Lala 2007-12-1 20:08
The Susanna Clarke interview（BBC）
BBC对Susanna Clarke的访谈 （哪位同学请来翻译一下）
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[img]http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/images/2004/09/15/susannah_clarke_203_203x152.jpg[/img]
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As the publication of her much anticipated first novel - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - approaches, we speak to the Nottingham born author Susanna Clarke.2c"a;u*`0g5kj#A
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[b]Who are your 5 favourite authors, and why? [/b];vg$]To kK)c
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Jane Austen, who got as close to perfection as anyone can. D8r*`Cz
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Alan Moore, who, in the words of Jonathan Ross, causes middle-aged men (and women) to fall to their knees in comic shops, weeping in gratitude.
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Charles Dickens: There is no one Dickens novel I could pick over all the others. Dickens is huge—like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it’s immediately recognizable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer—or any combination of these.
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Neil Gaiman, who is the most audacious and surprising writer. In the first comic of his I read, he emptied Hell. I was quite shocked. I thought, Are you really allowed to do that? Apparently you are. P U)n JC KG.NQ/g+O
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Joss Whedon and other assorted writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not perfect. The plots often creak. But the dialogue is wonderful and the characterization is almost as good. n!h^^*DS
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[b]Who or what was your biggest influence in deciding to become a writer? What inspired you to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell?[/b]
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Boredom, probably. And a restless, intrusive sort of imagination. I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually this led to making up stories and writing things down. (`e Qj? O#Jq8T
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I always really liked magicians. I’m not even sure why—except that they know things other people don’t and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects. In C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories there are only two magicians. One is weak and wicked, and the other barely gets two lines of dialogue. But they both fascinated me. One (the weak one) has a tray of magic rings, green and yellow, as shiny and bright as sweets. They’re magic, they’re jewellery and they look like scrummy sweets. What’s not to like?
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In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could. The closest model was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea stories. While you’re reading them, magic seems perfectly real. You feel it must exist and it must be just as Le Guin describes.
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It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing—never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine. As one of the characters says in Strange & Norrell: "Magic! Do not speak to me of magic! It is just like everything else, full of setbacks and disappointments." That’s a very key statement.
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[b]Is there any particular ritual involved in your writing process (favorite pen, lucky charm, south-facing window)?[/b]
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I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories. I like darkened rooms too, and lamplight, and the sound of rain. On sunny afternoons I’ve been known to draw the curtains, switch on the light and play a CD of rain falling. It creates a sort of quiet, private world which helps writing sometimes.)Ur+?#pE6M`4cj
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[b]Were Jonathan Strange, Mr Norrell and the Raven King modelled after any historical figures?[/b]y(lr v(\ I&W n
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Not really. Their antecedents are mostly literary. Strange has a touch of Byron in him, I suppose, and a little of the eighteenth-century rakes—Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and so forth. I wanted him to have a little wickedness in him—or the potential for wickedness, at any rate. *si:x&~:W$Q$G
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The Raven King had an odd genesis. Ursula Le Guin has a magician in the Earthsea trilogy who has no name: the Grey Mage of Plan, whose magic was so dubious, his name was forgotten. And there’s a magician in The Lord of the Rings, right at the very end, who comes out of Mordor to do battle against our heroes, and no one knows his name because he himself has forgotten it. I thought this was rather cool, and when I was developing my magicians, I wanted one without a name. Unfortunately I hadn’t quite understood what would happen if I had a major character without a name. The consequence has been that he has acquired more names than most people: the Raven King, John Uskglass, the Black King, the King of the North and a fairy name that no one can pronounce.
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Mr. Norrell is more difficult. The only person I can think of that he might be based on is me. We share the same hobbies: staying at home, surrounded by books and not answering the phone. I think I got him originally from a jigsaw puzzle. It was a really great jigsaw with a picture of a huge library and two or three old gentlemen with eighteenth-century wigs reading books. I carried the image of that library around in my head for years until I knew what to do with it.
