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A Turkish word for melancholy is huzun, and Orhan Pamuk’s writing soaks in it. Certain jazz musicians excepted, few artists conjure sweet sadness as unremittingly.
帕慕克的行文中总是浸透着一个格外伤感的土耳其字眼：“呼愁”(huzun)。除了少数几个爵士乐手，几乎没有任何艺术家能够创作出这样绵绵不绝的甜蜜忧伤之情。
Mr. Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006, sought to tap into “the huzun of an entire city” in his nonfiction book “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (2005). His sprawling new novel is after something similar.
帕慕克是2006年诺贝尔文学奖得主，在他2005年的非虚构文集《伊斯坦布尔：一座城市的记忆》(Istanbul: Memories and the City)一书中努力写出了这种“整个城市笼罩的呼愁”。他最新一部篇幅铺漫的小说也是在追寻类似的东西。
“A Strangeness in My Mind,” Mr. Pamuk’s first novel since “The Museum of Innocence” (2009), is a minor-key epic about life in Istanbul over the past half-century. It floats on a cushion of huzun, the way an air-hockey puck hovers above the game table.
《我意识里的怪癖》(A Strangeness in My Mind)是帕慕克自2009年的《纯真博物馆》(The Museum of Innocence)后的首部小说。它如同一曲小调史诗，吟咏伊斯坦布尔在过去半个世纪里的生活。它漂浮在一层呼愁之上，就像桌面冰球在球桌上方悬浮。
The first thing to know about “A Strangeness in My Mind” is that it ranks with “A Confederacy of Dunces” as a major street-food vendor novel. Its primary character is Mevlut Karatas, who walks Istanbul’s neighborhoods at night calling out: “Booo-zaaaaa. Goooood boozaaaaa.”
关于《我意识里的怪癖》，你要知道的第一件事就是它和《笨蛋联盟》(A Confederacy of Dunces)一样，堪称一本经典的路边食摊小贩小说。它的主角名叫梅弗卢特·卡拉塔斯(Mevlut Karatas)，一到夜里就在伊斯坦布尔沿街叫卖：“卜——茶——，好喝的——卜茶——”
Boza is an ancient fermented beverage, made in Turkey from wheat. It’s yellowish and thick and often topped with cinnamon and roasted chickpeas. Boza has a low alcohol content — so low that, as one character comments, it is “just something someone invented so Muslims could drink alcohol.”
“卜茶”(Boza)是土耳其一种古老的发酵饮料，用小麦制成。颜色澄黄，口味浓郁，上面往往点缀着肉桂和烤鹰嘴豆，其中略含酒精，不过含量很低，正如书中一个角色评论的，“它被发明出来就是为了让穆斯林也能喝酒。”
Boza sellers, Mr. Pamuk notes, have mostly disappeared from Istanbul. By the 1960s and ’70s, Mevlut is among the last of a breed. His call is ripe with huzun. One customer says, “You have a lovely voice, like a muezzin.” He replies, “It’s the emotion in the seller’s voice that really sells the boza.”
帕慕克指出，卜茶小贩已经在伊斯坦布尔近乎绝迹。20世纪六七十年代，梅弗卢特是其中的最后一代人。他的叫卖声中充满了呼愁。一个顾客说，“你的声音真美，好像清真寺塔上的宣礼人。”他答道，“卜茶就是靠着小贩声音里的情感才能卖出去的。”
“A Strangeness in My Mind” is not merely Mevlut’s story. This novel relates, through multiple voices, each jostling for airtime, the lives of a frazzled and often very funny cast of characters. Most are members of Mevlut’s extended family.
《我意识里的怪癖》不仅仅是梅弗卢特的故事。这部小说通过许许多多的声音将一系列疲惫而又往往非常风趣的角色们的生活联系起来，而每一个声音都在力争更多的亮相时间。大多数角色是梅弗卢特大家庭中的亲戚。
They arrive in Istanbul from poor villages in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. They move into crumbling houses on the city’s outskirts before being raked by modernity into tall and disorienting apartment buildings. From this handful of people, Mr. Pamuk evokes the flow of generations of hopeful immigrants into the teeming city.
