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逝者
埃米尔·弗拉金
Mar 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
埃米尔·弗拉金——农民，格罗佐文物宝窟的所有者——于2月10日逝世，享年103岁
天一亮，耕童就要下地干活。所以，1924年3月1日那天破晓之时，埃米尔·弗拉金正和他的爷爷赶牛耕地，那块地叫作迪朗东。极其糟烂的一块地，以前从未被耕过，到处是石头，湿滑的粘土顺坡流进一个河谷。瓦雷耶河在谷底流淌，细瘦的树木盖着坡顶；这是一个只有四间房子、名叫“格罗佐”的村子，位于法国正中部，在阿列省的一处无名角落，离维希市12英里。
Obituary
讣告
Michael Foot
迈克尔•富特
Michael Foot, politician and man of letters, died on March 3rd, aged 96
政治家、作家迈克尔•富特于本月3日仙逝，享年96岁
Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
HE DIED a much-loved Englishman, renowed for his untidy shock of white hair, his shambling wanderings on Hampstead Heath with his dog Dizzy, his devotion to literature, and the modesty that allowed him, when leader of the Labour Party, to stand in his anorak waiting at the bus stop. Deep into old age, half-blind, he never failed to keep up with the latest works on his great loves, Shelley and Byron, and to hold forth over breakfast—several eggs running all over his plate—about the latest troubles of his beloved party, and its prospects for the future.
他，名叫迈克尔•富特（Michael Foot），一位备受爱戴的英吉利人——带着他引人注目的一头蓬乱的白发、带着他在普斯泰德西斯公园牵着小狗迪齐蹒跚闲行的身影、带着他对文学的挚爱、还带着他任工党党魁时，身着风帽夹克在站台候车所赢得的谦逊美名——离开了人间。进入高龄后，他几近失明，雪莱和拜伦的作品，乃其至爱，一俟新评问世，他必关注；而且，在早餐（那早餐是几枚在餐盘中来回滚动的鸡蛋）时侃侃而谈，谈论他所爱戴的工党的困境和未来。
He was not always so popular. As a left-wing journalist working for the right-wing proprietor Max Beaverbrook before, during and after the war, the vituperative scorn of his prose injured those who did not realise that it masked a complete lack of personal malice. But age and familiarity smoothed the sharp edges. “Sweet man, Michael,” remarked Anthony Crosland, a revisionist socialist who, in the 1970s, had spent most of his time fighting him.
迈克尔•富特并不总是备受爱戴。在二战前、中、后的一段时间，他作为一名左翼记者在右翼领袖东马克斯•弗布鲁克旗下工作，他那充满责骂鄙视的文章伤害了一些人的自尊——这些人实际上没有意识到他的文章完全不带有对个人的蓄意伤害。但时间和世故人情消融了他的锐气。“好人，迈克尔”，安东尼•克罗斯兰如是说——20世纪70年代，修正社会主义者安东尼•克罗斯兰在与迈克尔•富特的论战中度过了大部分时光。
The leadership of the Labour Party was not a job which—for most of his life—he sought. When Jim Callaghan stood down as leader in 1980, the two men most likely to succeed him were Denis Healey on the right and Peter Shore on the left. But Mr Foot, by then 67, had developed a certain fond vanity which was worked on by a Machiavellian trade-union leader, Clive Jenkins, to persuade him to stand. The result was the worst disaster that could have befallen Mr Foot. He won.
出任工党党魁不是富特一生中大部分时间里所寻求的事业。1981年，吉姆•卡拉汉作为[工党]党魁下台时，最有可能接替他的两个人是[党内]右翼派系的丹尼斯•希利和左翼派系的彼得•肖尔。 那时的富特已经67岁，心里开始滋生出几分骄傲自满，一位狡猾的工会领袖正是利用这一点，劝说他挺身参选，而最终的结果则是他最不愿意看到的—-他赢了。
The Labour Party then was a veritable Bermuda triangle, containing both ardent followers of the left-wing policies advocated by Tony Benn, and a right-wing group, led by Roy Jenkins, which was threatening to start a new centre party. Mr Foot’s appeal was that, being of the left but not of the far left, he could hold this combustible mixture together.
