雙語美文：Me and Writing我筆下的奇異世界

Me and Writing我筆下的奇異世界

This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was thirteen years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very solemn boy. Not that I was sad, but I simply was paying attention. I'd been given a typewriter by my Uncle George, when he got an electric. He gave me his old Underwood typewriter and I set it up in the basement. I had a secret place under the stairs behind a stack of sheet rock. I sat in there and wrote where my parents could not see me because they were worried, you know, that I didn't go outside. And they believed in the illusion of a balanced life, you know, you do a little bit of this, you do a little bit of that. I just wanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.我想當作家的念頭是在這個夏天冒出來的。那年我十三歲了，戴着一副銀邊眼鏡，是個不苟言笑的男孩。倒不是因爲心情不好，我只是在琢磨事兒。喬治叔叔買了一臺電打字機後，就把手打打字機給了我。他給我的是一臺安德伍牌老式打字機，我把它架在地下室裏。樓梯下石磚牆後是我的密室。我坐在裏面寫東西，爸媽看不到我，你知道，我之所以要祕密行事是因爲他們擔心我總不出門。他們相信生活應該有多方面平衡，就是讓你做做這個又做做那個。而我只想做一件事——練筆。

I liked to write about tornadoes: Tornadoes, which come out of a peaceful summer day in the Midwest. And the sky's blue and then suddenly it's dark as night and this great snake-like cloud comes slithering across the landscape, smashing houses at random, destroying this one, leaving this standing. I liked that idea.我想寫寫龍捲風：一個平靜的夏日裏，在中西部驟然颳起了龍捲風。蔚藍的天空霎時間變得像夜晚一樣漆黑，蛇一般的巨煙雲捲過地面，將房屋揉得粉碎，摧毀了這間，放過了那間。我太喜歡寫龍捲風了。

I wrote a story, a sort of autobiographical story, about a family from New York, a microbiologist and his actress wife, and their son, who looked, and walked, and talked, and thought, and felt exactly like me. I sat in the backseat and they were driving across the Midwest, and they forgot me... at a gas station. We stopped for a rest stop... and they forgot me, and they drove away. I walked up the road that they had driven and suddenly the sky turned dark and... a tornado came up and it picked me up and it carried me and dropped me, uninjured, in the yard of a sanctified Brethren family. I knocked on the door and a woman in a white satin gown holding a flaming torch came out and asked me what I wanted. And I was going to tell them that I had to leave to look for my parents and then the dog spoke to me. The dog said, "Stay." So, I stayed. But still, I missed the life of glamour that I had known on New York's exclusive Upper West Side. I love to write stories like that.我寫了一個故事，自傳式的故事，說的是一個紐約家庭，家裏有一個微生物學家，當演員的妻子，還有他們的兒 子--那孩子的模樣和走路、說話、思考的方式簡直跟我一樣。我坐在汽車的後座，他們開車穿越中西部，後來他們把我忘在了一個加油站。我們停車休息，然後他 們就把我給落下了，開車走了。我沿着他們車駛去的方向走着，突然間，天空暗了下來， 龍捲風大作，風捲起我吹啊吹，毫髮不傷地把我扔在一個聖教徒家的後院裏。我敲敲門，一個身穿白色緞袍的女人舉着一把熊熊的火炬，走出來問我想幹什麼。我正 想說我想去找我的`爸媽，一條狗衝着我說話了：“留下來吧。”於是，我就留下了。但是，我還是很懷念在紐約高尚住宅區的好日子。我就喜歡寫這樣的故事。

I sat there at my Underwood typewriter, but I wished that something real would happen.我坐在安德伍牌打字機前，想寫些真實的事兒。

That was the summer that my cousin, Helen-Marie, came to stay with us suddenly. She was seventeen. She was four years older than I and I'd always admired her. She was lovelier than the rest of us. The rest of us had our family's looks; we had homely faces and she was pretty. She had blonde hair, a rarity in our family.那年夏天，我的表姐海倫瑪莉突然來我們家住下。她十七歲，比我大四歲，我很喜歡她。她比我們家的其他人都可愛。其他人都有着家族的容貌特徵，臉蛋兒一點兒也不起眼，她卻很漂亮。那一頭金髮在我們家族裏是極少見的。

Then I wrote a story about her; about a girl who is cooking lunch at home one day and a woman in a white satin dress holding a flaming torch bursts in through the door, and it startles the girl so much that she drops the cast iron skillet on her dog and the dog bites her and she gets an incurable blood disease from this. Doctors give her two weeks to live, and then, on top of everything, a tornado comes in and it blows the roof off the house and itimpales four blades of grass in her side. And there's something on that grass that cures that blood disease. Medical science has never seen anything like it. She's cured. She comes home. And that night the dog scratches on her door, and the dog says, "Aren't you curious to know what it was on the grass that cured that blood disease?" I sort of liked the story.於是我就寫了一個關於她的故事，說的是有一天，一個女孩正在家裏做午飯時，有個穿着白色緞袍的女人手裏舉 着熊熊的火炬從門外闖了進來，女孩嚇了一大跳，把鐵鍋砸到了她的狗，狗咬了她一口，她從此就得了一種沒法治的血液病。醫生說她只能活兩個星期了，這時，一 股龍捲風颳了進來，它掀掉屋頂，四片草葉子刺到她的身上。草葉子上面的什麼東西就把她的血液病給治好了。醫學上從來沒有見過這種奇事。她痊癒了，回到了 家。那天晚上，小狗抓撓着她的房門，那狗問她說： “你難道不想知道草葉子上面是什麼東西治好了你的血液病嗎？”我喜歡這樣的故事。