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[b]How do you feel knowing your book is being touted as the next Harry Potter or Harry Potter for adults?[/b]
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I don’t take it very seriously. I don’t think there ever could be another Harry Potter—it’s such a unique phenomenon. And I don’t think there could ever be an adult Harry Potter. Harry Potter reaches into children’s imagination and takes them over. It enchants them. It would be wonderful to think that any of my readers might be enchanted in the same way. But I think it’s harder for adults to be enchanted --it’s hard for them to switch off their critical faculties and just be swept along by the story.
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Comparisons with other books are useful as rough guidelines for readers. If you like Harry Potter/Jane Austen/The Quincunx/Instance of the Fingerpost, then maybe you’ll like this—or maybe you won’t. Readers are very sharp people—they’ll know how to take such claims.
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[b]How long did it take you to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell? How much historical research did you have to do?[/b]
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It took rather more than ten years, which is a crazy amount of time to spend on anything—except building a cathedral, growing a garden or educating a child.
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I did a lot of historical research, obviously, particularly politics and military history, and stuff about London and Venice. I enjoyed the military history much more than I expected. There are many, many eyewitness accounts of battles and campaigning, which make military much more immediate and vital than other kinds of history—you can easily discover what it felt like to be a soldier and what their everyday concerns were. Some of the people I came upon in the research made it into the book as minor characters: the exploring officer, Colquhoun Grant, and the chaplain, Samuel Briscall, for instance. Samuel Briscall was a great character to research. As far as I could tell there’s only ever been one article written about him. It’s about four pages long. I found it, read it—research done! So much easier than Wellington.?JE
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[b]Do you have a favourite character?[/b]P Z+a3k N6g{
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Strange, Norrell and I are like three people who’ve worked very closely together for a long time: We know each other a little too well and we don’t really want to socialize together. My favourite character is probably Childermass. He’s the one I’d most happily meet at the pub and have a drink with. He was meant to be a villain at the beginning, but I realized that he’s more complex than that. I love that he’s so subversive and independent—but he’s also (I hope) a man of his period. He begins as a servant and, although he’s very bright, he knows he can’t expect much more from life, so he sort of makes do with his position.
