【英文原声版71】Amy Hungerford: Beloved

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Zachary Davis: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.” These are the opening lines to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved.

扎克里·戴维斯：“一百二十四号充斥着恶意。充斥着一个婴儿的怨毒。房子里的女人们清楚，孩子们也清楚。多年以来，每个人都以各自的方式忍受着这恶意，可是到了一八七三年，塞丝和女儿丹芙成了它仅存的受害者。”这是托妮·莫里森1987年的小说《宠儿》的开场白。

Amy Hungerford: So it was disorientation and a kind of telescoping out from this strange address to, by the end of that paragraph, you know, the year 1873. It's a way of bringing you telescopically into a whole world and the skill of that writing to accomplish that in, you know, just a few sentences, I was hooked.

艾米·亨格福德：从这个奇怪的地址出发，一直到这段话的结尾，也就是1873年，整段文字呈现出一派迷蒙的全景式景象。作者以望远镜般的视角，用寥寥数语把你带入到整个小说世界中。这种写作技法深深地吸引了我。

Amy Hungerford: I’m Amy Hungerford. I'm a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and dean of the faculty there as well.

艾米·亨格福德：我是艾米·亨格福德，是哥伦比亚大学英语语言文学和比较文学教授，也是该系的系主任。

Zachary Davis: This baby is spiteful because she is dead. She was Sethe’s daughter, but Sethe killed her years earlier, not out of hate, but out of love. Toni Morrison’s story is inspired by a true story of a woman named Margaret Garner. Garner was born into slavery, but escaped with her child when she was 22. When the slave catchers found her, Garner killed her own child rather than have her return to slavery.

扎克里·戴维斯：这个婴儿死于非命，心有所怨。她曾是主人公塞丝的女儿，但多年前塞丝亲手将她杀害，不是出于恨，而是出于爱。托妮·莫里森这篇小说的灵感源于一个真实事件，事件的主人公是一个叫玛格丽特·加纳的女子。加纳生来就是黑奴。22岁时，她带着孩子逃出了奴隶庄园，却不幸被奴隶猎人找到了。为了不让孩子继续过着奴隶的生活，加纳杀死了她。

Amy Hungerford: So when Sethe makes a choice, that terrible choice to take the life of her baby, you feel the way that a whole world has conspired to make that horrific act seem like a choice.

艾米·亨格福德：在小说中，黑人塞丝也做出了同样可怕的选择，夺去了孩子的生命。你可以感觉到，整个世界似乎已经串通好了，让这个骇人的举措看上去像是一场主动选择。

Zachary Davis: Beloved is a story about possession, pain, and the psychological effects of slavery.

扎克里·戴维斯：《宠儿》这个故事讲述了占有、创伤和奴隶制带来的心理影响。

Amy Hungerford: The magic is much deeper than a genre or a technique. It's really the magic of seeing the world in a palimpsest of time with connections between human lives and human consciousness that transcends even particular embodiments, particular people. That's the magic that Morrison was creating on the page.

艾米·亨格福德：《宠儿》的魅力远不止于它的体裁和写作技巧。它真正的魅力在于，用多重时间以及人类生命和人类意识之间的联系来看待这个世界。这种联系超越了某个象征的实体，也超越了某个特定的人。这就是莫里森在书中创造的魅力。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Amy Hungerford to discuss Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：改变你和世界的100书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者讨论一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和艾米·亨格福德教授一起讨论托妮·莫里森的《宠儿》。

Zachary Davis: Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. From an early age, stories were a part of her life. Morrison’s parents exposed her to a variety of African-American folk tales and music. She was an avid reader and particularly enjoyed works by Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

扎克里·戴维斯：1931年，托妮·莫里森出生在俄亥俄州的洛雷恩。从小时候起，故事就是她生活的一部分。父母让她接触到了各种非裔美国人的民间故事和音乐。她如饥似渴地阅读各种书籍，尤其喜欢简·奥斯汀和列夫·托尔斯泰的作品。

Zachary Davis: She earned a BA in English from Howard University and a Master of Arts from Cornell University. For the next ten years, Morrison taught English at Texas Southern University and Howard University. She got married and then divorced and had two children.

