The Perfectionist - By Taylor Clark
完美主義者 - 作者：泰勒 克拉克 | 翻譯：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。他手里拿著一個剝了半邊顏色鮮艷的橘子。他家在西雅圖一個安靜的郊外，周圍樹木蔥郁。我的錄音器擱在他的餐桌上，記錄著五秒的沉默，直到十秒，再到十五秒。我發現，和姜談話其實就像在與一個匠意打磨的珠寶商聊天，他字斟句酌，只有找到恰當的措辭才肯繼續說話。

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.
也許姜正在仔細思量那個“為什么他沒有成為更多產的作家”的問題。事實上，在跨越了四分之一世紀的寫作生涯里，他只發布了14個短篇故事，差不多每兩年一篇。

“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.”
“我并沒有那么多我能夠將之轉化為故事的創意。” 他終于解釋道，親切地笑著。姜已經47歲，但他的臉看上去也就20來歲，皺紋全無，只有他黑色馬尾辮上的灰白發絲透露出一些他的年紀。接下來又是10秒鐘的沉默。窗外漸垂的秋光似乎讓樹影漸漸變得模糊。“而且寫作對我來說很難。即便當我真有一個創意并知道自己能將其轉化為故事時，實際去創作也會花費我大量的時間。”

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.
你當地的書店可能并不銷售特德·姜唯一的小說集《你一生的故事》，而一般的賽博朋克愛好者或《太空堡壘卡拉狄加》之類的粉絲可能也并不知道他是誰。雖然在主流科幻人群中他顯得不為人知，但姜已經默默地稱雄于這個流派的最高獎項長達二十年的時間：根據最近的統計，他已經獲得四次星云獎、四次雨果獎、一次西奧多·斯特金紀念獎、以及四次軌跡獎，還有其他一些獎項（譯注1）。他為數不多的所有作品就斬獲了這些榮譽，如果將這些小說的名稱羅列在一起甚至不能撐滿一個中等大小的書的封面。

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.
更令人驚嘆的是，姜獲得這些獎項依靠的并不是敘述太空飛船和星際戰爭這些科幻題材，而是憑借深思熟慮和詳細考察之下對寓言的精心構架，這些語言故事依托科技概念來闡釋人類的境況。他的一篇故事《商人和煉金術士之門》通過諾維柯夫自洽性原則--即時間旅行者并不能改變過去或未來--來探討我們該如何對待悔恨之情。另一篇《呼吸》則是獨具創意的關于死亡的冥想，姜將其稱為“一個關于熵的故事”。這些故事有趣而富于想象力，讓你讀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.”
“有時候，有讀者看完我的作品后告訴我，‘我喜歡你的小說，但那并不算是科幻，對嗎？’”他說，“而我總是覺得：‘不，實際上，我的作品正是科幻。’” 在星球大戰將這個類型文學定型成姜所謂的“披著鐳射槍外衣的冒險故事”之后，人們忘記了科幻之所以包含“科”這個詞是因為它本應該更廣意義上去探索知識的邊界，他這么說道。“所有我作品中的那些對思維實驗的展開和對哲學問題的探究，這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.
姜的父親曾在紐約州斯托尼布魯克的石溪大學擔任工程學教授，所以他從小在長島長大。姜愛上了科幻，并在15歲時開始向科幻雜志投稿。他在布朗大學的數年間一直堅持創作新的故事，但是沒有任何一篇獲得發表。

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.
不斷收到拒稿信使得姜意興闌珊，當他畢業后搬到西雅圖在微軟就任技術文檔撰寫職務時曾一度考慮完全退出科幻創作。最后讓他堅持下來的是他短期參加的一個專注于科奇幻創作的號角寫作培訓班。然而很快他的堅持得到了回報：1990年《Omni》雜志（譯注2）刊登了他的《巴比倫塔》。這真可謂是讓人欣喜。但讓姜有些措手不及的是接踵而至撲面而來的各項榮譽，包括他的第一個星云獎。

“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（星球大戰中的）歐比旺·克諾比一樣把雙手交叉伸進蒼藍色羊毛開衫的袖管里，然后陷入另一個長長的姜式暫停，“我并不是說獲得星云獎是件壞事或是說我不希望獲獎。但是它的到來著實嚇我一跳。”

