[2008.12.18] A very European hero 欧式英雄丁丁

TinTin
丁丁

A very European hero
一个很“欧洲”的英雄

Dec 18th 2008 | BRUSSELS
From The Economist print edition

A Tintin blockbuster is on the way. Baffled Americans hoping to understand him should look at him through the prism of post-war Europe.

一个以丁丁为题材的大片正在制作中。那些想要了解他而又感到困惑的美国人应该透过战后的欧洲这个历史的三棱镜来看待他。

IT IS one of Europe’s more startling laws. In 1949 France banned children’s books and comic strips from presenting cowardice in a “favourable” light, on pain of up to a year in prison for errant publishers. It was equally forbidden to make laziness or lying seem attractive. The law created an oversight committee to watch for positive depictions of these ills, along with crime, theft, hatred, debauchery and acts “liable to undermine morality” among the young.

1949年，法国颁布了欧洲史上的一项令人吃惊的法律：禁止在儿童书籍和连环画中以赞赏的口吻谈及懦弱，违反此法的出版商将面临着最多可达一年的监禁。该法同时禁止把懒惰和撒谎写得具有吸引力。为实施该法，政府成立了一个督察委员会用于监视（儿童文学作品中）对于一些社会病态的正面描述。这些病态除了上述三条之外还有犯罪、偷窃、仇恨、淫荡以及年轻人中的一些“可能有损道德的”举止。

Taken literally, the law suggests that an ideal comic-book hero would resemble an overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair play, restrained violence and no sex. That is a pretty accurate description of Tintin, the Belgian boy reporter who enjoyed spectacular success in post-war Europe.

从字面上讲，该法律所推崇的理想中的漫画书英雄应该像一个超龄的童子军，他的冒险活动涉及到英勇无畏、公平竞争、有限的暴力外加没有性行为。这些刚好是对丁丁的十分精确的描述。这个来自比利时的大男孩记者在战后的欧洲取得了辉煌的成功。

Tintin’s slightly priggish character fitted the times. His simple ethical code–seek the truth, protect the weak and stand up to bullies–appealed to a continent waking up from the shame of war. His wholesome qualities help explain the great secret of his commercial success–that he was, and remains, one of the rare comic books that adults are happy to buy for children.

丁丁的稍有几分一本正经的性格与那个时代是相吻合的。他的简单的道德准则–寻求真理，保护弱者和对抗恶霸–对一个刚刚从战争的耻辱中苏醒过来的大陆上的人们很有吸引力。他那健康向上的品质有助于解释他商业成功中的一个巨大的秘密–那就是他过去是，现在还是，大人们乐于买给孩子们的漫画书之一，这种漫画书实在是太少了。

But probity cannot explain why Tintin became a cultural landmark in Europe, as important on his side of the Atlantic as Superman on the other. There were plenty of wholesome comics in post-war Europe, most of them justly forgotten. Something else in Tintin spoke to children and adults in continental Europe. Even in the straitened years of post-war reconstruction, he was soon selling millions of books a year.

但是，刚正不阿并不能够解释为什么丁丁会成为欧洲文化史上的里程碑–他在大西洋此岸的重要性与超人在彼岸的重要性相当。战后的欧洲出现过很多健康向上的漫画书，它们中的大多数已为人们理所当然地遗忘掉了。丁丁这套书一定还有其它的什么东西，对欧洲大陆上的大人和孩子们具有独特的吸引力。即使在战后重建的艰难岁月里，它的销量很快就达到了每年数百万本。

Admirers point to the quality of the drawing in Tintin, and the tense pacing of the plots, and they are right. Any child reared on “King Ottokar’s Sceptre”, a Balkan thriller; or “The Calculus Affair”, about a scientist’s kidnap, will later feel a shock of familiarity when watching Hitchcock films or reading Graham Greene. It is all there: the dangerous glamour of cities at night; the terror of a forced drive into the forest; a world of tapped hotel telephones and chain-smoking killers in the lobby downstairs.

