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The great german author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, 13 years after he’d published his first work of literature and five short years after the English translation of a book of stories set in motion his rise to international renown.[qh]
德国伟大的作家温弗里德·塞巴尔德于2001年因一场车祸离世，享年57岁。13年前，塞巴尔德出版了他的第一部文学作品，5年前，他的一本故事集被翻译成英文，使他在国际上声名鹊起。[qh]
(Months before his death, he was rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.)[qh]
(在他去世前几个月，有传言称他是诺贝尔奖的候选人。)[qh]
Throughout his career and afterward, critics struggled to find words to describe the hallucinatory quality of his deceptively sober prose.[qh]
在他的整个职业生涯以及之后的时间里，评论家们都在努力寻找词语来描述他那看似严肃的散文的迷幻特质。[qh]
Sebald tells tales, that much one can say—ghost stories of a sort, as dark and translucent as smoky glass.[qh]
塞巴尔德讲的故事，很多人都会说这是幽灵般的故事，像烟雾弥漫的的玻璃一样黑暗而又透明。[qh]
Displaced Jews haunt some of these narratives; the shades of literary figures—Kafka, Stendhal, Nabokov—materialize in others.[qh]
流离失所的犹太人经常出现在这些故事中; 这些故事中的人物体现着卡夫卡、司汤达、纳博科夫等文学人物的影子。[qh]
And yet Sebald writes like a man typing up case histories, and he accompanies his narratives with something like documentation—photographs of people, facades, notes, newspaper articles, train tickets.[qh]
然而，塞巴尔德的写作手法就像一个人在录入病历一样，他在叙述时还会加上一些类似文档的东西——人物的照片、外观、笔记、报纸文章、火车票。[qh]
These have no captions, and you don’t always see how they relate to the text.[qh]
这些没有说明文字，而且你并不总是能理解它们与文本之间的联系。[qh]
But because photographs testify to the onetime existence of things, they give the weight of the real to stories that may or may not be made up.[qh]
但因为照片证明了事物曾经的存在，它们赋予了故事真实性的厚重感，而这些故事可能是虚构的，也可能不是。[qh]
Sebald’s refusal to respect the line between fact and fiction has become commonplace, especially among younger writers.[qh]
塞巴尔德拒绝尊重事实和虚构之间的界限，这已经成为一种普遍现象，尤其是在年轻作家中。[qh]
But his adroitly artless synthesis of fable, history, photography, and artifact is still jarring.[qh]
但他将寓言、历史、摄影和历史文物熟练地而朴实地结合在一起，依旧突兀。[qh]
The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte called Sebald’s method bricolage, which can mean both “collage” and “tinkering.”[qh]
塞巴尔德的学者乌维·史诸特将塞巴尔德的方法称为修补术(bricolage), 既可以表示“拼贴”，也可以表示“修补”。[qh]
The critic James Wood speaks of “fictional truth,” and also offers this aptly mournful phrase: “cinders of the real world.”[qh]
评论家詹姆斯·伍德在谈到“虚构的真相”时，也恰如其分地用了这个悲伤的短语:“现实世界的灰烬”。[qh]
The poet Michael Hamburger came up with “essayistic semi-fiction which gives rope to both observation and imagination.”[qh]
诗人迈克尔·汉布格尔提出了“随笔式的半小说，这为观察和想象提供了便利。”[qh]
In her new biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, the first life of the writer, Carole Angier calls that “the neatest summary” of Sebald’s method that “anyone ever managed.”[qh]
卡萝·安吉尔在她的新传记《讲述，沉默：寻找塞巴尔德》---作家的第一个生命中称，这是对塞巴尔德方法的“最简洁的总结”，是“任何人都不曾做到的”。[qh]
I like “periscopic,” which Sebald used, because it captures the subaqueous stillness of his worlds, and his disorienting angle of vision.[qh]
我喜欢塞巴尔德用的“潜望镜”，因为它捕捉到了他的世界中水下的静止，以及他迷幻的视角。[qh]
Every great writer founds a new genre, Walter Benjamin decreed.[qh]
瓦尔特·本雅明断言，每一位伟大的作家都开创了一种新体裁。[qh]
“The twentieth-century writer who best passes that crazy test,” Angier writes, “is W. G. Sebald.”[qh]
“最能通过这种疯狂测试的二十世纪作家，”安吉尔写道，“是塞巴尔德。”[qh]
