→全文閱讀：伊格言＜嬰孩＞（中文版）

    In the beginning you thought it was really just a nursery.
    The kind of hospital nursery where newborn infants were kept.  Snow-white walls.  Snow-white ceiling and floor.  Heavy curtains of a pale iris.  A room so wide and empty, like the belly of a dead whale.  Perhaps it was a time when the morning was just beginning to stir, and the babies were still sound asleep.  In the crack between the curtains and the window sill, divided into countless little pieces, you saw the hazy, bright light of day leaking in like spilt milk.
    Little spots drifting upon the floor close to the window.  (In such moments, you came close to believing that you were a drop of water, about to fall gently into the quiet, innocent slumber of the infants…)

    Did you have a good day? ^_^
    Yeah.  It was okay.  A little stressed out about the quiz. : (
    Let’s go to Shenkeng again next week, and watch TV together again when we come back in the evening.
    Sure.  Oh, by the way, would you like some cookies?  I’ll go buy ingredients and bake you some tomorrow.
    Really?  Yes please yes please.
    You’re really typing faster now.  Practicing on “talk” does work. ^_^

    (A bit too bright?  Let’s adjust the exposure time then.)
    (As if those moments were always hazy around the edges, with a hue soft and bright, like twilight…)

    For my ex-girlfriend L. and I, things neither came nor went easy.  Earlier on in our relationship we had already separated once; then we got back together because some things changed.  But in the end we split up anyway.
    Of course we had our happy times too.  That summer, for example.
    
    That summer.  I remember how, in my room with the curtains drawn, the light was always a honey-russet, as though the sun was setting (the strange thing was, it always seemed to me that those sunsets were not of that place, but of some foreign land I had never been…).  The summer night was a little hot; we may just have returned from eating a bowl of delicious shaved ice together.  We were both tired.  I made up the bed, while she twisted up her hair and, with her back to me, reached around and unhooked her bra…
    In that sunset-like glow, I always had the illusion that her form was circled by a ring of light.  I couldn’t resist stepping up to embrace her alabaster body, luminous, warm and soft in that light.  To this day, I can clearly recall the many minute details etched upon her skin.  It was like caressing a white-faced wooden puppet, a Japanese woodcut beauty in full kimono dress, in a pitch-dark room.  There were times when every touch of my hand triggered a wealth of delicate responses, as profound and complex as in a dream…

    But in the end we split up anyway.  Then she denied that she had ever really liked me.  Even now, for reasons I’m not certain of, she refuses to see me.  After the breakup, I often felt an overwhelming nostalgia for those fleeting moments of happiness; still more clearly, however, I would hear the sound of their brittle, silent disintegration in the waning light.

    (As though, because of some internal structural flaw you were unaware of, every one of your loving little gestures caused that white-faced wooden puppet, that Japanese woodcut beauty in full kimono dress, to break apart, suddenly and soundlessly, in unexpected places such as the collar and the waist.
    Crack.)

    (Did you take it for granted, then, that all the sweet infants waving their plump limbs in the nursery had been carefully placed in the countless clear glass incubators lined up all the way from where you stood to the far corners of the whitewashed walls?)

    Afterwards you discovered that that wasn’t a nursery at all.
    (Still too bright.  Can we darken it more?)

    Like the somber details I never had the nerve to focus my eyes upon.  The young woman with the sunglasses and the floppy-brimmed hat, denouncing the hospital in front of the camera.  You saw her sobbing, grief-stricken.  You saw her pick up a handkerchief to wipe the tears from her mottled face.  You heard her voice, blurry and broken like cobwebs from continuous racking sobs that made her choke.  How can they do this to my baby?
    How can they do this to my baby?
    It’s bad enough that the baby died; how can they do this to my baby?
              
    Oddly enough, even though the reporters’ flashbulbs kept going off, there seemed to be no alternative source of light on the scene; everything was sunk in darkness thick and viscous as gelatin.
    Therefore, you could only see the vast space in the sporadic glare of the flashbulbs around you.
    Snap snap.  Snap.  Snap snap snap.   
    (You looked with horror upon these actions that lacked continuity, illuminated and divided as they were by the brilliant white flashes.  Like panel upon panel of minute details secretly framed in the dark alleyways of time.  Everything in that space had, around its edges, a faint, cold bluish-green light…)
    All of a sudden you realized that, waist-high all around you, lined up one next to another like white-faced puppets in Japanese woodblock prints, were innumerable discarded infant bodies in clear glass boxes.
    
