事相比，小说和文学可能总体上在我们眼前确实已经变得有些边缘化了。图像以及直接传递体验的新形式（电影，摄影，虚拟现实）的影响力意味着它们可以替代传统阅读形式。阅读是一个非常复杂的心理和知觉过程。简而言之：首先将最难以捉摸的内容概念化和口头化，转变为符号和象征，然后将其从语言“解码”回为体验。那需要一定的智力。最重要的是，它需要集中精力和注意力，而在当今这个极度分散注意力的世界中，这种能力变得越来越罕见。

Humanity has come a long way in its ways of communicating and sharing personal experience, from orality, relying on the living word and human memory, through the Gutenberg Revolution, when stories began to be widely mediated by writing and in this way fixed and codified as well as possible to reproduce without alteration. The major attainment of this change was that we came to identify thinking with language, with writing. Today we are facing a revolution on a similar scale, when experience can be transmitted directly, without recourse to the printed word.

从口头表达、依靠鲜活的文字和人类记忆到古登堡（Gutenberg）革命，人类在交流和分享自己的经验交流和分享自己的经验方面已经有悠久的历史，当时故事开始通过写作广泛传播，并以此方式固定和编纂，尽可能地复制而无需更改。这一变化的主要成就是，我们开始用语言和写作来辨别思维。今天，我们正面对同样重大的革命，无需依靠印刷文字就可以直接传播经验。

There is no longer any need to keep a travel diary when you can simply take pictures and send those pictures via social networking sites straight into the world, at once and to all. There is no need to write letters, since it is easier to call. Why write fat novels, when you can just get into a television series instead? Instead of going out on the town with friends, it would be better to play a game. Reach for an autobiography? There’s no point, since I am following the lives of celebrities on Instagram and know everything about them.

当你只需拍照并立即通过社交网站直接将照片发送到世界上时，便不再有任何写旅行日记的需要。不需要写字，因为打电话更方便。当你可以直接进入电视连续剧时，为什么还要写厚厚的小说？与其和朋友一起出去玩，不如去玩游戏。写一部自传？没有意义，因为我在Instagram上关注着名人们的生活而且可以了解他们的一切。

It is not even the image that is the greatest opponent of text today, as we thought back in the twentieth century, worrying about the influence of television and film. It is instead a completely different dimension of the world—acting directly on our senses.

正如我们在二十世纪回想着电视和电影的影响一样，今天，图像甚至不是文字最大的对手。这是一种体验世界的完全不同的维度——直接作用于我们的感官。

3.

I don’t want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I’m often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy. These days the worrying words “someone, “something,” “somewhere,” “some time” can seem riskier than very specific, definite ideas uttered with complete certainty―such as that “the earth is flat,” “vaccinations kill,” “climate change is nonsense,” or “democracy is not under threat anywhere in the world.” “Somewhere” some people are drowning as they try to cross the sea. “Somewhere,” for “some” time, “some sort of” a war has been going on. In the deluge of information individual messages lose their contours, dissipate in our memory, become unreal and vanish.

我不想就讲述关于世界的故事遇到的危机描绘出一幅全景图。但我时常被一种世界有所空洞的感觉困扰。当透过玻璃屏幕与APP感受这一切时，这世界不知怎得变得虚幻、遥远、两极、奇怪得不可描述，即使在这里想找到任何一段信息都令人惊奇地容易。在这个时代，这些令人担忧的词，“有些人”，“有些事”，“有些地方”，“有些时候”，变得比那些极为具体，确切，用十足的肯定说出的话——诸如“地球是平的”，“接种会致死”，“气候变化是胡扯”，“民主在地球的任何一处都没有受到威胁”，显得更危险。“有些地方”有些人在试图越过海洋时溺水身亡。“有些地方”，在“有些”时候，战争正在“某种程度”地发生。在信息的洪流中，个体的声音纷纷失去了轮廓，很快在我们的记忆中被瓦解，变得不真实，然后消失。

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions.

