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Gabriel Garcia Marquez
加西亚·马尔克斯
No solitude
没有孤独
Until August. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
《我们八月见》，加西亚·马尔克斯著。
A seemingly happily married, middle-aged woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, makes an annual pilgrimage to an offshore island to lay a bunch of gladioli on her mother’s grave.
安娜·马格达莱娜·巴赫是一位看似幸福的已婚中年女性，她每年都去一个近海小岛，去给她母亲的坟墓上放一束剑兰花。
She does this every year on August 16th, staying on the island for only one night and following the same routine, until one year she meets a stranger in the hotel bar and goes to bed with him.
她每年8月16日都会这样做，只在岛上住一晚，遵循同样的惯例，直到有一年她在酒店的酒吧遇到了一个陌生人，并和他发生了关系。
This, in turn, becomes a routine, with a different, random man each year, a ritual that begins as controlled but turns her inner life upside down.
这继而也变成了惯例，每年她都会和不同的男人在一起，这个做法一开始是受控的，但后来却颠覆了她的内心生活。
She comes to realise that her marriage was sustained “by a conventional happiness that avoided disagreements in order not to stumble over them, the way people hide dirt under the rug”.
她逐渐意识到，维系她婚姻的是“一种为了不要因为分歧而产生磕磕绊绊，从而避免分歧的传统幸福，就像人们把灰尘藏在地毯下面一样”。
Her husband, too, has been unfaithful, she discovers, but they stay together.
她发现，她的丈夫也对她不忠，但他们仍然在一起。
It sounds like a conventional plot, but this slim novella is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel laureate.
这听起来像是老生常谈的情节，但这部篇幅很短的中篇小说的作者是来自哥伦比亚的诺贝尔奖获得者加西亚·马尔克斯。
It has been published—against his express request—to mark the tenth anniversary of his death.
这本书已经出版（违背了他不要出版的明确要求），用于纪念马尔克斯逝世十周年。
An act of defiance of a dead person’s wishes happens to appear at the end of the novella.
而在这部中篇小说的结尾，恰好出现了违抗死者意愿的行为。
But is it justified in life?
但这种行为在生活中是正当的吗？
In a brief preface, the author’s two sons recall that their father’s judgment, as he declined into dementia, was: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
在简短的序言中，作者的两个儿子回忆说，当他们的父亲患上痴呆症时，他的评价是：“这本书不行。它必须被销毁。”
Confessing “an act of betrayal” in deciding to publish it, they speculate that just as their father’s decline prevented him finishing the book, so it may also have prevented him realising how good it was.
两个儿子承认决定出版这本书是“一种背叛行为”，他们推测，就像父亲的衰病阻止了他完成这本书一样，他的病情可能也让他没能意识到这本书有多好。
Are they right?
他们是对的吗？
The master’s voice can certainly be heard in “Until August”.
马尔克斯的声音绝对可以在《我们八月见》中被听到。
Unusually for Garcia Marquez’s works of fiction, it is set in the present.
对于加西亚·马尔克斯的小说来说，这本书的不同寻常之处是故事背景设定在现在。
The unidentified place is the Colombian Caribbean as nobody else can conjure it, with its blue herons, palm-fringed lagoons, squalor and sensuality, and the sea, sometimes sleepy, sometimes terrifying.
这个没有写出地名的地方是哥伦比亚的加勒比海，因为其他任何人都想象不出这样的地方，那里有蓝鹭、岸边长着棕榈树的泻湖，脏乱而性感，还有时而沉睡、时而令人恐惧的海洋。
(It is also the setting of his greatest works: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”.)
(这也是他最伟大的作品《百年孤独》和《霍乱时期的爱情》的故事背景。)
It is a world peopled by silver-haired dandies in white linen suits and imperiously beautiful women crooning bolero.
在这个世界里，到处都是穿着白色亚麻西装的银发花花公子和低声哼唱着波列罗舞曲的傲慢美丽的女人。
Music occupies a central place in Latin American life, as it does in both “Until August” and, by a curious coincidence, in the latest novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez’s friend (until they fell out), who also won the literature Nobel.
音乐在拉美人的生活中占据着核心地位，就像在《我们八月见》中一样，巧合的是，在马里奥·巴尔加斯·略萨的最新小说中也是如此，略萨是马尔克斯的朋友（但后来决裂了），而且也获得了诺贝尔文学奖。
Mr Vargas Llosa, who is 87, has said that “Le Dedico Mi Silencio” (“I Give You My Silence”) will be his last book.
现年87岁的巴尔加斯·略萨曾表示，《我给你沉默》将是他的最后作品。
Garcia Marquez sketches the complicated complicities and compulsions of love and sex, his favourite subject matter.
加西亚·马尔克斯描绘了爱和性的复杂的同谋及强迫性，这是他最喜欢的主题。
With his precise, vivid prose, beautifully translated into English, Garcia Marquez creates an atmosphere as few other writers can.
他用精准、生动的文笔（英文翻译也很优美）创造出了一种很少有其他作家能创造的气氛。
But here he does not do as much with it as he might have in his prime.
但在这本书里，他没有像他在巅峰期时那样太多地发挥这方面。
Garcia Marquez worked intermittently on the text of “Until August”, which was originally conceived as a long novel, over many years.
加西亚·马尔克斯断断续续地写出了《我们八月见》的文本，而且写了很多年，这本书最初是被构思为一部长篇小说。
He published two fragments in magazines.
他在杂志上发表了其中两段节选。
But despite several drafts, he was unable to finish the slimmed-down story to his satisfaction before he died.
尽管写了几稿，他还是没能在去世前把这个精简版故事写到让他满意的程度。
Whether a dead author’s wishes regarding unpublished material should always be respected is a vexed question.
已故作家对于未出版作品的意愿是否应该一直得到尊重，这是一个很棘手的问题。
Few today would quibble with the decision of Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, to publish “The Trial” and “The Castle” against the writer’s instructions.
马克斯·布罗德是卡夫卡的朋友和文学执行人，他不顾卡夫卡的要求出版了《审判》和《城堡》，如今很少有人会抱怨他的决定。
More questionable were the actions of Ernest Hemingway’s publishers in marketing four works assembled from unfinished material, some many years after the author’s death.
更值得质疑的是欧内斯特·海明威的出版商的行为，他们把未完成的残稿汇编成四部作品并进行推销，其中一些作品是在作者去世多年后才出版的。
“You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,” complained Joan Didion, an American writer, speaking for many creators.
“你要么认为某个东西可以出版，要么认为不能出版，而海明威认为不能。”为许多创作者发声的美国作家琼·狄迪恩抱怨道。
Garcia Marquez’s Spanish editor, Cristobal Pera, claims to have hewed closely to the original, approaching it as a “restorer facing a great master’s canvas”.
加西亚·马尔克斯的西班牙语编辑克里斯托巴尔·佩拉声称，他保留了作品的原汁原味，以“面对大师画布的修复者”的态度处理了文本。
Diehard fans will rejoice at this posthumous bonus track.
马尔克斯的铁杆书迷将为在作家去世后又意外出现了一本书而欢欣鼓舞。
But others will find it hard to banish a slight queasiness—much as Ana Magdalena Bach felt on the return ferry from the island—at the commercial opportunism surrounding its publication.
但其他人会觉得很难驱散对于这次出版中的商业机会主义的轻微忐忑不安（很像安娜·马格达莱纳·巴赫乘坐渡轮从小岛回家时的感受）。
