Alice Munro:The Nobel Literature Prize Winner

By Hillel Italie and Malin Rising

If there were a literary award bigger than the Nobel Prize, Alice Munro would probably win that, too.

“Among writers, her name is spoken in hushed1. hushed: 小声的，低声的。tones,” fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood once wrote. “She’s the kind of writer about whom it is often said—no matter how well known she becomes—that she ought to be better known.”

Munro, 82, was awarded literature’s highest honor, saluted by the Nobel committee as a thorough but forgiving chronicler of the human spirit, and her selection marks a number of breakthroughs.2. 82岁的门罗被授予了文学界的最高奖项，这是诺贝尔奖委员会对她全面而宽容地记录人类精神的致敬，她的获选也标志着一系列的突破。salute: 向……致意；forgiving: 宽大的，仁慈的；chronicler: （事件的）记录者。She is the first winner of the $1.2 million prize to be fully identified3. identify: 使与……有关联。with Canada. Saul Bellow won in 1976,but though he was born in Canada, he moved to the U.S. as a boy and is more closely associated with Chicago.

Munro is also the rare author to win for short stories.

“When I began writing there was a very small community of Canadian writers and little attention was paid by the world. Now Canadian writers are read, admired and respected around the globe,” Munro said in a statement issued4. issue: 发表，发布。by her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. She said she hopes the Nobel “fosters further interest in all Canadian writers” and “brings further recognition to the short story form.”5. 她说，她希望这个诺贝尔奖“能激发所有加拿大作家更大的兴趣”，并“让短篇小说这一文学形式得到更多的认可。”foster: 培养，促进。

82岁的爱丽丝·门罗被誉为“加拿大的契诃夫”，她获得了2013年诺贝尔文学奖。这个结果在宣布时让人稍感意外，或许是因为门罗本人太低调了，或许是因为短篇小说好久没有受到如此的重视了。然而，认识门罗的人都会觉得她再出名也不为过……

Her books having sold more than 1 million copies in the U.S. alone, she has long been an international ambassador for the short story, proof that the narrative depth of characterization6. characterization: （小说、戏剧等中的）人物塑造，性格描绘。expected from a novel can be realized in just 30 to 40 pages.

Critics and peers have praised her in every way a writer can be praised: the precision of her language; the perfection of detail; the surprise and logic of her storytelling; the graceful, seamless shifts of moods; the intimacy with every shade of human behavior.7. 评论家和同行们给予了她作为一个作家所能得到的所有赞扬：用词精准、细节完善，故事出乎意料却在逻辑之中，气氛转换流畅自然，人物行为的刻画温暖亲切。seamless: 过渡自然的，不突兀的。Her stories are usually set in Ontario8. Ontario: 安大略省，位于加拿大南部。, her home province. Among her best-known is The Bear Came Over the Mountain, about a woman who begins losing her memory and agrees with her husband that she should be put in a nursing home.

The narrative begins in a relatively tender, traditional mood. But we soon learn that the husband has been unfaithful in the past and didn’t always regret it—“What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being.”9. unfaithful: 不忠的，通奸的；gigantic: 巨大的，庞大的。The wife,meanwhile, has fallen for10. fall for: 对……倾心，迷恋。a man at the nursing home.

In the story Dimensions, Munro introduces a chambermaid named Doree, who needs to take three buses for a visit to a “facility” outside Clinton, Ontario.11. chambermaid: 女服务员；facility: 机构，场所。Munro explains that Doree is happy in her work, that she has been told she is “young and decent looking” and that her picture was once in the newspaper, in the days when her spiked blonde hair was wavy and brown.12. decent: 相当漂亮的；spiked: 有尖顶的，呈锥形的，此处指高高挽起的；wavy: 波浪形的。

Dimensions begins in close-up13. close-up: 特写镜头，接近的观察。, then steadily pulls back. With every page, the story darkens, and terrifies. The “facility” is an institution where Doree’s husband is held. Doree’s picture was in the paper because her husband murdered their children.