爱好者们指出（丁丁书中的过人之处是）精美的画面和紧凑的情节，他们说对了。任何小时候读过《奥托卡王（King Ottokar）的权杖》（一个发生在巴尔干半岛的惊险故事），或者《卡尔库鲁斯（Calculus）事件》（关于一个科学家被绑架的故事）的人，长大后在观看希区科克[1]（Hitchcock）的电影时，或者在阅读格雷厄姆·格林[2]（Graham Greene）的作品时会感到惊人的相似之处。这些全出现过：夜色笼罩下的光怪陆离、危机四伏的城市；被赶入森林时所经历的恐怖；旅馆里被监听的电话以及在楼下大厅里连续吸烟的杀手的场景。

Yet even excellence does not explain Tintin’s success in Europe. For, despite his qualities, Tintin has never been a big hit in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Britain, he is reasonably well known, but as a minority taste, bound within narrow striations of class: his albums are bought to be tucked into boarding school trunks or read after Saturday morning violin lessons. In America, Tintin is barely known.

然而，甚至质量的出类拔萃也无法解释丁丁在欧洲的成功。因为虽然制作精美，丁丁从来没有成为过英语世界中的大热门。在英国，他的名字也算是家喻户晓，但只为来自于某一特定阶层的少数人所喜好：他的专集被买来塞进寄宿学校的衣箱内，或者是作为星期六早晨小提琴课后的读物。在美国，人们只是听说过这个名字而已。

All societies reveal themselves through their children’s books. Europe’s love affair with Tintin is more revealing than most.

所有的儿童作品中都可以找到其社会的一些特征，这一点从欧洲人对丁丁的珍爱上表现得尤为突出。

Any exploration of Tintin’s hold on continental affections must start not with culture, but with history. For all the talk about morality, France’s 1949 law on children’s books had ideological roots. It was pushed by an odd alliance of Communists, Catholic conservatives and jobless French cartoonists, determined that French children should be reading works imbued with “national” values. Pascal Ory, a historian at the Sorbonne university (author of “Mickey Go Home. The de-Americanisation of the cartoon strip”), writes that the main aim of the law–which, remarkably, remains in force today, tweaked in the 1950s to add a ban on incitement of ethnic prejudice–was to block comics from America.

丁丁长期以来为欧洲大陆的人们所喜爱，对于这个问题的探讨一定不能从文化入手，而要从历史入手。谈到道德，法国于1949年针对儿童书籍的那个法律是有其意识形态上的根源的。此法是在一个古怪的联盟的推动下而制定的：该联盟的成员有共产党人、天主教的保守派和无业的法国卡通作者。他们认为法国的儿童应该去读那些充满了国家价值观的作品。帕斯卡尔·奥瑞（Pascal Ory）是索帮大学的历史学家（也是《米老鼠滚回家，连环画的去美国化》这部书的作者）。他最近在一篇文章中谈到了这个法律–引人注目的是，该法至今依然有效，只是在上个世纪的五十年代经历了一个小小的修改，加入了对煽动种族偏见的禁令。他写到，该法的主要目的是阻止美国漫画的入侵[3]。

The question of the transatlantic gap remains current. The coming year is a big one for Tintin. In 2009 it will be 80 years since the boy reporter embarked on his first adventure, a trip to the Soviet Union. In Belgium a museum is to open, dedicated to the work of Herge, Tintin’s creator, whose real name was Georges Remi. (His initials, when reversed, are pronounced Herge in French.) Even under construction, the museum is impressive: a soaring structure of concrete and glass, wrapped around a large wooden form like the hull of an upturned ship. The seriousness of the architecture carries a message. This is not a theme park, but a gallery for high art. That is an uncontroversial view in continental Europe, especially in Belgium and France, where cartoon strips are reviewed in critical essays and dissected in academic thesis.

大西洋两岸之间的文化分歧至今依然是个问题。明年将是丁丁的一个大年，2009年将是这个大男孩记者踏上他的首次冒险征程，苏联之旅，八十周年。在比利时，有一家专门用于展览艾尔热作品的博物馆将开张。艾尔热是丁丁的创造者，他的真名叫乔治斯·雷米（Georges Remi）（把他的姓名中的第一个字母用法语反过来读，就成了艾尔热）。甚至还在建造中，该博物馆就显得非常壮观：一个拔地而起的混凝土和玻璃的结构包裹住了一个巨大的木块，形如一个竖起来的船体。这一结构的庄重向人们传达着一种信息：这里不是一个主题公园，而是一个高尚艺术的展览馆。这种观点在欧洲大陆是毋庸置疑的，特别是在比利时和法国，在这两个国家里，连环画作品是为文学批评的文章所评论并且在学术论文中被剖析的。

In America filming is supposed to begin in earnest on a trilogy of Tintin films to be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, using digital “performance capture” technology to create a hybrid between animation and live action. Mr Spielberg secured an option to film Tintin shortly before Herge’s death in 1983. The delays seem to have been caused partly by American puzzlement at Tintin. In September 2008 Universal Pictures pulled out of a plan to co-finance the project. The Hollywood Reporter, a trade publication, describes the films as being about “a young Belgian reporter and world traveller who is aided in his adventures by his faithful dog Snowy”, and explains that this storyline is “hugely popular in Europe”. You can almost hear the baffled shrugs.