愚蠢，残忍，憎恨言论，暴力影像的潮流被各种各样的“好消息”抵消了，但我无法用言语表达它未能掩盖的痛苦，察觉到这世界有地方不对头的痛苦。如今这曾仅为神经质诗人独占的感觉，像是一种无法被定义的瘟疫，焦虑从四面八方渗出。

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

文学是极少数可能让我们贴近世界确凿事实的领域之一，由于它的本质涵盖了心灵的哲学，也因为它始终关注人物内在的合理性与动机，揭示出他们难以用其他方式向他人展开的体验。唯有文学能够让我们深入其他存在的生命，理解他们的逻辑，分享他们的感情，体验他们的命运。

A story always turns circles around meaning. Even if it doesn’t express it directly, even when it deliberately refuses to seek meaning, and focuses on form, on experiment, when it stages a formal rebellion, looking for new means of expression. As we read even the most behavioristically, sparingly written story, we cannot help asking the questions: “Why is this happening?,” “What does it mean?,” “What is the point?,” “Where is this leading?” Quite possibly our minds have evolved toward the story as a process of giving meaning to millions of stimuli that surround us, and that even when we’re asleep keep on relentlessly devising their narratives. So the story is a way of organizing an infinite amount of information within time, establishing its relationship to the past, the present and the future, revealing its recurrence, and arranging it in categories of cause and effect. Both the mind and the emotions take part in this effort.

故事永远在意义周围游荡。即使它并不直接地将道理表达出来，甚至有时它形成，故意拒绝寻求意义而专注于形式或实验来寻求新的表达方式。当我们阅读哪怕是最行为主义，我们也情不自禁地会问：“为什么发生了这样的事？”，“这有什么含义？”，“它想说明什么”，“它要将我们引向何处？”我们的思维很有可能在不断地给予百万个围绕着我们的刺激解释时，以一种故事的方式进化了，以至于我们入睡时，仍在无休止地修改它们的叙述。因此，故事是一种在时间中编织起无限量信息，打开它们向过去，现在，未来的通路，把握住它们的每一次再现，并将它们安放在因果类别中的一种方式。理智与情感都参与其中。

No wonder one of the earliest discoveries made by stories was Fate, which apart from always appearing to people as something terrifying and inhuman, did in fact introduce order and immutability into everyday reality.

这也难怪，故事最早的发现之一是除了总是以恐怖与非人化的面目出现在人类面前，却也在每日的现实中引入了秩序与永恒的“命运”。

4.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

女士们，先生们，

A few years later, the woman in the photograph, my mother, who missed me although I hadn’t yet been born, was reading me fairy tales.

几十年以前，那个照片上的女人，也就是在我出生前就想念着我的母亲，在给我读童话故事。

In one of them, by Hans Christian Andersen, a teapot that had been thrown on the trash heap complained about how cruelly it had been treated by people―as soon as its handle broke off, they had disposed of it. But if they weren’t such demanding perfectionists it could still have been of use to them. Other broken objects picked up his tune, and told truly epic stories of their modest little lives as objects.

其中的一个由安徒生（Hans Christian Andersen）写的，讲述了一个被扔到垃圾堆的茶壶抱怨它如何被人们残忍对待——一等它的把手破了，它立刻就被抛弃了。如果他们不是那样的要求完美，它本还可以继续为它们所用。而其它破损的东西则接着它的话，讲起了自己默默无闻的一生中真正史诗般的故事。

As a child, I listened to these fairy tales with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes, because I believed deeply that objects have their own problems and emotions, as well as a sort of social life, entirely comparable to our human one. The plates in the dresser could talk to each other, and the spoons, knives and forks in the drawer formed a sort of a family. Similarly, animals were mysterious, wise, self-aware creatures with whom we had always been connected by a spiritual bond and a deep-seated similarity. But rivers, forests and roads had their existence too―they were living beings that mapped our space and built a sense of belonging, an enigmatic Raumgeist. The landscape surrounding us was alive too, and so were the Sun and the Moon, and all the celestial bodies―the entire visible and invisible world.