是时，工党[内]是一个名副其实的百慕大三角架构，其中既有托尼•本主张的左翼政策的追随者，也有罗伊•詹金斯领导的右翼团体，后者威胁要创建一个新政党。富特的左，但又左得不太远的主张，可以将这两种易燃物揉合在一起。
To a degree, he did. The breakaway was contained. Mr Foot accepted most of the policies of the left, including unilateral nuclear disarmament which he had always agreed with, and many others that he hadn’t. This was just enough to preserve his party broadly intact. Unfortunately, it also made it unelectable. In the 1983 general election, fought on a manifesto described by one shadow minister as “the longest suicide note in history”, the party started badly and finished worse.
在一定程度上，富特做到了这一点。党内分裂得到控制。富特接受了左派的大部分政策，包括他一直主张的单方面核裁军以及他过去不曾赞同的其他一些政策。他的这些举措仅可大体上保持党内团结。遗憾的是，这些举措未能确保他成功连任。1983年大选期间，由于富特发表了被一位影子大臣形容为“历史上篇幅最长的遗书”的竞选政纲，致使工党开局不顺，结果更糟。
Even before the election, Mr Foot was not an effective leader. He dithered terribly. At one point, he insisted in the Commons that Peter Tatchell, a left-winger, would never be a Labour candidate while he was leader. A little later, he decided that he could be. Most voters could not conceive of him as a plausible prime minister. He seemed to come from another age, perhaps the 19th century, a West Country radical in his family’s best tradition. He could not get the hang of television, and horrified the country by appearing at the Cenotaph one Remembrance Day in a short, scruffy coat. By the time he stepped down gratefully after his defeat, he seemed a tragi-comic figure.
即使在选举前，富特先生也算不上是一个卓有成效的领导人。他相当地优柔寡断。有一次，当时他还是工党领导人时，他在下院坚持说左翼成员彼得•塔契尔永远不能成为工党的候选人。过了一会儿，他又断定他会是[候选人]。多数选民无法想象他真的成为首相。他似乎来自另一个时代——或许就是来自19世纪吧，他是一位那个世纪英国西南部的、带着所在团队优良传统的激进分子。他不懂如何在电视机上秀形象，而令举国震惊的是，他于荣军纪念日在和平纪念碑出席纪念活动时，身着短裤、衣冠不整。他在竞选落败后，却带着感激引退的行为，令人感觉他是一位悲喜剧式的人物。
Flying with Hazlitt
与黑兹利特[注1]齐飞
His political judgment was dodgy from the beginning. In 1974-75, when he first went into government as employment secretary, he was responsible for relations with the trade unions. In the words of one cabinet member of the time, “The relationship was one of give-and-take. The government gave and they took.” Industrial subsidies, housing subsidies, even food subsidies flowed out in an effort to buy low pay settlements. All were enthusiastically supported by Mr Foot. None made a jot of difference to escalating wage agreements.
富特的政治辨别力自始就不怎么样。 1974至75年期间，他第一次进入政府内阁，出任劳工部大臣，在处理与工会的关系上，他是应受指责的。用当时一位政府内阁成员的话说：“这种相互妥协的关系变成一边倒。政府给，他们取”。工业补贴、住房补贴、甚至食物补贴大量花掉，以求与工会达成低工资协议。所有这一切都得到了富特先生满腔热忱的支持。但在免于形成高工资协议上毫无效果。
Mr Foot was slow to realise this. But once he had, he entered perhaps the most effective period of his political life. In an extraordinary speech to his party’s conference in 1976, he quoted Joseph Conrad: “Always facing it, Captain MacWhir. That’s the way to get through. Always facing it—that’s the way we’ve got to solve this problem.” By 1978 the economy was back on an even keel and Labour was neck-and-neck in the polls.
富特意识到这一点是缓慢的。但是，一旦他意识到了，就进入了也许是他政治生涯中最卓有成效的时期。在1976年工党年会上的一次特别演讲中，他引用约瑟夫•康拉德的话：“麦克惠尔船长，总得面对现实，这才是到达目的地的办法。总得面对现实——这才是我们不得不解决此麻烦的办法”。到1978年时，经济又回复平稳，且工党在民调中的支持率也与经济的转好同步上升。
But Mr Foot, by then the leader of the House of Commons, convinced himself that his party would lose an election that October. More important, he convinced the prime minister. The election was postponed to the spring of 1979. The “winter of discontent”, with widespread strikes, intervened.This was the first of two elections which Mr Foot delivered to Margaret Thatcher on a plate.
