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Sedaris doesn’t exaggerate his peculiarities on paper to earn a few laughs.
塞达里斯并没有为博得读者一笑而在作品里夸大自己的个性。
In person, he’s the same neurotic and charming guy that his faithful readers know so well.
他本人就是他的忠实读者所熟知的那个神经质却又十分迷人的家伙。
And yet in Calypso, he occasionally drops his trademark humor in favor of meditations on regret and mortality.
即便如此，在《卡利普索》里，他偶尔还是会放弃他标志性的幽默，转而思索遗憾和死亡等问题。
Sedaris has previously written about his mother in reverent tones:
在那之前，赛达里斯也曾用虔诚的语气描述过他的母亲：
her six children vied for her attention, and she held court at the dinner table every night.
六个孩子个个都想得到她的关注，每天晚上她都是饭桌上的焦点。
She even coached a young Sedaris on how to tweak his anecdotes to make them funnier.
她甚至还指导过小赛达里斯如何添油加醋将轶事写得更有趣。
But in the considered and brutally honest Calypso essay “Why Aren’t You Laughing?,”
但在《卡利普索》里那篇经过深思熟虑、下笔极其诚恳的文章“你为什么不笑？”中，
Sedaris admits that he regrets that he never confronted his mother about her alcoholism.
塞达里斯承认，他很后悔自己没有就母亲的酗酒问题和她当面对质。
In an essay titled “The Spirit World,” Sedaris remembers his last interaction with his sister Tiffany before she died by suicide.
在“精神世界”这篇文章中，塞达里斯回忆了妹妹蒂芙尼自杀前二人最后一次见面的情形。
The two had a difficult relationship and had not spoken for four years when she appeared unannounced at one of his readings in Boston.
两人关系不好，四年不曾说过一句话，后来，她突然出现在了他在波士顿的一次阅读会上。
She called to him from the stage door to the theater.
她在舞台门口喊他。
Sedaris ignored her, turned to a nearby security guard and asked him to shut the door.
塞达里斯没有理她，还转向附近的一名保安，让他把门关上了。
He never saw her again.
从那以后，他再也没有见过她。
“I feel the audience giving me the appropriate reaction when I talk about shutting the door in her face,”
“聊到我当着她的面把门关上这事的时候，我觉得观众的反应是很合理的，”
says Sedaris of reading that essay aloud on his book tour.
塞达里斯谈到自己在新书宣传时大声朗读那篇文章时的情形时说道。
“They didn’t expect that, and then they have to recalibrate their feeling toward me.
“他们都没料到我会那样，他们得重新调整对我的感情。
When I read that the first time, I thought, Do I really want to admit this? But it seemed false not to.
我第一次读那篇文章的时候，我也想过，我真的要承认这件事吗？但不承认好像又有点虚伪。
If you try to make yourself look better than you are, that’s bad.
试图美化自己是很糟糕的。
Especially if you’re making other people look bad, you have to be upfront about how bad you are.”
通过抹黑他人来美化自己就更糟了，你必须正视自己的问题。”
Sedaris says he doesn’t regret anything he’s ever written. But he does dislike his early work.
塞达里斯表示，他不后悔自己写下的每一件事。但他并不喜欢自己早期的作品。
Back then, he didn’t have the luxury of reading stories aloud in front of an audience dozens of times and then tweaking the language before publication.
那时，他还没有机会在观众面前大声反复朗读自己的故事几十遍再在发表前对语言进行调整。
“Everything in my first four or five books I would completely rewrite,” he says.
“前四五本书我每个字都想改，”他说。
“I sign those books sometimes, and I think, whatever is in here cannot be good.”
“有时候签名也会碰到那些书，碰到的时候我心里就会想，里头的内容没一点儿好。”
SEDARIS’ PERFORMANCES are essential to his craft.
这种表演对赛达里斯的写作可谓至关重要。
During his years at the Art Institute of Chicago, he reveled in the laughs he would get from his fellow students during workshops.
在芝加哥艺术学院上学时，同学们在研讨会上的笑声就让他颇为陶醉。
These days, he reads essays aloud on tour, marks down the audience’s reactions to certain sentences,
最近，他会在巡回宣传中朗读他的散文，然后记下观众对某些句子的反应，
returns to his hotel room to revise the story and then adjusts the delivery the next night.
回到酒店后对故事加以修改，继而对次晚的交付做以调整。
He read each of the essays in Calypso onstage at least 50 times before the book was published.
《卡利普索》出版之前，书中的每一篇文章他都在观众面前读过至少50遍。
He loves performing for an audience and even schedules tours when he doesn’t have a new book to promote.
他喜欢给观众展示他的作品，没有新书宣传的时候他也会安排巡演。
He also taps his audiences for material, chatting with every reader who stands in the book-signing line.
他还会到观众中间取材，与排队等他签名的每一位读者聊天。
A week before we spoke, a woman in Calgary, Alberta, claimed that her boyfriend was planning to get a tattoo of a corn dog on his face,
就在本次访谈的一周前，阿尔伯塔省卡尔加里就有一名女子声称，她的男友打算在脸上纹一个热狗，
which might make for a good anecdote in an essay if Sedaris could confirm it was true.
倘若塞达里斯能证实此言非虚的话，或许能写成一个不错的小故事。
A doctor he met at a reading in El Paso, Texas, volunteered to remove that benign tumor he later fed to a turtle.
他在德克萨斯州埃尔帕索的一场读书会上还遇到了一位医生主动请求切除他后来喂给了海龟的那个良性肿瘤。
Sedaris happily took her up on the offer, and in the wee hours of the morning he drove with her to a clinic for the surgery.
塞达里斯欣然接受了她的提议，凌晨时分，他就开车带她去了一家诊所做手术。
He never goes to Apple’s Genius Bar anymore;
他再也不去苹果的天才吧了；
he simply asks from the stage whether any attendees can fix a MacBook and offers them a chance to skip the line in exchange for tech support.
他开始直接在台上问台下的观众有没有人会修苹果笔记本，作为回报，他会优先给他们签名。
That’s no small offer.
这笔买卖可不亏。
The longest Sedaris book signing lasted over 10 hours.
要知道，赛达里斯最长的签售会持续了足足10个多小时。
As we stroll through Manhattan, he shows off the Band-Aids covering his arms.
就在我们漫步在曼哈顿的路上时，他还对我炫耀了他手臂上的创可贴。
He was signing books for so long the night before that his elbows began to bleed through his shirt.
原来，前一天晚上，由于签名时间太长，他的肘部都磨出血了，还渗到了衬衫上。
“Maybe that’s what I need,” he says. “A fatty shirt that also has elbow pads.”
“也许，我需要的是那种衬衫，”他说。“那种不仅宽松，还带有护肘垫的衬衫。”
He looks at me. “Do you think they carry that?”
他看着我。“你觉得市面上会有这种衬衫吗？”
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
