西雅图为她不眠
Writer and Filmmaker With a Genius for Humor
西雅图为她不眠
Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally...,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.
诺拉·艾芙隆(Nora Ephron)，一位桃乐丝·帕克(Dorothy Parker)式的(不过据一些人看来，艾芙隆要更聪明、更诙谐)散文家、幽默作家，是她那个时代最成功的剧作家和电影人，拍摄过几部成功的浪漫喜剧，比如《西雅图未眠夜》(Sleepless in Seattle)和《当哈利遇到莎莉》(When Harry Met Sally)，周二晚她在曼哈顿去世，享年71岁。
The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said.
她的儿子雅各布·伯恩斯坦(Jacob Bernstein)说，艾芙隆的死因是急性白血病引发的肺炎。
In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation weren’t expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of them successfully and many of them simultaneously.
1996年，艾芙隆在母校卫斯理大学(Wellesley College)毕业典礼致词时曾回忆说，对她那个时代的女性，人们认为碌碌无为即是美德。但她却从事了几份不同的事业，每一份都取得了成功，而且有些是同时进行的。
She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a movie director — a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks were and continue to be dominated by men. Her later box-office success included “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia.” By the end of her life, though remaining remarkably youthful looking, she had even become something of a philosopher about age and its indignities.
她曾是记者、博客作者、散文家、小说家、剧作家，奥斯卡奖提名编剧，也是电影导演——在电影行业，导演这个位置无论是在过去，还是在现在，都被男性一统天下，她可谓是一个异数。她在后期取得票房成功的电影包括了《电子情书》(You've Got Mail)和《美味关系》(Julie & Julia)。在晚年时，虽然自己保养得相当年轻，不过在论及衰老和与之相伴的耻辱时，她更像是个哲学家。
“Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger?” she wrote in “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” her 2006 best-selling collection of essays. “It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.”
“为什么那些写书的人总是念叨着，年长比年轻要好?” 她在2006年的畅销散文集《我可怜的脖子》(I Feel Bad About My Neck)中写道：“不可能啊!就算你拥有了睿智，可你还是想破脑袋都想不起来昨天碰到的那个人叫什么名字。”
写作是她的家族生意
Nora Ephron was born on May 19, 1941, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the eldest of four sisters, all of whom became writers. That was no surprise; writing was the family business. Her father, Henry, and her mother, the former Phoebe Wolkind, were Hollywood screenwriters who wrote, among other films, “Carousel,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Captain Newman, M.D.”
诺拉·艾芙隆于1941年5月19日生于曼哈顿的上西区，是四姐妹中的长女，几个女孩后来都成了作家。这并不让人意外;写作就是她们的家族生意。她的父亲亨利和母亲菲比(原名菲比·沃尔金德[Phoebe Wolkind])都是好莱坞的剧作家，写过的作品包括《天上人间》(Carousel)、《娱乐世界》(There's No Business Like Show Business)和《纽曼军医》(Captain Newman, M.D.)。
“Everything is copy,” her mother once said, and she and her husband proved it by turning the college-age Nora into a character in a play, later a movie, “Take Her, She’s Mine.” The lesson was not lost on Ms. Ephron, who seldom wrote about her own children but could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, her apartment, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelets.
“一切都是摹本，”她母亲曾这样说，而她和丈夫确实也证明了这一点，他们将大学时代的诺拉写成一部戏剧中的角色，后来又编进电影《带走她，她是我的》(Take Her, She's Mine)里。这个经验对艾芙隆也同样适用，她虽然几乎从未写过自己的子女，但却可以对其他万事万物做出动人的描摹：爬上她脖颈的皱纹，她的公寓，白菜馅卷饼，特氟龙平底锅，还有炒鸡蛋白的寡淡无味。
She turned her painful breakup with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, into a best-selling novel, “Heartburn,” which she then recycled into a successful movie starring Jack Nicholson as a philandering husband and Meryl Streep as a quick-witted version of Ms. Ephron herself.