扎克里·戴维斯：后来，她取得了霍华德大学的英语学士学位和康奈尔大学的文学硕士学位。之后的十年里，她在德克萨斯南方大学和霍华德大学教英语。她结过婚，也离过婚，有两个孩子。

Zachary Davis: While teaching at Howard, Morrison began to experiment with writing fiction. She joined a group of writers who met periodically to discuss their work. By the mid 1960s, Morrison left teaching and became the senior editor in the fiction department for the publisher Random House.

扎克里·戴维斯：在霍华德大学任教期间，莫里森开始尝试写小说。她和一群作家一起，定期聚会讨论自己的作品。到了20世纪60年代中期，莫里森辞去教职，成为了兰登书屋出版社小说部的高级编辑。

Amy Hungerford: And she was the first black woman to be hired as an editor. And she made significant acquisitions for that publisher. She published Gayle Jones. She published Henry Dumas, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森是第一个被聘为编辑的黑人女性。她为该社出版了几部重要的作品，包括盖尔·琼斯、亨利·杜马斯、休伊·牛顿、穆罕默德·阿里和安吉拉·戴维斯的作品。

Amy Hungerford: The period when Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House, the number of black writers published was notably higher than after she left. So she had a real impact, bringing these very important voices into American publishing and, and into world consciousness through their work.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森任职期间，兰登书屋出版的黑人作家作品的数量明显高于她离职之后的数量。她产生了真正的影响，通过他们的作品把这些非常重要的声音带入到美国出版界，让世界意识到他们的存在。

Zachary Davis: While working at Random House, Morrison began writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye. To find time between her job at Random House and raising her two children alone, Morrison would wake up every morning at 4 a.m. to write. She published The Bluest Eye in 1970, when she was 39.

扎克里·戴维斯：在兰登书屋工作期间，莫里森开始写她的第一部小说《最蓝的眼睛》。她要上班，还要独自抚养两个孩子。为了抽出时间，她每天凌晨四点起床写作。1970年，《最蓝的眼睛》出版了，那一年她39岁。

Amy Hungerford: I think she became a writer later in life, having done that work with a kind of knowledge that most young writers just don't have, both of readers and their thinking, but also having thought deeply about the world as an adult, as a mature human being and understanding race in a way that race and its role in American experience in a way that was really quite remarkable.

艾米·亨格福德：她是一个大器晚成的作家。写这部作品的时候，她有着多数年轻作家所不具有的知识。她了解读者，清楚读者的想法。身为一个成熟的成年人，她对世界有着深入的思考，能够从种族及其在美国历史中的作用出发来看待种族问题。这种思考角度非常难能可贵。

Zachary Davis: The Bluest Eye takes place in Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio. It is the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grows up in the years following the Great Depression. Throughout her youth, Pecola is called ugly because of her dark skin. As a result, she desires blue eyes, a feature she equates with whiteness.

扎克里·戴维斯：《最蓝的眼睛》背景设定在莫里森的家乡，也就是俄亥俄州的洛雷恩。小说讲述了非裔美国少女皮科拉在大萧条之后几年里的成长经历。在整个青年时代，皮科拉因为长着黑皮肤而被人们视作丑八怪。她渴望拥有一双蓝眼睛，一双象征着白人身份的蓝眼睛。

Amy Hungerford: And you can see there the same kind of political analysis or understanding of American culture, of racism in American culture. That's very much at the forefront of that novel. And, you know it shows all the marks of her work, deep compassion for a wide variety of characters.

艾米·亨格福德：小说中同样还可以看到对美国文化以及其中种族主义文化的政治分析或解读。这些内容是小说的核心，也展现了莫里森作品的特色，体现了她对各类人物的深切同情。

Zachary Davis: In addition to The Bluest Eye, Morrison published three other novels before Beloved—Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby. In 1983, she left publishing to focus more time on her writing. She also began teaching English again at various universities, eventually landing at Princeton, where she would remain until her retirement.

