A very special business angel
The self-effacing friend who enabled “Das Kapital” to be written [注2]

一位非常特别的商界天使：是这位不求闻达的朋友让《资本论》的写作成为可能

Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan Books; 448 pages; $32. Published in Britain as “The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels”. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

《马克思的将军：弗里德里希•恩格斯的革命生涯》。作者特里斯特兰•亨特，大都会出版社出版。448页；32美元。在英国的书名是《穿长礼服的共产主义者：弗里德里希•恩格斯的革命生涯》。艾伦•雷恩出版社出版；25英镑。可从Amazon.com和Amazon.co.uk网站购买。

WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.

去年秋天金融危机骤然降临时，1867年初版的卡尔•马克思的《资本论》在各个畅销书排行榜上飞速跃升。该书第一次对资本主义冷酷无情、吞噬一切和全球扩张的本性进行了描述，现在突然有了新的涵义。其实马克思从未真正离开过我们，不过弗里德里希•恩格斯－－这位大半生都在和马克思亲密合作并对《资本论》做出了巨大贡献的人－－却几乎被人遗忘了。英国历史学家特里斯特兰•亨特所作的新的传记有力的说明了恩格斯的功绩应该得到更大的承认。

The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.

马恩二人成为朋友是在1844年的巴黎，当时他们都是二十五岁上下。从那以后他们一直关系极为紧密，直至马克思于1883年逝世。两人都是莱茵人（本文的图片中恩格斯站在马克思身后，地点是他们共同编辑的《莱茵时报》印刷车间），但家庭背景很不一样：马克思的父亲是一名犹太裔律师，后来皈依基督教；恩格斯的父亲是新教教徒，也是一名成功的棉纺厂厂主。马克思先是学习法律，后来又研习了哲学；恩格斯不被家人看好，才17岁就被打发到家族企业去干活。1841年恩格斯在柏林服兵役，在此期间他接触到了当时在这个普鲁士首都躁动着和流传着的各式各样的观点。

Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen & Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute detail.

之后他去了其家族企业在英国曼彻斯特的分厂工作，该分厂的名称是俄们－恩格斯。十九世纪中期曼彻斯特的“棉都”是制造商的天堂，工人的地狱，也为恩格斯上了极为宝贵的一课，让他意识到经济因素是不同社会阶级之间冲突的基本原因。到1845年他才24岁时，他就不仅已经学会了如何做一名成功的资本家，而且已经写出了一本才华横溢的反资本主义著作，即《英国工人阶级状况》[注3]。该书以具体而微的细节描述了现代生产方法的惨无人道。

Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital”, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.

为了和马克思合写“共产主义宣言”，恩格斯离开了曼彻斯特。他们两个人在1840年代后期穿行于欧洲各处，试图赶上当时欧洲大陆各国的革命，最后他们在英格兰安顿下来。马克思那时已经开始了《资本论》一书上的工作，但他碰到了一个问题。他当时已经获得了一位来自贵族家庭的德国妻子，一窝嗷嗷待哺的孩子，同时还希望过上舒适的资产阶级生活，却没有支持这一切的物质手段。

Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples from business and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of “Das Kapital” was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual.

恩格斯（其家姓类似德语中“天使”[Engel]一词）提出了一个解决的办法，其慷慨让人震惊：他将回到曼彻斯特那让他厌恶的家族棉纺厂里重新过活，同时给马克思提供必要的资金以让后者写出他改变世界的论文。在其后的20年间，恩格斯任劳但不任怨的经营棉纺厂，将其丰厚收入的一半交给需求越来越多的马克思。他也和马克思围绕该部巨著进行了大量的合作，为之贡献了许多想法和来自工商业的实例，还为该书进行了亟需的编辑和校对。当《资本论》第一卷终于完成后，他从商务中抽身出来搬到了伦敦以便住在马克思一家附近。他成了一名食利者和知识人，阅读《经济学人》，享受生活。

Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.

恩格斯是一个迷。他天分甚高，充满活力，对各种政治观点着迷，但他却甘当马克思的副手。在他的朋友逝世后，他这样宣称：“马克思是个天才，我们其他人至多是有才而已。”亨特先生非常出色的将他们二人的奋斗置于当时的政治、社会和哲学潮流的环境之中来考察。这使得他的故事纷繁复杂，读者要理清头绪可能会有困难，但坚持把该书读下来却是非常值得的。

Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper.

