Yasmin Zaher的傑出小說《硬幣》贏得了斯旺西大學迪倫·托馬斯（Dylan Thomas）40歲以下作家獎。

這不是一開始就開始的故事。取而代之的是，其敘述者從泥土開始，對清潔度的痴迷開始，但後來暗示標題的硬幣 - 以色列謝克爾（Shekel），她在一次家庭公路旅行中不小心吞噬了她的父母在車禍中被殺 - 這將是一個同樣合適的起點。

Yasmin Zaher’s remarkable novel The Coin (Faber, £15) has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40.

Yasmin Zaher的傑出小說《硬幣》（Faber，15英鎊）贏得了斯旺西大學迪倫·托馬斯（Dylan Thomas）40歲以下作家獎。

This is not a story that begins at the beginning. Instead, its narrator starts with dirt and an obsession with cleanliness, but suggests later that the coin of the title – an Israeli shekel that she accidentally swallowed on a family road trip in which her parents were killed in a car crash – would have been an equally appropriate place to begin.

這不是一開始就開始的故事。取而代之的是，其敘述者從泥土開始，對清潔度的痴迷開始，但後來暗示標題的硬幣 - 以色列謝克爾（Shekel），她在一次家庭公路旅行中不小心吞噬了她的父母在車禍中被殺 - 這將是一個同樣合適的起點。

Long forgotten, the swallowed coin begins to make its presence felt, somewhere in her body, following her move to America. The narrator is a wealthy young Palestinian woman, teaching boys at a New York City middle school. Her wealth, however, is in the hands of a brother who controls her allowance. She responds by developing a scheme to resell luxury handbags with a homeless con-artist, known throughout as “Trenchcoat”.

長期以來，吞嚥的硬幣開始使自己的存在在她體內的某個地方，在她搬到美國之後。敘述者是一位富有的年輕巴勒斯坦婦女，在紐約市一所中學教男孩。然而，她的財富掌握在控制津貼的兄弟手中。她的回應是製定了一種計劃，將豪華手袋與無家可歸的同事一起轉售，被稱為“風衣”。

This is one of several attempts at shaping the world around her: she revels in her sexuality and ability to redefine herself through fashionable clothes and accessories; she teaches her class about black power and takes them on a trip to listen to the “dagger poems” of a black nationalist poet in New Jersey.

這是塑造周圍世界的幾種嘗試之一：她陶醉於自己的性行為和通過時尚的衣服和配飾重新定義自己的能力；她教她的班級有關黑人力量的知識，並帶他們去聽新澤西州黑人民族主義詩人的“匕首詩”。

I assume this poet is Amiri Baraka since they eat “Black Dada Nihilismus” burgers, a reference to his poem of the same name. But such acts of resistance, if not futile, are limited. Like the swallowed coin, the levers of control, whether material or psychic, lie out of reach as we witness the narrator’s gradual unravelling.

我認為這位詩人是阿米里·巴拉卡（Amiri Baraka），因為他們吃了“黑人達達·尼希里斯庫”（Black Dada Nihilismus）漢堡，這是他對同名詩的提及。但是，這種抵抗行為（即使不是徒勞的話）是有限的。就像吞嚥硬幣一樣，當我們目睹敘述者的逐漸解散時，控制的槓桿，無論是物質還是通靈的。

It is perhaps appropriate that a novel set in New York should win the prize named after Swansea’s most famous poet. New York both enticed and frightened Dylan Thomas. It was the city in which he died. The city, also, in which he recorded the ground-breaking reading of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

在紐約的一部小說應該贏得以斯旺西最著名的詩人命名的獎項也許是合適的。紐約都吸引了迪倫·托馬斯（Dylan Thomas）。那是他去世的城市。這座城市也記錄了威爾士兒童聖誕節的開創性閱讀。

In that story, as in his earlier Return Journey, his childhood self is a ghostly presence wandering among the “blitzed flat graves” of shops “marbled with snow and headstoned with fences”. The snow hides devastation. The destruction of the city that Thomas knew as a child. The 44 air raids mounted on Swansea between 1940 and 1943 killed 390 people. And it’s the similar loss of people and places, and the suffering in Gaza today, which Zaher’s novel examines.

