第四届CASIO杯翻译竞赛原文及参考译文

Reservoir Frogs
(Or Places Called Mama’s)<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

For the first time since the decline of Dadaism, we are witnessing a revival in the fine art of meaningless naming. This thought is prompted by the US release of the British film Trainspotting, and by the opening of Lanford Wilson’s new play Virgil is Still the Frogboy. Mr Wilson’s play is not about Virgil. No frogs feature therein. The title is taken from an East Hampton, Long Island, graffito to whose meaning the play offers no clues. This omission has not diminished the show’s success.

As Luis Bunuel knew, obscurity is a characteristic of objects of desire. Accordingly, there is no trainspotting in Trainspotting; just a predictable, even sentimental movie that thinks it’s hip. (Compared to the work of, say, William S. Burroughs, it’s positively cutesy.) It has many admirers, perhaps because they are unable even to understand its title, let alone the fashionably indecipherable argot of the dialogue. The fact remains: Trainspotting contains no mention of persons keeping obsessive notes on the arrival and departure of trains. The only railway engines are to be found on the wallpaper of the central character’s bedroom. Whence, therefore, this choo-choo moniker? Some sort of pun on the word ‘tracks’ may be intended.

Irvine Welsh’s original novel does offer some help. The section titled ‘Trainspotting at Leith Central Station’  takes the characters to a derelict, train-less station, where one of them attacks a derelict human being who is, in fact, his father, doling out a goodly quantity of what Anthony Burgess’s hoodlum Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, would call ‘the old ultraviolence’. Clearly, something metaphorical is being reached for here, though it’s not clear exactly what. In addition, Welsh thoughtfully provides a glossary for American readers: ‘Rat-arsed--drunk; wanker - masturbator; thrush - minor sexually transmitted disease’. At least an effort at translation is being made. Out-and-out incomprehensibilists disdain such cosiness.

How many readers of A Clockwork Orange, or viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s film of the book, knew that Burgess took his title from an allegedly common, but actually never-used, British simile: ‘queer as a clockwork orange’ ? Can anyone recall the meaning of the terms ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and ‘Powaqqatsi’ ? And were there any secrets encrypted in ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, or was it just a song about a flying girl with a necklace?                    

Nowadays, dreary old comprehensibility is still very much around. A film about a boy-man called Jack is called Jack. A film about a crazed baseball fan is called The Fan. The film version of Jane Austen’s Emma is called Emma.

However, titular mystification continues to intensify. When Oasis, the British pop phenoms, sing ‘(You’re my) Wonderwall’, what can they mean? ‘I intend to ride over you on my motorbike, round and round, at very high speed?’ Surely not. And Blade Runner? Yes, I know that hunters of android ‘replicants’ are called ‘blade runners’: but why? And yes, yes, William S. Burroughs (again!) used the phrase in a 1979 novel; and, to get really arcane, there’s a 1974 medical thriller called The Bladerunner by the late Dr Alan E. Nourse. But what does any of this have to do with Ridley Scott’s movie? Harrison Ford runs not, neither does he blade. Shouldn’t a work of art give us the keys with which to unlock its meanings? But perhaps there aren’t any. Perhaps it’s just that the phrase sounds cool, thanks to those echoes of Burroughs, Daddy Cool himself.

In 1928, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali co-directed the Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou, a film about many things, but not Andalusian dogs. So it is with Quentin Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs. No reservoir, no dogs, no use of the words ‘reservoir’, ‘dogs’ or ‘reservoir dogs’ at any point in the movie. No imagery derived from dogs or reservoirs or dogs in reservoirs or reservoirs of dogs. Nada, or, as Mr Pink and Co. would say, ‘Fuckin’ nada.’

The story goes that when the young Tarantino was working in a Los Angeles video store his distate for fancy-pants European auteurs like, for example, Louis Malle manifested itself in an inability to pronounce the titles of their films. Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants defeated him completely (oh reservoir les oh fuck) until he began to refer to it contemptuously as - you guessed it – ‘those, oh, reservoir dogs’. Subsequently he made this the title of his own movie, no doubt as a further gesture of anti-European defiance. Alas, the obliqueness of the gibe meant that the Europeans simply did not comprenday. ‘What we have here,’ as the guy in Cool Hand Luke remarked, ‘is a failure to communicate.’

But these days the thing about incomprehensibility is that people aren’t supposed to get it. In accordance with the new zeitgeist, therefore, the title of this piece has in part been selected – ‘sampled’ – from Lou Reed’s wise advice – ‘Don’t eat at places called Mama’s’ - in the diary of his recent tour. To forestall any attempts at exegesis (‘Author, Citing Dadaism’s Erstwhile Esotericism, Opposes Present-Day “Mamaist” Obfuscations’), I confess that as a title it means nothing at all; but then the very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic. Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude.

August 1996