孩子时，我听到这些故事时总是哭地涨红了脸，因为我深信那些器具就过着与人差不多的社交生活，有着它们自己的问题与情感。碗橱里的盘子互相说着话，柜子里的刀叉勺子则组成它们自己的家庭。差不多地，动物们则是神秘、智慧，有着自我意识，靠灵魂的纽带与我们连接，与我们深度相似的造物。而河流、森林、道路同样拥有它们自己的存在——它们是丈量了我们的空间，创造了归属感的生灵，是神秘的“Raumgeist”【注：德语合成词，是“raum”和“geist”的拼合，前者是空间之意，后者有鬼魂、灵魂、精神之意】。环绕着我们的风景也是活着的，正如太阳与月亮，所有的星辰，可见或未知的世界。

When did I start to have doubts? I’m trying to find the moment in my life when at the flick of a switch everything became different, less nuanced, simpler. The world’s whisper fell silent, to be replaced by the din of the city, the murmur of computers, the thunder of airplanes flying past overhead, and the exhausting white noise of oceans of information.

我是什么时候开始有了疑惑？我试着追溯那个随着那声开关打开，一切变得不同，简化，不再微妙的时刻。世界的低语消逝了，被城市的喧闹，电脑的嗡鸣，飞机飞过天空的震声，与信息汪洋令人疲竭的白噪音取而代之了。

At some point in our lives we start to see the world in pieces, everything separately, in little bits that are galaxies apart from one another, and the reality in which we live keeps affirming it: doctors treat us by specialty, taxes have no connection with snow-plowing the road we drive to work along, our lunch has nothing to do with an enormous stock farm, or my new top with a shabby factory somewhere in Asia. Everything is separate from everything else, everything lives apart, without any connection.

从某刻起，我们开始片段地看待世界，通过星系之间般遥远的一小点一小点理解彼此分离的一切：医生按我们的特殊情况分别诊治，税务与为我们开车去上班的那条路铲雪也并不相干，我们的午餐和大型牧场丝毫无涉，我的新上衣和亚洲某座破旧的工厂又有什么牵扯呢。所有事与其他所有事分割开来，都单独存在，互相没有任何联系。

To make it easier for us to cope with this we are given numbers, name tags, cards, crude plastic identities that try to reduce us to using one small part of the whole that we have already ceased to perceive.

为了使我们更轻松地处理此问题，我们提供了数字，名称标签，卡片，粗糙的塑料标识，这些标识试图使我们减少使用已经停止感知的，整体中的一小部分。

The world is dying, and we are failing to notice. We fail to see that the world is becoming a collection of things and incidents, a lifeless expanse in which we move around lost and lonely, tossed here and there by somebody else’s decisions, constrained by an incomprehensible fate, a sense of being the plaything of the major forces of history or chance. Our spirituality is either vanishing or becoming superficial and ritualistic. Or else we are just becoming the followers of simple forces―physical, social, and economic―that move us around as if we were zombies. And in such a world we really are zombies.

世界快死了，我们没有注意到。我们看不到世界正在变成事物和事件的集合，这是无生命的广阔空间，我们在茫茫而孤独的地方走来走去，在别人的决定下四处摇摆，受到无法理解的命运的束缚，一种被历史或机遇的重大力量当作玩物的感觉。我们的灵性正在消失或变得肤浅和仪式化。否则，我们只是成为简单力量——物理，社会和经济——的追随者，这些力量使我们像僵尸一样走动。在这样的世界里，我们真的是僵尸。

This is why I long for that other world, the world of the teapot.

