记者：Peter Stone
译者：许志强
原载《巴黎评论》第八十二期，1981年冬季号
Interviewer: Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?
García Márquez: In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
《巴黎评论》：在平衡真实与想象方面，记者与小说家拥有不同的责任吗？
加西亚·马尔克斯：在新闻中只要有一个事实是假的便损害整个作品。相比之下，在虚构中只要有一个事实是真的便赋予整个作品以合法性。区别只在这里，而它取决于作者的承诺。小说家可以做他想做的任何事，只要能使人相信。
Interviewer: Do you think that it’s common for young writers to deny the worth of their own childhoods and experiences and to intellectualize as you did initially?
García Márquez: No, the process usually takes place the other way around, but if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says “God help me from inventing when I sing.” It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
《巴黎评论》：你是否认为，对于年轻作家来说这是常见的：否认其童年和经验的价值并予以智性化，像你最初所做的那样？
加西亚·马尔克斯：不是的，这个过程通常是以另外的方式发生的。但如果我不得不给年轻的作家一点忠告，我会说，去写他身上遭遇过的东西吧。一个作家是在写他身上遭遇的东西，还是在写他读过的或是听来的东西，总是很容易辨别。巴勃罗·聂鲁达的诗中有一个句子说：“当我歌唱时上帝助我发明。”这总是会把我给逗乐，我的作品获得的最大赞美是想象力，而实际上我所有的作品中没有哪一个句子是没有现实依据的。问题在于，加勒比的现实与最为狂野的想象力相似。
Interviewer: What about the banana fever in One Hundred Years of Solitude? How much of that is based on what the United Fruit Company did?
García Márquez: The banana fever is modeled closely on reality. Of course, I’ve used literary tricks on things which have not been proved historically. For example, the massacre in the square is completely true, but while I wrote it on the basis of testimony and documents, it was never known exactly how many people were killed. I used the figure three thousand, which is obviously an exaggeration. But one of my childhood memories was watching a very, very long train leave the plantation supposedly full of bananas. There could have been three thousand dead on it, eventually to be dumped in the sea. What’s really surprising is that now they speak very naturally in the Congress and the newspapers about the “three thousand dead.” I suspect that half of all our history is made in this fashion. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, the dictator says it doesn’t matter if it’s not true now, because sometime in the future it will be true. Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.
《巴黎评论》：《百年孤独》中的香蕉热又如何呢？它有多少成分是基于联合果品公司的所作所为？
加西亚·马尔克斯：香蕉热是密切地以现实为模本的。当然了，有些事情上面我使用了文学的把戏，而它们还未得到历史的证明。例如，广场上的大屠杀是完全真实的，但我在以证词和文件为依据写作的时候，根本就不能确切地知道有多少人被杀死。我用的数字是三千，那显然是夸张的。但我儿时的一个记忆是目睹一辆很长很长的火车离开种植园，据说满载着香蕉。可能有三千死者在里面，最终被倾倒在大海里。真正让人惊讶的是，现在他们在国会和报纸上非常自然地谈及“三千死者”。我疑心我们全部的历史有一半是以这种方式制成的。在《族长的秋天》中，那位独裁者说，要是现在不真实那也没有关系，因为未来的某个时候它会是真实的。迟早都会这样，人们相信作家胜过相信政府。
Interviewer: Are the characters in The Autumn of the Patriarch, the dictators, for example, modeled after real people? There seem to be similarities with Franco, Perón, and Trujillo.
García Márquez: In every novel, the character is a collage: a collage of different characters that you’ve known, or heard about or read about. I read everything that I could find about Latin American dictators of the last century, and the beginning of this one. I also talked to a lot of people who had lived under dictatorships. I did that for at least ten years. And when I had a clear idea of what the character was going to be like, I made an effort to forget everything I had read and heard, so that I could invent, without using any situation that had occurred in real life. I realized at one point that I myself had not lived for any period of time under a dictatorship, so I thought if I wrote the book in Spain, I could see what the atmosphere was like living in an established dictatorship. But I found that the atmosphere was very different in Spain under Franco from that of a Caribbean dictatorship. So the book was kind of blocked for about a year. There was something missing and I wasn’t sure what it was. Then overnight, I decided that the best thing was that we come back to the Caribbean. So we all moved back to Barranquilla in Colombia. I made a statement to the journalists which they thought was a joke. I said that I was coming back because I had forgotten what a guava smelled like. In truth, it was what I really needed to finish my book. I took a trip through the Caribbean. As I went from island to island, I found the elements which were the ones that had been lacking from my novel.
