领域：学术论文 · 人文科学

Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931, was the second of four children. Her father, a shipyard welder and a gifted storyteller, and her mother, a religious woman skilled at singing church songs, moved from the South to Ohio, hoping to raise their children in an environment more welcoming to Black people. Although they had moved to the North, the Woffords maintained a family atmosphere where the oral traditions of Southern Black culture remained highly influential. Undoubtedly, this family atmosphere, filled with songs, stories, and women’s gossip, had a profound impact on her creative writing. A significant aspect of Morrison's literary endeavor has been to craft a distinct voice for Black Americans, one that draws its strength from the oral art forms of Afro-American culture.

Examples of this oral tradition are found throughout Morrison’s novels, where music is used as a tool to express the joys and soothe the sorrows of Black people. This Africanist musical language was often inaccessible to a white audience. By grounding her literary craftsmanship in Black musical traditions, she consciously distances herself from mainstream Anglo-American writers. Through her multi-layered lyrical narration, interweaving stories with music, myth, and other oral forms, Morrison offers readers vivid portrayals of the African-American experience—their love, loneliness, struggles, quests, traditions, and history. The characters and places she created, the scenes she imagined, and her explorations of humanity and bittersweet love all constitute an oeuvre unparalleled in contemporary American literature.

Morrison’s ability to intricately draw on these traditions stems from her rich personal experience. In a 1992 interview, she stated that she considers herself lucky to have learned two languages: “one from books and the other from the storytelling at large family gatherings that always took place when someone came up from the South.” This childhood experience is reflected in her unique writing style, which masterfully combines modern literary forms with ancient modes of discourse.

Music, in particular, held a special power for Morrison. Raised in a music-rich environment, she was surrounded by a family of musicians, including her mother and grandparents. She recalled waking up to her mother’s voice each morning, learning to understand its subtle nuances—its tone, volume, and timbre—which conveyed whether her mother was happy, sad, or angry. In her childhood world, the sound of music often spoke more powerfully than the words themselves.

Though immersed in this environment, Morrison was a listener rather than a performer. Claiming no natural gift for music, she recalled with frustration being sent with her sister to learn piano from a book. This theme of a complex relationship with music—both as a source of cultural heritage and a marker of social status—is powerfully explored in her novel Song of Solomon.

The novel presents characters whose identities are deeply tied to their acceptance or rejection of their musical heritage. For instance, Macon Dead II, who has become well-off and successful, strives to climb the social ladder. As a result, he rejects his sister, Pilate, because of her low social status and her deep connection to their family’s folk traditions. By all accounts, Pilate is a peculiar old woman who makes a living selling bootleg whiskey and lives without modern conveniences. Yet, she is the keeper of the family’s history, which she preserves in the songs she sings—a responsibility she believes was dictated to her by her father’s ghost. Despite his snobbery, Macon cannot resist the temptation of sneaking around Pilate’s house, listening to the three women inside singing by candlelight. He is caught in a dilemma, torn between the restrictive sophistication required for upward mobility and the free, soul-soothing musical expressions emanating from his sister’s home.

Ultimately, Macon chooses to reject Pilate and her music, thereby detaching himself from his family's history and roots. It is his son, Milkman, who embarks on a journey to seek his own identity, a journey that involves reconnecting with the very traditions his father spurned. This quest for self-discovery is intertwined with a mysterious song that holds the key to his family’s past.

The song first appears in the novel on the night of Milkman’s birth. As a man in blue wings attempts suicide, Pilate stands on the hospital steps and begins to sing “in a powerful contralto.” The song, considered the novel's most valuable treasure, is sung by children and elders, evolving as it is passed down. It interweaves the myth of a flying African slave with the history of the Dead family. This act of storytelling through music embeds Afro-American mythology into the family's oral tradition, ensuring it is handed down from generation to generation.

When asked about the "flying African" myth, Morrison explained that while she found references to it in slave narratives, she could not find hard data on its origins. She believed this was precisely its power. Myth, she argued, is “the way people learn narrative. Myth is the first information there is, and it conveys far more than what is explicitly stated.” It is clear that Morrison has faith in the ability of myth to communicate profound, nonspecific knowledge. In Song of Solomon, she gives voice to music to unearth this mythic core, providing a framework for the novel’s central themes of history, identity, and freedom.

翻译考点：
考点1：“church songs”推荐译为“颂歌”或“圣歌”
考点2：“women’s gossip”推荐译为“女性絮语”或“女性八卦”
考点3：“oral tradition”推荐译为“口头传统”
考点4：“flying African”推荐译为“黑人会飞”
考点5：“Milkman”推荐译为“奶娃”
考点6：“bootleg whiskey”推荐译为“私酿酒”或“私酿威士忌”，不能译为“私酒”
考点7：“his sister”需翻译成“他妹妹”，翻译成“他姐姐”错误