扎克里·戴维斯：在发表《宠儿》之前，除了《最蓝的眼睛》，莫里森还发表了《秀拉》、《所罗门之歌》和《柏油娃娃》三部小说。1983年，她离开出版界，把更多的时间放在写作上。她又开始在几所大学里教英语，最终来到了普林斯顿，退休前一直在这里任教。

Amy Hungerford: You know, for a long time she taught creative writing at Princeton and she had a kind of different vision of what that looked like. She she called her workshop an atelier, a place for the creation of art, for the stitching together of new work and exploration of writers.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森长期在普林斯顿教创意写作。她对创意写作的看法很特别，把自己的研讨课叫作“工作坊”，鼓励学生创作艺术，编织新作品，研究作家们的旧作。

Amy Hungerford: You know, I think Princeton was an institution that she inhabited for a long period of time and it must have been satisfying to her in some way for her to continue. She did not need to be associated with a university, but the sense of her as a teacher, you can feel it in the writing as well.

艾米·亨格福德：她在普林斯顿待了很久。能这么一直待下去，她估计也非常满足。你不需要把她和哪座大学扯上关系，但那种循循善诱的感觉，想必在她的作品中你也能感受得到。

Zachary Davis: Morrison wrote Beloved in 1987. It was her fourth novel.Would you mind for readers who have never read this to tell us what the story is as a whole and kind of how the story proceeds?

扎克里·戴维斯：1987年，莫里森写下了《宠儿》。这是她的第五部小说。一些听众可能没有读过这本书，您可以给我们讲讲大致的情节吗？整个故事是怎么推进的？

（注：原文序数词错误，疑为口误。在《宠儿》之前出版的有《最蓝的眼睛》、《秀拉》、《所罗门之歌》和《柏油娃娃》，故《宠儿》为第五部。）

Amy Hungerford: So, Beloved is a novel that was inspired by a newspaper clipping and the clipping actually itself appears at a certain point in the novel. It was the clipping from a newspaper, 19th century newspaper that told the story of this woman, Margaret Garner, who, when the slave catchers came to get her, killed her own child rather than have that child be returned to slavery.

艾米·亨格福德：小说《宠儿》的灵感源自一张报纸剪报，内容也反映在了小说的一段情节中。这张剪报来自19世纪的一份报纸，刊载了一个叫玛格丽特·加纳的非裔女子的事迹。奴隶猎人前来抓捕她。为了不让亲生孩子再次沦为奴隶，她杀死了孩子。

Zachary Davis: Margaret Garner was born into slavery in Kentucky. In 1856, when she was twenty two years old, she escaped with her family and fled north to the free state of Ohio. They found refuge with Garner’s uncle.

扎克里·戴维斯：玛格丽特·加纳出生在肯塔基州的奴隶主家中。1856年，也就是她22岁的时候，她和家人一起出逃，向北逃到了自由州俄亥俄州。他们随加纳的叔叔一起，找到了一处藏身之地。

Zachary Davis: Although Garner and her family members were in a free state, they weren’t completely safe. By law, any runaway enslaved person had to be returned to their enslavers. And that’s what happened. U.S. Marshals found the Garners. But before they could arrest the family, Margaret Garner killed her 2-year-old daughter Mary with a butcher’s knife. She prepared to kill her other children and herself but she was arrested before she could do so.

扎克里·戴维斯：虽然身处自由州，但加纳和家人并不完全安全。根据法律规定，任何逃亡的奴隶都必须被送回奴隶主那儿。噩梦真的降临了。美国警员找到了加纳一家。然而在逮捕之前，玛格丽特·加纳用屠刀杀死了两岁的女儿。她还准备杀死其他孩子，再自杀。可是还没来得及动手，她就被逮捕了。

Amy Hungerford: So Morrison takes this enigmatic scrap of history, and she fully embodies this woman to whom she gives the name Sethe. And she tries to create the human being that would find herself at that juncture and take that action.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森拾起了这块神秘的历史碎片。她塑造了一个叫塞丝的黑人女性角色来代表加纳，试图创造出一个在紧要关头会做同样事情的人物。

Zachary Davis: Unlike Garner, the main character Sethe and her family were really free. Beloved begins in 1873, and at that point, slavery was abolished every state. Sethe lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her 18-year-old daughter Denver. But then something mysterious happens.