在美国，一个由斯蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格（Steven Spielberg）和彼得·杰克逊（Peter Jackson）执导的丁丁三部曲应该已经实实在在地开拍了，该片运用数码“表演捕捉”技术创造出一种真人表演与动画的完美结合［4］。斯皮尔伯格在1983年艾尔热去世前不久获准了丁丁电影的拍摄权。使得该片拍摄一再推迟的部分原因似乎是美国人对丁丁的困惑。2008年九月，寰球影视取消了共同投资这一项目的计划。一家名为《好来坞报告者》的商务期刊将此片描述为有关“一个年轻的比利时记者、世界旅行者，他在冒险的过程中得到了其忠犬白雪的帮助”，并解释说这一故事情节“在欧洲极其流行”。你几乎可以听到评论者因困惑而耸肩所发出的声音。

As a journalist, Tintin is spectacularly unproductive, even by the idle standards of his trade. In all 24 albums he pauses perhaps twice to jot down a note. He happily gives rival reporters the details of his latest scoop. Only once is he seen with a completed article, on his inaugural 1929 trip to the Soviet Union. He briefly ponders how to get the manuscript to his office, before yawning and heading for bed, declaring: “Oh well, we’ll think about that tomorrow.” Four frames later, secret policemen are climbing the stairs to arrest him, and the article is never mentioned again.

作为一个新闻工作者，丁丁在事业上明显一事无成，即使依照这一行业的宽松的标准来看亦是如此。在全部24个专集中，他大概只有两次停下来匆匆写下一点东西。他很乐于把他最近获得的独家新闻的详细情况告诉给那些与他竞争的记者们。只有一次，他总算写完了一篇文章，那是还是他于1929年的首次冒险–苏联之旅。他想了一下该怎样把这篇手稿送到他的办公室，然后就打着哈欠走向床边，嘴里说着：“好吧，让我们明天再考虑这个问题吧”。四幅画面之后，秘密警察上楼来逮捕了他，那篇文章就再也没有被提及了。

Unlike another fictional adolescent with a media job–the American comic character Spiderman (portrayed as a freelance photographer in civilian life)–Tintin is not an outsider, or a rebel against the established order. He defends monarchs against revolutionaries (earning a knighthood in one book). His first instinct on catching a villain is to hand him over to the nearest police chief. He does not carry his own gun, though he shoots like an ace. Though slight, he has a very gentlemanly set of fighting skills: he knows how to box, how to sail, to drive racing cars, pilot planes and ride horses. He has few chances to rescue girls or women, moving in an almost entirely male, sexless world, but is quick to defend small boys from unearned beatings. His quick wits compensate for his lack of brawn. Andre Malraux, a French writer and politician, claimed that General de Gaulle called Tintin his “only international rival”, because both were famous for standing up to bullies.

不同于另外一个也是为媒体工作的虚构少年–美国的漫画人物蜘蛛侠（他被描述为平民生活中的一个自由摄影师），丁丁并不是一个局外人，也不是一个现行社会秩序的反对者。他帮助君主抵御革命者（在一本书中被封为骑士）。他在抓住坏蛋之后的第一个反应就是把此人交给最近的警长。他虽然枪法极好，可自己却从不带枪。尽管不够强壮，但他掌握了一整套的绅士般的战斗技巧：他会拳击、驾船、开赛车、开飞机和骑马。游荡于一个几乎没有性别、全是男人的世界，他因此很少有机会去救一个女孩或女人，但当他看到小男孩受到欺负时，会马上冲过去保护。他的急智弥补了他身材上的不足。安德鲁·马隆（Andre Malraux）是一个法国作家和政治家，他声称戴高乐将军称丁丁为自己的唯一国际对手，因为他们俩人都是以在恶霸面前挺身而出而著名的。

Tintin is grandly uninterested in money. He is indifferent when–on occasion–he is offered large sums for accounts of catching some villain. Herge’s disdain for transatlantic capitalism is portrayed in the 1931 “Tintin in America”, in which businessmen bid each other up to offer Tintin $100,000 for an oil well. When the young reporter explains the well is on Blackfoot Indian land, the businessmen steal the land from the Indians.

