Percy Cradock
珀西•柯利达
Sir Percy Cradock, ambassador to China, died on January 22nd, aged 86
珀西•柯利达爵士，英国驻华大使，1月22日辞世，享年86岁。
Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN the registry filled up with smoke, and he realised the building was on fire, Percy Cradock knew it was time to leave. The date was August 22nd 1967. For months, both tension and noise had been gradually increasing. Drums, gongs and loudspeakers blaring revolutionary songs had made earplugs standard issue in the British Mission in Beijing. The diplomatic round had gone on much as normal; but dinner with the Danish chargé d’affaires, amid the gleam of silverware, had also featured scenes outside the window of people being dragged out of buses and beaten in the street. Now mobs of Red Guards were storming the mission as Mr Cradock, then political counsellor, and the rest of the staff retreated. There was only one thing for it. He raised his arms “in a generally reassuring way” and cried, “We’re coming out.”
登记处烟雾弥漫，珀西•柯利达意识到，房子已经着火了。是时候离开了。那天是1967年8月22日。数月来，局势日趋紧张，窗外也越发吵杂。锣鼓声、扩音器传出的刺耳的革命歌曲，这让耳塞成了北京的英国驻京办事处的一个标准装备。外交界还和往常一样，但是在银器微光下和丹麦临时代办的晚餐中，也不乏窗外有人被拉出汽车，遭人于街头暴打的场景。现在红卫兵正冲进办事处，当时还是政治顾问的柯利达和其它同事赶紧撤退。剩下一件事。他举起双手，以一种宽慰众人的方式，喊道，“我们出来了”。
Some would call it surrender. Mr Cradock knew, on the contrary, that it was the only realistic response. Confrontation would be useless. Besides, having made that concession, he went no further. He was asked by the Guards, as they beat him round his back and shoulders, to cry “Long Live Chairman Mao!” He refused, “and fortunately the demand was not pressed.” Forced to bow his head in the ritual kowtow, he kept trying to raise it. He was asked afterwards why he could not make just one small gesture of obeisance. He replied, with that opaque courtesy beloved of both Chinese officials and Whitehall mandarins, that it could not be done.
有人会称之为投降。相反，柯利达知道，这是唯一可行的办法。正面交锋是没有用的。此外，除了这之外，他没再做别的让步。红卫兵一边不停得打他后背、肩膀，一边要他高喊“毛主席万岁！”他拒绝了。“还好，红卫兵没在继续要求。”他被强行按下头叩头，但他仍努力抬起来。后来有人问他，为什么他不做哪怕是一个很小的屈服动作。他用那种中国和英国官员都很喜欢的模糊的礼貌用语回答说，不能这么做。
He was a figure who might have been at home in the Middle Kingdom, where professional scholar-officials, with the equivalent of his double starred firsts in English and law from Cambridge, kept the vast realm ticking like clockwork. Like them he was low-key but razor-sharp, happy to let ministers have their say first, but with an impish glint in his eye, or a slow steepling of his fingers, that showed he had instantly grasped the danger, or the absurdity, of a situation.
他这个人在中国很可能生活得非常自得。中国是由一群职业的学者官员让这片广袤的土地保持着正常运转，这些官员像他在剑桥拿到英文和法律的双科第一一样，也有类似光辉的学业成绩。而他也和他们一样，低调但又敏锐，乐于让部长们先说，但他眼里调皮的一个眼神，或者指尖稍稍翘起，就意味着他立马抓住了情况的危险所在或是不合理之处。
His regret was that he could not always lead others to grasp it too; that they could not learn to see things from the Chinese point of view. “Know your enemy” was his motto, as well as the title of his book about a late stint as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. But for the British governments he served from the 1960s to the 1990s, China was simply unfathomable. Even he—on his scattered tours of duty in 1962, 1966-69, 1978-84 (as ambassador) and secretly thereafter—found the changes baffling. One decade uniformed crowds would be chanting to Mao as the red sun shining in their hearts; the next, “louche young men in T-shirts” proclaimed Deng Xiaoping’s drive to open and modernise. In one dispatch, in his literary way, he resorted to Auden to describe the fading of the Cultural Revolution in 1968:
而他的遗憾是，他不能总是也让别人领悟；他们总是不能学不会从中国的角度看问题。“了解你的敌人” 是他的箴言，这也是有关他随后担任联合情报委员会主席期间生活的一本书的名字。但是对于他二十世纪六十年代至九十年代他任职的英国政府而言，中国简直就是深不可测。即使在他看来——他先后于1962年，1966-1969年，1978-1984年（担任驻华大使）到中国任职，之后又秘密来过——中国的变化也让人迷惑。十年前，统一着装的人群高唱毛主席是他们心中的红太阳，十年后，“身着T恤的不受人尊敬的时髦青年”成了邓小平的改革开放事业的标志。他在1968年的一封信中，引用了奥登（Auden）的诗，从字面上，描写下文化大革命的消退：
The vases crack, the ladies die,
The Oracles are wrong:
We suck our thumbs or sleep; the show
Is gamey and too long.
瓶碎
女亡
圣语妄：
我们舐吸拇指或眼屎
戏剧龌龊也太长
Beneath it all, however, he believed China preserved a self-sufficiency, secrecy and superiority that would not change, and had not done since Britain had been dismissed as “a handful of stones in the Western Ocean”.