这就是为什么我渴望另一个世界，茶壶的世界。

5.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors that I followed in Flights. I’m fascinated by associating facts, and by searching for order. At base―as I am convinced―the writer’s mind is a synthetic mind that doggedly gathers up all the tiny pieces in an attempt to stick them together again to create a universal whole.

在我的一生中，我一直痴迷于那些相互联结的结构，着迷于我们所忽视的却又偶然发现的互文，以意外的巧合或命运的交汇，螺母、螺栓、焊接接头、连接器——所有那些我在《云游》中所关注的。我迷恋着联想事实和寻求秩序。从本质上说，我相信作家的头脑应是整合的头脑，它顽强地把所有微小的碎片收集起来，试图把它们再次粘合在一起，创造出一个完整的宇宙。

How are we to write, how are we to structure our story to make it capable of raising this great, constellation form of the world?

我们该如何写作？我们该如何构建我们的故事，才能使其撑起世界这伟大的星丛一般的形式？

Naturally, I realize that it is impossible to return to the sort of story about the world that we know from myths, fables and legends, which, communicated orally, kept the world in existence. Nowadays the story would have to be far more multidimensional and complicated; after all, we really do know much more, we’re aware of the incredible connections between things that seem to be far apart.

当然，我意识到我们不可能再像过去一样通过阅读神话故事、寓言和传说了解世界——世界通过这些口口相传的故事得以存在。如今的故事必须得更加多维和复杂；毕竟，我们的确了解得更多，我们也意识到看似天差地别的事物之间有着令人难以置信的联系。

Let us take a close look at a particular moment in the history of the world.

让我们仔细看看历史上的一个特殊时刻。

It is August 3, 1492, the day on which a small caravel named Santa Maria is to set sail from a quay at the port of Palos in Spain. The ship is commanded by Christopher Columbus. The sun is shining, there are sailors going to and fro on the quay, and there are stevedores loading the last crates of provisions on board. It is hot, but a light breeze from the west saves the families who have come to say farewell from fainting. Seagulls strut grandly up and down the loading ramp, closely observing the human activities.

1492年8月3日，这一天一艘名为圣玛利亚（Santa Maria）的小型帆船正要从西班牙帕洛斯港口的一个码头起航。这艘船的指挥者是克里斯托弗·哥伦布。阳光明媚，码头上的水手来来往往，装卸工正在装载最后几箱运往船上的补给品。天气很热，但西边吹来的一阵微风解救了前来告别的家庭成员，好使他们没有晒晕过去。海鸥趾高气扬地在装货坡道上上下下迈着步伐，仔细地观察着人类的活动。

The moment that we can now see across time led to the death of 56 million of the almost 60 million native Americans. At the time, they represented about 10 percent of the world’s entire population. The Europeans unwittingly brought them some lethal gifts―diseases and bacteria to which the indigenous inhabitants of America had no resistance. On top of that came ruthless oppression and killing. The extermination continued for years, and changed the nature of the land. Where beans, corn, potatoes and tomatoes had once grown in cultivated fields that were irrigated in a sophisticated way, wild vegetation returned. In just a few years, almost 150 million acres of arable land changed into jungle.

我们穿越历史看到的这个瞬间，导致了近6000万美洲原住民中5600万人的死亡。在当时，美洲原住民约占世界总人口数的10%，欧洲人无意间给他们带去了致命礼物——疾病与细菌，而美洲原著居民对此毫无免疫力。在疾病之后，是残酷的压迫和杀戮。灭绝持续了数年，改变了这篇土地的样貌。在以往用复杂灌溉方式养殖豆子、玉米、土豆和西红柿的这片耕地上，野生植被卷土重来。仅仅几年时间，将近1.5英亩的可耕地变为了丛林。

As it regenerated, the vegetation consumed vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thus weakening the greenhouse effect, and that in turn lowered the global temperature of the Earth.

随着植被再生，野生植物消耗了大量二氧化碳，从而削弱了温室效应，也进一步降低了地球的全球温度。

This is one of many scientific hypotheses to explain the onset of the minor ice age that in the late sixteenth century brought a long-term cooling of the climate in Europe.