他们从土耳其安纳托利亚中部贫困的村庄来到伊斯坦布尔，搬进城市郊区破旧的房子，然后又在现代化大潮中被抛进令人迷失的高楼大厦。帕慕克从这一小群人着手写起，描述出一代代充满希望的移民是如何涌入熙熙攘攘的城市。
The primary theme in Mr. Pamuk’s work, powerfully evoked in his eerily fine novel “Snow” (2004), is mental dislocation — life lived between the competing attractions of Western and Eastern values, between secular doubt and religious conviction.
帕慕克在2004年那本怪异而精致的小说《雪》(Snow)中强有力地写到了精神错位这个主题——生活在相互冲突的东西方价值观魅力之间、生活在世俗的怀疑与坚定的信仰之间。
That’s true here, too. Mevlut is pulled, at trying moments, toward a deeper engagement with Islam. But “A Strangeness in My Mind” wears this topic lightly. The book is a hymn to life’s physical and mental chaos, not to the harmonies faith would impose.
这个主题亦存在于《我意识里的怪癖》之中。在某些令人痛苦的艰难时刻，梅弗卢特被更深地推向伊斯兰信仰。但这本书对这个话题涉及不多，它是一曲对生活中灵与肉的混乱的赞歌，而不是信仰所能带来的身心和谐。
A lot happens in “A Strangeness in My Mind.” There are timely births and untimely deaths, feuds and frauds, heartaches by the number. At its center is an unconventional love story.
《我意识里的怪癖》中发生了很多事情。有适时的生育与过早的夭亡、世仇与欺骗、无数心痛。而故事的核心是一个不合传统的爱情故事。
Mevlut is hoodwinked into eloping with the wrong girl, the less attractive older sister of a woman he admired. Theirs becomes a blissful marriage anyway, though they never quite make it out of poverty.
梅弗卢特受到欺骗，和错误的女孩私奔，她是他爱慕的那个女人的姐姐，长相也不好看。不过他们毕竟是成了有福的一对，尽管一生都在受穷。
There are many things to praise in “A Strangeness in My Mind,” which I’ll get to in a moment. What first needs to be said about this amiable novel is that, like boza, its alcohol content is not very high.. At nearly 600 pages, it has the stretch of an epic but not the impact of one. Like boza, it leaves a bit of film on your lip.
《我意识里的怪癖》中有很多值得赞美之处，我会马上讲到。首先，它是一本温和的小说，和卜茶一样，酒精含量不是太高……它有着史诗般的篇幅，接近600页，但没有史诗的冲击力。和卜茶一样，只是在你唇边留下一丝回味。
Melancholy is a hard emotion to sustain; over the long run, it cloys. Reading this novel, I was reminded of a passage in Elif Batuman’s lovely nonfiction book, “The Possessed” (2010). Ms. Batuman, an American writer born to Turkish parents, described how few people in Turkey read novels, and how the melancholy Mr. Pamuk seemed somewhat miserable writing his.
忧郁是一种很难去保持的感情，从长远角度来看会显得发腻。读这本小说的时候，我想起艾丽芙·巴图曼(Elif Batuman)可爱的非虚构作品，2010年的《附体》(The Possessed)。巴图曼是美国作家，她的父母是土耳其人，她在书中描述很少土耳其人读小说，而忧郁的、写小说的帕慕克有时候看上去真是可怜。
About his novel “The Black Book” (1994), she writes: “It was about a man who had lost a woman called ‘Dream.’ This guy was walking around the streets of Istanbul calling: ‘Dream! Dream!’ I remember reading this on a bus in Turkey and feeling deeply, viscerally bored.”