《巴黎评论》：《族长的秋天》中的角色，例如那位独裁者，是以真人为模特的吗？好像是与佛朗哥、庇隆和特鲁希略有种种相似之处。
加西亚·马尔克斯：每一部小说中的人物都是一个拼贴：你所了解的或是听说的或是读过的不同人物的一个拼贴。我读了我能找到的关于上个世纪和这个世纪初拉美独裁者的所有东西，我也跟许多生活在独裁政体下的人谈过话。我那么做至少有十年。然后当我对人物的面貌有了一个清楚的想法时，便努力忘记读过的和听到过的一切，这样我就可以发明，无需使用真实生活中已经发生过的情境。某一点上我认识到，我自己并没有在独裁政体下的任何时期生活过，于是我想，要是我在西班牙写这本书，我就能够看到在公认的独裁政体下生活会是一种什么样的氛围。但我发现，佛朗哥统治下的西班牙，其氛围不同于那种加勒比的独裁政体。于是那本书卡住了有一年光景。缺了点什么，而我又拿不准缺的是什么。然后一夜之间，我做出决定，咱们最好是回加勒比去。于是我们全家搬回到哥伦比亚的巴兰基利亚。我对记者发布了一个声明，他们都以为是开玩笑。我说，我回来是因为我忘记番石榴闻起来是什么味道了。说真的，那就是我要完成这本书所真正需要的东西。我做了一次穿越加勒比的旅行。在我从一个岛屿到另一个岛屿的旅程中，我找到了那些元素，而那是我的小说一直缺乏的东西。
Interviewer: You often use the theme of the solitude of power.
García Márquez: The more power you have, the harder it is to know who is lying to you and who is not. When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that’s the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality; everything is in concert to isolate him.
《巴黎评论》：你经常使用孤独的权力这个主题。
加西亚·马尔克斯：你越是拥有权力，你就越是难以知道谁在对你撒谎而谁没有撒谎。当你到达绝对的权力，你和现实就没有了联系，而这是孤独所能有的最坏的种类。一个非常有权力的人、一个独裁者，被利益和人所包围，那些人的最终目标是要把他与现实隔绝；一切都是在齐心协力地孤立他。
Interviewer: What about the solitude of the writer? Is this different?
García Márquez: It has a lot to do with the solitude of power. The writer’s very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it, in an ivory tower, as they say. Journalism is a very good guard against that. That’s why I have always tried to keep on doing journalism, because it keeps me in contact with the real world, particularly political journalism and politics. The solitude that threatened me after One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t the solitude of the writer; it was the solitude of fame, which resembles the solitude of power much more. My friends defended me from that one, my friends who are always there.
《巴黎评论》：你如何看待作家的孤独？它有区别吗？
加西亚·马尔克斯：它和权力的孤独大为相关。作家描绘现实的非常企图，经常导致他用扭曲的观点去看待它。为了试图将现实变形，他会最终丧失与它的接触，关在一座象牙塔里，就像他们所说的那样。对此，新闻工作是一种非常好的防范。这便是我一直想要不停地做新闻工作的原因，因为它让我保持与真实世界的接触，尤其是政治性的新闻工作和政治。《百年孤独》之后威胁我的孤独，不是作家的那种孤独；它是名声的孤独，它与权力的孤独更为类似。幸好我的朋友总是在那儿保护我免于陷入那种处境。
Interviewer: How?
García Márquez: Because I have managed to keep the same friends all my life. I mean I don’t break or cut myself off from my old friends, and they’re the ones who bring me back to earth; they always keep their feet on the ground and they’re not famous.
《巴黎评论》：怎么个保护法？
加西亚·马尔克斯：因为我这一生都在设法保留相同的朋友。我的意思是说，我不跟老朋友断绝或割断联系，而他们是那些把我带回尘世的人；他们总是脚踏实地，而且他们并不著名。
Interviewer: What about artificial stimulants?
García Márquez: One thing that Hemingway wrote that greatly impressed me was that writing for him was like boxing. He took care of his health and his well-being. Faulkner had a reputation of being a drunkard, but in every interview that he gave he said that it was impossible to write one line when drunk. Hemingway said this too. Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.
《巴黎评论》：那怎么看待人造兴奋剂呢？
加西亚·马尔克斯：海明威写过的一件事让我感到印象极为深刻，那就是写作之于他就像拳击。他关心他的健康和幸福。福克纳有酒鬼的名声，但是在他的每一篇访谈中他都说，醉酒时哪怕要写出一个句子都是不可能的。海明威也这么说过。糟糕的读者问过我，我写某些作品时是否吸毒，但这证明他们对于文学和毒品都是一无所知。要成为一个好作家，你得在写作的每一个时刻都保持绝对的清醒，而且要保持良好的健康状态。我非常反对有关写作的那种罗曼蒂克观念，那种观念坚持认为，写作的行为是一种牺牲，经济状况或情绪状态越是糟糕，写作就越好。我认为，你得要处在一种非常好的情绪和身体状态当中。对我来说，文学创作需要良好的健康，而“迷惘的一代”懂得这一点，他们是热爱生活的人。
Interviewer: Blaise Cendrars said that writing is a privilege compared to most work, and that writers exaggerate their suffering. What do you think?