总的来说，丁丁对金钱是不感兴趣的。有一次，他抓住了一些坏蛋，有人为此向他提供了大笔赏金，他却显得无动于衷。艾尔热对于大洋彼岸的资本主义的蔑视表现在出版于1931年的《丁丁在美洲》一书里：一些商人互相竞价，最终愿意用十万美元从丁丁手里买下一口油井。当年轻的记者向他们解释此井是位于黑脚印地安人的领地之后，商人们从印地安人手里把土地偷走了。

European snobbery about money permeates the books. Villains are frequently showy arrivistes. Old money is good. A gift (as opposed to gainful employment) allows his best friend, Captain Haddock, to buy back his family’s ancestral mansion. The captain takes to castle life with relish. Enriched by a treasure find, he swaps his seaman’s uniform for an increasingly Wodehousian wardrobe involving cravats, tweeds and at one point a monocle.

书中随处可见欧洲人在金钱上所表现出来的势力眼：坏蛋们经常以暴发户的身份粉墨登场；祖上留下的金钱是好钱。一个礼物（而不是劳动所得）使得丁丁的好友阿道克船长得以买回祖居的豪宅，船长从此沉迷于古堡的生活中。因找到了一笔财宝而发了财，他脱下了水手制服，穿上了越来越考究的沃德豪斯式［5］的全部行头，包括领结、花呢套服，有一次还用上了单眼镜。

Herge did not share his creation’s lack of interest in money. He paid minute attention to marketing (in total, some 200m albums have been sold) and the production of puzzles, colouring books and toys. Though Herge is routinely voted onto lists of “10 famous Belgians”, he had no illusions about his homeland’s limitations as a market. He quickly began excising references to Tintin’s Belgian roots to boost his appeal on the French and Swiss markets, referring to him in 1935 as a “young European reporter”. He was happy for English-language editions to leave the impression that Tintin was British. Captain Haddock’s ancestral mansion changed from the Chateau de Moulinsart into Marlinspike Hall, and his most illustrious ancestor became a hero of the British royal navy, rather than a commander in the fleet of Louis XIV.

艾尔热可不像他笔下的人物那样对金钱缺乏兴趣。他在对丁丁作品的市场化上绞尽脑汁（总共售出了两亿册），他还力推拼图、着色书及玩具等附加产品。虽然艾尔热经常被选入“比利时十大名人”之列，可他并不认为他的市场仅限于他的祖国。为了提升丁丁在法国和瑞士市场的吸引力，他很快就着手删除书中有关丁丁的比利时之根的情节，于1935年改称丁丁为“一个年轻的欧洲记者”。他很高兴地看到此书的英文版给人留下了丁丁是英国人的印象。阿道克船长祖居的豪宅穆林沙特城堡（Chateau de Moulinsart）被更名为马林斯派克庄园（Marlinspike Hall），并且他最有名的祖先从路易十四麾下的舰队司令摇身一变成了英国皇家海军的英雄。

Assuming that Tintin does end up the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster, many around the world will soon think he is American. Herge’s heirs know Tintin’s fame will take on quite different, global dimensions, in a way that will be hard to control. That will mark a big change.

假如丁丁最终成为好来坞大片的主题，世界上的许多人很快会认为他是美国人。艾尔热的继承者们知道丁丁的名声将会以一种很难控制的方式在一个与过去截然不同的、全球的空间里发展。这将标志着一个巨大的变化。

After Herge’s death, his wife Fanny inherited the rights to his work. She remains in overall artistic control of the Herge Studios in Brussels (day to day the studios are run by Fanny’s second husband, Nick Rodwell, a British businessman). The studios are known for the ferocity with which they guard the works, scouring the world for abuses of copyright from Herge’s old offices on a smart shopping avenue.

艾尔热死后，他的妻子法妮继承了他作品的版权。她至今仍然控制着位于布鲁塞尔的艾尔热工作室的整体艺术规划（工作室的日常运作由法妮的第二任丈夫尼克·罗得威尔负责，他是一个英国商人）。此工作室坐落于一条高雅的购物街上，以其对作品的保护异常凶猛而著名。雇员们以艾尔热早先的一些办公室为基地，在全世界范围内搜寻对其版权的滥用行为。

Mrs Rodwell confesses to seeing risks in Hollywood doing Tintin. To her, the charm of Herge’s work is absolutely “European”–more “nuanced” than an American comic strip. The American style of telling a story threatens that European “sensibility”, she suggests: American narratives are “very dynamic, but more violent, and are much more aggressively paced.”