不过，时任下议院领袖的富特自我确认，他所在的工党将会在10月的大选中落马。尤其是，他也使首相[即当时由工党出任的首相詹姆斯•卡拉汉—译者注]认识到这一点。因伴之以大罢工的“不满的冬天”事件的影响，10月份的选举被推迟到1979年的春天。这次选举是富特两次轻易将胜选权让渡给撒切尔夫人中的第一次。
He could seem unworldly. As a minister, he once boarded a plane to a Socialist International conference in Europe without a penny in foreign currency, carrying only a leather-bound volume of Hazlitt. Yet in one sense, he was entirely worldly. He had an instinctive understanding of people. He wrote beautifully and, after overcoming a stammer, was a wonderful orator: humorous, self-deprecating, empathetic. He could be a hater—anyone who failed to perceive the genius of his hero Aneurin Bevan, whose biography he wrote, had best look out—but he was incapable of sustained malevolence.
富特似乎天生不谙世故。作为一位大臣，他曾经在没有一分外币的情况下，仅携带一本黑兹利特的皮面装订书籍，就登上一架飞机，去欧洲出席一个“国际社会主义者”会议。但在某种意义上说，他又老于世故。他对民众悲喜如天才般洞若观火。他文笔优美，而且在克服口吃后成了优秀的演说家，他幽默诙谐、自嘲自谦、善解人意。他本当是一个怀有恨意的人——任何不能感知贝文•安奈林（富特所写传记中的主人公）的才能的人，最易得此判断——但让他持久对某人怀有恨意，他又做不到。
Over the last few years of his life, Mr Foot contemplated writing a serious work of socialist philosophy. Instead, he embarked on a biography of an eccentric literary genius, H.G. Wells. In the end, that seemed to suit him better.
在富特生命的最后几年，他打算写一部关于社会主义思想体系的严肃著作。相反，他却写起了一部关于一位超乎寻常的文学天才HG威尔斯的传记来。也许，后者于他更适合。
注1：Hazlitt——黑兹利特 (1778-1830)，英国小品作家和文学评论家
译者：微言大义
欲与译者本人对该文进行切磋，请到如下链接：http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=31601&extra=&page=1
Obituary
逝者
J.D. Salinger
J.D.塞林格
Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Jerome David Salinger, writer, died on January 28th, aged 91
杰罗姆·大卫·塞林格，作家，于1月28日逝世，享年91岁
PEOPLE kept sneaking year after year to the place on the hill in Cornish, New Hampshire, but the Great American Writer was almost never seen. Ageing rebels, second-year master’s students with lacquered nails, broad-shouldered phonies in Norfolk jackets, snappers from Newsweek, all approached the cringing, little house where he had lived, or battened down, or holed up—you, general reader, can choose the word you please—ever since a great wave of fame had broken over him in 1953, two years after he happened to write a book called “The Catcher in the Rye”.
新罕布什尔州的科尼什的一座小山上的一处地方——一年又一年，不断会有人潜行至此，但是那位美国大作家却总是不得一见。这些人当中有上了年纪的愤青，有涂着指甲油的二年级研究生，有穿着诺福克上衣宽肩膀的装酷男，有《新闻周刊》的摄影记者；他们都接近了那个拒外的小房子，那是他居住的地方，或者说是他自我封闭的地方，或说是自我囚禁之所——读者你们可以选择自己喜欢的词来形容——自那股巨浪般的盛名突然向他砸来之后，他就住到了那里，那是1953年；在那两年之前，他恰巧写了一本书，书名叫作《麦田里的守望者》。
They caught a glimpse of him sometimes, with his haughty head, angular and bug-eyed, getting groceries in the village; but he gave them the slip almost always. The truth of it was that though his book might be on all the syllabuses, picked over by the academicians, hailed as the authentic voice of every teenager who had ever squeezed a pimple or tried, drawing himself up tall, to order a Scotch and soda, his life was nobody’s godammed business. If his dream was to live in the woods, with a fireplace and a typewriter and sheaves of notes hooked on the wall, almost like a deaf-mute in his dealings with the world, that was his affair.