    Snap snap.  Snap snap snap.
    Countless infant carcasses.  Cold bluish-green light.  Snap.  Faces scrunched up like a fist.  Snap.  Necks full of wrinkles and folds, like the gnarled roots of an ancient tree.  Snap.  Downy, sparse baby hair.  Snap.  Limbs shrunken and twisted, like a desiccated vine.  Snap.  Stiff, ash-grey, waxy skin.  Snap.  Snap snap.  
    Perhaps because the glass boxes were so small, the bodies of the dead babies were forced into all kinds of strange contortions.  You saw the arches of their feet touching the crowns of their heads, legs along their spines.  Twisted lips grew on their dead grey faces.  Their torsos resembled masses of misshapen veins from which bluish and purplish-black arms and legs sprouted.  Arching their backs and bending their knees, they hugged the swelling bruises that rose up everywhere on their grayish-white skin.  You saw that, in order for them to be crammed into the countless undersized glass cases around you, stretching far into the whitewashed corners, every joint, every ligament in their bodies had been twisted and bent into fantastic, excruciating angles…
    How can they do this to my baby?  How can they do this to my baby?  How can they do this to my baby?  How can they do this to my baby?
    Snap snap.  Snap.
    The faces of infants who never had a chance to grow, who aged and altered instantly in the never-ending flashes of bright light.  Like a secret known to and condoned by the entire population of some shadowy land.  (You saw that, in the moment of a flash, even the snowy wall seemed to have spread and blistered, wall mold breaking out, scabrous and frothy, in innumerable spots…)
    It’s bad enough that the baby died; how can they do this to my baby?  

    (Aperture closed.  Flashing ceased.  All, all turned into darkness…)
    I remember how, in the days following my breakup with L., I would, in delusory moments of despondency, see images that looked as though they had never before passed through the sight of man.
    As though I was in a dream.  As though, dreaming, I peered through a membrane originally impenetrable, but which stretched ever thinner over time, and saw these images.  They were similar to the “talk” function screen on electronic bulletin board systems, divided into upper and lower halves, with lines of words gradually emerging, like swirling white specks, to dance one by one before my eyes.  At first I thought I was on “talk” with L. (in the early days, whenever we couldn’t see each other, we would jokingly use “learning to type” as a pretext to “talk” on the electronic bulletin board), so I tapped away with great enthusiasm on the keyboard.  But later on I realized that I was wrong.
    L. was talking to people I didn’t know.  It was like listening through a door, with great difficulty, to some muffled, mutilated conversation in a foreign tongue.  I, in a dreamlike trance, could not understand what they were saying at all.  I never slept a wink during those nights, I remember, but lay staring, wide awake, at the various alien lighted pixels and blocks of color that cut up my computer screen, a screen that flickered and flowed as L. “talk”ed to someone else.

    Far into the night, I continued to tap alone on the keyboard in that empty, desolate room.  But not a single word that I really wanted to say ever appeared on the screen.    

    (Did you have a good day? ^_^
    Yeah.  It was okay.  A little stressed out about the quiz. : (
    Let’s go to Shenkeng again next week, and watch TV together again when we come back in the evening.
    Sure.  Oh, by the way, would you like some cookies?  I’ll go buy ingredients and bake you some tomorrow.
    Really?  Yes please yes please.
    You’re really typing faster now.  Practicing on “talk” does work. ^_^)
     

→全文閱讀：伊格言＜流光＞

　　然而她知道海底的本質是無聲而冰冷的。那一絲冰冷自海底上浮，流過鋼琴、流過她的身軀，像一縷絲絹，靜默地流到海洋遙遠的深處裡去了。......

→全文閱讀：伊格言＜星期五的生命與時代：讀柯慈《仇敵》＞

2007曼氏亞洲文學獎部份報導與完整入圍名單

→《Taipei Times》專訪入圍者伊格言

Taiwanese writer Egoyan Zheng wants the world to see that Taiwan has some top-class literary talent and is a match for its giant neighbor in terms of quality...

→關於2008歐康納國際短篇小說獎

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《甕中人》（印刻出版）

參考文本：【小說】墜落
特別推薦：【小說】拜訪糖果阿姨（2008.3.《印刻文學生活誌》小說展作品）
聽媽媽的話：【小說】咖啡杯遊戲
醫學系的故事：【甕中人後記】那些未完成的
西門町的故事：【小說】獎座
參考文本：【小說】嬰孩
小說：未發表科幻新作《無色之人》片段（1）：方程式測定儀
小說：未發表科幻新作《無色之人》片段（2）：植入式相機
小說：未發表科幻新作《無色之人》片段（3）：幻火

參考文本：【隨筆】冷血告白
關於顏射：【阿宅】川島和津實之溫柔的可能
參考文本：【詞條】石黑一雄．《別讓我走》

◇ 【借來的時光...】駱以軍讀伊格言