罗得威尔夫人坦承她意识到了让好来坞拍摄丁丁的危险性。在她看来，艾尔热作品的魅力绝对在于其欧洲风格–比美国的连环画更加细腻。美国人讲故事的方式对欧洲风格中的敏感性造成了威胁。她指出：美国人的故事“在情节上跌宕起伏，但充斥更多的暴力并且节奏超快”。

Herge wanted the risk taken. He died days before a planned face-to-face meeting with Mr Spielberg, but had been briefed on the director’s thinking by a trusted assistant, Alain Baran, sent to Los Angeles to open negotiations. Mr Baran later wrote that Mr Spielberg saw Tintin as an “Indiana Jones for kids”, imagining Jack Nicholson as Captain Haddock. Such talk did not alarm Herge. He said a film-maker like Mr Spielberg should be given free rein, and told his wife: “This Tintin will doubtless be different, but it will be a good Tintin.”

艾尔热想要冒这个险。他本已安排好了要和斯皮尔伯格进行一次面对面的会谈，可他却于会谈到来的几天前去世。幸好他的亲信助手，被派到洛杉矶开展协商的阿联·巴兰（Alain Baran），已经向他汇报了斯导的一些想法。巴兰后来写到，在斯皮尔伯格眼里，丁丁是一个孩子版的印地安那·琼斯（Indiana Jones）［6］，他想让杰克·尼克尔森（Jack Nicholson）［7］来演阿道克船长。这些话并没有引起艾尔热的警觉。他说象斯皮尔伯格这样的电影制作者应该放手让他自由发挥。他还告诉妻子：“这个丁丁无疑会和以往不同，但他会是一个好的丁丁。”

Such artistic openness is perhaps surprising, given where Herge began his career. He always said the Catholic boy-scout movement rescued him from a “grey” childhood in lower middle-class Brussels. From there, he fell in with a slightly hysterical clutch of hard-right priests and nationalists, one of whom gave him his first job, on a small Belgian Catholic newspaper, the Vingtieme Siecle, which fervently supported the monarchy, Belgian missionaries in the Congo and Mussolini and loathed the Bolshevik atheists running Russia and “Judeo-American” capitalism.

考虑到艾尔热从哪里开始他的创作生涯，这种艺术家的开明也许会令人感到惊奇。他总是说是天主教的童子军运动把他从中下阶层布鲁塞尔人的灰色童年中解救出来。从那时起，他就投入了一些极右派牧师和狂热的国家主义分子的怀抱。这些人其中的一位给了他第一份工作：为一家名叫“二十世纪报（Vingtieme Siecle）”的巴尔干天主教报纸打工。该报热烈地支持君主制，在刚果的巴尔干传教士和墨索里尼；痛恨统治俄国的布尔什维克无神论者和犹太人主导的美国资本主义。

Tintin was born in this unpromising environment, in a weekly children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtieme. Herge wanted to draw cartoons about the Wild West of America. His employer, an alarming priest named Norbert Wallez, had other ideas, ordering that the new fictional reporter be sent to the Soviet Union, then to Belgium’s colony in the Congo.

丁丁就是在这种毫无希望的环境中诞生的，最初刊载于二十世纪报的每周儿童副刊上。艾尔热想要画一些有关美国未开化的西部的卡通。他的老板罗勃兹·沃尔茨（Norbert Wallez），一个对其教义念念不忘的牧师，却有着其它打算。他命令艾尔热把这位新虚构出来的记者派到苏联去，然后再派往比利时的殖民地刚果。

The 1930 story “Tintin in the Congo” has done much to feed Herge’s reputation for racism. Its Africans are crude caricatures: child-men with wide eyes and bloated lips who prostrate themselves before Tintin (as well as Snowy his dog), after he shows off such magic as an electromagnet, or quinine pills for malaria.

发表于1930年的故事《丁丁在刚果》使艾尔热落得了个种族主义的名声。书中的非洲人被画得十分粗糙：大大的眼睛、突出的嘴唇，长得像孩子般的大人。他们拜倒在丁丁（和他的狗白雪）面前，只因他向他们显示了磁铁的魔力和用来治疟疾的奎宁药丸。

In Scandinavia the staggering toll of African wildlife Tintin kills–especially a rhinoceros he reduces to blackened chunks with dynamite–has prompted additional angst. The book remains popular in Africa, Herge defenders like to assert. But, in truth, it has lost any charm it ever possessed. It is a work of propaganda–not for “colonialism”, as is often said–but more narrowly for Belgian missionaries, one of whom keeps saving Tintin’s life in evermore ludicrous ways: first dispatching a half dozen crocodiles with a rifle then rescuing him from a roaring waterfall, seemingly unhindered by his advanced age and ankle-length soutane.

