Yasmin Zaher的杰出小说《硬币》赢得了斯旺西大学迪伦·托马斯（Dylan Thomas）40岁以下作家奖。

这不是一开始就开始的故事。取而代之的是，其叙述者从泥土开始，对清洁度的痴迷开始，但后来暗示标题的硬币 - 以色列谢克尔（Shekel），她在一次家庭公路旅行中不小心吞噬了她的父母在车祸中被杀 - 这将是一个同样合适的起点。

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的杰出小说《硬币》（Faber，15英镑）赢得了斯旺西大学迪伦·托马斯（Dylan Thomas）40岁以下作家奖。

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.

这不是一开始就开始的故事。取而代之的是，其叙述者从泥土开始，对清洁度的痴迷开始，但后来暗示标题的硬币 - 以色列谢克尔（Shekel），她在一次家庭公路旅行中不小心吞噬了她的父母在车祸中被杀 - 这将是一个同样合适的起点。

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”.

长期以来，吞咽的硬币开始使自己的存在在她体内的某个地方，在她搬到美国之后。叙述者是一位富有的年轻巴勒斯坦妇女，在纽约市一所中学教男孩。然而，她的财富掌握在控制津贴的兄弟手中。她的回应是制定了一种计划，将豪华手袋与无家可归的同事一起转售，被称为“风衣”。

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.

这是塑造周围世界的几种尝试之一：她陶醉于自己的性行为和通过时尚的衣服和配饰重新定义自己的能力；她教她的班级有关黑人力量的知识，并带他们去听新泽西州黑人民族主义诗人的“匕首诗”。

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.

我认为这位诗人是阿米里·巴拉卡（Amiri Baraka），因为他们吃了“黑人达达·尼希里斯库”（Black Dada Nihilismus）汉堡，这是他对同名诗的提及。但是，这种抵抗行为（即使不是徒劳的话）是有限的。就像吞咽硬币一样，当我们目睹叙述者的逐渐解散时，控制的杠杆，无论是物质还是通灵的。

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.

在纽约的一部小说应该赢得以斯旺西最著名的诗人命名的奖项也许是合适的。纽约都吸引了迪伦·托马斯（Dylan Thomas）。那是他去世的城市。这座城市也记录了威尔士儿童圣诞节的开创性阅读。

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.

在那个故事中，就像他较早的返回旅程一样，他的童年自我是一个幽灵般的存在，在商店的“闪电般的扁平坟墓”中徘徊，“雪地里雪地大理石，围着栅栏摇摇欲坠”。雪隐藏了破坏。托马斯小时候知道的城市的破坏。 1940年至1943年之间在斯旺西进行的44次空袭造成390人丧生。 Zaher的小说所研究的是人和地方的类似损失，以及当今加沙的苦难。

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.

巴勒斯坦是硬币中的持久而令人不安的存在。对于迪伦而言，斯旺西的破坏是一个更广阔的世界的代名词，平民越来越成为战争的受害者。令人遗憾的是，他的世界仍然是我们的世界。硬币是对我们当代世界的深刻冥想，也是我们在破坏另一个地方和人民方面的同谋。

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.”

在一个动人的场景中，叙述者回忆起一个犹太朋友，“一个梦想成为芭蕾舞女演员的非常温柔的女孩”。她住在曾经属于“ 1948年被开除的巴勒斯坦家庭”的房子里。朋友告诉她花园里两个地下房间。其中一个房间是“便便室”，允许使用第二个房间，其中包含“一个充满宝藏和黄金的大木箱”。叙述者不断地思考那个秘密的房间，里面的木箱，充满了以为会返回的家人的银器和金色。”

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.

吞咽硬币。无法访问的津贴。木箱里充满了宝藏和黄金。无法实现的货币作为一个强大的象征中心，连接了构成这部适当零散小说的简短场景和冥想。在叙述者的内脏中丢失的某个地方，被从经济交流中撤离，属于城市生活的排泄物和碎屑，这是叙述者令人讨厌的痴迷的对象。

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.

这部小说中的纽约是流通失败的存储库 - 这座城市街道的污秽为无尽的资本主义流动提供了哥特式的底面，这使叙述者的痴迷尝试使自己保持清洁。叙事和流通在泥土的停滞中结束。巴勒斯坦历史以剥夺结束。吞咽硬币，无法访问的津贴和埋藏的宝藏是巴勒斯坦创伤记忆的象征性存储库。

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向我们展示了新颖的形式如何仍然可以提供一种独特的理解世界，绘制我们当代迷失方向的方式。它不是通过提供清晰度，而是通过在移动，价值和含义分解的空间中徘徊来做到这一点。这是一本关于流通的小说 - 金钱，身体和意义。

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.

吞咽硬币本身就是一种抵抗，拒绝与定义我们世界的不安的资本运动一起进行。硬币拒绝流动性，从而拒绝同谋；它从经济体系中删除了一种模仿一种令人沮丧的抗议活动。在小说的下方，经常发疯而充满活力的表面隐藏了一种抵抗性的反对行动。