他到村里买东西时，他们有时会捕捉到他的身影——头上昂，脸颊棱角分明，金鱼眼；但是他几乎总是摆脱得掉他们。他避人的真正缘由在于——尽管他的书可能在所有由教育专家精挑细选出的学校必读书单上（被誉为道出了所有少年的心声（只要这些十来岁的小孩曾经挤过青春痘，或是为了点一杯加苏打的威士忌而使劲拉长身子以显得更高））——他的生活和他妈的别人无关。他的生活是住在树林中，屋里有壁炉，桌上有打字机，墙上挂着成捆的笔记，几乎像聋哑人一样与世界打交道——如果这是他梦想的生活的话。
He was not just away in Cornish, he was also above. (The italics were his own.) From above, Holden Caulfield, the hero of “Catcher”, first entered his story to look down on the distant football game between Saxon Hall and Pencey Prep, all those little running figures of whom he was not one, because he was outside and expelled. The writer who truly lived for his art—who made it, as Mr Salinger did, his religion, along with Vedanta and Zen and the Tao—did not descend and did not integrate. He defended until death, or non-publication, the sanctity of his words. A writer asked to discuss his craft ought just to jump up and declaim, de haut en bas, the names of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Blake, Coleridge, Proust, James. And admit that after Melville there had been no really good American writer until—Salinger.
住在科尼什的他不只是在[尘世的]远处，而且是在高处。（斜体字引自他自己的话。）同样是在高处，《麦田》的主人公霍尔顿·考菲尔德首次登场，俯看远处的橄榄球比赛，对阵双方是萨克逊·霍尔中学和潘西中学，那些跑动的微小身影中没有他，他是局外者，他被开除了。真正为艺术而生的作家——这些人把艺术变成自己的宗教，就像塞林格所做的那样；除了艺术，塞林格的宗教还有吠檀多，还有禅，还有道——不会选择屈尊向下，不会选择妥协融合。塞林格至死都在捍卫自己作品的神圣纯粹，或者干脆不发表。作为一个作家，如果有人要你谈谈自己的行当，你只要应声而起，以藐视世人的态度大声喊出这些作家的名字：福楼拜，托尔斯泰，布莱克，柯勒律治，普鲁斯特，詹姆斯。并且要承认在梅尔维尔之后，美国还没有真正好的作家——直到塞林格的出现。
But that—wait—was not necessarily the name he answered to. In his short stories, a scant three dozen of them, rounding off the whole oeuvre, he gradually took the name and voice of Buddy Glass, a fortyish and paunchy short-story writer who had ended up in an English Department. And Glass in turn wrote obsessively, devotedly, as if of some plaster saint, about his elder brother Seymour, his Literary Ideal. Buddy was the working-writer Salinger, the man who had laboured in 1939-43 to get stuff into Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, while all the time disdaining those slicks and lusting after the New Yorker—which, in 1948, took him into its embrace. But Seymour was “all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our doublelensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience…our one full poet.” He would open the door, blow “three or four or five unquestionably sweet and expert notes on a cornet”—and then disappear.
等一下，他并不一定只有“塞林格”这一个名字。在他的短篇小说里（一共写了为数不多的三十几篇，和其它作品一块儿组成了他的全部作品），他慢慢开始借用巴蒂·格拉斯的名字和声音来说自己的话，这是一个四十来岁、大腹便便的短篇小说作家，最后沦为一名大学英语系教师。而格拉斯则痴迷专注地在写一个人，一个好似圣人一样的人——他的哥哥西摩，他的文学典型。巴蒂是那个以写作为职业的塞林格，是那个在1939-1943年间笔耕不辍只为把自己写的东西弄到《君子》杂志和《周六晚邮报》上的那个人，但却始终厌恶那些纸质上等、内容空乏的报刊，而垂涎于《纽约客》杂志——在1948年，将其揽入怀抱。但是西摩“对于我们来说则是全部的真实：他是我们的蓝带独角兽，我们的复式凸透镜，我们的天才咨询师，我们的是非活手册……我们唯一的大诗人。” 他会推开门，“在短号上吹出三个、四个或者五个音符，悦耳且专业那是自不用说”——然后消失掉。
On the cliff-edge
在悬崖边
In time the Glass family thoroughly eclipsed the Salingers in the mind of the man in Cornish. But they were often the same. He too was “of part-Jewish, part-Irish, and conceivably part-Minotaur extraction”, brought up comfortably on the upper West Side with bellhops and cab-rides to Macy’s, and educated in schools like Pencey Prep. There, in Holden Caulfield mode, he failed to apply himself in almost everything except English composition; and so, although icily sardonic in conversation and convinced he would be a “superlative” writer, he never made the Ivy League. That hurt all his life.
