《比利?林恩伊拉克球队力克对手，取得胜利晋级的中场战事》讲的是美伊战争的故事
比利?林恩所在的B班士兵伊拉克球队力克对手，取得胜利晋级，在伊拉克赢得伊拉克球队力克对手，取得胜利晋级了一场3分43秒的短暂胜利。一夜间，他们成了美国的英雄。每个人都说着“感谢你们”，记者、好莱坞导演蜂拥而至。他们甚至还被邀请参加超级碗的中场秀。
绚丽的烟花在耳边炸响，伴舞身上的亮片在身畔旋转，战争仿佛无比遥远。但有那么一刹那，比利觉得还是打仗好，总比被人当舞台布景挪来挪去爽多了。老天作证，打仗确实烂透了，可他实在看不出这种无聊的和平生活又有什么好的。
这一天，比利?林恩遭遇了人生中最大的挑战。
Ben Fountain's blinder of a first novel has been a long time coming.开云体育官网 Fountain is such an egregious late bloomer that, a few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about him.
本·方丹处女作小说的问世姗姗来迟。方丹出乎一般地大器晚成，几年前，马尔科姆·格拉德威尔就在《纽约客》上介绍过他。
egregious | 臭名昭著的
例句：But the most egregious of Trump’s downsides has been his personal behavior, both on the stump, in interviews, in debates and on social media. (Salon, Nov. 9) 特朗普最不堪之处在于他的个人行为，不论在讲台上，采访中，辩论中还是在社交媒体上。
Back in 1988 he left his job as a property lawyer in Dallas, Texas, to write at his kitchen table; his first book, the acclaimed short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was not published until 18 years later, in 2006.
1988年，他辞去德州达拉斯地产律师的工作，开始在厨房的餐桌上写作，他的第一部书《与切·格瓦拉的短暂邂逅》直到18年后的2006年才出版，那是一部为人称赞的短篇故事集。
Now, with Fountain well into his 50s, his full-length debut has finally emerged – a fierce, exhilarating novel about the Iraq war.
如今的方丹已是知天命之年，他的长篇作品终于登场——一部关于伊拉克战争的小说，炽烈而振奋。
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk features no more than a few glimpses of battle. It's set on the home front, in 2004 or thereabouts, over one long Thanksgiving Day match at the Dallas Cowboys' stadium.
《比利·林恩的中场战事》只是记述了这场战争的几场片段。故事发生在大后方，2004年左右，达拉斯牛仔体育馆一场漫长的感恩节比赛。
As Karl Marlantes, the Vietnam veteran and novelist who dubbed it "the Catch-22 of the Iraq war", explained, it is a book about "the American way of watching war". And it is terrific: eloquent and angry, funny and poignant.
把小说誉为“伊拉克战争的《第二十二条军规》”的越战老兵和小说家卡尔·马蓝提斯解释说，这本书有关“美国式观战”，写得太好了：洋洋洒洒，愤怒而有趣，切中要害。
Poignant | 切中悲恸之处的
Sir Elton John said Leonard Cohen was "a giant of a man and a brilliant songwriter", while Boy George called him a "poignant force of energy". （BBC, Nov. 11）埃尔顿·约翰说莱昂纳德·科恩是“伟大的人和出色的作曲家”，博伊·乔治称他是一种“动人心弦的力量”。
It doesn't particularly resemble Catch-22, but it recalls all sorts of good things: the delirious Playboy bunnies stadium scene in Apocalypse Now; the outrageous military banter in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket; the all-American cacophony of Tom Wolfe when he was still funny; Norman Mailer's anatomies of US celebrity; perhaps even the baseball game at the start of Don DeLillo's Underworld.
作品并不太像《第二十二条军规》，却让人诸多联想：《现代启示录》中花花公子兔女郎，她们在体育场中神志错乱；库布里克《全金属外壳》中令人发指的军中玩笑；汤姆·沃尔夫美国式的乱炖写作；诺曼·梅勒对美国名人的解剖；或许还有堂·德里罗《地下世界》开头的棒球比赛。
delirious | 精神错乱的
He was, at that point, reportedly delirious, hallucinating that police and “special forces” were outside his apartment, preparing to seize him.（时代周刊，Nov.8）据说他当时有点癫狂，出现了幻觉，以为警察和“特种部队”在家门外，准备捉他。
Bravo squad are heroes. They've been involved in a firefight in Iraq, in which they not only tore apart a group of insurgents – "beebs" or "hajjis" in the army's harsh dialect – but were filmed doing so by an embedded journalist.