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.
在出道之后該如何續寫自己的成就困擾了姜很多年。在整個90年代早期他間或寫下些文字，但主要還是專注于自己在微軟為電腦程序員撰寫相關技術材料的工作。最終讓他擺脫創意停滯困境的是個關于一個女人受命破譯一種外星語言的故事靈感，這種外星語言與人類的語言完全不同，它甚至改變了她認識世界的方式。

“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.”
“當我開始有了那個創意時，我不僅意識到自己必須開始為此學習許多語言學相關的知識，還明白技術上而言我還沒有能力將腦子里的這個故事寫好。”姜說。所以在隨后的4年多時間里，他學習了語言學，打磨他的寫作技巧，并規劃他故事里的每一個細節。“我必須告訴你，我并不是在建議別人也去這么做，”他笑道，“我只是在說明當時的情況。”

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.
這個漫長創作期的成果就是1998年的《你一生的故事》，一個離奇的冥想，關乎物理學、自由意識、語言學和母性。這個中篇小說發表后獲得了各種重要科幻獎項，姜也很快進入了一種穩定的日常寫作模式。他現在花費一半的時間在技術文檔寫作方面的工作，他說自己喜歡這個工作，因為他喜歡把事情解釋明白；另一半的時間則花在幻想創作上。這樣的安排帶來的好處是讓他擺脫其他作家所不得不面對的經濟壓力，讓他更從容地決定到底寫什么，到底寫多久。

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》出版至今將近二十年，它現在有望為姜帶來比獲得第一個獎項時還要多的潛在關注，或許會讓他身心俱疲：今年的早些時候，導演丹尼斯·維倫紐瓦計劃開始拍攝這個小說的改編劇本，投資預計5千萬美金，由艾米·亞當斯主演（譯注3）。好萊塢當然有很多因為作品改編的電影不理想而讓作者失望的先例，其中頗有些作者和姜一樣標準嚴苛：他曾有一次拒絕了雨果獎提名（譯注4），因為他覺得故事并沒有達到他期望的水準。說起來，他似乎對前景感到頗為茫然。

“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.”
“在他們和我聯系之前，我從未想過《你一生的故事》有朝一日可能會被制作成電影，”他說，“這對我而言并不是特別有意義。如果我一直夢想著它能被拍成電影的話我會很投入，但是并不是這樣，所以我沒什么特別的感覺。”

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。十秒鐘過去了。他扶了扶自己的無框眼鏡。十五秒。我不禁好奇他是否在苦苦思量關于電影改編本身或是夢想或是量子物理敘事相關的一些奧妙之處。二十秒。姜笑了。

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

原文出處：https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/ted-chiang-scifi-perfectionist/ 2014年1月4日發表于The Califonia Sunday Magazine (《加利福尼亞星期日雜志》)。

譯注1：特德姜獲得雨果獎星云獎的主要作品：
《巴比倫塔》（Tower of Babylon）1991年星云獎最佳短中篇
《你一生的故事》（Story of Your Life）2000年星云獎最佳長中篇
《無神之地就是地獄》（Hell is the Absence of God）2002年雨果獎最佳短中篇，2003年星云獎最佳短中篇
《商人和煉金術士之門》（The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate）2008年雨果獎最佳短中篇，2008年星云獎最佳短中篇
《呼吸》（Exhalation）2009年雨果獎最佳短篇
《軟件體的生命周期》（The Lifecycle of Software Objects）2011年雨果獎最佳長中篇

譯注2：《Omni》是美國的老牌科普科幻雜志，以稿酬優厚著稱。

譯注3：文中的“今年”指的是訪談寫就的2014年。《你一生的故事》在北美地區的原著改編權由派拉蒙公司在2014年戛納電影節電影交易市場上以2000萬美元的高價購得。電影定名為《Arrival》，預計2016年11月11日上映。IMBd鏈接：http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

譯注4：2002年他的短篇小說Liking What You See: A Documentary（《所見即所愛：一部紀錄片》）被提名雨果獎最佳短中篇，他以這是為了湊2002年出版的短篇集特意寫的趕稿之作不適合參選為由拒絕提名。