最终，在这位科尼什居者的心中，格拉斯家族的光芒完全盖过了塞林格一家。但是两者之间时常有重合。塞林格同样是“一部分犹太血统，一部分爱尔兰血统，还看得出有部分弥诺陶洛斯血统”，他在曼哈顿上西城无忧无虑地长大，那里有到Macy’s百货商店的出租车，会有服务生帮着搬行李。他进了和潘西中学一样的学校。在那里，他和霍尔顿·考菲尔德无出二辙，除了英语作文之外几乎什么都不行；于是，尽管在与人交谈时会带有不友善的讽刺，尽管确信自己会成为一个“最棒的”作家，他最终却没有迈进常春藤盟校。他一辈子都对此耿耿于怀。
Salinger or Glass, he lived on his nerves. After his war service he could feel his mind teeter like insecure luggage and his fingers bump together, his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s not intact. In the opinion of some lofty experts they never quite cohered again. Hence his hatred of photographs, blurbs, potted biographies and all else that might besmirch the plainness of a book-jacket—as well as the increasing weirdness of the work, thousands upon thousands of words about Seymour which both laboured to idolise and failed to describe, culminating in 1965 in “his” letter from summer camp, “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the ever- and over-indulgent New Yorker.
无论是作为塞林格，还是格拉斯，他的神经总是与紧张相伴。从战场归来后，他会感觉心总是晃晃悠悠的，就像[头顶行李架上]没有放稳的行李，他的手指会相互碰撞打架，他的湿—嗯——西—阴受损了。在某些玄虚的专家看来，他们没有再完全融洽统一过。于是就有了他对于书皮上的照片、宣传推荐语、简短肤浅的作者介绍以及其它可能会玷污其朴实品性内容的憎恶——其作品的愈加怪异就更不用说了：动用千言万语描写西摩只为表达无限崇拜之情，却未能给出一个清晰的人物轮廓。这种絮语式作品的顶峰是1965年“他”从夏令营寄来的信——《哈普沃思16，1924》，发表在对其一贯纵容且过分纵容的《纽约客》杂志上。
Perhaps, said the hacks to the paparazzi as they climbed the hill again, it had all been hype; apart from a hawk-sharp ear for dialogue, and a keen, tender eye for the tricksiness of children, he had never shown half as much literary talent as talent for publicity-by-intrigue. There were said to be unpublished manuscripts in his safe; most pundits were happy to wait.
也许都是宣传的噱头（小报作者这么告诉帕帕垃圾，于是帕帕垃圾带着新目的再次上山）；除了一对能从对话当中捕捉到精彩的灵敏耳朵，除了两行投向淘气顽童敏锐且温暖的目光，他显示出的文学才华还不及自我宣传才能的一半。据说，在他的保险箱中存有尚未发行的手稿；塞林格迷们大都在乐观等待，认为手稿总有现天日的那天。
What they did not always realise, as their cars left tyre-ruts on his property, was exactly what Mr Salinger had been doing there. He said he wrote just for himself; but he was also “the most terrific liar”. As Holden Caulfield, he had famously seen himself on the edge of “some crazy cliff”, watching thousands of children at play in a big field of rye, and “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.” Eight years later the idea recurred as he wrote “Seymour: An Introduction”. He felt he was “removing, at least for a minute or two, all the detonators from all the bombs in this bloody world.”
但是，当他们把轮胎印留在他的“领地”上的同时，他们并不总是搞得懂塞林格到底在那儿做着什么。他说他只为自己写作；但是他同时也是“最会撒谎的人”。作为霍尔顿·考菲尔德，他看见了自己的理想状态：站在“那混账的悬崖边”，看着在一大片麦田里玩耍的上千个孩子，“我要做的就是守望，如果有哪个孩子朝悬崖处来，我就要把它捉住。” 八年后，在他写作《西摩：小传》时，这种想法再次浮现。他觉得他正在“拆除这个混账世界里所有炸弹上的所有雷管，至少也会拆个一两分钟。”
Not ignoring it, then; not hiding from it; frankly, if you believed him, saving it.
这么看来，他既不是对这个世界置之不理，也不是对其避之恐不及；而是——如果你信他的——拯救其于水火。
译者：eastx
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