【译言训练营】第3期第7次作业
欧阳淑铭
Dear all，
作业来咯~貌似这篇难度有点大哦，大家得发力了！
原文标题：Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson – review
原文链接地址：http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/25/ten-thousand-saints-henderson-review
1. 作业截止：明天（5月29日）上午12点。
2. 作业要求：请在标题中注明“【译言训练营】”字样，
3. 作业提交：原文任务将于今晚8点半左右提交到译言训练营第3期项目组里，到时会在本邮件里向大家通知原文链接。各位也可在训练营的任务区里认领。
Guardian有时会打不开，我先把原文贴在下方。打不开的童鞋就复制此处的原文翻译。
Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson – review
A high-octane debut novel set in 1980s New York City
Stroll down Saint Mark's Place in New York City today – past the glossy
new high-rises and the twentysomethings dressed in hip high-end fashion
label Band of Outsiders – and you might find it hard to remember the
period in the twilight of the Reagan years when it was the gritty centre
of hardcore punk, the faster, heavier music that succeeded punk rock,
and when crack vials and needles littered the streets. This vanished New
York is the subject of Eleanor Henderson's first novel. It's so far
away it almost seems like a dream.
That might be the subtext of the lovely exchange that opens the book: "'Is it dreamed?' Jude asked Teddy. 'Or dreamt?' Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy's life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas." This lyrical, understated passage shows off Henderson's considerable talents. Teddy and Jude are 16-year-old best friends growing up in smalltown Lintonburg, VT (a fictionalisation of Burlington). They smoke a lot of pot, skip school, invent asinine nicknames for local spots ("Pizza Slut" and "Häagen-Douche") and huff turpentine. They're into the Misfits and Black Flag and Metallica. The first 50 pages of Ten Thousand Saints, which chronicle a single night, offer as tender and fierce a portrait of them as one could ask for.
The night in question is a meandering New Year's Eve spent on the margins, during which Teddy has sex for the first time – with Eliza, the daughter of Jude's father's girlfriend – just hours before his untimely death. The book traces the effects of Teddy's death on a handful of intertwined people, skittering from Lintonburg to New York and back again over the course of 1988. The book's territory – the mid-80s hardcore and straight-edge scene in which scores of punk-rock loving kids renounced drugs, drink, eating animals, and promiscuous sex, in reaction to the perceived excesses of the time, is as central as any character. In the aftermath of Teddy's death, Jude falls into a depression that leads his mother to ship him off to her former husband Les, who abandoned the family and moved to New York City when Jude was nine.
Adrift in the East Village, Jude takes up with Johnny, Teddy's older half-brother, who's become a straight edge Hare Krishna, and gives up drugs. They start a band and form an impromptu family with the pregnant Eliza, protecting Teddy's unborn child from her mother, who wants Eliza to abort it. Confused? You're meant to be. Ten Thousand Saints portrays the chaos of the post-nuclear family in the hands of former hippies, but Henderson never judges her characters, and rarely sentimentalises them.
At its best, this high-octane ensemble novel evocatively charts the way teenagers' lives interconnect. Henderson has hit on a fabulous subject, taking in all the crucial cultural touchstones: CBGB's Sunday hardcore "matinees", the advent of Aids, the anarchist group Missing Foundation, the ties between the straight edge movement and Hare Krishnas. She is first-rate on the adolescent period when you leave your family behind but have no prospect as yet of a new one, and friends assume the importance your parents once had.
At the same time, the novel's events feel as though they take place at the far end of a telescope, rather than right outside our window. Too much of the writing feels studied, and the result is more like a bus tour through the East Village than a dispatch from the streets. After its powerful opening section, the book becomes choppy and overly plotted, and there's curiously little writing about punk rock itself.
Still, Ten Thousand Saints has an intuitive grasp of the hungering souls of adolescents, and Henderson cannily illuminates the contradictions at the core of straight edge – the way violence shadows its obsession with purification, the fact that so many of its adherents were trading drugs or drink for just another peer-driven identity. This isn't, finally, so much a book about music or New York as about the possibilities that are passed by, both as a culture and as individuals. It's too bad, then, that Henderson gets tangled up in her plot and loses sight of her best qualities.
• Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye is published by Virago.
MINDY
--
译言网编辑
QQ：1152888456
Gtalk：ouyang...@gmail.com
TEL：182 111 000 93
朝阳区曙光西里甲1号第三置业大厦B座3206室
欧阳淑铭
大家晚上好，邂逅八十年代的纽约，感觉还不错吧：）
原文任务已提交到项目组，地址如下：
http://source.yeeyan.org/view/432821_723
1. 提交译文前，请在标题中注明【译言训练营】字样；
2. 提交译文后，请在以下链接中提交你的译文地址：
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHNBWE5MaTB4UG40aUdLcTJXN1hpUGc6MQ
Enjoy your visit to NYC in the 1980s and good nite~~
MINDY
欧阳淑铭
http://pro.yeeyan.org/ycamp3/topic/view?id=12860
大家可以在讨论帖里分享自己查找到的资料，或提出自己在翻译中碰到的问题。
各位明天见：）