在斯堪的纳维亚半岛，被丁丁杀死的野生动物的惊人的数量，特别是那只被炸药炸得粉身碎骨的犀牛，引起了人们更多的不安。艾尔热的拥护者们乐于声称该书在非洲依然很流行，但实际上它已经失去了原有的魅力。它现在已沦为宣传品：不是人们常说的为殖民主义作宣传，而是更加狭义地为比利时的传教士们作宣传。这些传教士中的一位以越来越可笑的方式连着几次救丁丁于危难之中：他首先是用一杆来复枪杀死了六只鳄鱼（从而救了丁丁一命），然后又从咆哮的瀑布上再度把丁丁救回，看上去他那老迈的年龄和齐脚的长袍一点都没有对他造成不便。

Herge’s reputation is also marked by charges of anti-Semitism. He received many complaints about one of his villains, the hook-nosed New York financier, “Mr Blumenstein”. It does not help that this caricature appeared in “The Shooting Star”, an adventure written in 1941 while living in Brussels under Nazi occupation. In the field of devout Tintinologists, much effort has been put to explaining this “lapse” away. Michael Farr, a British expert on Tintin, is typical, writing in 2001 that as soon as Herge realised that his character was “liable to misunderstanding”, he gave Blumenstein a different name and a new nationality, having him hail from “Sao Rico”.

艾尔热还曾被指控为反犹太主义。他因书中的一个反面人物收到了许多投诉，此人名叫“布鲁曼斯坦”，是一个长着鹰钩鼻子的纽约金融家[8]。虽然此人出现于《神秘的星星》这个冒险故事中，该冒险故事完成于1941年，当时作者生活在纳粹占领下的布鲁塞尔，但这也无济于事。那些虔诚的丁丁学家所做的研究中，有很大一部分努力是被用于把这一疏忽解释开的。迈克·法尔（Michael Farr），一个来自英国的丁丁专家，是这方面的一个典型人物。他于2001年写到，当艾尔热意识到他笔下的人物“会引起误解时”，他马上为布鲁曼斯坦改了名，并给了他一个新的国籍，让他来自“圣·雷克”。

Tintinologists have a ready explanation too for another lapse: the fact that Herge spent the war working for Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper seized by the German occupiers and turned into a propaganda organ. This is usually explained by Herge’s “naivety”, as an author of children’s comics (a defence also used for P.G. Wodehouse).

丁丁学家们已经为另外一个疏忽准备好了辩解：这就是艾尔热在整个二战期间一直为“拉·塞尔报（Le Soir）”工作的事实。该报原本为一家比利时报纸，后来为德国占领军夺去，把它变成了一个宣传工具。这一疏忽通常被解释为艾尔热作为一个儿童连环画作家的“天真”（同样的说法也被用来为沃得豪斯辩解）。

Alas, none of those arguments survive a reading of a biography of Herge by Philippe Goddin, published in 2007. Mr Goddin’s honesty is commendable: his is an official biography, based on Herge’s large collection of private papers.

遗憾的是，在读完2007年版的由菲力普·格丁（Philippe Goddin）撰写的艾尔热传后，所有这些论点都显得苍白无力了。格丁的诚实是值得称赞的：此书是官方的传记，写作过程中参考了大量的艾尔热的私人文件。

Mr Goddin returns to “The Shooting Star”, and its initial newspaper serialisation in Le Soir. This included a strip about the panic unleashed when it seemed a giant meteorite would hit the earth. In one frame, he writes, Herge drew two Jews rejoicing that if the world ended, they would not have to pay back their creditors. At that same moment in Belgium, Mr Goddin notes, Jews were being ordered to move to the country’s largest cities and remove their children from ordinary schools. They were also banned from owning radios, and were subject to a curfew. In the news pages of Le Soir, these measures were described as indispensable preparations for an orderly “emigration” of Jews. A year later, Herge deleted the drawing of the Jews of his own accord, when the serialised “The Shooting Star” became an album.

