Last night, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was awarded to Aharon Appelfeld's novel "Blooms of Darkness" at a ceremony in London. It was a night for the winner, but also for small publishing houses, which had published five of the six novels on the shortlist, including Appelfeld's (Umberto Eco's "The Prague Cemetery", published by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Random House, was the exception). The prize proved, yet again, how much we need these publishers. Independents have given us everything from the multimillion-selling "Millennium Trilogy" by Stieg Larsson, published by the MacLehose Press, to last night's winner, about moments of hope amid the terrors of the Holocaust, published by Alma Books.

昨晚，在伦敦举行的独立报外国小说奖颁奖仪式上，Aharon Appelfeld的小说《黑暗之花》获奖。这是一个属于得奖者的夜晚，也是一个属于小型出版社的夜晚，这次候选名单上的六部小说中有五部，包括得奖作品在内都是由小型出版社出版的（Umberto Eco的《布拉格墓地》是唯一的例外，由兰登书屋的子出版社Harvill Secker出版）。这次的颁奖再一次证明我们多么需要这些小型出版社。小型独立出版社一直以来给我们带来了那么多的著作，从Stieg Larsson所著，MacLehose出版社出版那本百万销量的《千禧年三部曲》，到昨晚Alma图书出版的赢家－这部关于纳粹大屠杀恐惧之中偶尔透露出希望的小说。

It was also a night for translators. The prize is one of the very few occasions when authors share the spotlight and the prize-money equally with their translators, whose reward doesn't often extend beyond a tiny sum of money for their work and a small credit on a book's title page. But Appelfeld was joined on the stage by Jeffrey M. Green, who has been translating his Hebrew into English for many years, and who as well as a cheque got a chance to speak about the translator's art.

这也是一个属于译者的夜晚。很少会有这种文学奖项能使译者和作者分享关注与奖金。通常译者所能得到的最多不过是一小笔稿费和在扉页上的一行小体字著名。但是昨晚和Appelfeld一起走上领奖台的是多年来一直把他的希伯来语作品翻译为英语的Jeffrey M. Green。Green不但收到了一笔奖金，还有机会在台上致词，谈及翻译的艺术。

He compared translating not to writing but to acting. Translators, he said, have to find their own way to deliver somebody else's words, just as actors do on stage, where each performance of a part, like each translation of a book, will be slightly different from all the others. But he didn't stop there. Writers, too, he said, are often translators of a kind. In "Hamlet", Shakespeare gave us Danish characters speaking Elizabethan English. Appelfeld's characters are native German-speakers. Hugo, an 11-year-old boy, is saved from the Holocaust when his mother smuggles him out of the ghetto into the hands of a friend, Mariana, a prostitute who cares for the boy. Although Appelfeld himself was brought up speaking German, he refuses to write in it, regarding it as the "the language of the murderers". So his characters speak to us in Hebrew. Thanks to the part played by Jeffrey M. Green, they also speak in English.

他将翻译比喻为表演，而不是写作。他说，译者正如舞台上的演员，必须要找到自己的方式来表现他人的词句。舞台上某个角色的多次演绎，就如一本书的多次翻译一样，每一次都会有细微的不同。不过他并没有局限在这方面的讨论。他也提到作者通常也是某种形式上的译者。在《哈姆雷特》中，莎士比亚让丹麦角色说起了伊丽莎白时代的英语。德语是Appelfeld书中角色的母语。11岁的男孩雨果被他母亲偷运出犹太人集中区，送到她的朋友玛丽安手中，逃过了大屠杀。身为妓女的玛丽安照顾了雨果。虽然作者Appelfeld本人从小是说德语长大的，但是他拒绝用德语写作，称其为“杀人者的语言”。因此他作品里的角色说的都是希伯来语。幸亏有Jeffrey M. Green的贡献，他们也能够说英语。