翻译练习：What Are The Best First Lines In Fiction(5)

What Are The Best First Lines In Fiction(5)

最好的小说开场是什么（5）

简爱

So what are the rules of writing a great opening line? Unsurprisingly, for writers with talent enough, there are none. Madeleine L'Engle even got away with repurposing a cliché so mocked that the author to whom it's been attributed (not altogether fairly) now has named after him a prize rewarding the very worst opening. I'm referring to Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the rambling sentence that starts "It was a dark and stormy night...". In his time, Bulwer-Lytton was more widely read than Dickens, also coining the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword", but it's for his pilloried opener that he's best remembered, hence San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which entrants submit dire opening sentences from non-existent works. And yet L'Engle begins her zany - and much praised - YA classic, A Wrinkle in Time, with those same seven words. Fans of Charles M. Schulz might recall that Snoopy was also fond of the formulation.

那写出一个牛逼开场白的规则是啥呢？当然，这对有足够天赋的作家来说就不是个事情。马德琳·英格甚至改造了一个老掉牙的句子，这句老掉牙的句子（这个评价不是很公平）不断被后人调侃，现在还搞出个以其作者命名的奖项，奖给那些糟糕透顶的开场白。我在讲爱德华·布尔沃-李顿和那句不明所以的话“这个夜黑风高之夜……”。在他那个时代，爱德华·布尔沃-李顿有比狄更斯更多的读者，他还创造了“笔诛远胜剑伐”这样的短语，不过大家记住了他却是因为这句广受嘲弄的开场白，圣何塞州立大学才有了一年一度的爱德华·布尔沃-李顿小说竞赛，参赛者提交非真实存在的极糟的开场白。然而，英格就是用这七个词开始她古怪——却广受好评——的年轻的成年人的经典作品，《时间的皱折》。查尔斯·M·舒尔茨的粉丝们可能还记得，史努比就是喜欢这个调调。

Every bibliophile has their own favourite first line(I'm partial to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink") and there's irresistible literary sport to be had from comparing lists. All the same, taking them in isolation does rather miss the point. After all, the chief function of a first sentence is to make you read on. It's true, too, that some of the most celebrated first lines owe their might largely to what follows. Consider, for instance, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day". As sentences go, its charms are discreet to say the least. And yet those 10 words, as anyone who returns to them having reached the novel's end, capture so much about its eponymous heroine's character - her low expectations, her bottomless capacity for disappointment.

每一个爱读书的人都有他们自己喜欢的开场白（我偏爱多迪史密斯《我的秘密城堡》中的“我坐在厨房的水槽里写出这篇小说”）我们会不由自主地从英雄榜上开展文学比武运动。尽管如此，把这些开场白独立出来谈论的确是迷失了开场白的作用。开场白的主要作用就是让你读下去。的确如此，那些非常著名的开场白多半也得归功于接下来的文字。比如，夏洛蒂·勃朗特的《简·爱》：“那天不可能去散步了”。作为一个开场白，至少可以说它非常小心谨慎。然而当读者读完全篇再回来琢磨这10个词，就会发现这句话能够刻画出同名女主角太多性格上的东西——她的低欲望，她那无尽的失望。