متن زیر را به فارسی ترجمه کن

YOU’VE SEEN IT HAPPEN. It’s the public-reading train wreck, right up there with “Do you write with
pen or pencil (or the keyboard equivalent)?” If you go to even a very few readings, you take your seat with
a certain dread clinging to your slumping shoulders: when will it come, when will the awful thing be asked,
will it be the first or the second question? It meanders around the hall throughout the reading, until the
tension is almost too much for mere mortals to bear. Then, the author’s thanks to the audience, the general
approbation, and the call for interrogation. Here it comes, to be followed by an almost inaudible groan:
“Where do you get your ideas?”
Um, from my head? To the credit of the writing community, I’ve never
actually heard that response, but you can see the thought form, push forward, be
squelched by the higher being, and slink sulkily back to the dungeon of
wisecrackery. It sounds so naïve, so shallow, so dumb. It sounds like, “How did
you get to be creative, when the rest of us aren’t?” Sometimes it even sounds
like, “What is wrong with you?” I think, however, it’s more than that, although
those questions may be part of the package. It seems to me the question also has
to do with some larger issue of creativity: Why this idea and not that? What
makes one idea more suitable for a novel than some other? What brings you to
borrow from this source rather than some other? Or even, how do you decide
from whom to steal? Sounds better, doesn’t it? But let’s face it: it’s just the same.
Those of us who don’t write novels are always going to wonder at those who do.
Where do they get their ideas? In general, despite the multitude of sources,
there’s one common answer.
Look around.
In a course I regularly teach, there is a novel based on the Old English epic
Beowulf, another based on the author’s time as a soldier in Vietnam, one that
grows out of the writer’s family life on an Indian reservation, yet another that
comes from an early-morning vision combined with a vast knowledge of
Victorian novels, one that is the product of the novelist’s encounter with African
American history, and one that can best be said to spring from, among other
things, drug-induced paranoia coupled with prodigious, and quite useless,
erudition. So where do they get their ideas? Everywhere. And from one place in
particular. Novels come from a host of sources, the most important of which is
always personal experience.
So they’re autobiographical?
No. I mean, yes. I mean, what do you mean? “Autobiographical” is one of
those highly charged and, therefore, highly suspect terms. Like that other
degraded (and related) form, the roman à clef (literally, “novel with a key,”
meaning something close to a one-to-one correspondence with real-life persons
and events). “Autobiographical” generally means that “about me”-ness lurks in
the novel or poem or whatever. Often in the worst way, or at least the way of
least imagination and most lawsuits. Think The Devil Wears Prada or one of
those thinly veiled Hollywood tell-alls. That’s not exactly what I had in mind by
personal experience, although it’s certainly one side of it.
Let’s go back to that course I mentioned a minute ago. What kind of person
writes a novel based on Beowulf? How about a scholar of medieval literature?
That was John Gardner—writer, critic, medievalist, creative-writing teacher
extraordinaire, student of the novel, philosophy, mythology, and Batavia, New
York. His novels engage pretty much all of his interests. Grendel (1971),
obviously, is taken from that first English literary work, Grendel being the
monster who can only be subdued by a hero from outside the warrior
community. Freddy’s Book (1980) made further use of his interest in the Middle
Ages: the novel is a frame tale; the inner narrative is a saga of sixteenth-century
Sweden written by the reclusive giant of the title. He turned to even older source
material in The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), a novel consisting chiefly of a
dialogue between an ancient philosopher and his pupil, and Jason and Medeia
(1973), a verse retelling of the story of the Argonauts and of a wronged wife’s
revenge on her faithless mate. Rust Belt western New York comes into several of
his novels and many of his short stories, most famously in The Sunlight
Dialogues (1972), an encounter between the morose police chief of a mythical
Batavia and a magician/madman/genius/natural-philosopher known as The
Sunlight Man. Their sometimes madcap conversations range across the fields of
ethics, religion, contemporary society, freedom, justice, government, and about
anything else eight hundred pages can hold. The Something Dialogues could be
the title of almost every Gardner novel. His characters are contentious,
thoughtful, and unusually well informed. Each of Grendel’s chapters, for
instance, makes use of a form of philosophy unavailable to the characters of the
source text; Unferth is a “whiny existentialist” (Gardner’s phrase) about twelve
hundred years too early. In October Light (1976), his National Book Award
winner, an elderly farmer and his even older sister have an ongoing dialogue, or
argument or maybe border war, through the door where either he has imprisoned
her or she has locked herself (agency, or at least motive, is a little murky). And
in his final novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), the main character is a
philosopher and many of his dialogues are with persons who are not, cannot, be
there. The novel may or may not pass muster with professional philosophers, but
it wrestles with the big issues of life and death through the medium of fiction.
And it certainly demonstrates one of Gardner’s abiding preoccupations in full
flower.
So where does it all come from? Personal experience. That experience can
take lots of forms: reading, social observation, history, myth, obsession and
preoccupation, family events, personal failings and successes, the lot.