格丁重新研究了《神秘的星星》这部专集以及其当年连载于拉·塞尔报上的那个首版。这里包括了几幅画面，描写当一块巨大的陨星看上去将要撞上地球时所引起的恐慌。他写到，在一张图上艾尔热画了两个犹太人在那里庆祝，因为如果世界的末日来临，他们就不用还债了［9］。格丁评论道，此时此刻，在比利时，犹太人正在被命令迁往大城市，并把他们的孩子们从普通学校里接出。他们还被禁止拥有收音机，并且受到宵禁的约束。在拉·索尔报的新闻版面上，这些做法被描述成为了有秩序地将犹太人移往国外的必不可少的准备。一年以后，当把系列刊载的《神秘的星星》改编成一部专集时，艾尔热自行删除了这个关于犹太人的画面。

Mr Goddin demolishes the excuse of naivety, thanks to papers found in Herge’s files. As early as October 1940, he records, Herge received an anonymous letter accusing him of luring Belgian children to read German propaganda, by publishing Tintin in Le Soir’s youth supplement. A few months later, Herge had a bitter argument with an old friend, Philippe Gerard. In a letter, Gerard demanded Herge either endorse the “odious propaganda” of Le Soir or make his disagreement with the German occupation known. Saying it was just “a job” would not do, his friend concluded.

格丁依据从艾尔热的文件中找到的信件彻底推翻了“天真”这个借口。他纪录到，早在1940年十月，艾尔热就收到了一封匿名信，指控他把丁丁发表于拉·索尔报的儿童副刊上，以此引诱比利时的孩子们去读德国人的宣传。几个月后，艾尔热和他的老友菲力普·杰拉尔德（Philippe Gerard）展开了一场激烈的争论。杰拉尔德在一封信中要求艾尔热或者支持拉·索尔报的“令人厌恶的宣传”，要不就让人们知道他反对德国占领的立场。他在信的最后说，用“只是一个工作”这样的借口来搪塞可不行。

By way of reply, Herge offered a defence of neutrality. “I am neither pro-German, nor pro-British,” he wrote back. “As I can do absolutely nothing to hasten the victory of either England or Germany, I watch, I observe and I chew things over. Calmly and without passion.” His aim was to remain an “honest man”, Herge wrote, which did not mean shouting “Heil Hitler” or volunteering for the Waffen SS. Some said German occupiers were pillaging Belgium. An honest man had to acknowledge this was not true.

艾尔热在对此信的回复中为自己的中立进行了辩护。他写到：“我既不偏向德国，也不偏向英国，因为我绝对没有本事去促进任何一方取胜。我注视、我观察并且冷静地、不带感情地细细思量每一件事”。他还写到，他的目标是做一个“诚实人”，这并不意味着高喊“希特勒万岁”，或者去为党卫军当志愿者。有人说德国占领者正在对比利时进行大肆掠夺。一个诚实的人必须得承认这不是真的。

There is a link between Herge, this disappointing man, and his creation Tintin, who fights against despots so bravely. It lies in the rationalisation of impotence: a very European preoccupation.

在艾尔热这个令人失望的男人和他笔下的勇于与暴君抗争的丁丁之间有一条纽带，那就是把无能合理化：这个无能是欧洲人的一块心病。

The key to Tintin is that he has the mindset of “someone born in a small country”, says Charles Dierick, in-house historian at the Herge Studios. He is “the clever little guy who outsmarts big bullies”. And as a little guy, even a clever one, Tintin’s bravery works within limits: he rescues friends, and foils plots. But when he finds himself in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, in “The Blue Lotus”, he can do nothing to end the broader problem of foreign occupation.

艾尔热工作室内部的历史学家查尔斯·德瑞克（Charles Dierick）说，丁丁的关键之处是他具有一个“小国之民”的思维方式。他是一个“在智慧上战胜了大恶霸的聪明的小人物”。作为一个小人物，即使很聪明，丁丁的勇敢行为还是有一定限度的。他拯救朋友、戳穿阴谋。但当他在《蓝莲花》这个故事中来到日军占领下的上海时，他对结束外国占领这样的更大的问题无能为力。

Herge’s final complete adventure, the 1976 “Tintin and the Picaros”, offers the clearest expression of this doctrine of neutrality. Tintin finds himself summoned to rescue old friends from a civil war between two Latin American warlords. One general is backed by “Borduria”, a fictional but identifiably Communist-block nation. The other is financed by the (presumably American) International Banana Company. Tintin does not take political sides. He contents himself by backing the rebel general in exchange for his friends’ freedom, and a pledge that the revolution will be bloodless, with no executions or reprisals. That focus on the death penalty is an extremely European way for Tintin to remain a “man of good faith”, to borrow a phrase Herge used about himself. There is no wild talk of promoting democracy, or even regime change.

