首页 -> 2007年第4期
第四届ＣＡＳＩＯ杯翻译竞赛原文
作者：佚名
(Or Places Called Mama’s)
For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the US release of the British film Trainspotting, and by the opening of Lanford Wilson’s new play Virgil is Still the Frogboy. Mr Wilson’s play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, Long Island, graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clues. This omission has not diminished the show's success.
As Luis Bunuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in Trainspotting; just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it's hip. (Compared to the work of, say, William S. Burroughs, it’s positively cutesy.) It has many admirers, perhaps because they are unable even to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue. The fact remains: Trainspotting contains no mention of persons keeping obsessive notes on the arrival and departure of trains. The only railway engines are to be found on the wallpaper of the central character’s bedroom. Whence, therefore, this choo-choo moniker? Some sort of pun on the word ‘tracks’ may be intended.
Irvine Welsh’s original novel does offer some help. The section titled ‘Trainspotting at Leith Central Station’ takes the characters to a derelict, train-less station, where one of them attacks a derelict human being who is, in fact, his father, doling out a goodly quantity of what Anthony Burgess’s hoodlum Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, would call ‘the old ultraviolence’. Clearly, something metaphorical is being reached for here, though it's not clear exactly what. In addition, Welsh thoughtfully provides a glossary for American readers: ‘Rat-arsed--drunk; wanker - masturbator; thrush - minor sexually transmitted disease’. At least an effort at translation is being made. Out-and-out incomprehensibilists disdain such cosiness.
How many readers of A Clockwork Orange, or viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s film of the book, knew that Burgess took his title from an allegedly common, but actually never-used, British simile: ‘queer as a clockwork orange’? Can anyone recall the meaning of the terms ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and ‘Powaqqatsi’? And were there any secrets encrypted in ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, or was it just a song about a flying girl with a necklace?
Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called Jack. A film about a crazed baseball fan is called The Fan. The film version of Jane Austen’s Emma is called Emma.
However, titular mystification continues to intensify. When Oasis, the British pop phenoms, sing ‘(You’re my) Wonderwall’, what can they mean? ‘I intend to ride over you on my motorbike, round and round, at very high speed?’ Surely not. And Blade Runner? Yes, I know that hunters of android ‘replicants’ are called ‘blade runners’: but why? And yes, yes, William S. Burroughs (again!) used the phrase in a 1979 novel; and, to get really arcane, there’s a 1974 medical thriller called The Bladerunner by the late Dr Alan E. Nourse. But what does any of this have to do with Ridley Scott's movie? Harrison Ford runs not, neither does he blade. Shouldn’t a work of art give us the keys with which to unlock its meanings? But perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps it's just that the phrase sounds cool, thanks to those echoes of Burroughs, Daddy Cool himself.