【搬运+翻译】作者费兰特官网po的洛杉矶时报采访 | In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels – Los Angeles Times

2020.7.13 b站的费兰特纪录片： Ferrante Fever

搬运地址：埃莱娜费兰特 文字采访网站链接

Do you recall when you first had the idea for “My Brilliant Friend”? 答：I can’t give you a precise answer. It may have had its origin in the death of a friend of mine, or in a crowded wedding celebration, or perhaps in the need to return to themes and images of an earlier book, “The Lost Daughter.” One never knows where a story comes from; it’s the product of a variety of suggestions that, together with others that you are not aware of and never will be, excite your mind.

费兰特：我已经记不清一开始有《我的天才女友》这个故事时的确切情形了。可能来源于我的一个朋友的去世，也可能产自于一场热闹拥挤的婚礼，也或是想要回归于我之前一本书《失落的女儿》里面的主题和画面。一个作家无法确定一个故事的精确来源，因为这常常是各种各样，甚至一些你自己都没意识到的，能够使你脑神经兴奋的建议的汇聚。

Did you know from the beginning that the complete work would require four volumes? 答：No. In its first rough draft, the story of Lila and Lenù fit very easily into a single, substantial volume. Only when I began to work on that first text did I understand that there would be two, three, four volumes.

费兰特：一开始我并不知道这个故事会写成四本书。起稿时，我以为一本书就可以讲完莉娜和莱农的故事。但是当我开始着笔把故事写成文字时，才意识到应该会有第二本、第三本、第四本书。

Was the whole story planned in advance before the actual writing started? 答：No, I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line.

费兰特：在开始写作前，我并没有把整个故事大纲都写出来，我不喜欢把故事全都计划好。一个详细的写作大纲会让我对写这个故事失去兴趣。即便是一个简短的口头梗概也会让我的写作欲望消失殆尽。我是那种在开始写作之前只记住故事中我想表达的一些必要元素，剩下的就交由写作时一字一句的灵感。

The first book of the series was published [in Italy] in 2011, the last in 2014 — a short period of time for such an ambitious endeavor. Had you written most of the series before the publication of the first volume? Can you tell us about the timing of the writing/publication of the novel? 答：I started in 2009 and spent a year, more or less, completing the entire story, with its various turning points. Then I began to revise, and I discovered with great pleasure that from the first page, the text was expanding; it grew and grew, becoming more detailed. At the end of 2010, given the mass of pages that had accumulated merely for telling the story of the childhood and adolescence of Lila and Lenù, the publisher and I decided to publish it in several volumes.

费兰特：从2009年我开始写这个故事，花了大概一年的时间断断续续把故事写完。当我开始第一次修稿的时候，字数越写越多，故事也变得更加具体。到2010年底，因为光是写莉娜和莱农童年和青少年的故事就积累了大量的页数，我的出版社和我决定将这个故事写成一个系列。

I imagine that when the first novel of the series was published, you were able to write in tranquility. Then came the novel’s extraordinary success, which could have jeopardized your writing. How were you able to keep your work from being disrupted by that overwhelming success?

答：It was a completely new experience for me. As a child, I liked telling stories and finding effective words for the small audience of kids of my age who gathered around me. It was electrifying to sense their encouragement, to feel that my listeners wanted me to continue, to pick up the story again the next day, the next week. It was a thrilling endeavor and an exciting responsibility. I think I felt something similar between 2011 and 2014. Once I was cut off from the media clamor — which was possible thanks to the absence that I chose starting in 1990 — that childhood pleasure returned: of giving form to a story while an increasingly vast and attentive audience wants you to tell more and more. While readers were reading the first volume, I was refining and finishing the second; while readers were reading the second, I was refining and completing the third; and so on.

费兰特：这部小说的巨大成功对我而言完全是一种全新的人生体验。小时候，我喜欢被一小簇和我年纪差不多的小孩包围着，听我用引人入胜的语言讲故事。每次感受到他们希望我把故事继续讲下去的那种鼓舞总让我心神激荡。这对我来说是一种无上的成就，也是一份责任。我觉得我在2010到2014年之间，就是怀着这种感受在创作。只要我从媒体的喧嚣中抽离（还好我在1990年开始就有意识地隔绝媒体），童年给一群沉浸在故事中并且想要听到更多的听众们讲故事的乐趣就能回到我身边。读者们阅读我第一本书的时候，我已经在润色完成第二本；当他们读第二本的时候，我已经快写完第三本。

Looking back, how would you describe the writing process? Was it effortless and smooth from the start? Or, on the contrary, did you have moments of doubt? Did you go through many drafts, with a lot of cutting and editing?