恩格斯身材魁梧，容貌潇洒，他不仅喜欢思想，也喜爱快乐的生活—美酒、女人、和柴郡的猎狐队伍一道打猎――他用以支付这一切的是无产者累死累活的劳动，但他似乎没怎么觉出这其中的反讽。他的家庭生活远比马克思的更为离经叛道。他和一个叫玛丽•伯恩斯的字都没有认全的爱尔兰女工断断续续在一起生活过；在她死后，他又和她的妹妹丽琪生活在了一起，直到后者临终时才娶了她。他没有小孩，虽然在一名女仆生下了马克思的一个儿子后他骑士般的承担了责任。

Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of “Das Kapital”. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume III, where Marx discussed the tendency of companies’ profitability to fall and noted that this might lead to the “shaking” of capitalist production, Engels substituted the word “collapse”, opening up the text to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century Marxists.

恩格斯的自我牺牲在马克思死后也未停止。他不仅继续为马克思一家和他们的追随者提供资金，而且花费了多年时间整理马克思为《资本论》第二和第三卷留下来的混乱的笔记。[注4] 恩格斯难免要将很多马克思没有很好解决的问题按照他认为合适的方式解决，有时这样改动后的文字比作者本来可能想说的更富革命性。在第三卷，马克思讨论了公司的利润率会趋于下降，于是他提出这也许会导致资本主义生产的“动摇”。恩格斯在此处用“崩溃”一词替代了“动摇”，从而使得该文本后来能够被二十世纪的马克思主义者们赋予远为激进的阐释。

When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.

当恩格斯在1895年逝世时，他避开了伦敦的海格特公墓－－他的朋友长眠于斯。直到最后一刻都不求闻达的他让人将他的骨灰撒在了靠近伊斯特伯恩的英吉利海峡――在那儿他和马克思一家度过了许多愉快的假日。

[注1]：这篇文章载于去年八月的一期《经济学人》，读的时候就想把它翻成中文，但一直没有找到时间，现在总算了却了这桩心愿。马克思和恩格斯的学说的功过我不想去谈，但是他们二人的思想直到今天仍然值得我们后人认真研究和学习（当然不是指为了不那么高尚的目的强迫别人进行的那种所谓学习――那实在是对“学习”这个词的玷污――汉语中被这样污染了的词语还有不少）。《经济学人》这篇书评当然更多的着眼于马恩二人深挚的友谊，读来让人感念恩格斯对朋友的无私。能得恩格斯这样铁杆的朋友实乃老马人生的一大幸事啊。

[注2]: 《资本论》一书的德语书名是Das Kapital，但它的英语书名并不是The Capital， 而是Capital，即没有定冠词。Capital指资本时不可数，所以除非当它特指某人或某公司等的资本，前面不应加定冠词。

[注3]：仅从英文书名上讲，The Condition of the Working Class in England中的England应该译为英格兰而非英国，因为这二者并不是一回事（后者在恩格斯的时代还包括爱尔兰的全部，当然也包括英格兰和苏格兰）。不过既然中国国内对此书书名的翻译向来都是《英国工人阶级状况》，此处也就依从这个习惯译法。

[注4]：Hangers-on也可指食客，这可能更符合这篇《经济学人》文章作者的原意。只是感觉上中文的“食客”二字比hangers-on刺耳，所以先不用罢。

译者：Uniquorn
如想与译者本人对该文进行切磋，请到如下链接：

http://ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=30349&extra=page%3D1

Tsutomu Yamaguchi
山口疆

Jan 14th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, died on January 6th, aged 93

山口疆，一个经历过两次原子弹爆炸的幸存者，于1月6日逝世，享年93岁

WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus. Much was on his mind that morning. He had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard; there were goodbyes to say at the office, then a 200-mile train journey back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. He was slightly stressed when he got to his stop, still with half-an-hour’s walk ahead of him on a track that led through featureless potato fields. But it was a beautiful August day; the sky was clear, his spirits high. And then—readers will feel a tremor, but he felt none—he noticed an aircraft circling, and two parachutes dropping down.

哭泣止住之后，山口疆就会告诉你们他为什么要把他这本诗集叫作《人筏》。全是因为那天，那个“他忘了带自己的姓名章去上班，所以不得不中途下车”的那天。那天早上，他的脑子里全是事儿。那天，他必须要打包离开广岛；他作为工程师已经完成了在三菱造船厂为期三个月的任务；他要向办公室其他的同仁告别，然后乘坐火车回到长崎，回到200英里以外的家中，回到妻子尚子和还在嗷嗷待哺的儿子胜敏的身边。当他到站时，不觉有些厌烦，因为前面还有半小时的脚程，要经过一片单调无奇的马铃薯地。但是美丽的八月和清澈的天空让他精神振作了起来。然后——读者读到这里会感觉脊背发颤，而他却麻木无觉——他注意到一个绕圈的飞机，还有两个正在下落的降落伞。