扎克里·戴维斯：与加纳不同的是，主人公塞丝和她的家人是真正的自由人。《宠儿》的故事开始于1873年，那时美国各州已经废除了奴隶制。塞丝和18岁的女儿丹芙住在俄亥俄州的辛辛那提。然而后来，一些神秘的事情发生了。

Amy Hungerford: A young girl turns up and follows Sethe home essentially, and becomes part of her family. And Sethe calls her Beloved or she calls herself Beloved, and Sethe accepts that name.

艾米·亨格福德：一个年轻女子冒了出来，随塞丝住进了家里，成为了家庭的一员。塞丝叫她“宠儿”。或者说，她说自己叫“宠儿”，而塞丝接受了这个名字。

Amy Hungerford: Sethe’s other daughter, Denver, who is also with her, comes to love Beloved as a sister. And then it turns out the Beloved, you know, this young girl foundling seems to know things about Sethe, about her history. She has a very odd way of talking as if she were somehow unformed, mentally or young or childlike, even baby-like. And so this story unfolds and we learn that Beloved is somehow the incarnation of the child that Sethe has killed.

艾米·亨格福德：塞丝的另一个女儿丹芙也住在一起。她很喜欢宠儿，把她看作姐姐。然而后来，大家渐渐发现宠儿似乎知道塞丝的事情，了解她的过去。宠儿说话的方式也很奇怪，像心智未开的小孩，甚至宛如婴儿一般。故事慢慢展开，我们渐渐发现，从某种程度上说，宠儿是塞丝杀死的孩子还魂变来的。

Zachary Davis: Years earlier, Sethe was enslaved at a Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home. As in the real life story of Margaret Garner, Sethe escaped with her family and fled north to Cincinnati. She was discovered by slave catchers, but before they could arrest her, she grabbed her children, ran to the woodshed, and tried to kill all of them instead of having them be returned to slavery. But like Garner, Sethe only managed to kill one of her children, a two-year-old daughter. The spirit of this daughter has come back and now inhabits Beloved’s body.

扎克里·戴维斯：多年前，塞丝在肯塔基州一个叫“甜蜜之家”的种植园做奴隶。像真实世界中的玛格丽特·加纳一样，塞丝带着家人出逃，向北逃到了辛辛那提。很不幸，她被奴隶猎人找上了门。被捕前，她抓住几个孩子，跑向柴棚，打算杀死他们，好叫他们不要再受奴役。但和加纳一样，塞丝只杀死了其中一个孩子，也就是她两岁的女儿。如今，女儿的怨魂回来了，栖居在宠儿的身体里。

Amy Hungerford: Now, also coming to Sethe’s house is a man named Paul D, who was one of the men enslaved at Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe and her husband and her family were also enslaved. And Paul D comes to find her after slavery has ended and wants to start a life with her, had always been a bit in love with her. And he comes back to find her. They become a couple and they begin to try to love each other in a way that is possible under freedom rather than under slavery.

艾米·亨格福德：塞丝家里还住着一个男人，叫保罗·D，从前和塞丝一家一起在“甜蜜之家”做奴隶。保罗一直有些喜欢塞丝。奴隶制废除后，他找到塞丝，想与她携手开启新生活。于是他回来找到了塞丝。两人成了一对情侣，尝试着以一种自由人才拥有的方式相爱。

Amy Hungerford: That's the basic plot. And what I would say the basic theme is or the preoccupation of the novel is: how can one human being love another in freedom? What does it mean to be a free human being? And what are the implications of freedom for love?