答：In the past, I’ve had a lot of problems with writing. I’ve always written, ever since adolescence, but it was a struggle, and I was generally dissatisfied with the result. The consequence is that I’ve rarely been convinced that I should publish. In the case of this very long story, things went differently. The first draft rolled along without running into any obstacles: The pure pleasure of telling a story dominated. Also, the work that ensued in the following years was surprisingly easy, a kind of permanent party. The honing of the four volumes, their polishing for publication, was essentially faithful to the first rough drafts and at the same time expanded and complicated the material. No crisis, in other words, no doubts, very few cuts, few rewritings, a cascade of new inserts. In my mind, there remains the impression of a tidal wave, and when it’s gone, you’re happy that you’re still alive.

费兰特：我以前的写作有很多毛病。虽然我从青少年时期就开始了写作，但是过程总是很艰辛，而且我对写出来的东西都不满意。这直接导致我觉得自己的作品就不该被发表。但是这部长篇小说，却是个例外。写第一稿就非常顺利，写的时候我内心充满了说故事的快乐。随后几年的写作也出乎意料得容易，感觉像是一场永远不会结束的狂欢party。对四部曲的修整和润色都是忠于一开始的第一稿，不过是增加了细节和填充了内容。简而言之，写作中没遇到危机、没有犹豫、也没什么大改、重写、也没有任何大段的补充。整个创作过程就好像是一个大浪向我打来，等大浪走了，我很高兴我没被浪卷走。

In a letter to Mario Martone, you said that any distraction could make writing seem unnecessary, pointing out the fragility of it all. However, no writer seems stronger than you are, and more capable of building a colossal work of fiction. Would you agree that this combination of fragility and strength is essential to your writing?

答：My greatest fear is of suddenly feeling that to devote so much of my life to writing is meaningless. It’s a sensation that I’ve felt very often, and I’m afraid that I will again. I need a lot of determination, a stubborn, passionate adherence to the page, not to feel the urgency of other things to do, a more active way of spending my life. So yes, I’m fragile. It’s all too easy for me to notice the other things and feel guilty. And so it’s pride that I need, more than strength. While I’m writing, I have to believe that it’s up to me to tell this or that story, and that it would be wrong to avoid it or not to complete it to the best of my abilities.

费兰特：我将我生命的很大一部分时间都用于写作，有些时刻我会突然觉得这件事没什么意义，这种感觉是我目前体会过的最深刻的恐惧。这种恐惧常常向我袭来，我觉得我应该不久就又会体会到这种感觉。对我而言，坚持写作不仅需要决心，还要有一种热情到固执的对纸张的眷念，还要对自己想要尝试其他人生体验的欲望有所克制。所以你说得对，我在写作这件事情上不是特别坚韧。我很容易被其他的事情搅乱心神，然后后悔于自己注意力的浪费。相较于坚毅的精神，我更需要的是那种写作产生的自豪感。当我写的时候，我需要坚信这个故事非我写不可，要是我没能尽我所能地写到最好那就是犯了大错了。

Where does the vital energy of your writing come from?

I don’t know if my writing has the energy you say it does. Of course, if that energy exists, it’s because either it finds no other outlets or, consciously or not, I’ve refused to give it other outlets. Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there.

费兰特：我不是很确定我的作品里面有你说的那种能量。如果这种能量存在的话，那应该也是因为我自己有意或无意地没给这种能量其他的出口，所以只能倾泻在我的作品里。确实有些时候，我会把自己的一部分倾注到作品里，不管是令人激动的、还是碎片式的，抑或是让我感到难受的。

In your description, Naples is rough, violent and unpleasant, and even more so in the second half of the fourth volume, where Lila and Lenù have to confront violence on every side. Have you witnessed acts of extreme violence in Naples yourself? How have Neapolitans been able to cope with violence over the years, and have they developed a particular understanding of the violence innate in human beings, and do you perhaps share that?