在那個故事中，就像他較早的返回旅程一樣，他的童年自我是一個幽靈般的存在，在商店的“閃電般的扁平墳墓”中徘徊，“雪地裡雪地大理石，圍著柵欄搖搖欲墜”。雪隱藏了破壞。托馬斯小時候知道的城市的破壞。 1940年至1943年之間在斯旺西進行的44次空襲造成390人喪生。 Zaher的小說所研究的是人和地方的類似損失，以及當今加沙的苦難。

Palestine is a persistent and troubling presence in The Coin. For Dylan the devastation of Swansea was a metonym for a wider world where civilians were increasingly the victims of war. His world is, regrettably, still ours in that sense. The Coin is a profound meditation on our contemporary world and our complicity in the destruction of another place and people.

巴勒斯坦是硬幣中的持久而令人不安的存在。對於迪倫而言，斯旺西的破壞是一個更廣闊的世界的代名詞，平民越來越成為戰爭的受害者。令人遺憾的是，他的世界仍然是我們的世界。硬幣是對我們當代世界的深刻冥想，也是我們在破壞另一個地方和人民方面的同謀。

In a moving scene, the narrator recalls a Jewish friend, “a very gentle girl who dreamed of becoming a ballerina”. She lived in a house that once belonged to “a Palestinian family that had been expelled in 1948”. The friend tells her about two underground rooms in the garden. One of the rooms, “the poop room”, allows access to the second which contains “a big wooden chest full of treasures and gold”. The narrator keeps “thinking of that secret chamber off the shit room, the wooden chest inside, full of silverware and gold of the family who thought they would return.”

在一個動人的場景中，敘述者回憶起一個猶太朋友，“一個夢想成為芭蕾舞女演員的非常溫柔的女孩”。她住在曾經屬於“ 1948年被開除的巴勒斯坦家庭”的房子裡。朋友告訴她花園裡兩個地下房間。其中一個房間是“便便室”，允許使用第二個房間，其中包含“一個充滿寶藏和黃金的大木箱”。敘述者不斷地思考那個秘密的房間，裡面的木箱，充滿了以為會返回的家人的銀器和金色。 ”

The swallowed coin. The inaccessible allowance. The wooden chest full of treasures and gold. Unreachable currency functions as a powerful symbolic centre connecting the brief scenes and meditations that constitute this appropriately fragmented novel. Lost somewhere in the narrator’s entrails, removed from economic exchange, the coin belongs with the excrement and detritus of urban life, which is the object of the narrator’s disgusted obsessions.

吞嚥硬幣。無法訪問的津貼。木箱裡充滿了寶藏和黃金。無法實現的貨幣作為一個強大的象徵中心，連接了構成這部適當零散小說的簡短場景和冥想。在敘述者的內臟中丟失的某個地方，被從經濟交流中撤離，屬於城市生活的排泄物和碎屑，這是敘述者令人討厭的痴迷的對象。

New York in this novel is a repository of failed circulation – the filth of the city’s streets offering a gothic underside to the endless flows of capitalism, frustrating the narrator’s obsessive attempts at keeping herself clean. Narratives and circulation end in the stasis of dirt. Palestinian history ends in dispossession. Swallowed coin, inaccessible allowance and a buried treasure chest are symbolic repositories of Palestinian traumatic memory.

這部小說中的紐約是流通失敗的存儲庫 - 這座城市街道的污穢為無盡的資本主義流動提供了哥特式的底面，這使敘述者的痴迷嘗試使自己保持清潔。敘事和流通在泥土的停滯中結束。巴勒斯坦歷史以剝奪結束。吞嚥硬幣，無法訪問的津貼和埋藏的寶藏是巴勒斯坦創傷記憶的象徵性存儲庫。

Zaher shows us how the novel form can still offer a unique way of understanding the world, of mapping our contemporary disorientation. It does this not by offering clarity, but by lingering in the spaces where movement, value and meaning break down. This is a novel about circulation – of money, of bodies and of meaning.

Zaher向我們展示了新穎的形式如何仍然可以提供一種獨特的理解世界，繪製我們當代迷失方向的方式。它不是通過提供清晰度，而是通過在移動，價值和含義分解的空間中徘徊來做到這一點。這是一本關於流通的小說 - 金錢，身體和意義。

The swallowed coin is itself a kind of resistance, a refusal to go along with the restless movement of capital that defines our world. The coin refuses liquidity and thereby refuses complicity; its removal from the economic system mimics a kind of muted protest. Beneath the novel’s often frenetic and energetic surface hides a resistant counter-politics of inaction.

吞嚥硬幣本身就是一種抵抗，拒絕與定義我們世界的不安的資本運動一起進行。硬幣拒絕流動性，從而拒絕同謀；它從經濟體系中刪除了一種模仿一種令人沮喪的抗議活動。在小說的下方，經常發瘋而充滿活力的表面隱藏了一種抵抗性的反對行動。