艾米·亨格福德：这就是小说的大致情节。在我看来，这部小说的基本主题或核心议题是：一个人如何自由地爱另一个人？身为自由人意味着什么？自由对爱有哪些影响？

Zachary Davis: Where is the novel set in what time period? And what is going on with Black Americans and the relationship to the state and regimes of oppression?

扎克里·戴维斯：小说的背景设置在什么时候？当时美国黑人经历了什么？他们如何应对种族歧视政权和制度？

Amy Hungerford: So it's, you know, 1870s, 1880s Ohio. This is a place where black communities formed after the civil war and the disruptions of escaping to the north. So it has a kind of history of that of being a place where freedom could be attained.

艾米·亨格福德：故事发生在1870、80年代的俄亥俄州的一个地方。在内战和黑奴艰难北逃的过程中，黑人们建起了这块地方。这儿有着历史的印记，成了自由曙光照拂的地方。

Zachary Davis: Slavery was officially abolished in the United States in 1865. Although this was a step towards legal freedom for many enslaved people in the U.S., life for Black Americans was far from peaceful.

扎克里·戴维斯：1865年，美国正式废除了奴隶制。虽然这在法律上迈出了一大步，解放了美国的奴隶，让他们获得了自由。但在实际生活中，美国黑人过得并不太平。

Amy Hungerford: There are a lot of racial tensions just because of the history of, you know, white racism, white supremacy. So the black residents are impoverished. They have to stick together. They're still subject, if not to slavery, to segregation, the beginnings of Jim Crow at the end of reconstruction. So all of that is part of the reality in which Sethe and her family and their community operate.

艾米·亨格福德：由于长期的种族主义和白人至上主义历史，美国的种族关系仍然非常紧张。黑人生活困顿，只能报团取暖。重建时期结束后，美国多地出台了“吉姆·克劳法”。即使没有了奴隶制的束缚，黑人仍旧处于种族隔离政策的束缚之下。所有这些都是塞丝一家和他们这一群体所面临的部分社会现实。

Zachary Davis: Morrison explores the notions of freedom and possession through Beloved, who wants to possess Sethe’s life, because Sethe possessed hers.

扎克里·戴维斯：莫里森借助《宠儿》探讨了自由和占有这两个概念。宠儿想要霸占塞丝的生活，因为塞丝霸占了她的生命。

Amy Hungerford: So the baby is enraged at having had her life taken from her, rightly so. Any human being should be enraged by that. And yet, when Beloved returns, what she wants is some strange amalgamation of both revenge on her mother for having taken her life, possessed it in a way that slavery, you know, shared that logic. One human being can possess the life of another. Well, in a way, that's what Sethe does when she takes the life of her child.

艾米·亨格福德：宠儿一定很愤怒，愤怒于自己的生命被夺走了。每个人都会因为这个而愤怒。宠儿回来之后的所作所为非常离奇，既想要报复母亲的夺命之举，又想要像奴隶制那样霸占着母亲的生活。她的复仇方式和奴隶制是相通的。一个人会霸占着另一个人的生活。而从某种程度上看，当塞丝杀死孩子的时候，也一同霸占了孩子的生活。

Amy Hungerford: So the baby is enraged and the baby also is hungry, endlessly hungry for her mother's love. And it's in the latter, which ends up sort of eating, almost in a literal way, like Beloved can't get enough sweets and somehow just keeps trying to feed her more and more things and she becomes huge. And in the end, she becomes pregnant. She sleeps with Paul D. And by the end of the novel, she's sort of this monstrous, pregnant, embodied form of this vengeful baby and that vengeful baby wants love.