答：One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

费兰特：在那不勒斯想要和暴力绝缘，是需要点运气的。我估计这点在纽约、伦敦和巴黎也差不多。和意大利或是世界上的其他大城市相比，那不勒斯并没有更糟糕。我花了很长时间才理解了这一点。过去我总以为只有那不勒斯才会出现罪犯逍遥法外，让遵纪守法的人都开始困惑自己到底做得对不对。我也以为只有那不勒斯能将好心情以一种暴力的方式中断，变为糟糕的感觉。今天对我而言那不勒斯就是我的全部世界，那不勒斯的好就是它从不掩饰自己的本来面目。正是因为这个城市既有令人惊艳的美，也有各种各样的丑-犯罪猖獗、暴力横行、纵容腐败 – 由此而激增的恐惧让我们感到豪无防备。也因此，民主制度的弊端在这里彰显得更为清楚。

Lila and Lenù suffer a lot throughout the books. Why did you choose to subject them to so many tragic experiences of all kinds?

答：It doesn’t seem to me that their sufferings are very different from those which women endure every day in every part of the world, especially if they’re born poor. Lila and Lenù fall in love, marry, are betrayed, betray, search for a role in the world, face discrimination, give birth, raise children, are sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, experience loss and death. I do use the novelistic, but relatively sparingly. The emotional bond we establish with characters is generally what makes their story seem like an endless series of misfortunes. In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others, we feel their suffering, only when we learn to love them.

费兰特：莉娜和莱农遭受的苦难和在这个世界其他角落的普通女性每日承受的苦难并没有什么不同，特别是那些出身贫困的女性。莉娜和莱农经历了恋爱、结婚、背叛、被背叛、找寻自己在世界中担任的角色、直面歧视、生产养育孩子，时而开心时而难过，体会过失落和死亡。我会使用虚构的手法，但比较少用到。真正让我们同情小说人物痛苦遭遇的是我们和人物建立起来的情感链接。生活和小说一样，只有我们学会爱别人的时候，才能对他们的痛苦感同身受。

In the fourth volume, why did you choose to make Nino so cruel and superficial?

答：I wanted to describe the effects of superficiality when it’s combined with a good education and moderate intelligence. Nino is a smart but superficial man, a type of man I’m very familiar with.

费兰特：我不过想要描述那种受过高等教育而且有点小聪明，但是却很肤浅的人。尼诺聪明却肤浅，这种人我在生活中经常遇到。

Why did the narrative require the traumatic and nightmarish disappearance of Tina, in the fourth volume, near the end of the story?

答：Here I will decline to give you my reasons — I prefer that readers find their own way. I can only emphasize that that event was always, even before I began to write, one of the few definite and inevitable stops on the narrative journey that I had in mind.

费兰特：我更希望我的读者能自己体悟出我为什么在第四部结尾把蒂娜给写消失了的原因，所以这里我暂时不想给出我的答案。不过我想强调一点，在我开始写这个故事之前，我就已经打算好把失踪的孩子这个事件写进这个长篇里。

Lila is enthusiastic about new electronic tools, like PC computers. She seems to be driven by an instinctual brilliance, and yet, surprisingly, she understands these logical machines. Is she more unpredictable than Lenù, or is it the other way around?

答：Lila, in my intentions, is never enthusiastic. She applies her intelligence to whatever, for one reason or another, comes into the field of action that she herself is given, starting from the moment she is forced to leave school. It’s because her father is a shoemaker that she designs shoes. It’s because Enzo is taking correspondence courses from IBM that she becomes involved with electronics. Unlike Lenù, who uses education to force the boundaries of the neighborhood and escape, eagerly aspiring to write, Lila acts brilliantly on what turns up, without using up her own capacities in any of the things she happens to get involved in. If one wanted to put it schematically, the only long-range project that really excites Lila is the life of her friend.

费兰特：我的人物塑造里，莉娜从来就不是一个热情洋溢的人。她不过是在被迫停止上学以后，因为各种各样的原因，把自己的智慧投入到她被扯进的事务中。比如，因为她爸爸是鞋匠，所以她设计了鞋子。因为恩佐在上IBM的训练课程，她也就跟着捣鼓电脑相关的事情。而莱农却和她不一样，莱农利用教育机会而迫使自己逃离原生环境，对写作有极大的渴望和热情。莉娜虽然每件事都做得很棒很聪明，但是她却没能在一件事情上倾尽自己所能。如果从更宏观的范畴来看，唯一能使莉娜长时间感兴趣的似乎只有莱农的人生而已。

In the book, women struggle. Men often take advantage of them. How do you feel about the #MeToo protests throughout the world?