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[b]What’s next for you? What’s next for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell?[/b]3B;_U(D/GS
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The next book will be set in the same world and will probably start a few years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell finishes. I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it. I doubt that the new book will be a sequel in the strictest sense. There are new characters to be introduced, though probably some old friends will appear too. I’d like to move down the social scale a bit. Strange and Norrell were both rich, with pots of money and big estates. Some of the characters in the second book have to struggle a bit harder to keep body and soul together. I expect there’ll be more about John Uskglass, the Raven King, and about how magic develops in England.
Sylvan 2008-2-9 23:09
BBC对苏珊娜•克拉克的访问
在她万众期待的第一本小说——《乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生》出版日期临近之际，我们与在诺丁汉出生的作家苏珊娜•克拉克进行了对话。+n gvz[,R)h
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[b]谁是你最喜爱的作家，请列出五位，并说明原因。$d:z?@3H
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[/b]简•奥斯丁，她比所有人都更接近完美。
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阿兰•莫尔，借用乔纳森•罗斯（Jonathan Ross）的话来说，“使得那么些中年男人（以及女人）跪在漫画书店前，用眼泪来表达他们的感激之情。”【注：是《The Watchmen》，《V字仇杀队》，《绅士联盟》，《来自地狱》的编剧。】KR!HCg
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查尔斯•狄更斯：狄更斯所有的小说都一样的优秀。他宽广无垠——就像天空。随意打开任意一本狄更斯的作品，无论那本作品的体裁是社会讽刺小说、滑稽剧、恐怖小说，还是关于一个谋杀犯的心理分析——或是这些之中任意的结合，都能马上辨认出狄更斯的痕迹。
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尼尔•盖曼，他是最锐意进取和令人惊讶的作者了。在我读到的第一篇他的漫画书中，他把整个地狱弄空了。我被惊呆了。我当时想，你真的获准做这种事情？很明显你的确做到了。 ? O0p+s+D x;EVLg
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乔斯•威顿（Joss Whedon）和“捉鬼者巴菲”系列的其他作者。这个系列不是很完美。情节有时有些不搭调；但对白很棒，还有人物塑造几乎可以与对白并驾齐驱。F6x9A
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[b]有没有某个人或某件事物对你决定走上写作的道路上影响最大？是什么给予了你创作《乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生》的灵感？
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也许是一种厌倦情绪吧。而且还有一种不断浮现在我脑海中甚至影响我正常思考的想象画面。我一直都可以想象出比我自己真实所处的环境更有趣的地方，比我自己更有趣的人物。最终这种想象引导我开始着手进行故事架构，并把这些想法付诸笔墨。g ^$S/_&g"B$p
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我一直都很喜欢巫师。我甚至不太清楚这种情绪的来源——除了我喜欢他们的一些特质，比如了解知晓一般人不了解的事情，还有住在那些乱糟糟的、堆满了奇怪物件的屋子里。在C•S•刘易斯的“纳尼亚”系列作品中只有两个巫师。其中一个弱小又邪恶，而另一个连台词都没有超过两行。但他们两个都让我着迷。其中弱小的那一个拥有一盘子的魔法戒指，绿色的黄色的，就跟糖果一样闪闪发亮。这些好像scrummy糖果的魔法珠宝，让我没法不喜爱他们。【scrummy sweets没有查到中译名，可能是一种糖果。】≡奥德赛公会≡*`)E.L/H.u&{4l9L(~2Kc|| G
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在《乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生》小说里我想要竭尽所能地创造一个最使人信服的魔法和巫师的故事。这里最接近的模型就是厄休拉•勒奎恩的地海系列。当你们阅读这些故事的时候，魔法看起来是那么真实。你会觉得魔法确实存在，而且就像Ursula Le Guin那支生花妙笔描述的那样。/t NX;W"Nw8K-g,{-h
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对我而言，让魔法变得真实的方法就是让它变得有些平凡，有些别扭，并且会令人失望，也没有其他人所想像的那样迷人的特质。就像这本书中一个角色所说的：“魔法！别跟我扯关于魔法的事情！它就跟其他任何事情一样，老让人挫败和失望。”这就是对我眼中的魔法最精辟的陈述。
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[b]在你的写作过程中有没有一些特定的程式（用惯的钢笔，幸运魔法，朝南的窗户之类的）？[/b]s},ZKC8\@V9bW
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虽然可以在大多数场合写作，但我还是比较偏爱火车这个地点。介于起点站和终点站之间的旅途很能释放人的灵感，而且望着窗外那一系列不断延展变化的风景和随机出现的景物对故事的架构很有好处。我也喜欢火车上昏暗的房间、灯火和雨声。熟悉我的人都知道，在晴朗的午后我会放下窗帘，打开灯，然后播放一张录制雨声的CD。这种方法能够营造一种适于我创作的安静、幽僻的空间。
