Me and Writing
我笔下的奇异世界
This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was thirteen years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very solemn boy. Not that I was sad, but I simply was paying attention. I'd been given a typewriter by my Uncle George, when he got an electric. He gave me his old Underwood typewriter and I set it up in the ba百度竞价推广ent. I had a secret place under the stairs behind a stack of sheet rock. I sat in there and wrote where my parents could not see me because they were worried, you know, that I didn't go outside. And they believed in the illusion of a balanced life, you know, you do a little bit of this, you do a little bit of that. I just wanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.
我想当作家的念头是在这个夏季冒出来的。那年我十三岁了，戴着一副银边眼镜，是个不苟言笑的男生。倒不是由于心情不好，我只不过在琢磨事儿。乔治叔叔买了一台电打字机后，就把手打打字机给了我。他给我的是一台安德伍牌老式打字机，我把它架在地下室里。楼梯下石砖墙后是我的密室。我坐在里面写东西，父母看不到我，你了解，我之所以要秘密行事是由于他们担忧我总不外出。他们相信生活应该有多方面平衡，就是叫你做做这个又做做那个。而我只想做一件事——练笔。
I liked to write about tornadoes: Tornadoes, which come out of a peaceful summer day in the Midwest. And the sky's blue and then suddenly it's dark as night and this great snake-like cloud comes slithering across the landscape, smashing houses at random, destroying this one, leaving this standing. I liked that idea.
我想写写龙卷风：一个平静的夏日里，在中西部骤然刮起了龙卷风。蔚蓝的天空霎时间变得像夜晚一样漆黑，蛇普通的巨大烟云卷过地面，将房子揉得粉碎，摧毁了这间，放过了那间。我太喜欢写龙卷风了。
I wrote a story, a sort of autobiographical story, about a family from New York, a microbiologist and his actress wife, and their son, who looked, and walked, and talked, and thought, and felt exactly like me. I sat in the backseat and they were driving across the Midwest, and they forgot me... at a gas station. We sTOPped for a rest sTOP... and they forgot me, and they drove away. I walked up the road that they had driven and suddenly the sky turned dark and... a tornado came up and it picked me up and it carried me and dropped me, uninjured, in the yard of a sanctified Brethren family. I knocked on the door and a woman in a white satin gown holding a flaming torch came out and asked me what I wanted. And I was going to tell them that I had to leave to look for my parents and then the dog spoke to me. The dog said, "Stay." So, I stayed. But still, I missed the life of glamour that I had known on New York's exclusive Upper West Side. I love to write stories like that.
我写了一个故事，自传式的故事，说的是一个纽约家庭，家有一个微生物学家，做演员的老婆，还有他们的儿 子--那小孩的模样和走路、说话、考虑的方法简直跟我一样。我坐在汽车的后座，他们开车穿越中西部，后来他们把我忘在了一个加油站。大家停车休息，然后他 们就把我给落下了，开车走了。我沿着他们车驶去的方向走着，忽然间，天空暗了下来， 龙卷风大作，风卷起我吹啊吹，毫发不伤地把我扔在一个圣教徒家的后院里。我敲敲门，一个身穿白色缎袍的女性举着一把熊熊的火炬，走出来问我想做什么。我正 想说我想去找我的父母，一条狗冲着我说话了：“留下来吧。”于是，我就留下了。但，我还是非常怀念在纽约高尚住宅区的好日子。我就喜欢写如此的故事。
I sat there at my Underwood typewriter, but I wished that something real would happen.
我坐在安德伍牌打字机前，想写些真实的事儿。
That was the summer that my cousin, Helen-Marie, came to stay with us suddenly. She was seventeen. She was four years older than I and I'd always admired her. She was lovelier than the rest of us. The rest of us had our family's looks; we had homely faces and she was pretty. She had blonde hair, a rarity in our family.
那年夏季，我的表姐海伦•玛莉忽然来大家家住下。她十七岁，比我大四岁，我非常喜欢她。她比大家家的别的人都可爱。别的人都有着家族的相貌特点，脸蛋儿一点儿也不起眼，她却非常漂亮。那一头金发在大家家族里是极少见的。
Then I wrote a story about her; about a girl who is cooking lunch at home one day and a woman in a white satin dress holding a flaming torch bursts in through the door, and it startles the girl so much that she drops the cast iron skillet on her dog and the dog bites her and she gets an incurable blood disease from this. Doctors give her two weeks to live, and then, on TOP of everything, a tornado comes in and it blows the roof off the house and itimpales four blades of grass in her side. And there's something on that grass that cures that blood disease. Medical science has never seen anything like it. She's cured. She comes home. And that night the dog scratches on her door, and the dog says, "Aren't you curious to know what it was on the grass that cured that blood disease?" I sort of liked the story.
于是我就写了一个关于她的故事，说的是有一天，一个女生正在家做午饭时，有个穿着白色缎袍的女性手里举 着熊熊的火炬从门外闯了进去，女生吓了一大跳，把铁锅砸到了她的狗，狗咬了她一口，她从此就得了一种没法治的血液病。大夫说她只能活两个星期了，这个时候，一 股龙卷风刮了进去，它掀掉屋顶，四片草叶子刺到她的身上。草叶子上面的什么东西就把她的血液病给治好了。医学上从来没见过这种奇事。她痊愈了，回到了 家。那天晚上，小狗抓挠着她的房门，那狗问她说： “你难道不想了解草叶子上面是什么东西治好了你的血液病吗？”我喜欢如此的故事。
