中英双语回忆贾平凹的西大三年（中英双语回忆贾平凹的西大三年）

——十五年后的记忆

Three Years at Northwest University

——Memories after fifteen years

By Jia Pingwa

胡宗锋罗宾•吉尔班克 译

Translated from the Chinese by

Hu Zongfeng & Robin Gilbank

Professor

　一九七二年四月二十八日，汽车将一个十九岁的孩子拉进西大校内，这孩子和他的那只绿皮破箱就被搁置在了陌生的地方。

On 28thApril 1972, a vehicle carried a nineteen year old boy into Northwest University. The boy together with his shabby green case found himself in an unfamiliar place.

这是一个十分孱弱的生命，梦幻般的机遇并没有使他发狂，巨大的忧郁和孤独，他只能小心翼翼地睁眼看世界。他数过，从宿舍到教室是五百二十四步，从教室到图书馆是三百零三步。因为他老是低着头，他发现学校的蚂蚁很多。当眼前有了好些各类鞋脚时，他就踽踽地走了，他走的样子很滑稽，一只极大的书包皮，沉重使他的一个肩膀低下去，一个肩膀高上来。

Thus far his fate had been precarious. He did not lose his head over receiving this dream-like opportunity. Acute loneliness and melancholy caused him to view the world with apprehension. He had counted how from the classroom to the dormitory there were 524 steps and how from the classroom to the library 303 steps. As he always kept his head bowed he discovered that there were so many ants scuttling across the campus. All sorts of shoes crossed his line of vision and he would walk away reluctantly. His manner of walking was clumsy. The burden of a gargantuan schoolbag pressed one of his shoulders down, tilting the other one skyward.

他惟有一次上台参加过集体歌咏，其实嘴张着并没有发声。所以，谁也未注意过他，这正合他的心境。他是一个没有上过高中的乡下人，知识的自卑使他敬畏一切人，悄无声息地坐在阅览室的一角，用一个指头敲老师的家门，默默地听同窗的高谈阔论。但是，旁人的议论和嘲笑并没有使他惶恐和消沉，一次政治考试分数过低，他将试卷贴于床头，早晚让耻辱盯着自己。

He only mounted the stage once to participate in the choral competition. In actual fact, his mouth may have opened but no sound was released. Nobody noticed him and inconspicuousness was exactly what he craved. He was a boy from the countryside who had never attended senior high school. This lacuna left him in thrall of everybody else’s knowledge. Quietly he would consign himself to the corner of a reading room and when he had to knock on a teacher’s front door he would jab the wood with a single pattering finger. His classmates’ rowdy discussions would be audited in silence. However, their mockery and jeers failed to upset or dishearten him. Once he scored a desultory mark in Politics. He pasted the exam paper above the head of his bed so that the object of his shame could look down on him from dawn to dusk.

他当过宿舍的舍长，当然尽职尽责，遗憾的是他没有蚊帐，夏夜的蚊子轮番向他进攻。实在烦躁到极致，他反倒冷静了，想：小小的蚊子能吃完我吗？这蚊子或许是叮过什么更有知识的人的。那么，这蚊子也是知识化了的蚊子，它传染给我的也一定是知识吧。冬天里，他的被子太薄，长长的夜里他的膝盖以下总是凉的，他一直蜷着睡，这虽然影响了他以后继续长高，但这样却练就了他善于聚集内力的功夫。

He once served as prefect of the dormitory. Of course, his discharged his duties with great care. His oly regret was that he did not own a mosquito net. The pests assailed him relentlessly every summer night. Despite being pushed to an extreme of aggravation, he was able to regain his composure. He wondered: “Is there any way that all these tiny mosquitoes can gnaw me into oblivion? Perhaps they bit someone more knowledgeable than me first, so maybe these are wise mosquitoes? They could be passing a touch of that onto me!” In winter, his quilt was too thin. During the long night, he always felt chilly below the knee and so curled into a foetal position. This surely inhibited his growth, but must have trained him to be good at consolidating the inner power of hiskung-fu.

