The Perfectionist - By Taylor Clark
完美主义者 - 作者：泰勒 克拉克 | 翻译：阿道

Ted Chiang is frozen in thought. A bright-orange clementine sits half-peeled in his hands. My tape recorder, parked on the dining-room table of his home in a quiet, woodsy suburb of Seattle, vacuums up five seconds of silence, now ten, now 15. To have a conversation with Chiang, I’m finding, is to speak with a man who weighs every word as carefully as a jeweler, and who isn’t afraid to pause until he’s found the right one.
特德·姜陷入了沉思。他手里拿着一个剥了半边颜色鲜艳的橘子。他家在西雅图一个安静的郊外，周围树木葱郁。我的录音器搁在他的餐桌上，记录着五秒的沉默，直到十秒，再到十五秒。我发现，和姜谈话其实就像在与一个匠意打磨的珠宝商聊天，他字斟句酌，只有找到恰当的措辞才肯继续说话。

So perhaps it’s appropriate that Chiang is currently pondering the question of why he isn’t a more prolific writer. In fact, over a career that spans a quarter century, he has published just 14 short stories — one every two years, give or take.
也许姜正在仔细思量那个“为什么他没有成为更多产的作家”的问题。事实上，在跨越了四分之一世纪的写作生涯里，他只发布了14个短篇故事，差不多每两年一篇。

“I don’t get that many ideas that I know how to turn into stories,” he explains at last, smiling affably. At 47, Chiang still has the unlined face of a 20-something; the gray streaks in his black ponytail offer the only visible evidence of his age. Another ten seconds pass in silence. The failing autumnal light outside seems to grow a shade dimmer. “And writing is very hard for me. When I do get an idea that I know how to turn into a story, it still takes me a long time to actually do it.”
“我并没有那么多我能够将之转化为故事的创意。” 他终于解释道，亲切地笑着。姜已经47岁，但他的脸看上去也就20来岁，皱纹全无，只有他黑色马尾辫上的灰白发丝透露出一些他的年纪。接下来又是10秒钟的沉默。窗外渐垂的秋光似乎让树影渐渐变得模糊。“而且写作对我来说很难。即便当我真有一个创意并知道自己能将其转化为故事时，实际去创作也会花费我大量的时间。”

Your local bookstore probably doesn’t carry Chiang’s only story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, and the average fan of cyberpunk or Battlestar Galactica likely has no clue who he is. Yet despite his anonymity among the mainstream science-fiction crowd, Chiang has quietly dominated the genre’s highest awards for two decades: At last count, he has netted four Nebulas, four Hugos, one Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and four Locus awards, among many others — all with an oeuvre that wouldn’t even strain the covers of one mid-size book.
你当地的书店可能并不销售特德·姜唯一的小说集《你一生的故事》，而一般的赛博朋克爱好者或《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》之类的粉丝可能也并不知道他是谁。虽然在主流科幻人群中他显得不为人知，但姜已经默默地称雄于这个流派的最高奖项长达二十年的时间：根据最近的统计，他已经获得四次星云奖、四次雨果奖、一次西奥多·斯特金纪念奖、以及四次轨迹奖，还有其他一些奖项（译注1）。他为数不多的所有作品就斩获了这些荣誉，如果将这些小说的名称罗列在一起甚至不能撑满一个中等大小的书的封面。

More remarkable still, Chiang has been able to pull this off not by leaning on sci-fi staples like talking spaceships and interstellar war, but by crafting carefully considered, deeply researched parables that use scientific concepts to illuminate the human condition. One story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” employs the Novikov self-consistency principle — which holds that a time traveler could never change the events of the past or future — to explore how we deal with regret; another, “Exhalation,” is an inventive meditation on death that Chiang describes as “a story about entropy.” They’re entertaining, imaginative tales that leave you feeling smarter by the time you reach the last line.
更令人惊叹的是，姜获得这些奖项依靠的并不是叙述太空飞船和星际战争这些科幻题材，而是凭借深思熟虑和详细考察之下对寓言的精心构架，这些语言故事依托科技概念来阐释人类的境况。他的一篇故事《商人和炼金术士之门》通过诺维柯夫自洽性原则--即时间旅行者并不能改变过去或未来--来探讨我们该如何对待悔恨之情。另一篇《呼吸》则是独具创意的关于死亡的冥想，姜将其称为“一个关于熵的故事”。这些故事有趣而富于想象力，让你读完以后感到更具智慧了。