The next thing he knew was a blaze of white magnesium light, and a huge ball of fire. He dived to the ground. The fireball, roaring upwards, sucked him up again and threw him, blinded, face-down into the mud of the potato field. He was two miles from the epicentre of the blast, in a rain of flaming scraps of paper and clothes. His upper body and half his face were badly burned, his hair gone and his eardrums ruptured. In this state, he made his way back to the devastated city to try to do what he had meant to do that day: catch the train. The river bridges were down. But one river was full of carbonised naked bodies of men, women, children, floating face-down “like blocks of wood”, and on these—part treading, part paddling—he got to the other side. His human raft.

接下来，他感到眼前一阵炫目的镁光，还很有一颗巨大的火球。他就地扑倒。腾起的火球把他再次吸起，他眼前一黑，脸朝下被扔进土豆田的泥当中。他所处位置距离爆炸中心两英里，这里下起一阵“碎片雨”——燃烧的纸片和衣服碎片。他的上身和半张脸被严重烧伤，头发没了，耳鼓破了。在这样的情形下，他依然设法回到了被摧毁的城市，然后设法完成他那天原定的计划：赶火车。过河桥都塌了。但是却有一条河里满是碳化的裸露尸体，男人、女人、小孩，脸朝下浮在水面之上，好像“一块块木头”。借着这些“木块”——半是踏，半是划——他过到了另一边。他的人筏。

At this point in his story he would weep uncontrollably. It was by no means the end of it. When he reached Nagasaki, barely pausing to get his burns dressed, he reported for work. His boss was sceptical: how could a single bomb have destroyed Hiroshima? Then the same white magnesium light blazed in the window, and Mr Yamaguchi was tossed to the ground again. A reinforced-steel stairwell saved him. His bandages were blown off, and he spent the next weeks curled round his raw wounds in a shelter, close to death. His house was destroyed, his wife and son saved for no reason he could see. But when schoolchildren later asked him, in awed respect, “What was the most terrible thing?”, his answer was not the dangling tongues and eyeballs, not the skin that hung off the bodies of the living “like giant gloves”—but the bridge of bodies on which he had crossed the river.

故事讲到这，他会无法控制地哭泣。然而这绝不是故事的尾声。回到长崎，还未停歇来好好处理一下烧伤，他就回去单位报道。老板对于他的讲述满是问号：一颗炸弹就能把广岛给毁了？接着，窗口出现同样的白色炫目镁光，山口又一次被扔到地上。但是一段由高强度钢构建的楼梯井救了他。他的绷带被爆开，接下来的几周，他待在一个庇护所里，蜷着身子护着伤口，濒临死亡。他的家被毁了，妻子和儿子却奇迹般生还，虽然他看不到他们是如何逃脱的。之后，当小学生满是敬畏地问他，“最恐怖的事是什么？”，他的答案不是悬荡的舌头和眼球，不是活者“像巨型手套一样”悬在身体外的皮肤——而是他踩着过河的尸体桥。

He talked about all this to Charles Pellegrino, an American writer, and Richard Lloyd Parry of the London Times. He told them that he hated the atom bomb because of “what it does to the dignity of human beings”. Walking into Hiroshima, he noticed that the bewildered crowds on the streets were mostly naked, limping children. They made no sound; indeed, no one made a sound. They were reduced—like him, as he was flung into the furrows of the potato field—to the level of mute sticks or leaves, tossed in the wind and burned, or used as floats.

他把所有这些都讲述给美国作家查尔斯·佩莱格里诺和《伦敦时报》的理查得·劳埃德·佩里。他告诉他们说他恨原子弹，因为“原子弹践踏了人性”。走进广岛市区，他看到街道上这些不知所措的人群中大部分都是赤裸跛行的儿童。他们没有声音；不仅如此，所有人都没有声音。他们被原子弹弄成了呆哑的木头，或是如他被扔进土豆田垄沟一样被风卷起，接着被火着身，或是如河上一浮子。

Painting the Buddhas

为佛陀着色

Some argued that he was lucky. A deaf left ear and weak legs were the only after-effects until, late on, stomach cancer appeared. He worked as a translator, then a teacher, and eventually returned to Mitsubishi. But, as he wrote in 1969, he was not so sanguine inside.