这是用来解释16世纪末期小冰期到来的众多科学假说之一，这个小冰期给欧洲气候带来了一段长期降温。

The minor ice age changed the economy of Europe. Over the decades that followed, the long, frozen winters, cool summers and intense precipitation reduced the yield of traditional forms of farming. In Western Europe, small family farms producing food for their own needs proved inefficient. Waves of famine ensued, and the need to specialize production. England and Holland were worst affected by the colder climate; as their economies could no longer rely on farming, they began to develop trade and industry. The threat of storms prompted the Dutch to dry out the polders and to convert marshy areas and shallow marine zones into land. The southward shift of the range where cod occur, though catastrophic for Scandinavia, proved advantageous for England and Holland―it allowed these countries to start developing into naval and commercial powers. The significant cooling was particularly acutely felt in the Scandinavian countries. Contact with Greenland and Iceland broke off, the severe winters reduced the harvests, and years of famine and shortages set in. So Sweden turned its greedy gaze southward, embarking on war against Poland (especially as the Baltic Sea had frozen, making it easy to march an army across it) and getting involved in the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.

小冰期改变了欧洲的经济。在接下来的几十年里，漫长而寒冷的冬季、凉爽夏季与强降雨减少了传统农业的产量。在西欧，自给自足的小型农场家庭在这种情况下效率底下。饥荒接踵而至，专业化生产的需求浪潮也席卷而来。英格兰和荷兰是受寒冷气候冲击最大的国家；由于经济不能再依靠农业，他们开始发展贸易和工业。暴风雨的威胁促使荷兰人抽干了他们的围垦地，将沼泽地和浅海地带变为陆地。鳕鱼的活动范围朝南移动，尽管这对斯堪的纳维亚半岛来说是灾难性的，对英格兰和荷兰来说却十分有利——这使得两国开始发展为海洋和贸易强国。气温急剧下降在斯堪的纳维亚半岛表现尤为明显。半岛与格陵兰岛和冰岛的连接中断，严峻的冬季削减了收成，接下来是数年的饥荒与食物短缺。在这种情况下，瑞典将贪婪的目光转向南方，开启了对波兰的战争（尤其是在波罗的海已经结冰的情况下，军队越海变得十分容易），也接连卷入了欧洲三十年战争。

The efforts of scientists, trying to establish a better understanding of our reality, show it to be a mutually coherent, densely connected system of influences. This is no longer just the famous “butterfly effect,” which as we know involves the way that minimal changes at the start of a process can lead in the future to tremendous, unpredictable results, but here we have an infinite number of butterflies and their wings, in constant motion―
a powerful wave of life that travels through time.

科学家为了更好理解我们的现实所做出的这些努力表明，现实是一个相互连贯、密切相关的影响系统。这不再仅仅是著名的“蝴蝶效应”，也就是我们熟知的在过程开始前，一个微小变化将导致未来巨大的、不可预知效果的效应。但是在这里，我们面对的是无数的、正在持续运动中的蝴蝶和翅膀——形成一种穿越时间的强大生命波。

In my view, the discovery of “the butterfly effect” marks the end of the era of unswerving faith in our own capacity to be effective, our ability to control, and by the same token our sense of supremacy in the world. This does not take away from mankind our power to be a builder, a conqueror and an inventor, yet it illustrates that reality is more complicated than mankind might ever have supposed. And that we are nothing but a tiny part of these processes.

在我看来，“蝴蝶效应”的发现标志着一个时代的结束，在这个时代中我们对自身的有效能力、控制能力以及自身在世界上的至高无上感抱有坚定的信念。这种时代的结束并没有剥夺人类成为建造者、征服者和发明家的能力，但它表明，现实可能比人类想象的要复杂得多。并且，我们人类只是这些过程中的一小部分。

We have more and more proof of the existence of some spectacular, sometimes highly surprising dependencies on a worldwide scale.