答：I believe that they have put a spotlight on what women have always known and have always been more or less silent about. Patriarchal domination, even — despite appearances — in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don’t feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system. And raising one’s voice, saying, “Me too,” seems a good thing, but only if we maintain a sense of proportion: Just causes in particular are damaged by excesses. Even though the power of [offenders] large and small at the center of the world or on its peripheries lies in not being ashamed of the various forms of rape they subject us to and, by means of a repulsive stratagem, in making us think that it is we who should be ashamed. 费兰特：我相信#MeToo让那些女性知道却不大敢说的事情暴露在聚光灯下。表面上看，重男轻女的思想似乎已经不怎么普遍，但实际上在西方仍然存在。在各种各样的场合、以不同的方式，这种思维还继续在伤害以及羞辱沉默的受害者、胆战心惊的屈从者、不愿妥协的反抗者、甚至一个孜孜不倦的控诉者。听上去可能挺矛盾的，但是我觉得那些受过教育、穿着精致、在社会上层工作着的好莱坞女性和我故事里面生活在那不勒斯的底层女性没什么区别。敢于发声说MeToo似乎是件好事，但是我们必须小心：过犹不及，做得太过头反而会损害正义的事业。尽管性侵罪犯感受到的掌控权力的大小与女性被性侵犯后的羞耻度没什么关系，但是这些罪犯们仍然以令人恶心的诡计让我们觉得我们才是该负责任和应该羞耻的一方。

Would you predict — and would you call for — a new feminism to emerge from #MeToo? 答：A certain disdain for the feminism of mothers and grandmothers has spread among the younger generations in recent years. There is a conviction that the few rights we have are a fact of nature and not the product of an extremely hard cultural and political battle. I hope that things change and that girls will realize that we have millenniums of subservience behind us, that the struggle should continue and that if we lower our guard, it won’t take much to eliminate what, at least on paper, four generations of women have with great difficulty gained.

费兰特：最近几年，年轻一代似乎对父母、祖父母那一代的女权斗争结果越发不满了。大家开始认同女性的权力缺失是确实存在的事实，而不仅仅只是某种严苛文化和政治斗争的产物。我希望女性的意识能够觉醒，要知道我们的背后有千禧一代的前仆后继，女性的抗争应该继续下去。要是我们防备意识稍稍变弱，就可能使前面四代女性努力争取的法律认可的权力丧失殆尽。

Would you agree that your novel belongs to a tradition of popular narratives (such as those of Alexandre Dumas), with a lot of action and characters, rather than to a modernist, more minimalist approach to storytelling? 答：No. I can decide to reuse some of the powerful devices of popular literature, but I do so, like it or not, in an era completely different from the one in which that literature performed its task. I mean that with some regret, I can in no way be Dumas. To draw on the great tradition of the popular novel doesn’t mean creating, for better or for worse, that type of narrative but rather using it, distorting it, violating its rules, disappointing its expectations, all in the service of a story of our time. Rummaging in the great historical warehouse of the novel and the anti-novel is today, in my opinion, a duty for anyone who is by profession a narrator. Diderot could write “The Nun” but also “Jacques the Fatalist.” We can erase the boundary between literary experiences that are different from one another and use them both, at the same time, to give a shape to this historical moment. A lot of action, many characters or the minimalism you allude to, taken separately, don’t carry us far today. Let’s try to get out of useless cages.

费兰特：我不觉得自己的小说属于古典式的通俗畅销读物。我使用了一些传统通俗文学的写作技巧，但是这些技巧的使用却不是以文学为目的而采用的。我的意思是说，我怎么也不可能成为大仲马。从通俗小说的伟大传统里汲取，并不意味着创作出和之前完全相同的叙述方式，而是应该去灵活地运用甚至扭曲那种叙述方式、舍弃之前的规则、不要满足于既定的期望，所做的这一切都应为创作出属于我们这个时代的小说而服务。今天的每一位作家都应该在藏满各类小说的文学仓库里好好探索一番。狄德罗能写出《修女》，也可以写出《定命论者雅克》这样的作品。各种文学经验之间的边界是可以被擦除的，我们可以用一个或者多个文学手法，来塑造我们现在这个历史时刻。你刚提到的极简主义使用的手法，并不能让文学走得更远。我们还是尽量跳出那些条条框框吧。