García Márquez: I think that writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction. I think that I’m excessively demanding of myself and others because I cannot tolerate errors; I think that it is a privilege to do anything to a perfect degree. It is true though that writers are often megalomaniacs and they consider themselves to be the center of the universe and society’s conscience. But what I most admire is something well done. I’m always very happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.
《巴黎评论》：布莱斯·桑德拉尔说，较之于绝大部分工作，写作都是一种特权，而作家夸大了他们的痛苦。这一点你是怎么看的？
加西亚·马尔克斯：我认为，写作是非常难的，不过，任何悉心从事的工作都是如此。然而，所谓的特权就是去做一种让自己满意的工作。我觉得，我对自己和别人的要求都过于苛刻，因为我没法容忍错误；我想那是一种把事情做到完美程度的特权。不过这倒是真的，作家经常是一些夸大狂患者，他们认为自己是宇宙和社会良知的中心。不过最令我钦佩的就是把事情做好的人。我在旅行的时候，知道飞行员比我这个作家更好，我总是非常高兴的。
Interviewer: When do you work best now? Do you have a work schedule?
García Márquez: When I became a professional writer the biggest problem I had was my schedule. Being a journalist meant working at night. When I started writing full-time I was forty years old, my schedule was basically from nine o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon when my sons came back from school. Since I was so used to hard work, I felt guilty that I was only working in the morning; so I tried to work in the afternoons, but I discovered that what I did in the afternoon had to be done over again the next morning. So I decided that I would just work from nine until two-thirty and not do anything else. In the afternoons I have appointments and interviews and anything else that might come up. I have another problem in that I can only work in surroundings that are familiar and have already been warmed up with my work. I cannot write in hotels or borrowed rooms or on borrowed typewriters. This creates problems because when I travel I can’t work. Of course, you’re always trying to find a pretext to work less. That’s why the conditions you impose on yourself are more difficult all the time. You hope for inspiration whatever the circumstances. That’s a word the romantics exploited a lot. My Marxist comrades have a lot of difficulty accepting the word, but whatever you call it, I’m convinced that there is a special state of mind in which you can write with great ease and things just flow. All the pretexts—such as the one where you can only write at home—disappear. That moment and that state of mind seem to come when you have found the right theme and the right ways of treating it. And it has to be something you really like, too, because there is no worse job than doing something you don’t like.
《巴黎评论》：现在什么时候是你的最佳工作时间？你有工作时间表吗？
加西亚·马尔克斯：当我成了职业作家，我碰到的最大问题就是时间表了。做记者意味着在夜间工作。我是在四十岁开始全职写作的，我的时间表基本上是早晨九点到下午两点，两点之后我儿子放学回家。既然我是如此习惯于艰苦的工作，那么只在早上工作我会觉得内疚；于是我试着在下午工作，但我发现，我下午做的东西到了次日早晨需要返工。于是我决定，我就从九点做到两点半吧，不做别的事情。下午我应对约会和访谈还有其他会出现的什么事。另外一个问题是我只能在熟悉的环境里工作，我已经工作过的环境。我没法在旅馆里或是在借来的房间里写作，没法在借来的打字机上写作。这就产生了问题，因为旅行时我没法工作。当然了，你总是试图找借口少干点活。这就是为什么，你强加给自己的种种条件始终是更加的艰难的原因之所在。不管在什么情况下你都寄希望于灵感。这是浪漫派大加开发的一个词。我那些信奉马克思主义的同志们接受这个词非常困难，但是不管你怎么称呼它，我总是相信存在着一种特殊的精神状态，在那种状态下你可以写得轻松自如，思如泉涌。所有的借口，诸如你只能在家里写作之类，都消失了。当你找到了正确的主题以及处理它的正确的方式，那种时刻和那种精神状态似乎就到来了。而它也只能成为你真正喜欢的东西，因为，没有哪种工作比做你不喜欢的事情更加糟糕。
Interviewer: Can you distinguish between inspiration and intuition?
García Márquez: Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one which you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to writing fiction, is a special quality which helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge, or any other special kind of learning. The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It’s a way of having experience without having to struggle through it. For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it’s contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world—in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition has the advantage that either it is, or it isn’t. You don’t struggle to try to put a round peg into a square hole.