艾米·亨格福德：孩子被惹怒了，如饥似渴地噬取着母亲的爱。在小说后面，宠儿在作者的笔下变得非常贪吃，吃起甜食来似乎永远都嫌不够，得不停地喂给她更多吃的。她的块头越来越大。在小说末尾，她引诱了保罗·D，怀孕了。到这里，宠儿成了一个怀孕的可怕怪物，成了这个渴望爱与复仇的孩子的化身。

Amy Hungerford: And Morrison, unpacking the emotional mechanisms of this and making it into this incredible drama of possession. She shows what adult love should look like, how it needs to differ from that, in order to be sustaining to the dignity of a free adult woman or a free adult man.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森揭开了其中的情感缘由，将它打造成一出关于霸占与掌控的精彩故事。她告诉了读者成熟的爱应当是什么样，需要什么来让爱不至于这般畸形，好保全一个自由的成年女性或男性的尊严。

Zachary Davis: Even though Sethe is no longer enslaved, she isn’t yet free. Her life is still possessed by Beloved.

扎克里·戴维斯：塞丝不是奴隶了，但她仍然不自由。她的生活仍然被宠儿霸占着。

Amy Hungerford: What is transformed is Sethe’s ability to love herself. She says to Paul D, “my children were my best thing.” And Paul D says, “no, Sethe, you are your own best thing.” That to me, is what Morrison is saying about love in freedom, that in freedom you own yourself and that there was a way in which Sethe’s mother love—and this is kind of a radical idea.And I don't know what one should think about it—but that there's a way in which mother love—the love of the child above the love of self—is related to a form of slavery, of not owning yourself. And so when Paul D says you are your own best thing, she's called to value herself and not to be possessed by anyone, not even her own child.

艾米·亨格福德：塞丝变了，她失去了爱自己的能力。她对保罗·D说：“孩子是我最宝贵的东西。”保罗·D回答道：“不，塞丝，你自己才是最宝贵的。”在我看来，这就是莫里森所说的自由的爱。自由的时候，你尚且拥有自我。而塞丝的母爱带有偏执的成分。我不知道我们应当如何看待，但这种母爱，这种将爱孩子看得比爱自己还要重的念头恰似另一种形式的奴役。在这场奴役中，你渐渐失去了自我。所以保罗·D说“你自己才是最宝贵的”，其实是想叫塞丝在乎一下自己，不要被任何人掳走自我，哪怕这个人是她的孩子。

Zachary Davis: Do you do you think that Beloved does come to that state? Does she develop the kind of self-love and I guess healthy relationships with others that, you know, that Morrison seems to be interested in?

扎克里·戴维斯：你觉得宠儿能达到那种境界吗？她能不能培养出自爱，建立起莫里森欣赏的与他人的健康关系？

Amy Hungerford: No, she does not. She has to be banished by the end. What Morrisson shows us is that this power is so excessive that in the end, when imbued with a kind of supernatural seductiveness, only the the collective of a community can can sort of protect Sethe in the end from this monstrous return to baby.

艾米·亨格福德：她没有。最后，她不得不被赶走。莫里斯向我们展现了，这种爱在最后变得多么偏执。塞丝陷入了超自然力量的诱惑中，在最后，只有邻里的集体力量才能保护她免受孩子怨魂的纠缠。

Zachary Davis: When Sethe took her baby’s life, her community shunned her. But when Beloved comes back, the community comes to Sethe’s rescue.

扎克里·戴维斯：塞丝杀死孩子之后，邻里们对她避之不及。宠儿来了之后，邻里们又前来拯救塞丝。

Amy Hungerford: The community watches what is happening to Sethe at Beloved's hand. They hear through whispers and gossip what's going on. And finally, the community comes together and they say, this is enough. This baby, this returned angry baby has no right to take the life of this woman, no matter what she's done.

艾米·亨格福德：邻里们目睹着宠儿如何操纵、影响着塞丝。他们交头接耳，互相打探。最终，他们聚起来，说：“够了。无论塞丝做了什么，这个孩子、这个归来的怨魂都无权夺走她的生活。”

Amy Hungerford: And there are a couple of women in the group that go at the end to exorcise, to perform a kind of exorcism at Sethe’s house, who remember being the victims of repeated rape by their enslavers, and they remember hating the children born of those rapes. And it's a kind of activation of the complexities, even of mother love of giving birth under the conditions of abuse and slavery. And that power motivates them to go and sing in a community gathered around Sethe’s house. And it's their singing together that drives this baby to vanish.