You once said that you discovered Flaubert when you were quite young, in Naples. When did you first fall in love with a book, or with a character, and also with literature？ 答：Yes, I really loved “Madame Bovary.” As I girl, when I read, I dragged the stories and the characters into the world I lived in, and “Emma,” I don’t know why, seemed close to many of the women in my family. But long before “Madame Bovary,” I loved “Little Women,” I loved Jo. That book is at the origin of my love for writing. 费兰特：是的，我特别喜欢《包法利夫人》这本书。小时候读的时候就总是把书中的故事还有人物和我身边的世界联系在一起。特别是爱玛这个人物，不知道为什么，似乎和我家族里的很多女性都很接近。不过早在我读《包法利夫人》之前，我超爱《小妇人》，我深爱乔这个人物。这本书是我热爱写作的根源。

Have you been influenced by women writers (possibly French, like Colette, Duras, etc.)? 答：As a girl, I read all kinds of things, in no particular order, and I didn’t pay attention to the names of the authors — whether they were male or female didn’t interest me. I was enthralled by [the characters] Moll Flanders, by the Marquise de Merteuil, by Elizabeth Bennet, by Jane Eyre, by Anna Karenina, and I didn’t care about the sex of the writer. Later, in the late ’70s, I began to be interested in writing by women. If I stick with French writers, I read almost all of Marguerite Duras. But the book of hers that I’ve spent the most time with, studied most closely, is “The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein”; it’s her most complex book, but the one you can learn the most from. 费兰特：从小我就爱读各种类型的书籍，我不怎么在意作者的名字或者性别。笛福笔下的摩尔弗兰德斯、《危险关系》里的梅黛夫人、《傲慢与偏见》里的伊丽莎白、《简爱》、《安娜卡特琳娜》这些人物都深深让我着迷。70年代我才开始对女性作家的作品产生了浓厚的兴趣。要说法国作家的话，杜拉斯的作品我基本都读过。研究时间最长的是《劳儿之劫》，这是她最复杂的一本书，但能学到很多。

How do you feel about female writing? Do you believe that the category exists — that there is female writing and male writing? For example, Elsa Morante versus Hemingway? As for your own style, would you say it’s a combination of both male and female? 答：Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers. For example, I learned from the books I loved and studied, by male and female authors, and I could easily name them, but I’ve also been deeply affected by sentences whose provenance I no longer remember, whether it was male or female. The literary apprentice, in short, passes through channels that are hard to identify. So I would avoid saying that I was formed by this or that author. Above all, I would avoid saying that I was formed essentially by women’s writing, even though I very much loved and still love “House of Liars,” by Elsa Morante. We are in a period of great change, and the presentation of gender is at risk of being not only unconvincing but not really valid. 费兰特：当然，我认同女性写作和男性写作的不同是存在的，不过这也主要是因为写作是被历史文化建构（其中包括了性别这个要素）深深影响的。换句话说，性别这张网特别大，所牵涉的规则很宽泛，现在越来越难以重建哪些要素对作家产生了影响和塑造作用。拿我做例子，我从我喜欢的男女作家的作品中学习写作，我可以告诉你他们的名字，但是我却说不出是谁写的某个句子深刻的影响了我。简而言之，你没法确定文学的学徒所经历的通道都有哪些，所以我一直避免说自己是深受这个或是那个作家的影响。虽然我特别喜欢艾尔莎莫兰黛的《House of Liars》，但我尤其忌讳说自己是女性写作的产物。我们现处在一个变革之中，拿性别说事不仅不能使人信服，还没有什么好效果。

When you read a book, what do you appreciate most? 答：Unexpected events, meaningful contradictions, sudden swerves in the language, in the psychology of the characters. 费兰特：读书最喜欢人物心理描写中 没预料到的事件、充满寓意的矛盾性、表述方式的突然转换。