《巴黎评论》：能对灵感和直觉做个区分吗？
加西亚·马尔克斯：灵感就是你找到了正确的主题、你确实喜欢的主题，而那使工作变得大为容易。直觉，也是写小说的基础，是一种特殊的品质，不需要确切的知识或其他任何特殊的学问就能帮助你辨别真伪。靠直觉而非别的东西可以更加轻易地弄懂重力法则。这是一种获得经验的方式，无需勉力穿凿附会。对于小说家而言，直觉是根本。它与理智主义基本上相反，而理智主义可能是这个世界上我最厌恶的东西了——是就把真实世界转变为一种不可动摇的理论而言。直觉具备非此即彼的优点，你不会试着把圆钉费力塞进方洞里去。
Interviewer: How do you regard translators?
García Márquez: I have great admiration for translators except for the ones who use footnotes. They are always trying to explain to the reader something which the author probably did not mean; since it’s there, the reader has to put up with it. Translating is a very difficult job, not at all rewarding, and very badly paid. A good translation is always a re-creation in another language. That’s why I have such great admiration for Gregory Rabassa. My books have been translated into twenty-one languages and Rabassa is the only translator who has never asked for something to be clarified so he can put a footnote in. I think that my work has been completely re-created in English. There are parts of the book which are very difficult to follow literally. The impression one gets is that the translator read the book and then rewrote it from his recollections. That’s why I have such admiration for translators. They are intuitive rather than intellectual. Not only is what publishers pay them completely miserable, but they don’t see their work as literary creation. There are some books I would have liked to translate into Spanish, but they would have involved as much work as writing my own books and I wouldn’t have made enough money to eat.
《巴黎评论》：你怎么看翻译家呢？
加西亚·马尔克斯：我极为钦佩翻译家，除了那些使用脚注的人。他们老是想要给读者解释什么，而作家可能并没有那种意思；它既然在那儿了，读者也只好忍受。翻译是一桩非常困难的工作，根本没有奖赏，报酬非常低。好的翻译总不外乎是用另一种语言的再创作。这就是我如此钦佩格里戈里·拉巴萨的原因。我的书被译成二十一种语言，而拉巴萨是唯一一位从不向我问个明白，以便加上脚注的译者。我觉得我的作品在英语中是完全得到了再创作。书中有些部分字面上是很难读懂的。人们得到的印象是译者读了书，然后根据记忆重写。这就是我如此钦佩翻译家的原因。他们是直觉多于理智。出版商不仅支付给他们低得可怜的报酬，也不把他们的工作视为文学创作。有一些书我本来是想译成西班牙语的，但是要投入的工作会跟我自己写书需要的一样多，而我还没有赚到足够的钱来糊口呢。
Interviewer: Do you think that fame or success coming too early in a writer’s career is bad?
García Márquez: At any age it’s bad. I would have liked for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where you turn into a kind of merchandise.
《巴黎评论》：你认为在作家的生涯中名气或成功来得太早是不好的吗？
加西亚·马尔克斯：任何年龄段上都是不好的。我本来是想死后才让我的书获得承认，至少在资本主义国家里，届时你将变成一种商品。
Interviewer: Why do you think fame is so destructive for a writer?
García Márquez: Primarily because it invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world. A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don’t really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn’t have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage in fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you’re famous for twenty-four hours a day and you can’t say, “Okay, I won’t be famous until tomorrow,” or press a button and say, “I won’t be famous here or now.”
《巴黎评论》：为什么你认为名气对作家这么有破坏性呢？
加西亚·马尔克斯：主要是因为它侵害你的私生活。它拿走你和朋友共度的时间、你可以工作的时间，它会让你与真实世界隔离。一个想要继续写作的著名作家得要不断地保护自己免受名气的侵害。我真的不喜欢这么说，因为听起来一点都不真诚，可我真的是想要让我的书在我死后出版，这样我就可以做一个大作家，用不着去对付名声这档子事了。拿我来说吧，名声的唯一好处就是我可以把它用于政治，否则就太不舒服了。问题在于，你一天二十四小时都有名，而你又不能说“好吧，到了明天再有名吧”，或是摁一下按钮说“这会儿我不想有名”。
Interviewer: Do you think any books can be translated into films successfully?
García Márquez: I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.
《巴黎评论》：你是否认为任何书籍都能被成功地翻拍成电影？
加西亚·马尔克斯：我想不出有哪一部电影是在好小说的基础上提高的，可我能想到有很多好电影倒是出自于相当蹩脚的小说。
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