书写菲利普·罗斯的生活与反生活——伊拉·纳代尔访谈录

Writing about Philip Roth’s Life and Counterlife:An Interview with Ira B.Nadel

伊拉·纳代尔,不列颠哥伦比亚大学英语系教授、加拿大皇家学会院士,国际知名传记作家,已发表众多专著和传记,其新作《菲利普·罗斯:一种反生活》由牛津大学出版社在2021年出版。在这篇由上海外国语大学李锋教授主持的访谈中,纳代尔认为要把握任何一名作家的本质,呈现其人生的不同版本(或者样态)是一个重要途径。对于罗斯而言,尽管其人生充满了各种悖论,但梳理这些矛盾,恰恰是书写其传记的吸引力所在。纳代尔还强调,传记作家应当避免全面性的概括,而要着力针对具体的细节,因为这当中的一大挑战就是如何将罗斯一生中最富代表性、具有典型意义的重要时刻筛选出来为之所用。

Ira B.Nadel is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia,a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,and a world-renowned biographer.He has authored and edited numerous books,and his new biography,Philip Roth:A Counterlife,was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.In this interview by Li Feng,a professor at Shanghai International Studies University,Nadel argues that exploring versions of life,or variations,is an important way to grasp the nature of any writer.For Roth,though his life is full of paradoxes,addressing these contradictions is the very pull of writing biography.Nadel also emphasizes a biographer’s need to get away from generalizations and to deal with specifics since the major challenge is to select and use the most representative moments signaling patterns in Roth’s overall life.