艾米·亨格福德：在结尾处，一群女人在塞丝家举办了一场驱魔仪式。有女人回忆起自己曾经如何被奴隶主反复强奸，生下了一个自己唾厌的孩子。此情此景勾起了她们的复杂情绪，甚至勾起了母爱，在虐待与奴役中拼命生下孩子的母爱。这股力量让她们上前，聚在塞丝的房子周围一同唱歌。歌声渐渐驱走了宠儿。

Zachary Davis: Beloved immediately became Morrison’s most acclaimed work. In 1987, it was nominated for the National Book Award, and in 1988 it won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It was adapted for film in 1998 and starred Oprah Winfrey. Beloved is still a young work, but its cultural influence can already be seen in how we think about identity and our relationship with the past.

扎克里·戴维斯：《宠儿》一经问世就立刻成为莫里森最受好评的作品。1987年，它获得了美国国家图书奖提名，1988年获得了普利策小说奖。1998年，它被改编成电影，由奥普拉·温弗瑞主演。《宠儿》仍是一部年轻的作品，但它已经带来了文化影响，引领着我们思考我们的身份以及我们与过往的关系。

Amy Hungerford: I certainly see the influence of Beloved on how writers make free with things like the transmission of memory across time. It's a very powerful tool today and one that people I think are hungry for. So I think her work and the way this novel made it believable that you could have a memory that belonged to somebody else.

艾米·亨格福德：《宠儿》一经问世就立刻成为莫里森最受好评的作品。1987年，它获得了美国国家图书奖提名，1988年获得了普利策小说奖。1998年，它被改编成电影，由奥普拉·温弗瑞主演。《宠儿》仍是一部年轻的作品，但它已经带来了文化影响，引领着我们思考我们的身份以及我们与过往的关系。

Amy Hungerford: I think it has joined a cultural effort to connect with the past in a profound way that can really form people and their identities. I think today's thinking about how identity works and how we relate to the past, especially in the U.S. I think it owes a debt to the imaginative work that Beloved did.

艾米·亨格福德：它推动了一种文化趋势，以一种深刻的方式将人们与过去联系起来，塑造了人们与人们的身份。如今，尤其在美国，人们常常谈论身份如何产生、我们如何与过去相连。我觉得这得归功于《宠儿》中的奇思妙想。

Amy Hungerford: For writers, It certainly blazed the way for a kind of ensemble novel that brought the community to life. You can see this in, you know, Louise Erdrich does it for Native Communities and returns to characters. You know, the dedication to represent in fiction communities rather than just a protagonist. That I think has been really important in American fiction particularly. And that's something that I think she showed us not only how to do it, but why it was critically important to do that.

艾米·亨格福德：它为之后的作家开创了复调小说，细致地描绘社群生活。你会看到，路易斯·厄德里克用类似的方法描绘了美国原住民社区，落笔于各种各样的人物，而不仅仅聚焦于主角。我觉得这对美国小说的发展尤为重要。莫里森不仅向我们展现了如何做到这一点，还揭示了为什么这么做很有必要。

Zachary Davis: Is there a genre name for Morrison's writing?

扎克里·戴维斯：莫里森的作品有没有形成一个流派？

Amy Hungerford: I sometimes like to call Morrison's work postmodern, and that's not what most people think postmodernism is. Most people think of a set of white experimental writers, usually male, as what postmodernism is. But why, you know, why would I call Toni Morrison postmodern? Because she takes 19th-century forms. She deploys experimental techniques developed in high modernism by Joyce and others. Faulkner, she's often compared to Faulkner. And she combines those things with a late 20th century, very sophisticated, deeply lived analysis of what it means to be black in America, what it means to inhabit this society after that history or in that history.