她把与第二任丈夫、水门事件记者卡尔·伯恩斯坦(Carl Bernstein)痛苦的离婚写成了畅销小说《心痛》(Heartburn)，之后又把它翻拍成了一部卖座电影，杰克·尼克尔森(Jack Nicholson)饰演花心的丈夫，梅丽尔·斯特里普(Meryl Streep)演绎的则是机智的艾芙隆本人。
When Ms. Ephron was 4, her parents moved from New York to Beverly Hills, where she grew up, graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1958. At Wellesley, she began writing for the school newspaper, and in the summer of 1961 she was a summer intern in the Kennedy White House. She said later that perhaps her greatest accomplishment there was rescuing the speaker of the house, Sam Rayburn, from a men’s room in which he had inadvertently locked himself. In an essay for The New York Times in 2003, she said she was also probably the only intern that President John F. Kennedy had never hit on.
艾芙隆四岁那年，她父母将家从纽约搬到比弗利山，她在那里长大，1958年毕业于比弗利山高中。在马萨诸塞州的卫斯理大学读书时，她开始为校报撰稿，1961年夏天，她去了肯尼迪(Kennedy)总统任内的白宫进行暑期实习。后来她说，在这期间自己最大的功绩，大概要算当众议院议长萨姆·雷伯恩 (Sam Rayburn)不小心将自己反锁在男厕所时，她要把他解救出来。而在2003年为《纽约时报》写的一篇随笔中，她说，在所有白宫实习生中，自己也许是约翰·F.肯尼迪(John F. Kennedy)总统唯一没有献过殷勤的一位。
After graduation from college in 1962, she moved to New York, a city she always adored, intent on becoming a journalist. Her first job was as a mail girl at Newsweek. (There were no mail boys, she later pointed out.) Soon she was contributing to a parody of The New York Post put out during the 1962 newspaper strike. Her piece of it earned her a tryout at The Post, where the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, remarked: “If they can parody The Post, they can write for it. Hire them.”
1962年大学毕业后，她移居纽约——这是她一直深爱的城市，决意成为一名记者。她的第一份工作是在《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)作信差(后来她指出来，当时那儿没有男人作信差)。不久，在同年《纽约邮报》(The New York Post)罢工期间，一帮人合办了一份模仿该报的报纸，她参与了撰稿。她的稿件为她赢得了参加该报面试的机会，当时的出版人桃乐丝·希夫(Dorothy Schiff)说：“既然他们能模仿邮报，就能为这份报纸撰稿。把他们招进来!”
Ms. Ephron stayed at The Post for five years, covering stories like the Beatles, the Star of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History, and a pair of hooded seals at the Coney Island aquarium that refused to mate.
艾芙隆在邮报工作了五年，报道内容包括了披头士乐队(the Beatles)、美国自然历史博物馆“印度之星”蓝宝石被抢劫事件，以及科尼岛水族馆里的两头冠海豹拒绝交配。
“The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there,” she wrote, but added that the experience taught her to write short and to write around a subject, since the kinds of people she was assigned to cover were never going to give her much interview time.
“我在那里的时候，邮报是份糟糕的报纸，”她曾写道，不过她又补充说，这份经历让她学会了将文章写短，以及围绕报道对象外围进行写作，因为她采访的那些人都不可能给她充分的采访时间。
In the late 1960s Ms. Ephron turned to magazine journalism, at Esquire and New York mostly. She quickly made a name for herself by writing frank, funny personal essays — about the smallness of her breasts, for example — and tart, sharply observed profiles of people like Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and the composer and best-selling poet Rod McKuen. Some of these articles were controversial. In one, she criticized Betty Friedan for conducting a “thoroughly irrational” feud with Gloria Steinem; in another, she discharged a withering assessment of Women’s Wear Daily.
20世纪60年代末，艾芙隆转战杂志，主要在《君子》(Esquire)和《纽约》(New York)杂志工作。很快她就因写率真、诙谐的个人散文而小有名气——比方说在文中，她会谈到自己的平胸;此外她也写文字尖刻、观察细致入微的人物特写，报道对象包括安·兰德(Ayn Rand)、海伦·格蕾·布朗(Helen Gurley Brown)和作家兼畅销诗人罗德·麦昆(Rod McKuen)。其中一些作品引发了争议。在一篇文章中，她指责贝蒂·弗里丹(Betty Friedan)导演了一场与葛劳瑞娅·斯坦能(Gloria Steinem)之间“完全不可理喻”的争端;而在另一篇文章中，她对《女装日报》(Women's Wear Daily)的评价极尽讽刺之能事。
But all her articles were characterized by humor and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline. (Many of her articles were assembled in the collections “Wallflower at the Orgy,” “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”)
但她的文章以幽默和坦诚为特点，风格清晰、直接、低调，对于在什么地方抛出妙语，她有种完美的分寸感(她的许多文章收录在这三本合集中：《派对壁花》[Wallflower at the Orgy]、《疯狂沙拉》[Wallflower at the Orgy]和《潦草数笔》[Scribble Scribble])。
Ms. Ephron made as much fun of herself as of anyone else. She was labeled a practitioner of the New Journalism, with its embrace of novelistic devices in the name of reaching a deeper truth, but she always denied the connection. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is,” she once wrote. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.”