敢死队里都是英雄，他们在伊拉克开火，不仅击溃了叛军组织——用军队那种刺耳的口音说“俾布斯”或“哈吉斯”——还被一名乱入的记者拍了下来。
As a reward they have been plastered with medals and sent home on a two-week propaganda tour. The novel is set on the last day, just before they fly back to Iraq. The men of Bravo are "feeling soft, sated, bleary, under-rested and overproduced" after days of press conferences and nights of bars and strippers.
作为奖励，他们被贴上各种奖章，回国参加为期两周的宣传活动。小说从最后一天开始，他们马上就要飞回伊拉克了。几天的新闻发布会，连夜泡吧，与脱衣舞娘厮混，这让敢死队里的男人们“感觉轻飘飘的，厌腻反胃，睡眼惺忪，休息不足，用力过猛”。
For the eight soldiers, the trip is an ambiguous experience, to say the least, since they also lost one of their men during the fight. "It's kind of weird," says Billy, the book's 19-year-old protagonist. "Being honoured for the worst day of your life."
对于八名士兵而言，说好听点，这次旅行暧昧不清，因为他们在战斗中失去了一个好兄弟。“有点怪怪的。”19岁的主人公比利说。“过了生命中最糟糕的一天，却因此受誉。”
Most of all, it's hard work dealing with the American public, being "passed around like everyone's favourite bong" from the people in the hotel lobbies and football stands to the Texas super-rich in their corporate boxes.
更难的是应对美国公众，他们就像“大家最爱的水烟筒一样被传来传去”，从酒店大堂和足球看台的人群到德克萨斯公司大楼里的超级富豪。
Faced with a bona fide war hero, they "go a little bit out of their heads. They do! They mash in close, push and shove, grab at his arms and talk too loud…"
面对一个如假包换的战斗英雄，他们“有点不太理智。真是如此。他们搅成一团，相互推搡，手挽手，大声说话……”
The book opens with "tag teams of grateful citizens" trampolining "right down the middle" of Billy's hangover, and their patriotic words tumbling around his brain: "terrRist"; "freedom"; "nina leven"; "currj"; "sacrifice".
小说开篇，“感激的公民宛若双打摔跤队”，蹦到醉醺醺的比利“正中间”，一股脑的爱国主义词汇萦绕在他大脑周围：“恐负主义”“自由”“nina leven”“currj”“牺牲”。
Having fought for these people, he looks at them anew, and finds them suddenly troubling: "There's something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That's his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they're all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year."
他为这些人打了仗，现在重新审视，猛然发现他们不对劲儿：“他的美国同胞有点残酷，他们热切若狂，有一种发自内心底的渴求。他觉察到了，他们都想从他那儿得到点什么，一大群还算优渥的律师、牙医、足球妈咪和公司高管，他们都咬牙切齿地要从每年14800美元且没什么前途的低等兵身上得到些什么。”
gnash | 咬牙切齿
The European Union greeted Donald Trump’s election with gnashing of teeth and a typically chaotic “emergency summit” in Brussels over the weekend. （华尔街日报，Nov. 14）特朗普当选让欧盟咬牙切齿，周末在布鲁塞尔召开了“紧急峰会”，一如既往地一团糟。
This is the book's theme: everyone wants a piece of the Bravos.
这就是本书的主题：每个人都想要那么点敢死队的劲头。
There's one long flashback in Billy Lynn, describing Billy's return home to a small Texas town, and some brief passages set in Iraq. Otherwise, it's a day-long set piece evoking America "as a nightmare of superabundance".
这是《比利·林恩》的一场长长的闪回，记述了比利回到德克萨斯小镇的家中，并倒叙了伊拉克的某些片段。否则，小说只是一整天的舞台布景，让人联想到美国“超级过剩的噩梦”。
The Bravos eat a disgustingly big lunch; meet the Dallas Cowboys, "industrial-sized humans" with "beer-keg heads and redwood necks"; listen to grotesque speeches from Norm Oglesby, the team's unlovely owner.
敢死队员们一番饕餮，会见了达拉斯牛仔队队员，还有“脑袋大如啤酒桶、脖子粗如红杉”的“工业化人士”；他们听牛仔队老板诺姆·奥格斯比可笑的演讲。
grotesque | 怪异而可笑
We’ll give him a chance and hope that he does not come into office as the grotesque candidate that he campaigned as.（时代杂志，Nov. 11）我们给了他一个机会，让他就任时不要像他竞选时那样奇葩。
At the centre of the book, there's the half-time show, fronted by Destiny's Child: a jingoistic circus in which the Bravos are forced to march next to cheerleaders and scantily-clad dancers.
