[M is for Magic]Introduction 序（附所有插图）

Lala

Introduction

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, and it doesn’t really seem that long ago, I loved books of short stories. Short stories could be read from start to finish in the kind of times I had available for reading—morning break, or after-lunch nap, or on trains. They’d set up, they’d roll, and they’d take you to a new world and deliver you safely back to school or back home in half an hour or so.

Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Horror stays with you hardest. If it brings a real chill to the back of your neck, if once the story is done you find yourself closing the book slowly, for fear of disturbing something, and creeping away, then it’s there for the rest of time. There was a story I read when I was nine that ended with a room covered with snails. I think they were probably man-eating snails, and they were crawling slowly toward someone to eat him. I get the same creeps remembering it now that I did when I read it.

Fantasy gets into your bones. There’s a curve in a road I sometimes pass, a view of a village on rolling green hills, and, behind it, huger, craggier, grayer hills and, in the distance, mountains and mist, that I cannot see without remembering reading The Lord of the Rings. The book is somewhere inside me, and that view brings it to the surface.

And science fiction (although there’s only a little of that here, I’m afraid) takes you across the stars, and into other times and minds. There’s nothing like spending some time inside an alien head to remind us how little divides us, person from person.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

I’ve been writing short stories for almost a quarter of a century now. In the beginning they were a great way to begin to learn my craft as a writer. The hardest thing to do as a young writer is to finish something, and that was what I was learning how to do. These days most of the things I write are long—long comics or long books or long films—and a short story, something that’s finished and over in a weekend or a week, is pure fun.

My favorite short story writers as a boy are, many of them, my favorite short story writers now. People like Saki or Harlan Ellison, like John Collier or Ray Bradbury. Close-up conjurors, who, with just twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, could make you laugh and break your heart, all in a handful of pages.

There’s another good thing about a book of short stories: you don’t have to like them all. If there’s one you don’t enjoy, well, there will be another one along soon.

The stories in here will take you from a hardboiled detective story about nursery rhyme characters to a group of people who like to eat things, from a poem about how to behave if you find yourself in a fairy tale to a story about a boy who runs into a troll beneath a bridge and the bargain they make. There’s a story that will be part of my next children’s book, The Graveyard Book, about a boy who lives in a graveyard and is brought up by dead people, and there’s a story that I wrote when I was a very young writer called “How to Sell the Ponti Bridge,” a fantasy story inspired by a man named “Count” Victor Lustig who really did sell the Eiffel Tower in much the same way (and who died in Alcatraz prison some years later). There are a couple of slightly scary stories, and a couple of mostly funny ones, and a bunch of them that aren’t quite one thing or another, but I hope you’ll like them anyway.

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like, and he published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he’d mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn’t.)

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises….

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以上这段是Neil Gaiman 在M is for Magic短篇集前写的序，哪位同学来翻译一下？

此书为插图版合集（图已经给每篇都加了），除了这篇Introduction 我们全翻译完了，有望为大家制作本电子书。[s:1]
http://www.odyguild.org/bbs/thread-5998-1-1.html

pksunking

很美的散文，我夜班把它翻出来吧。

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谢谢pk，是NG对于创作此本集子里这些故事的一些小感想。

pksunking

序

在我小的时候，那真的不像是那么久以前的事，我喜爱短篇集。在我可以用来阅读的时间里——早茶时，午休后或者火车上，短篇小说可以一口气读完。它们创造、它们展开、它们把你带到一个新的世界里，然后在大约半个小时里，又把你安全的送回学校或家里。

你在花样年华里读过的那些故事从没有真正离开过你。你可能忘了它们的作者或者故事的名字。有时你记不清故事里到底发生了什么，但是如果一个故事打动了你，它就会与你同在，停留在你灵魂深处很少触及的地方。

恐惧把你抓得最紧。如果它真的让你颈后发冷，如果当故事结束时你发现自己慢慢地合上书，生怕惊动了什么，然后蹑手蹑脚地离开，那么以后它就永远伴随着你了。在我九岁的时候曾经读过一个故事，结尾是许多蜗牛布满了一个房间。我想它们大约是吃人的蜗牛，正慢慢爬向一个将被吃掉的人。至今我回想起来仍像当初读它时那么害怕。

幻想会浸入你的骨髓。有时，当我经过一条道路的转弯，看到起伏的、郁郁葱葱的山坡上的小村，以及后面那些更高、更陡峭、更灰暗的丘陵，还有远方的山脉和迷雾，便不由得想起《魔戒之王》。这本书一直在我心底的某处，而眼前的景象使它浮了上来。

而科学幻想（尽管我恐怕这本书里并不多）带你穿越星辰，走进不同的年代和思想。没有什么比花些时间呆在另一个头脑里更能提醒我们人与人之间的差距是多么小。

短篇小说开启了一扇小窗，窥向不同的世界、不同的心灵和不同的梦想。它们是通往宇宙尽头的旅程，却让你能及时赶回来吃晚饭。

四分之一个世纪以来，我一直在写短篇小说。起初，它们是我磨练写作技艺的最好途径。对于一个年轻的作家来说，最难的事情是如何结束一个故事，正是通过写短篇，我学会了怎么去做。那些日子里，我写的东西大多很长——很长的喜剧，很长的书，或是很长的电影——那种可以在一个星期或是一个周末里完成的短篇是一种纯粹的娱乐。