越来越多的证据表明，在全球范围内存在一些惊人的、有时令人惊讶的依赖关系。

We are all―people, plants, animals, and objects―immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities. Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.

我们全都——人、植物、动物和物体——浸入了一个由物理定律支配的单一空间。这个空间有它的形状，在此之中，它的物理定律塑造出无数的形式，而这些形式不间断地相互关联着。我们的心血管系统就像江河的流域系统，一片树叶的结构就像人类的运输体系，星系的运动就像水槽放水时回旋的漩涡，社会群落的发展跟细菌群落的扩张方式也是类似的。宏观与微观的尺度下显示出无穷的系统相似性。我们的言语、思维和创造力不是抽象的脱离世界的东西，而是在这个世界无休止转变过程中的另一个层次的延续。

6.

I keep wondering if these days it’s possible to find the foundations of a new story that’s universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable.

我一直在想，如今是否有可能找到一个新型故事的基础，这个新型故事是普遍的、全面的、包容的，根植于自然，充满情境，同时又是可理解的。

Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self, revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections? That would be able to keep its distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal center point of commonly shared opinions, and manage to look at things ex-centrically, away from the center?

有没有一个故事可以超越一个人沉默寡言的自我监狱，去揭示更广阔的现实世界，展示彼此之间的联系？有没有这样的故事能够远离那些被广泛接受的、显而易见的、毫无创见的观点的中心，并设法从远离中心以外的角度看待问题？

I am pleased that literature has miraculously preserved its right to all sorts of eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy. I dream of high viewing points and wide perspectives, where the context goes far beyond what we might have expected. I dream of a language that is capable of expressing the vaguest intuition, I dream of a metaphor that surpasses cultural differences, and finally of a genre that is capacious and transgressive, but that at the same time the readers will love.

I also dream of a new kind of narrator―a “fourth-person” one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time. Oh yes, I think this narrator’s existence is possible.

我也梦想着有一种新的叙述者——一个“第四人称”的叙述者，他自然不会只是语法结构的搭建者，而是能够成功囊括每个角色的视角，并且有能力跨越每个角色的视野，看得更多，视野更广，忘却时间概念。我认为这样的叙述者是可能存在的。

Have you ever wondered who the marvelous storyteller is in the Bible who calls out in a loud voice: “In the beginning was the word”? Who is the narrator who describes the creation of the world, its first day, when chaos was separated from order, who follows the serial about the origin of the universe, who knows the thoughts of God, is aware of his doubts, and with a steady hand sets down on paper the incredible sentence: “And God saw that it was good”? Who is this, who knows what God thought?

你有没有想过，在圣经中，谁是讲故事的人？是谁大声呼喊：“太初有道”？谁是那个叙述者？那个描述了世界的创造的人：第一天，当混乱从秩序中被分离出来。那个追随宇宙起源发展的人，那个明白上帝思想，知道上帝怀疑，并坚定地记录下这惊人的语句的人：“上帝承认这是好事”。那个人是谁呢？谁又知道上帝在想什么呢？

Leaving aside all theological doubts, we can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. Seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture “here” is connected to a gesture “there,” that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between “mine” and “yours” starts to be debatable.

抛开所有神学疑问，我们可以认为这个神秘、温柔的叙述者形象是不可思议并意义重大的。他形成一个立点，提供了一个可以看到任何事物的角度。这种众览万物的角度意味着认可一个最终事实，那就是所有存在的事物都将相互连接为一个整体，即使它们之间的联系还是未知的。众览万物也预示着一种要对世界承担的完全不同的责任，因为自然而然，每一个“这里”的姿态都与“那里”的姿态有关，时间上一个地方做出的决定将对另一个地方产生影响，这种“我的”和“你的”之间的区分开始变得有争议。

So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader’s mind, that sets off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet.