艾芙隆在挖苦自己时，跟挖苦旁人同样不留情面。她被贴上了“新新闻主义”践行者的标签，认为是广泛运用了小说的写作技巧，挖掘到了更深刻的事实，但她一直抗拒这种联系。她曾写道：“我不是新记者，不管这究竟是什么劳什子。我只是坐在打字机前，一个劲儿地爬着旧格子。”
她是个“彪悍的人”
Ms. Ephron got into the movie business more or less by accident after her marriage to Mr. Bernstein in 1976. He and Bob Woodward, his partner in the Watergate investigation, were unhappy with William Goldman’s script for the movie version of their book “All the President’s Men,” so Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Ephron took a stab at rewriting it. Their version was ultimately not used, but it was a useful learning experience, she later said, and it brought her to the attention of people in Hollywood.
艾芙隆在1976年与伯恩斯坦结婚后，或多或少是在无意间进入了电影业。伯恩斯坦与合作进行水门事件调查的鲍伯·伍德沃德(Bob Woodward)合著了《总统班底》(All the President's Men)一书，两人对威廉·戈德曼(William Goldman)改编的电影剧本不是很满意，于是伯恩斯坦与艾芙隆想试试自己做改编。他们重写的这个版本最终没能用上，但她后来说，这是一次有益的学习经历，让好莱坞的人注意到了她。
Her first screenplay, written with her friend Alice Arlen, was for “Silkwood,” a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked. Ms. Arlen was in film school then, and Ms. Ephron had scant experience writing for anything other than the page. But Mike Nichols, who directed the movie (which starred Ms. Streep and Kurt Russell), said that the script made an immediate impression on him.
她的第一部剧本是与朋友爱丽丝·阿伦(Alice Arlen)共同编写的《丝克伍事件》(Silkwood)，这部电影拍于1983年，根据凯伦·丝克伍(Karen Silkwood)的生平改编，丝克伍在调查自己工作的一家生产钚的工厂危害公共安全事件时去世，死因可疑。当时阿伦在读电影学院，而艾芙隆除了给报刊写过东西，没有一点相关经验。但该片(由梅丽尔·斯特里普和库尔特·拉塞尔[Kurt Russell]联袂出演)导演迈克·尼科尔斯(Mike Nichols)说，他一看这个本子，就留下了很好的印象。
But it was her script for “When Harry Met Sally...,” which became a hit Rob Reiner movie in 1989 starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, that established Ms. Ephron’s gift for romantic comedy and for delayed but happy endings that reconcile couples who are clearly meant for each other but don’t know it.
1989年，导演罗伯·莱纳将她的剧本《当哈利遇到莎莉》拍成电影，由比利·克里斯托(Billy Crystal)和梅格·瑞恩(Meg Ryan)主演，电影大获成功。艾芙隆撰写浪漫喜剧的天赋这才得到了公认，她善于安排一对明明是天作之合佳侣，却懵懂不知，好事多磨终于有个大团圆结局。
Her first effort at directing, “This Is My Life” (1992), with a screenplay by Ms. Ephron and her sister Delia, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer about a single mother trying to become a standup comedian, was a dud. But Ms. Ephron redeemed herself in 1993 with “Sleepless in Seattle” (she shared the screenwriting credits), which brought Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together so winningly that they were cast again in “You’ve Got Mail.”
她首次尝试导演，是在1992年拍摄《这是我的生活》(This is My Life)，剧本由她和妹妹迪莉娅(Delia)合写，根据梅格·沃利兹(Meg Wolitzer)的小说改编，说的是一个单亲妈妈努力想要成为脱口秀艺人的故事，这次尝试并不成功。但在1993年艾芙隆凭借着《西雅图未眠夜》收复失地(她也参与了编剧)，因为这部剧中汤姆·汉克斯(Tom Hanks)和梅格·瑞恩的合作十分成功，在拍摄《电子情书》时，她再次请两人出演。
Among the other movies Ms. Ephron wrote and directed were “Lucky Numbers” (2000), “Bewitched” (2005) and, her last, “Julie & Julia” (2009), in which Ms. Streep played Julia Child.