艾尔热最后的一个完整的冒险故事，出版于1976年的《丁丁和流浪汉》，为这一中立的信条提供了最清楚的表述。故事中丁丁被召去解救几个身陷拉美两大军阀内战之中的老朋友们。一方的将军得到了“玻度亚（Borduria）”的支持，这是一个虚构的国家，但可以看出是共产主义阵容中的一分子；另一方的将军得到了“国际香蕉公司（Internatuional Banana Company）”（假定为美国）的资助。丁丁在政治上没有立场，他只是满足于利用对反叛将军的帮助来换取朋友们的自由，他还迫使该将军作出了一个在革命中不流血、不杀人和不报复的承诺。这里对死刑的关注是一个极端欧洲式的做法，以此证明丁丁是一个“有着良好信念的人”（借用艾尔热用来描述自己的原话）。这里没有关于发展民主，甚至改朝换代的长篇大论。

Interviewed late in life, Herge acknowledged the links between his wartime experiences and his moral outlook. The second world war lies behind a great deal in Tintin, just as it lies deep beneath the political instincts of many on the European continent. It matters a lot that the Anglo-Saxon world has a different memory of that same war: it is a tragic event, but not a cause for shame, nor a reminder of impotence.

艾尔热晚年在接受采访时承认了他的道德观和其战时经历之间的联系。第二次世界大战在丁丁身上留下了许多痕迹，它也同样在欧洲大陆很多人的政治本能深处留下了许许多多的印记。重要的一点是，英语世界对于同样的一场战争有着截然不同的记忆：它是一场悲剧，但它不会给人们带来耻辱感，提起它也不会令人们感到自己曾经是多么的无能。

Tintin has never fallen foul of the 1949 French law on children’s literature. He is not a coward, and the albums do not make that vice appear in a favourable light. But he is a pragmatist, albeit a principled one. Perhaps Anglo-Saxon audiences want something more from their fictional heroes: they want them imbued with the power to change events, and inflict total defeat on the wicked. Tintin cannot offer something so unrealistic. In that, he is a very European hero.

丁丁从未违反过法国于1949年颁布的那部有关儿童文学的法律。他不是一个懦夫，书中也从未以赞赏的口吻描述这一不良行为。但他是一个实用主义者，尽管他有自己的原则。也许英语世界的观众们对他们的虚构英雄们有着更多的要求：他们想要这些英雄们具有改变现实的能力，并且能够把邪恶的一方彻底击败。丁丁无法做到这些如此不现实的事。从这个意义上讲，他是一个很“欧洲”的英雄。

注解

[1] 阿尔弗雷德·希区柯克（Alfred Hitchcock），出生于英国的好莱坞悬念大师，擅长心理惊悚，对后世留下深远影响。主要作品有：《眩晕》（Vertigo）,《蝴蝶梦》（Rebecca）和《三十九级台阶》（The 39 Steps）等。

[2] 格雷厄姆·格林（Graham Greene），英国作家，是二十世纪声誉最盛的小说大师之一。主要作品有《第三个人》，《一支出卖的枪》，《密使》，《我们的人在哈瓦那》，《人性的因素》和《荣誉与权力》。

[3] 现在明白了，为什么推动此法的人中有“无业”的法国卡通作家。

[4] 又称为三维动画技术。

[5] 沃德豪斯（Pelham Grenville Wodehouse），英国小说家，以擅写喜剧著名，其作品多为反映了第二次世界大战前英国上流社会的生活。

[6] 印地安那·琼斯（Indiana Jones），同名三部曲电影（译作夺宝奇兵）中的主人公。他是一个充满智慧及冒险精神的考古学家，受雇于美国政府去追寻失落的圣约柜。由哈里森.福特主演。

[7] 杰克·尼克尔森（Jack Nicholson），好莱坞具有传奇色彩的演员之一，曾获得过三次奥斯卡的殊荣，在蝙蝠侠里扮演Joker。

[8] 印象中有很多犹太人都叫“XX”斯坦，比如爱因斯坦。有了这一条，外加纽约金融家，想说他不是犹太人都难！

[9] 够阴，够损，看来受反犹太主义的指控一点都不冤枉，记忆中只有莎翁笔下的夏洛克可以与此媲美。

 

译者：vagrant  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=16572