因此，最好的办法就是诚实地讲述故事，用这种方式激发读者脑海中形成整体感，促使读者形成将片段整合成整体的能力，以及从事件的微小粒子中推导整个星丛的能力。要讲述这样的一个故事，去清楚表明每个人与每件事都沉浸在一个共同概念中，而在星球的每一次转动中，我们都在脑海中细心刻画着这个共同概念。

Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of “national literatures,” knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation.

文学有能力做到这一点。我们应该摒弃被过分简单化的文学分类，比如高雅文学和低俗文学，流行文学和小众文学，我们应该温和地把它们分为不同类型（genres）。我们应该放弃“国家文学”(national literatures)的定义，因为我们知道文学世界是一个单一存在，就像“一元宇宙”（Unus mundus）的概念，是人类经验统一起来的一个共同心理现实（psychological reality）。作者和读者扮演着同等的角色，前者通过创造，后者通过不断诠释。

Perhaps we should trust fragments, as it is fragments that create constellations capable of describing more, and in a more complex way, multi-dimensionally. Our stories could refer to one another in an infinite way, and their central characters could enter into relationships with each other.

或许我们应该相信碎片，因为是碎片创造了星丛，这些星丛能够以更多维复杂的方式描述更多的事物。我们的故事能够以无限的方式互相参照，而其中的核心角色可以跨入彼此的故事建立联系。

I think we have a redefinition ahead of us of what we understand nowadays by the concept of realism, and a search for a new one that would allow us to go beyond the limits of our ego and penetrate the glass screen through which we see the world. Because these days the need for reality is served by the media, social networking sites, and indirect relationships on the internet. Perhaps what inevitably lies ahead of us is a sort of neo-surrealism, some rearranged points of view that won’t be afraid to stand up to a paradox, and will go against the grain when it comes to the simple order of cause-and-effect. Indeed, our reality has already become surreal. I am also sure that many stories require rewriting in our new intellectual contexts, taking their inspiration from new scientific theories. But I find it equally important to make constant reference to myth and to the entire human imaginarium. Returning to the compact structures of mythology could bring a sense of stability within the lack of specificity in which we are living nowadays. I believe that myths are the building material for our psyche, and we cannot possibly ignore them (at most we might be unaware of their influence).

我认为当下的我们，需要重新定义今天我们用现实主义理解的东西，并寻求一个新的定义，这个定义可以让我们超越自我限制，穿透我们观看世界的玻璃屏幕。因为现在人们对现实的需求是通过媒体、社交网站和互联网上的间接联系来满足的。或许现在摆在我们面前不可避免的是某种类似超现实主义的存在、一些被重新布局的观点，这些观点不惧悖论，在因果的简单顺序面前背道而行。的确啊，我们的现实已经变成了超现实。我也确信，许多故事需要在我们的新知识背景下重写，从新的科学理论中汲取灵感。但我发现不断涉及神话和整个人类的想象力也同等重要。回归神话的紧凑结构可以给我们缺乏特性的生活状况带来一种稳定感。我相信神话是我们构筑心灵的材料，我们不可能忽视神话（虽然我们可能没有意识到它们的影响）。

No doubt a genius will soon appear, capable of constructing an entirely different, as yet unimaginable narrative in which everything essential will be accommodated. This method of storytelling is sure to change us; we will drop our old, constricting perspectives and we will open up to new ones that have in fact always existed somewhere here, but we have been blind to them.

毫无疑问，一个天才即将出现，他将能构建起一个完全不同，迄今为止难以想象的故事，这个故事将会适应一切基本事物。这种讲故事的方式一定会改变我们，我们将摒弃那些陈旧狭隘的观点，向新的观点敞开怀抱，事实上，这些新观点一直存在于某处，但我们却一直视而不见。

In Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann wrote about a composer who devised a new form of absolute music capable of changing human thinking. But Mann did not describe what this music would depend on, he merely created the imaginary idea of how it might sound. Perhaps that is what the role of an artist relies on―giving a foretaste of something that could exist, and thus causing it to become imaginable. And being imagined is the first stage of existence.