艾芙隆参与编写和导演的电影还包括《幸运数字》(Lucky Numbers，2000年)、《家有仙妻》(Bewitched，2005年)和最后一部电影《美味关系》(2009年)，在该片中斯特里普饰演茱丽娅·柴尔德(Julia Child)。
She and Ms. Streep had been friends since they worked on “Silkwood” together. “Nora just looked at every situation and cocked her head and thought, ‘Hmmmm, how can I make this more fun?’ ” Ms. Streep wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.
在合作《丝克伍事件》时，她和斯特里普成为朋友。“诺拉无论是面对何种局面，总会扬起头说，‘嗯，我怎么才能把它弄得更有意思些?’”在周二发来的邮件中斯特里普这样写道。
Ms. Ephron earned three Oscar nominations for best screenplay, for “Silkwood,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally....” But in all her moviemaking years she never gave up writing in other forms. Two essay collections, “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman” (2006) and “I Remember Nothing” (2010), were both best sellers.
艾芙隆分别因为电影《丝克伍事件》、《西雅图未眠夜》和《当哈利遇到莎莉》，三次获得奥斯卡最佳编剧奖提名，不过在从事电影生涯时，她也从未放弃过其他形式的写作。她的两部散文合集，《我可怜的脖子：以及其他身为女人的感想》(I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman，2006年)和《我什么都记不住了》(I Remember Nothing，2010年)，都是畅销书。
Several years ago, Ms. Ephron learned that she had myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic condition, but she kept the illness a secret from all but a few intimates and continued to lead a busy, sociable life.
几年前，艾芙隆得知自己罹患骨髓增生异常综合征，这是一种将转归为白血病的病症，但她把病情隐瞒了下来，继续过着忙碌、交友广阔的生活，只有几个身边人知道这个消息。
“She had this thing about not wanting to whine,” the writer Sally Quinn said on Tuesday. “She didn’t like self-pity. It was always, you know, ‘Suck it up.’ ”
“她这人不喜欢抱怨，”作家萨莉·奎恩(Sally Quinn)在周二说道：“她不喜欢自怨自艾，总是把什么事情都‘自己吞进肚里’。”
Ms. Ephron’s first marriage, to the writer Dan Greenburg, ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Mr. Bernstein. In 1987 she married Nicholas Pileggi, the author of the books “Wiseguy” and “Casino.” (Her contribution to “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure,” edited by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, reads: “Secret to life, marry an Italian.”)
艾芙隆与作家丹·格林伯格(Dan Greenburg)的第一段婚姻以离婚告终，与伯恩斯坦的婚姻同样如此。1987年，她嫁给了尼古拉斯·派勒吉(Nicholas Pileggi)，他是《盗亦有道》(Wiseguy)和《赌城风云》(Casino)的作者。
In addition to her son Jacob Bernstein, a journalist who writes frequently for the Styles section of The Times, Ms. Ephron is survived by Mr. Pileggi; another son, Max Bernstein, a rock musician; and her sisters Delia Ephron; Amy Ephron, who is also a screenwriter; and Hallie Ephron, a journalist and novelist.
艾芙隆的家人包括丈夫派勒吉;两个儿子，一个是雅各布·伯恩斯坦，他是个记者，常常为《纽约时报》的风尚栏目撰稿，另一个是麦克斯·伯恩斯坦，他是摇滚音乐人。还有三位妹妹，分别是迪莉娅·艾芙隆;艾米·艾芙隆(Amy Ephron)，同样是剧作家;以及做记者和小说家的哈莉·艾芙隆(Hallie Ephron)。
Another friend, Robert Gottlieb, who had edited her books since the 1970s, said that her death would be “terrible for her readers and her movie audience and her colleagues.” But “the private Nora was even more remarkable,” he added, saying she was “always there for you with a full heart plus the crucial dose of the reality principle.”
她的另一位朋友罗伯特·哥特列布(Robert Gottlieb)，自从20世纪70年代起就开始编辑她的著作，他称艾芙隆的死“对她的读者、她的电影观众和她的同事，是件很可怕的事情”。他又补充说，但“私下里的诺拉甚至要更加了不起，永远全心全意伴随在你左右，同时又能为你注入一剂必要的现实的清醒剂”。