当我还是一个男孩时所珍爱的那些短篇小说家，他们中的大多数，至今仍是我的最爱。比如萨其（Saki）或者哈伦.埃利森（Harlan Ellison），还有约翰.科利尔（John Collier）以及雷‧布莱伯利（Ray Bradbury）。他们是特写的大师，只用二十六个字母和几个标点，在寥寥数页里，就可以让你欢喜让你忧伤。

短篇小说集的另一个优点是：你不必喜欢里面的每一篇。假如其中有一篇你并不欣赏，没关系，很快还会有下一篇的。

这本集子里有一篇关于童谣人物的硬派侦探小说，有一篇描写一群贪吃的人。有一首诗，告诉你假如发现自己走进了童话怎样才算举止得体，有一个故事，讲述一个男孩如何在桥下遇到了巨魔，他们又达成了怎样的协议。这里有一个短篇将是我下一本儿童读物——墓地之书的一部分，讲一个在墓地里生活，被死人养大的男孩。还有一个短篇是在我很年轻的时候写的，叫做“怎样卖出庞狄桥”，这篇幻想小说的灵感，来自一个叫维克托•拉斯提格“伯爵”的人，他真的用差不多一样的方法把埃菲尔铁塔卖了（几年以后，他死在了阿尔卡特拉斯监狱）。这里有几篇稍稍有点儿恐怖，还有几篇算得上是有趣，更多的是那些不知道算是什么的故事，不过，无论如何，我希望你喜欢它们。

在我还是个男孩的时候，雷‧布莱伯利从他的短篇集里挑出一些故事，他认为小读者们会喜欢，他把它们出版并命名为《R代表火箭》以及《S代表太空》。现在我在做着相同的事，于是我问雷他是否介意我把这本书叫做《M代表魔法》。（他并不介意。）

M代表魔法。所有的字母都有魔力，只要你把它们正确地拼到一起。你可以用它们创造魔法，梦想，以及，我希望，甚至是一些惊喜……


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这部集子里的作品只看过《巨魔桥》和《女巫的墓石》，翻译到最后介绍书中故事的那一段有点不知所云了，希望看过的同学指正。

尼尔·盖曼的文笔真是赞，读起来是一种享受，不过看我的译文恐怕是一种折磨了吧。[y:3]

尼尔在这篇序言里讲，读过的小说许多年以后，往往记不清名字和情节，只记得读时的感受。于是尼尔的小说干脆省略了这些情节和背景，只是用他有魔力的文字把那种感受直接传达给你，让你久久不能忘怀。有时觉得尼尔的小说更像是音乐，把那种或忧伤或温暖或恐惧的情绪浸泡在文字里直达你的心底。

谢谢pk，其他几篇你也可以先读一下。

子夜

连这本也翻译了？忽然对那个“NG作品翻译”区里的内容有些好奇了。Lala大人能不能把已经翻译好的作品名称列出来？

pksunking

原帖由 子夜 于 2008-1-29 15:38 发表
连这本也翻译了？忽然对那个“NG作品翻译”区里的内容有些好奇了。Lala大人能不能把已经翻译好的作品名称列出来？

我也是昨天才看到，简直是宝库啊，NG的短篇几乎都翻译了。

Lala

M is for Magic 列表在此
http://www.odyguild.org/bbs/thread-5998-1-1.html

另外，Smoke and Mirrors
Fragile Things
我们也基本都译好了

子夜

Lala大人没看懂在下的意思。在下是说专门开个主题罗列每一篇翻译好的短篇小说的标题，无论是收录在NG的某本小说集里的，还是从未被NG的个人小说集收录过的。这样一来可以满足在下这等闲人的好奇心，二来也可在一定程度上避免新人撞车。

PS 那个The Witch's Headstone的原文在哪可以看见？要HTTP的，FTP太麻烦。不知是译者的原因，还是作者的原因，总觉得有些个地方表述不清，还有逻辑问题（举个例子来说，巴德知道莉莎以前在洗衣房工作，却不知道莉莎以前的工作是洗衣服……OTZ）。当然，如果HTTP上没有就请当在下没问。

lofeiy

我翻译是由原书直接scan得来，不过可能技术疏浅，品质有点不太好，但还是尽量以之为本翻的，边翻边改。

若子夜想看的话，烦pm一下email，我可以直接寄档过去[s:1]

子夜

在下与其是说想看，不如说是想挑刺。大人如此胸怀，真让在下无地自容。所以还是不麻烦lofeiy大人了。

Lala

这等事情我最近忙的没工夫弄啊，请这个版的版主负责或者其他目前空闲的ng fan列一下吧

如果子夜需要英文原文，pm我你的email，就发你邮箱里去好了。