在这些文字背后，他却认为中国仍留有一份自我满足感、神秘感和优越感，这些都不会改变。自从英国以“西部大洋里的几块石头”被打发走后，这些也都一直没有变过。
Giving up Hong Kong
放弃香港
His fascination was first sparked by reading Arthur Waley’s[1] translations from the Chinese at school. He stayed intrigued after years of meetings with Chinese leaders who smoked, spat or pickled themselves with mao-tai. A Beijing autumn, calm and golden, with persimmons hanging like lanterns in the trees, would enchant him. But the romance of China was soon eclipsed by the struggle to live, as a free-thinking foreigner, within the communist system. China was, he confessed, an addiction with him. But it was also “an acquired taste, much of it bitter”.
第一次让他对中国着迷的是在学校里读到的阿瑟•韦利（Arthur Waley）翻译的一些作品。在年复一年与抽烟、斗嘴、狂饮茅台的中国领导的各种会议中，他仍保持着这种痴迷。北京之秋，平静的金黄色，挂在树上的柿子像一个个灯笼，让他心旷神怡。但是作为共产主义体制下保持自由思想的外国人，他不得不为了生活而斗争，这种对中国的美好情愫也很快被侵蚀掉了。他坦承，中国让他上瘾了。“虽然有几分苦涩，但我已经习惯了。”
The toughest episode—though also, in his view, a triumph—came in 1983-84, with the talks that arranged the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Sir Percy, as he now was, eschewed a showdown. Britain “had virtually no cards”; it was therefore essential to make a deal, while pressing for whatever freedoms could be salvaged. Margaret Thatcher, still fiery from the Falklands war, at first disagreed with him; popular newspapers talked of betrayal. Chris Patten, who became governor of Hong Kong in 1992, pressed democracy a good deal too much for Sir Percy, who knew it would unnecessarily upset the Chinese. He accused him, in Prospect magazine, of a “fatal miscalculation”.
最艰难的一段时间——尽管在他眼里，这也是一种胜利——是1983——1984年。当时，要和中国政府就香港回归的问题进行一系列谈判。尽管他当时身为珀西爵士，他仍回避了谈判的最后交锋。英国“事实上已经没有牌了”，因此，必须要达成协议，但仍为能够保存一些自由而努力，不管自由能到何种程度。撒切尔夫人，当时还没能从马岛战争的怒火中走出来，起初和他意见相左；大众媒体也给他扣上了背叛的帽子。对于珀西爵士而言，基利斯•彭定康（Chris Patten），也就是后来的1992年香港总督要求的民主太难了，珀西知道，没必要激怒中国。珀西甚而在《观点》杂志上谴责彭定康，斥之为“分析重大失误”。
This was uncharacteristic. Sir Percy usually made his points, and got his way, stealthily and quietly. He would steal upstairs, when foreign-policy adviser at Number 10, to watch Wimbledon on television; he would travel incognito to Beijing, once to negotiate the new Hong Kong airport, and would be snapped pacing in the grounds of the Summer Palace, looking much like George Smiley. But he was provoked into open war with Mr Patten by his very hatred of confrontation. Dealing with China and its arcana imperii was a matter for professionals, not politicians. And his method was not surrender, though it might look as though he had put his hands up, or made a cringing kowtow to the Chinese. It was just, as he saw it, a nod in their direction, in a coolly realistic way.
这不是他的性格。通常，珀西爵士会阐明他的观点，然后离开，悄悄的安静的离开。在他还是唐明街10号的外交政策顾问时，他会偷偷上楼，观看电视中播出的温布尔登网球比赛；有一次在协商香港的新机场时，他会悄悄到北京旅游，在颐和园的庭院里踱步时被人拍到，就像乔治•斯迈利（George Smiley）一样。但这一次，他被激怒了，以他极其厌恶的对峙方式和彭定康进行了公开的对决。和中国及其帝国奥秘打交道是专家的事，而非政客的事。而且，他的办法也不是屈服，尽管当他举起双手，或者向中国人屈膝叩头时，看上去很像。正如他说看到的一样，这不过是按照他们的要求点头而已，这种方式冷静而现实。
[1] 阿瑟韦利（Arthur Waley）是20世纪初英国的汉学大师。
韦利在大英博物馆专职研究艺术品，当时大英博物馆乏人研究东亚艺术，便请他兼职。出于工作需要韦利开始自学汉语，1917年韦利翻译出版了《170首中国诗歌》。韦利翻译的中国诗歌，令西方读者对东方文明大开眼界，当时媒体评论形容：“读中国诗歌，如发现了新大陆一般地激动和兴奋。”中国诗歌热销离不开那个时代的背景。20世纪初的西方人，从报刊上读到的中国消息不是战争就是饥荒，但当读者从书架上取出韦利翻译的中国诗歌集时，里面所展示的则是另一个道德、文明、慈悲、诚实及社会准则的东方乐园。他们开始服膺中国数千年亘古不变的道德哲学，相信这就是文明古国多少世纪来行之有效的治国之本。
韦利于1929年辞去大英博物馆职位，成为一介独立的东方文学译者。上世纪三四十年代，他陆续出版了《诗经》（1937年）、《论语》（1938年）、《猴子》（节译自《西游记》，1942年）。韦利最为推崇白居易和苏东坡。他自称不是一个翻译匠，他认为自己的文学风格与杜甫迥异，因此从未碰过他感觉译不出“灵魂”的中国古诗。韦利被形容为“坐在家里的观察者”，因他从未光临过亚洲。
http://www.guoxue.com/xueren/sinology/wenzhang/fyzggd.htm
[2] 间谍乔治•斯迈利（George Smiley），一个小说里的人物，是侦探史上最为郁郁不得志的一个人。在圈内斯迈利是有口皆碑的反间谍高手，可惜他既不懂作秀，也没生了一张英俊脸孔，所以光环完全被007遮住；他虽屡破奇案，但不会搞好人际关系，所以一直都只是情报处的一个小小职员。
译者：davidship
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