　他无意于将来要当作家，只是什么书都看，看了就作笔记，什么话也不讲。当黄昏一人独行于校内树林子里，面对了所有杨树上那长疤的地方，认定那是人之眼，天地神灵之大眼，便充裕而坚定，长久高望树上的云朵，总要发现那云活活的是一群腾龙跃虎。

He had no intention of being a writer in the future. He read any book he could lay his hands on and jotted down notes after poring over them. All the while he remained tight-lipped about what he was doing. Walking alone in the forest groves of the campus at sunset, he scrutinised all the scars in the bark of the poplars. It was his belief that these were sentient eyes, the eyes of the gods who governed the heavens and the earth. Feeling enriched and determined, he gazed long and intently at the clouds above the trees, always perceiving in them pouncing tigers and leaping dragons.

他的身体先还较好，虽然打篮球别人因个子小不给传球而从此兴趣殆尽，虽然他跳不过鞍马，虽然打乒乓球尽败于女生，但是，当一次献血活动，被抽去300CC之后又将血费购买书了。不久就患了一场大病，再未恢复过来。这好，他却住了单间，有了不上操、不十点熄灯的方便了，但创作活动也于此开始。当今有人批评他的文章多少有病态意味，其实根因也正在此。

His health was at first rather good. As no one was willing to pass the ball to someone so diminutive, his interest in basketball soon dried up. He couldn’t clear the vaulting horse and even lost pingpong matches to female classmates. Once it was time to donate blood he gave 300 cc and used all of the fee to purchase books. Soon afterwards, he was stricken by a serious disease from which he was never to recover. That proved a blessing in disguise. He could now live in a single room, was exempted from morning exercises and not required to observe the 10pm curfew. His creative writing now began its gestation. Nowadays, some critics accuse his articles of having “the air of a sick man.” The root cause of this is how his writing began.

最不幸的是肚子常饥，一下课就去站长长的买饭队，叮叮当当敲自己的碗筷，而一块玉米面发糕和一勺大混菜，总是不品滋味地胡 乱扒下。他有他的改善生活日，一首诗或一篇文章写出，四角五分钱的价格，他可以去边家村食堂买一碗米饭和一碗鸡蛋汤。因为饭菜的诱惑，所以他那时写作极勤。但他的诗只能在班壁报上发表。

The most unfortunate thing is that his stomach now always churned. After class, he was forced to queue in a long line to buy food, clanging his chopsticks against his bowl. He would always polish off a block of cornbread very swiftly together with a ladleful of mixed fried vegetables. Anyhow, he had his own way of giving himself a treat. When a poem or an article of his was published, he would use the 45 cents royalty to buy a bowl of rice and a bowl of egg soup in a restaurant in Bian Family Village. Owing to the seductive quality of rice and vegetables, at that time he wrote extremely prolifically. His poems, however, got no further than the bulletin board displayed in his classroom.

他忘不了的是授过他知识的每一位老师，年长的，年轻的。他热爱每一个同学，男性的，女性的。他梦里还常梦到图书馆二楼阅览室的那把木椅，那树林子中的一块怪模怪样石头，那宿舍窗外的一棵粗桩和细枝组合的杨树，以及那树叶上一只裂背的仅是空壳了的蝉。

What he could never forget were all the teachers young and old. He also felt attached to everyone in his class, whether male or female. In his dreams, he always imagined the wooden chair in the reading room on the second floor of the library, a grotesque carbuncle of stone lying in the forest, the thick trunk and the wiry branches of the poplar tree outside his dormitory window, and the shattered carapace of a cicada on the leaves of the tree.

整整十五年后，他才敢说，他曾经撕过阅览室一张报纸上的一块文章，而且是预谋了一个上午。他掏三倍价为图书馆赔偿的那本书，说丢了那是谎言，其实现在还保藏在他的书柜里。他是在学校偷偷吸烟。他是远远看见一个留辫子的女学生而曾做过一首自己也吃惊的情诗。

Fully fifteen years have gone by. He could not dare to confess that he once tore an article from a newspaper in the reading room. For the whole morning, he had plotted how he would execute this theft. He also lied about losing a library book, paying fines on it three times when it was actually still on his shelf. As a student, he had started to smoke on the sly. When he spied a girl with long pigtails cross his eyeline in the distance he would pen a love poem for her that would surprise even himself.

　　一九七五年的九月，他毕业了，离开校门，他依旧提着那只绿皮破箱，又走向了另一个陌生的地方。

In Spetember 1975, he graduated. He left the university, still carrying his shabby green case. He was again to find himself in another unfamiliar place.