In the book, motherhood is an enemy of writing (Lenù is so busy bringing up her daughters that she can’t get the concentration she needs). In your own experience, how is it best to write? Alone? Seeing no one? Living a secluded life? Or, on the contrary, going out a lot, drawing inspiration from meeting people, possibly being in love? 答：When one is in love, one writes very well. And, in general, if someone does not have experience of life, what does he or she write about? Spending one’s time focused only on writing is the ambition of an adolescent, of a sad adolescent. Living is a permanent disruption for writing, but without it, writing is a frivolous squiggle on water. That said, life, when it has the force of a tidal wave, can devour the time for writing. Motherhood, in my experience, is certainly capable of sweeping away the need to write. Conceiving a child, bringing it into the world, raising it is a marvelous and painful experience that over a fairly long span of time — especially if you don’t have the money to buy the time and energy of other women — takes away space and meaning from all the rest. Naturally, if the need to write is strong, you sooner or later find an arrangement that leaves you some room. But that holds for all the fundamental experiences of life. They hit us, they overwhelm us, and then, if we don’t end up dead in a corner, we write. 费兰特：恋爱中的人写作都特别顺畅。一个人要是没什么人生经历，他能写什么？所以说，把时间仅仅花在写作上是青少年式的野心，还是个悲剧青少年。生活会打扰写作，但是没生活，写作不过是隔靴搔痒。当生命中迎来大风大浪时，确实会把写作的时间消耗殆尽。从我的人生体验来看，做一个称职的母亲，能把你写作的欲望榨干。怀孕、生小孩、养育小孩是一段漫长的很神奇却很难熬的经历，会榨干你的私人空间与时间，特别是你没钱支付其他能够帮助你的女性的时间与精力的话。要是你的写作欲望强烈，你迟早会能安排出一些时间来。即便如此，消耗精力的人生是我们写作内容的来源和基石。这些人生经历击打我们、让我们不知所措，但是只要我们存活在这个世界上，我们就应该继续写作。

Was it hard to wake up one day thinking, “The story of Lila and Lenù is over. I’m finished with it.” Like giving birth and suddenly feeling empty in some way？ 答：The metaphor of birth applied to literary works has never seemed convincing to me. The metaphor of weaving seems more effective. Writing is one of the prostheses we have invented to empower our body. Writing is a skill, it’s a forcing of our natural limits, it requires long training to assimilate techniques, use them with increasing expertise and invent new ones, if we find we need them. Weaving says all this well. We work for months, for years, weaving a text, the best that we are capable of at the moment. And when it’s finished, it’s there, forever itself, while we change and will change, ready to try out other weaves. 费兰特：创作出文学作品这个说法一直不能让我认同。我觉得织网人这个比喻给作家是更合适的。写作是我们身体的义肢。写作是一门技巧，迫使我们突破自己的极限，还需要长时间的训练，还得经常自己通过已经习得的专业技能发明出新的技巧。织网人这个比喻特别好。我们长年累月地编织文字，做到我们当时能达到的最好程度。当完成的时候，作品就永恒地存在了。如果我们自己有了新的变化，这些变化也应该显示在新织的作品上面。

Have you possibly considered writing a sequel, or side stories (the way J.K. Rowling did with Harry Potter)? The ending does allow it, doesn’t it？ 答：No, the story of Lila and Lenù is over. But I know other stories and hope I’ll be able to write them. As for publishing them, I don’t know. 费兰特：莉娜和莱农的故事已经完结，我不会写衍生故事。但是我有别的故事，希望可以写出来，至于能不能发表，我就不知道了。

Your novel values friendship more than anything else, even more than love, which is unpredictable and can vanish. Do you value friendship in that way, in your own life? 答：Yes, friendship has to do with love but is less at risk of being spoiled. It’s not constantly threatened by sexual practices, by the danger that exists in the mixture of feeling and the use of bodies to give and be given pleasure. Sexual friendship is more widespread today than in the past, a game of bodies and elective affinities that tries to keep at bay both the power of love and the rite of pure sex. But with what results I don’t know. 费兰特：友谊与爱有关，但又不容易被宠坏。友谊不受性的威胁，也不会被那种情感与肉体混合后所给予的欢愉所影响。如今炮友挺常见的，这种关系不过在玩身体和情感的游戏，炮友需要把性和爱的程度控制得刚刚好。最终能是什么结果，我就不知道了。

I have been asking many writers about where they write. The most recent was Tom Wolfe, describing his desk and the colors of his office walls — blue. Could you describe the place where you write (or, if not, can you tell us about some objects that you care about and which are around when you write)? 答：I write anywhere. I don’t have a room of my own. I know that I’d like a bare space, with white, empty walls. But it’s more an aestheticizing fantasy than a real necessity. When I write, if it’s really going well, I soon forget where I am. 费兰特：我不挑写作的地点。我也没有自己的专属房间。但我确实喜欢空旷的空间，没有装饰的白墙。不过这只是我关于美的幻想，不是必需品。如果进行顺利的话，我写作时常常忘记自己所在。

结束！翻译得吐血。。很多地方是猜着翻的，可能不是特别妥帖，还是尽量看原文呀。