关于他1994年的小说《黑书》(The Black Book)，她写道：“这是一个男人的故事，他失去了一个名叫‘梦’的女人，于是走遍伊斯坦布尔的街头，呼唤着：‘梦！梦！’我记得自己在土耳其的公共汽车读这本书，内心一阵深深的厌倦。”
I was not deeply, viscerally bored by “A Strangeness in My Mind.” But I mostly turned its pages with polite interest rather than real desire. This novel hits its low points in its too frequent nods toward its title, to the strangeness in Mevlut’s mind. This “strangeness” is not so very strange; it comes to seem like little more than a variation on the author’s own brand of huzun.
《我意识里的怪癖》并没有让我内心深深厌倦，但打开这本书的时候，我心中怀着的往往是礼节性的兴趣，而不是真正的渴望。这本小说写得最不好的地方就是它经常呼应标题，写到梅弗卢特意识里的怪癖。这个“怪癖”其实并不太怪；最后只不过是作家自己的呼愁的一个变种。
Mr. Pamuk remains an estimable writer. One of his great gifts is for blending what is clearly a large amount of research, on many topics, into alert, humane, nonwonky prose. One example can stand in for many: his writing about street vendors.
帕慕克仍然是一位非常难能可贵的作家。他最好的天赋就是把他对许多题材的大量研究混合在一起，成为敏锐、富于人文色彩而坚决的行文。举一个例子就够了，他对街头小贩的描写。
He evokes “the golden years of Ottoman-style street food.” He expounds on many dishes, from stuffed mussels and lamb’s head to pan-fried liver. We learn the history of these food sellers. We witness them coping with onerous regulations, fickle customers, mean dogs.
他描述“黄金时代的奥斯曼土耳其风格街头食物”。他详细地描写各种菜肴，从填馅青口、羊头到煎肝脏。我们通过这些食物小贩学到了历史。我们看到他们如何应付繁重的规则、暴躁的顾客和恶犬。
Mr. Pamuk is a subtle writer on about social class. Once dishes like chicken with chickpeas and rice, eaten outside with plastic cutlery by office workers, begin to be seen as poor people’s food, sales shrivel.
帕慕克擅长细微地描写社会阶层。办公室职员在外面用塑料餐具吃的鸡肉鹰嘴豆米饭一旦被视为穷人的食物，销量马上就跌下来了。
Mevlut is among these sellers. At night, he peddles boza. During the day, he sells whatever he can. His wife, who helps prepare the food he hawks, describes herself as “the head chef of a three-wheeled restaurant.”
梅弗卢特也是这些小贩之一。晚上，他兜售卜茶。白天他什么都卖。他的妻子帮他准备他卖的这些食物，说自己是“三轮餐馆的主厨”。
The humor in this novel, which has been lucidly translated by Ekin Oklap, flows freely. The narrators interrupt and contradict one another as if they were talking heads in an early Spike Lee movie.
小说中也包含了大量幽默，由翻译艾金·奥克拉普(Ekin Oklap)流畅地还原。叙事者们彼此打断，彼此矛盾，好像斯派克·李(Spike Lee)早期电影里的旁叙人。
One woman notes the upside of dirt floors: “It took a month before I realized that the more I swept the floor, the higher the ceiling got.” Mevlut, who loves movies, comments on the downside of American and European ones: “You never quite knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.”
一个女人说肮脏的地板也有好处：“我花了一个月才发现，我越扫地，房顶就显得越高。”梅弗卢特爱看电影，他说美国电影和欧洲电影有个缺点：“你永远都分不清谁是好人谁是坏人。”
Yet “A Strangeness in My Mind” lacks the visceral and cerebral impact of Mr. Pamuk’s best novels, notably “Snow” and “My Name Is Red” (2001). For all its melancholy, it verges on being cute. You can say about it what one character says of Mevlut: “He’s a bit of a weirdo, but he’s got a heart of gold.”
是的，《我意识里的怪癖》缺乏帕慕克那些最好的小说当中对心灵与头脑的冲击力，特别是《雪》和《我的名字是红》(My Name Is Red)。它虽有悲凉，却也不无喜乐。你可以用书中一个角色评价梅弗卢特的话来形容它：“他是个怪人，却有一颗金子般的心。”