托马斯·曼在《浮士德博士》中写道，一位作曲家发明了一种能够改变人类思维的绝对音乐的新形式。但是曼并没有描述这种音乐是基于什么产生的，他只是创造了这种音乐听起来可能是什么样子的想象，也许这就是艺术家角色所依赖的——预先体验一种可能存在的东西，从而使其变得可以想象，而被想象是存在的第一阶段。

7.

I write fiction, but it is never pure fabrication. When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.

我写小说，但我的小说从来不是纯粹的虚构。每当我写作的时候，我必须感受自己内心的一切，我得让书中所有出现的生物和物体穿透我，包括所有属于人类和超越人类的一切，以及所有鲜活着但并未赋予生命的一切。我必须以最严肃的态度细细审视每一件事、每一个人，在内心将他们人格化、个性化。

That is what tenderness serves me for―because tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.

这就是温柔的目的——因为温柔是拟人化的艺术，是分享感受的艺术，由此无限地发现同感之处。编写故事意味着赋予物体生命，赋予世界微小碎片以存在感，正是这些碎片映照着人类经验、生存境况和记忆。温柔让与之有关的一切个性化，让这些事物有发出声音的可能，有生存空间和时间的可能，有被表达的可能。多亏了温柔，茶壶才开始说话。

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.

温柔是爱最谦逊的形式。这种爱并没有出现在圣经或者福音书中，无人信仰它，也无人引用它。它没有特殊的标志或符号，也不会招致犯罪的念头或挑起嫉妒之心。

It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self”.

当我们小心凝视另一种存在，观察非“自我”的东西时，它便出现了。

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

温柔是自发的、无私的，它超越了同理心。虽然可能略显忧郁，温柔是有意识地共同分享命运。温柔是对另一种存在的深切的情感关怀，关怀它的脆弱、独特，以及无法抵挡痛苦和时间的承受力。温柔感知我们之间的纽带、我们之间的相似和一致。温柔是观察世界的一种方式，它向我们展现这世界的生机、鲜活和相互连接，展示出世界与自身的合作与相互依赖。

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

文学建立在自我之外对他者的温柔之上。这是小说的基本心理机制。感谢这个神奇的工具，这是人类最复杂的交流方式，让我们的经验能够穿越时间，达到那些还未出生的人，有一天他们会转向这些被我们写下的文字，阅读我们讲述的关于自己和世界的故事。

I have no idea what their life will be like, or who they will be. I often think about them with a sense of guilt and shame.

我不知道他们的生活将会是什么样，也不知道他们会成为什么样的人。我时常怀着内疚和羞愧的心情想到他们。

The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of nowhere. We often forget that they are not just the result of a twist of fate or destiny, but of some very specific moves and decisions―economic, social, and to do with world outlook (including religious ones). Greed, failure to respect nature, selfishness, lack of imagination, endless rivalry and lack of responsibility have reduced the world to the status of an object that can be cut into pieces, used up and destroyed.

在气候危机和政治危机之中，我们正试图找到我们的道路，也急于通过拯救世界来抵挡这些危机，但这些危机并非是凭空出现的。我们时常忘记，这些危机并非仅仅是命运或天数的捉弄，而是特定行动和决策下的结果——经济上、社会上，以及涉及到世界整体（包括宗教在内）的行为决策。贪婪、不尊重自然、自私、缺乏想象力、无休止的竞争和丧失责任感，这些已使世界沦落为一个物体，可以被切成碎片，被耗尽，被毁灭。

That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.

这也是为什么我们必须讲述一些故事，仿佛世界仍然是一个鲜活的、完整的实体，不断在我们眼前成型，仿佛我们就是其中一个个微小但强大的组成部分一样。