“In all the time since what had happened, any thought of the children had been something to get rid of, pull out immediately like a knife in the throat,” Munro writes.14.“事情发生之后的每时每刻，所有关于孩子的念头都必须清除，而清除这些念头就像瞬间从喉咙里拔出刀一样（痛苦），”门罗写道。

Munro won a National Book Critics Circle prize in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman and was a finalist in 2001 for Hateship, Friendship,Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.15. National Book Critics Circle prize:（美国）国家图书批评家奖，于1974年设立，旨在奖励优秀作家；finalist:参加决赛者，此处指门罗的作品入围了最终候选名单；courtship:求爱。She is also a three-time winner of the Governor General’s prize16. Governor General’s prize: 加拿大总督奖，是加拿大文学界的最高奖项。, Canada’s highest literary honor.

Any further awards are likely to be honorary. She told Canada’s National Post that she was “probably not going to write anymore.”

Her most recent collection, Dear Life, came out in 2012.

Starting in the 1960s, when she was first published, she has often contrasted her youth in Wingham, a conservative town west of Toronto,and her life after the social upheaval of the ’60s.17. Wingham: 温厄姆，位于加拿大安大略省；conservative: 保守的；social upheaval of the ’60s: 20世纪60年代的社会突变，剧变。此处指20世纪60年代妇女运动、土著居民反对社会不公平待遇的运动等。Munro herself lived out the fears, and celebrated the liberation, of the educated housewives in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.18. Betty Friedan: 贝蒂·弗雷顿（1921—2006），美国作家，社会活动家和女权主义者，她于1963年发表了《女性的奥秘》，正是这部作品掀起了美国第二次女权运动，弗雷顿因此也被称为第二次女权运动之母；feminine: 女性的，妇女的。

In an interview in 2003, she described the ’60s as “wonderful.”“Because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old,and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing19. prance: 大摇大摆地走，神气活现地走。around,” she said.

The daughter of a fox farmer and a teacher, she was born Alice Anne Laidlaw, a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion.20. 爱丽丝·门罗原名爱丽丝·安·莱德劳，父亲以饲养狐狸为生，母亲是位教师。她在一个没有多少文学气息的小镇里进行文学创作，她就像掩藏一种禁欲一样隐藏着她的文学梦想。

She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, and was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC radio in Canada. She dropped out to marrya fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a fulltime housewife. By her early 30s, she was so confined, frightened and depressed that she could barely write a full sentence.21. 三十出头的时候，她感到十分压抑、恐惧和沮丧，以至于她几乎连一个完整的句子都写不出来了。

Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband, in 1963.Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, she saw her narrative talents resurface but her marriage collapse.22.周围的一切，从成人间的谈话到简单地填写发票，都给了她激励，她发现自己的叙事才华再次浮现，但是她的婚姻也在此时走到了尽头。invoice: 发票，发货清单；resurface: 再次出现，重新露头。

Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades23. Dance of the Happy Shades: 《快乐影子之舞》，为爱丽丝·门罗的第一部短篇小说集，发表于1968年。, came out in 1968 and won the Governor General’s prize.

At least in her work, Munro is among the least political of Nobel winners, who in recent years have included Latin America’s Mario Vargas Llosa and British novelist Doris Lessing.24. Mario Vargas Llosa: 马里奥·巴尔加斯·略萨（1936— ），拥有秘鲁与西班牙双重国籍的作家及诗人，是2010年诺贝尔文学奖得主；Doris Lessing: 多丽丝·莱辛（1919— ），当代英国最重要的作家之一，获得2007年诺贝尔文学奖。In 2003, she told the AP she was not inspired by current events but by memories, anecdotes, gossip. The stories themselves have few topical references or famous names.25. topical: 有关时事的，时下关注的；reference: 提到，论及。

“I don’t do a lot of indicators where you can tell what time it is,because that would impinge on me too much.26. 我不会（在作品中）给出很多提示，让你猜出故事发生的具体时间，因为那样会严重影响到我的写作。indicator: 指示物；impinge on:影响。Somebody writing about now would have to have Iraq in it. They need to have the right music and right celebrities and right style of clothes,” she said. “In ordinary life I am a fairly active, political person. I have opinions and join clubs. But I always want to see what happens with people underneath; it interests me more.”