“Sometimes, people who read my work tell me, ‘I like it, but it’s not really science fiction, is it?’” he says. “And I always feel like, no, actually, my work is exactly science fiction.” After Star Wars forever made the genre synonymous with what Chiang calls “adventure stories dressed up with lasers,” people forgot that science fiction includes the word “science” for a reason: It is supposed to be largely about exploring the boundaries of knowledge, he says. “All the things I do in my work — engaging in thought experiments, investigating philosophical questions — those are all things that science fiction does.”
“有时候，有读者看完我的作品后告诉我，‘我喜欢你的小说，但那并不算是科幻，对吗？’”他说，“而我总是觉得：‘不，实际上，我的作品正是科幻。’” 在星球大战将这个类型文学定型成姜所谓的“披着镭射枪外衣的冒险故事”之后，人们忘记了科幻之所以包含“科”这个词是因为它本应该更广意义上去探索知识的边界，他这么说道。“所有我作品中的那些对思维实验的展开和对哲学问题的探究，这些都正是科幻所要做的。”

Growing up on Long Island, where his father was an engineering professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Chiang fell in love with sci-fi and began submitting his stories to magazines at 15. He doggedly produced new ones all through his college years at Brown University, but not a single publication bit.
姜的父亲曾在纽约州斯托尼布鲁克的石溪大学担任工程学教授，所以他从小在长岛长大。姜爱上了科幻，并在15岁时开始向科幻杂志投稿。他在布朗大学的数年间一直坚持创作新的故事，但是没有任何一篇获得发表。

Demoralized by his growing stack of rejection slips, Chiang considered abandoning fiction entirely after graduation, when he moved to Seattle to take a job as a technical writer at Microsoft. A short stint at the sci-fi- and fantasy-focused Clarion Writers’ Workshop convinced him to keep at it, however, and soon enough, his persistence paid off: In 1990, Omni published his story “Tower of Babylon.” That part, at least, was gratifying. What Chiang was less prepared for was the ensuing avalanche of glory dumped upon him, including his first Nebula Award.
不断收到拒稿信使得姜意兴阑珊，当他毕业后搬到西雅图在微软就任技术文档撰写职务时曾一度考虑完全退出科幻创作。最后让他坚持下来的是他短期参加的一个专注于科奇幻创作的号角写作培训班。然而很快他的坚持得到了回报：1990年《Omni》杂志（译注2）刊登了他的《巴比伦塔》。这真可谓是让人欣喜。但让姜有些措手不及的是接踵而至扑面而来的各项荣誉，包括他的第一个星云奖。

“It was a surreal experience,” he says, tucking his hands into the opposite sleeve openings of his pale-blue cardigan, Obi-Wan Kenobi–style, and sinking into another long Chiang-ian pause. “I don’t want to say that winning a Nebula was a bad thing or that I wish I hadn’t. But it definitely threw me for a loop.”
“我不敢相信那是真的，”他像（星球大战中的）欧比旺·克诺比一样把双手交叉伸进苍蓝色羊毛开衫的袖管里，然后陷入另一个长长的姜式暂停，“我并不是说获得星云奖是件坏事或是说我不希望获奖。但是它的到来着实吓我一跳。”

Anxiety about how he would follow up his debut paralyzed Chiang for years; throughout the early ’90s, he pecked out a furtive sentence every now and then but primarily focused on his work at Microsoft, writing reference materials for computer programmers. What finally broke him out of this creative malaise was an idea for a story about a woman tasked with deciphering an alien language — one so radically different from ours that it alters the way she perceives the world.
在出道之后该如何续写自己的成就困扰了姜很多年。在整个90年代早期他间或写下些文字，但主要还是专注于自己在微软为电脑程序员撰写相关技术材料的工作。最终让他摆脱创意停滞困境的是个关于一个女人受命破译一种外星语言的故事灵感，这种外星语言与人类的语言完全不同，它甚至改变了她认识世界的方式。

“When I initially had that idea, I realized not only that I had to learn a lot of linguistics for it but also that I wasn’t technically good enough to write the story I had in mind,” he says. So for more than four years, Chiang studied linguistics, honed his writing, and planned out every detail of his story. “I should tell you, I’m not recommending this approach to anyone,” he laughs. “That’s just how it happened.”
“当我开始有了那个创意时，我不仅意识到自己必须开始为此学习许多语言学相关的知识，还明白技术上而言我还没有能力将脑子里的这个故事写好。”姜说。所以在随后的4年多时间里，他学习了语言学，打磨他的写作技巧，并规划他故事里的每一个细节。“我必须告诉你，我并不是在建议别人也去这么做，”他笑道，“我只是在说明当时的情况。”