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乔纳森•斯特兰奇、诺瑞尔先生、渡鸦王这些角色身上有没有某些历史人物的影子呢？3l E L Z,Q APh4n'q$M
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应该没有。他们大部分都来源于文学创作。斯特兰奇倒是有些拜伦的影子，还有一点十八世纪浪子的味道——比如《危险关系》（Les Liaisons Dangereuses）中的Valmont……等等。我希望他能有一些邪恶的味道——哪怕是一些潜在的邪恶品质。
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渡鸦王这个角色的来历是很独特的。厄休拉•勒奎恩在地海三部曲里塑造了一个无名的灰巫师（the Grey Mage of Plan），他的魔法完全没准，他的名字也被人遗忘。而在《指环王》中接近结尾的部分也有一个来自莫多、与主角为敌的巫师，因为他自己都忘记了所以没人知道他的真实姓名。我想，这样真是很酷。所以在我着手塑造自己的角色时，也希望有一个无名的巫师。不幸的是，当时我并没有很明白如果一个主要人物没有名字的话会发生什么事情。结果就是，他比其他大多数人得到了更多的名字：渡鸦王，乔治•乌斯格拉斯（John Uskglass），黑王，北方之王，还有一个人类无法发音的仙子名字。!d+k'@ X D
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创作诺瑞尔先生就更难了。我想，他原型人物只有一个，那就是我。我们有一样的爱好：窝在家里，被书本包围着，而且从来不接电话。我想我是从一个拼图游戏中得到了灵感。那真的是一个很好的拼图，背景是一个很大的图书馆，内容是两三个带着18世纪假发的、上了年纪的绅士在读书。那张拼图的画面一直在我的脑海中反复浮现，直到我想到用它作创意来写本小说。N~3fl2a,v
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[b]在你听说自己的书在宣传中被誉为第二本《哈利•波特》或是写给大人的《哈利•波特》，你是怎么想的呢？ f*yN8i4lX4g
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我并没有放在心上。我不认为它会是另一本《哈利•波特》——那是一个独一无二的现象。而且我不认为会有一本写给大人的《哈利•波特》。《哈利•波特》深深影响了孩子们的想象方式，而且完全占据了他们的心灵。它对他们施展了魔法。只要想到任何一个我的读者可能被这本书的魔法吸引住，就像被《哈利•波特》系列书的魔法吸引住一样，我就很开心。但我想，对于成年人来说，他们不太容易被书中的“魔法”影响——对他们而言，要不评判一本书而直接全心全意地欣赏故事本身是一件很难的事情。
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将这本书与其他书作比较，对于读者而言的确是一种比价粗略的介绍方式。如果你喜欢哈利波特系列、简奥斯丁的书，《The Quincunx》，《Instance of the Fingerpost》【没有查到中译名】，那么你也许也喜欢我写的这本书——当然你也可能不喜欢。读者们眼光都很犀利——他们都清楚如何对待这些宣传中的说法。
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[b]你写这套书花了多长时间呢？在写作过程中你做了多少研究工作？[/b] ~@ z%S9n0b,YH+d
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大概是十年以上吧，这么长的时间对做任何事情来说都是疯狂的，当然，除了建造一座大教堂，培植整个花园，还有教育一个孩子。ioNuMN6]'q{"Wi+O
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我的确做了大量的历史研究，尤其在政治和军事历史方面，还有关于伦敦和威尼斯的资料。我比我想象中更喜欢军事历史。我看过很多关于战争战役的目击者记述，这些让军事显得更加触手可及，更致命，比其他类型的历史而言——你可以轻易地与一名战士感同身受，他们每天关心的事情。在研究中我遇到的一些人成为了书中的配角：比如负责探测的官员格兰特（Colquhoun Grant），牧师萨缪尔（Samuel Briscall）。萨缪尔是一个很值得研究的角色。我所能找到的关于他的资料只有一篇长约四页的文章而已。我找到并读完了它——研究完成！这比研究威灵顿将军省事多了。
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[b]你有自己最喜欢的角色吗？[/b]t2mM&\"F/z oh!t
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乔纳森•斯特兰奇、诺瑞尔先生和我，我们三个人好像在距离彼此很近的地方一起工作很久了：我们有些过分地了解彼此，但我们并不想融入彼此的社交圈。我最喜欢的角色可能是齐尔德莫斯（Childermass），他是我最愿意在酒吧里遇到并且一起喝一杯的那种人物。在开始的时候我本来是想把他写成一个坏人的，但我慢慢发现他比我想象得要复杂。我喜欢他的破坏性和独立性，但他同时是他所处那个时代的风云人物（至少我希望如此）。他以一个仆人的身份起家，而且尽管他非常机敏，知道自己不能期望从生活中得到更多，但他在他的职位上还是竭力对付了，至少有那么个意思。【这句译文不确定。】
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[b]接下来你有什么计划吗？关于这本书有什么打算吗？[/b]
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《乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生》的下一本书也会设定在同样的世界里，而且也许就会从《乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生》故事结束后的几年开始写起。我觉得十九世纪初的时代设定比较适合我，所以我打算继续用这个背景。这本新书可能会有一个真正意义上的结局。书里会有新的角色登场，当然了，一些老朋友也会继续露面的。我希望把书中的社会等级向下移一些。乔纳森•斯特兰奇与诺瑞尔先生都拥有大量金钱和地产。在第二本书中，有些角色可能为了谋生就要绞尽脑汁了。我希望书里面会有更多关于渡鸦王,乔治•乌斯格拉斯（John Uskglass）的戏份，而且还会进一步深入探讨魔法在英国的发展始末。
回声 2008-2-22 15:05
楼、楼上是小瑞吗？
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我说为什么刚把书推荐给你，就会看到这个译文……