艾米·亨格福德：我有时候喜欢把莫里森的作品称为“后现代主义”。当然，这个“后现代”并不是大多数人所说的“后现代”。大多数人口中的“后现代”仅仅是一些白人作家（通常是男性白人作家）的文学实验。那么，为什么我要把托妮·莫里森的作品称作“后现代主义”呢？因为她采用了19世纪的形式，运用了现代主义中乔伊斯、福克纳等人发明的实验性技巧。她本人就常常被人和福克纳拿来做比较。她将这些技巧和20世纪末对黑人复杂精深的分析结合了起来，分析了在美国身为黑人意味着什么，在蓄奴史之中或之后，生活在这个社会意味着什么。

Amy Hungerford: Gosh, that's of the moment. She takes all the resources of two centuries of literary accomplishment in American letters, and she turns those to new uses and makes something entirely her own of it. To me, that's postmodern. We're sort of back in the 19th century and yet way beyond it.

艾米·亨格福德：这可是那个时代的重要成果。她吸收了两个世纪以来美国知识界的所有文学成就，用作新的用途，创造出了完全属于她的东西。我觉得这很“后现代主义”。她为我们再现了19世纪的文学风采，但实际上带给我们的远不止这一点。

Zachary Davis: Through Beloved, Morrison shows readers how possession of one’s life can lead to the destruction of their identity. She illustrates how past traumas impact present life, specifically the traumas of slavery.

扎克里·戴维斯：在《宠儿》中，莫里森向读者展示了，霸占他人的生活会如何瓦解他人的身份。她还展示了过去的创伤、尤其是奴隶制的创伤如何影响了现在的生活。

Zachary Davis: She writes in the preface to Beloved, “In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive…”

扎克里·戴维斯：她在《宠儿》的序言中写道：“为了让奴隶生活经验更为亲切，我希望能有一种一切尽在掌控而又频频失控的感觉贯穿始终；日常生活的秩序和平静将遭到粗暴破坏，让位于饥渴的死者制造的混乱；遗忘的巨大努力将受到绝地求生记忆的威胁……”

Amy Hungerford: There was a time, you know, when I first came to this novel in the early 90s where she was understood, you know, as a feminist writer, as a writer of “ethnic fiction”. And truly, I think in this moment, and because of the incredible psychological and spiritual understanding of human beings that you find throughout her novels, she really reaches beyond those framings. And the stories are classic: their tragedy and comedy, characters with fatal flaws, I mean, these are the the deep resources of literary culture, of storytelling. Let's put it that way, of storytelling. She is a storyteller, I think, for all time.

艾米·亨格福德：曾经，在90年代，我第一次读这本书的时候，莫里森被解读为“女性主义作家”或“少数族裔小说家”。但我觉得如今看来，她的作品贯穿着对人类心理与心灵的深刻剖析，远远超越了女性主义或少数族裔的框架。这些故事非常经典，有喜有悲，人物有着致命缺陷，为文学文化以及小说创作提供了丰富的养料。莫里森是个小说家、一个不朽的小说家。

Amy Hungerford: The times have changed a lot since, you know, since Song of Solomon was published, since Beloved was published. But boy, she understood the durable realities of race in America. Those are not going to change even if we move to better places. But those underpinnings don't change.

艾米·亨格福德：自《所罗门之歌》和《宠儿》出版以来，世事变迁，沧海桑田。不变的是美国的种族现实，这一点恰恰被莫里森观察到了。即便我们朝着更好的方向发展，这些现实不会改变，造就这些现实的根基不会改变。

Amy Hungerford: And her understanding of them and ability to capture them in art, that is something that we will need to return to for a long, long time. And when we're done with that, which maybe someday we will be done with that, we'll want to return for the storytelling, you know, for all the human riches that she has given us in those novels.

艾米·亨格福德：莫里森用艺术的形式阐释、捕捉了这些现实。在之后的很长时间里，我们还需要回顾这些现实。或许有一天，我们完成了这些使命之后，还会想要回过头看看莫里森的作品，看看她在小说中带给我们人类的所有财富。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！