The result of this long gestation was 1998’s “Story of Your Life,” a mind-bending meditation on physics, free will, language, and motherhood. The novella went on to win an armful of major sci-fi awards, and Chiang soon settled into a writing routine. He now spends half his time on his technical-writing work, which he says he enjoys because he likes explaining things, and devotes the other half to fiction — a system that has the added advantage of freeing him from the economic pressure that other writers face, thereby allowing him to work on whatever he wants, for as long as he wants.
这个漫长创作期的成果就是1998年的《你一生的故事》，一个离奇的冥想，关乎物理学、自由意识、语言学和母性。这个中篇小说发表后获得了各种重要科幻奖项，姜也很快进入了一种稳定的日常写作模式。他现在花费一半的时间在技术文档写作方面的工作，他说自己喜欢这个工作，因为他喜欢把事情解释明白；另一半的时间则花在幻想创作上。这样的安排带来的好处是让他摆脱其他作家所不得不面对的经济压力，让他更从容地决定到底写什么，到底写多久。

Nearly 20 years after its publication, “Story of Your Life” is now set to bring Chiang more potentially unnerving attention than that first award did: Early this year, the director Denis Villeneuve is scheduled to begin filming a $50 million adaptation of the story, with Amy Adams as the lead. Hollywood, of course, has left legions of authors disappointed with how their work was translated to film, few of them as exacting as Chiang — a man who once declined a Hugo nomination because the story hadn’t turned out how he wished. Yet if anything, he seems bemused by the prospect.
《你一生的故事》出版至今将近二十年，它现在有望为姜带来比获得第一个奖项时还要多的潜在关注，或许会让他身心俱疲：今年的早些时候，导演丹尼斯·维伦纽瓦计划开始拍摄这个小说的改编剧本，投资预计5千万美金，由艾米·亚当斯主演（译注3）。好莱坞当然有很多因为作品改编的电影不理想而让作者失望的先例，其中颇有些作者和姜一样标准严苛：他曾有一次拒绝了雨果奖提名（译注4），因为他觉得故事并没有达到他期望的水准。说起来，他似乎对前景感到颇为茫然。

“Before they came to me, I wouldn’t have said it was even possible to make ‘Story of Your Life’ into a movie,” he says. “It’s not something that really made sense to me, so that means I’m not as invested in it as I would be if I had always been dreaming about this movie.”
“在他们和我联系之前，我从未想过《你一生的故事》有朝一日可能会被制作成电影，”他说，“这对我而言并不是特别有意义。如果我一直梦想着它能被拍成电影的话我会很投入，但是并不是这样，所以我没什么特别的感觉。”

Once again, Chiang pauses. Ten seconds pass. He pushes his rimless glasses up his nose. Fifteen seconds. I begin to wonder if he’s mulling some deeply esoteric point about the nature of film adaptation or dreams or the quantum physics of narrative. Twenty seconds. Chiang smiles.
姜又一次沉默。十秒钟过去了。他扶了扶自己的无框眼镜。十五秒。我不禁好奇他是否在苦苦思量关于电影改编本身或是梦想或是量子物理叙事相关的一些奥妙之处。二十秒。姜笑了。

“I hope it gets made,” he says. “I hope it’s good.”
“我希望它能拍出来，”他说。“希望它能拍好。”

原文出处：https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/ted-chiang-scifi-perfectionist/ 2014年1月4日发表于The Califonia Sunday Magazine (《加利福尼亚星期日杂志》)。

译注1：特德姜获得雨果奖星云奖的主要作品：
《巴比伦塔》（Tower of Babylon）1991年星云奖最佳短中篇
《你一生的故事》（Story of Your Life）2000年星云奖最佳长中篇
《无神之地就是地狱》（Hell is the Absence of God）2002年雨果奖最佳短中篇，2003年星云奖最佳短中篇
《商人和炼金术士之门》（The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate）2008年雨果奖最佳短中篇，2008年星云奖最佳短中篇
《呼吸》（Exhalation）2009年雨果奖最佳短篇
《软件体的生命周期》（The Lifecycle of Software Objects）2011年雨果奖最佳长中篇

译注2：《Omni》是美国的老牌科普科幻杂志，以稿酬优厚著称。

译注3：文中的“今年”指的是访谈写就的2014年。《你一生的故事》在北美地区的原著改编权由派拉蒙公司在2014年戛纳电影节电影交易市场上以2000万美元的高价购得。电影定名为《Arrival》，预计2016年11月11日上映。IMBd链接：http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

译注4：2002年他的短篇小说Liking What You See: A Documentary（《所见即所爱：一部纪录片》）被提名雨果奖最佳短中篇，他以这是为了凑2002年出版的短篇集特意写的赶稿之作不适合参选为由拒绝提名。