在本书一半的时候，有一场中场秀，由真命天女打头阵：这是一个推崇极端爱国主义的马戏团，敢死队被迫紧随啦啦队和近乎裸体的舞者后面游行。
The novel is niftily postmodern, in that it deals with a heavily mediated reality. Bravo squad aren't even called Bravo squad, but that was what the "Fox embed" christened them.
小说是一部精巧的后现代作品，因为它处理了大打折扣的现实。敢死队甚至也不叫敢死队，那是“福克斯推送”授予他们的。
The stadium is dominated by the huge "Jumbotron" screen; Billy wonders whether "maybe the game is just an ad for the ads". But Fountain, like better-known writers of his generation such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has dragged this ironic, media-saturated style back in the direction of sincerity, with rich, sharply drawn characters that you care about.
体育场里被一块巨大的“电视屏幕”占据，比利怀疑“可能比赛只是为了广告而广告”。可方丹与他这一代更著名的作者如乔纳森·弗兰岑和大卫·福斯特·华莱士一样，将这种反讽的、被媒体包围的风格拉回来，真诚地去表现它，塑造出丰满、犀利、吸引人的人物。
Beneath the dazzle, there's a story as old and simple as Kipling's poem "Tommy": "They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls, / But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!"
眼花缭乱的背后，有一个古老而简单的故事，正如吉卜林的诗作《托米》中的话：“他们把我送到画廊，送到音乐厅，可打起仗来，主啊，他们把我推进畜栏。”
Billy Lynn isn't perfect. The plot strands holding the set pieces together are thin: Billy's flirtation with a cheerleader is, as the book itself acknowledges, "the sort of delusion a desperate soldier would dream up".
《比利·林恩》并非完美无缺。把片段牵连在一起的情节线索很弱：比利和一名拉拉队员调情，正如作品自身承认，是“某种绝望的士兵梦想的错觉”。
And the novel is sometimes coarsened by its political agenda. "In case you haven't noticed this is a highly partisan country we live in," says Billy's sergeant. People who support the war, such as Billy's horrendously bigoted dad, tend to be inferior human beings; Bravo squad are suspiciously liberal.
小说有时因其政治议程被粗鄙化。“假设你没注意到我们生活在一个高度党派化的国家，”比利的军士长如是说。支持战争的人，正如比利极度盲从的爸爸，都是下等人，敢死队倒非常自由派。
Mostly, Fountain does an excellent job of grafting an alienated, educated, leftish perspective on to his cast of young soldiers, but at times the mask slips. "They love to talk up God and country but it's the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull," thinks Billy – a great line that doesn't sound much like a 19-year-old who barely graduated from high school.
更重要的，方丹优雅地将异化的、教育良好的左翼视角嫁接到年轻士兵身上，可有时候，这种面具也会脱落。“他们爱和上帝和国家直接对话，可他们却祈祷恶魔，全是些代表着性、死亡和战争的生化小鬼儿，在脑壳子里作祟。”比利的想法听起来不像一个刚高中毕业的19岁男孩。
But then if the novel had a quieter, more realistic voice, it wouldn't be half as fun or interesting. Fountain has a marvellous ear for dialogue, and Billy Lynn is written in a sharp, profane language that makes English English sound terminally dull.
可如果这部小说的声音更平和、更写实，趣味性就丢了大半。方丹对对话尤其敏感，《比利·林恩》充满尖锐、亵渎的语言，让英式英语听上去无趣得无可救药。
Even the rain is rude: "It's raining, sort of, the air pilled with a dangling, brokedick mizzle." Scores of smart metaphors and similes zip by; "their faces set with the pinched look of angry vegans"; "forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town". Billy Lynn is an exhilarating read, and convincingly – if belatedly – damning of Bush's America.
即便下雨也如此粗莽：“下雨了，好像空气里咣当着吊儿郎当、逃避训练的细毛儿”。近百个贴切的隐喻和直喻流淌而来，“他们的脸就像愤怒的吃素者扭曲的表情”，“强作欢呼，就像穷人区的圣诞灯光”。《比利·林恩》读来令人畅快，对小布什治下美国的诅咒令人信服，尽管姗姗来迟。
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