有人认为他很幸运。唯一的后遗症是一只聋了的左耳和不灵便的双腿，直到后来出现了胃癌的症状。他作了翻译，然后作老师，最后回到三菱公司。但是，如他在1969年写到，他的内心并不安详乐观。

Thinking of myself as a phoenix,
I cling on until now.
But how painful they have been,
those twenty-four years past.

想象自己是一只凤凰，
坚持，坚持，坚持到现在这一刻。
但是时间多么苦长，
过去这二十四年间。

His emotions mostly emerged in these tanka, or 31-syllable poems. He wrote hundreds, each one an ordeal. When he composed them, he would dream of the dead lying on the ground. One by one, they would get up and walk past him.

他的情感大都表达在这些短歌（或曰“三十一音节诗”）里。他写了上百首，每一首都是一次折磨。他在创作时会看见死者躺在地上，然后一个一个站起来，从他身边走过。

Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland
all the Buddhas died,
and never heard what killed them.

原子核爆后的焦土
面地碳焦的尸体
诸佛皆死
是什么杀死了他们
他们再也不会知道

He published these poems himself in 2002, and they might have been his only testimony. But in 2005 his son Katsutoshi died of cancer at 59, killed by the radiation he had received as a baby. Mr Yamaguchi began to feel that fate had spared him to speak out against the horrors of nuclear weapons: in schools, in a documentary, in a letter to Barack Obama and even, at 90, on his first trip abroad, in front of a committee of the United Nations in New York.

他在2002年出版了这些诗，本来很可能就此是他对于这场灾难唯一的见证词。但是2005年他的儿子胜敏在59岁的年纪死于癌症，凶手是婴儿阶段受到的辐射。这时，山口开始感到命运要他大声疾呼核武器的恐怖：在学校里，在一个纪录片里，在给巴拉克·奥巴马的一封信里，甚至在九十高龄首次国外行在纽约联合国总部的一群委员面前。

If there exists a GOD who protects
nuclear-free eternal peace
the blue earth won’t perish

如果存在这样一个上帝
可以叫原子弹无踪无迹
可以让和平天长且地久
这个蓝星球将不会毁灭

At his insistence, his status was recognised by the Japanese government: he became officially (though there had been more than 100 others) the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-victim of the atom bomb.

在他的坚持下，他的位置得到了日本政府的承认：他成为官方认定（尽管还有另外100多人）唯一一名“原子弹双重受害者（nijyuu hibakusha）”。

He began to be comforted by three things. One was a set of drawings of the 88 Buddhas of the Shikoku pilgrimage, whose outlines—robes, haloes, calm hands—he devoutly painted in. The carbonised, face-down Buddhas of his tanka found peace again. The second comfort was in “simple acts of kindness”. And the third was an image of his life as a baton, passed on every time anyone heard or read his testimony. All these batons might form, together, another human raft.

有三样东西开始让他的心灵得到抚慰。一个是四国朝圣路上八十八尊佛的一组白描像，他虔诚地将他们的轮廓——佛袍，晕环，静安的手——着上颜色。他诗中那些面地碳焦的佛陀再次找到了静谧和安详。第二个安慰在“简简单单的善举”中。第三个是他把自己的生命想象成一根接力棒的图景，每当有人听到或是读到他的见证之语，也就是接到了接力棒。所有这些接力棒合在一起，可能就会组成另外一只人类之筏。

译者：eastx

Oct 1st 2009
From The Economist print edition

William Safire, pundit and lexicographer, died on September 27th, aged 79
权威政治评论家、词典编纂家威廉•赛菲尔于九月二十七日辞世，享年79岁

HAD William Safire written his own obituary, he would have laid down a few simple rules. First, use the active, not the passive voice, no matter how inert the corpse. Second, taking the bull by the hand, nix those mixed metaphors. Third, kill all sentences starting with conjunctions, or ending in “by”, “with”, or “on”. De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Preferably not; swaydo-intellectual Latinisms cut no ice with him, unless he allowed himself a silkily Catulline ave atque vale.

如果让威廉•赛菲尔写自己的讣告，他会立下几条简单的规矩。首先，要用主动而非被动语态，甭管死者的躯体如何僵硬不动。其次，类似“降牛要抓手”[注1] 这样的混杂隐喻要不得。第三，毙掉所有用连词开头或是用“by”、“with” 或“on”结尾的句子。那能不能用用拉丁文，比如“对于死者唯有赞美”(De mortuis nil nisi bonum”)？最好别；他对被人拉来伪装智识的拉丁文词句不以为然[注2]，除非他愿意用拉丁文为自己写一首像卡图卢斯的“敬礼和道别”那样珠圆玉润的 悼亡诗[注3]。

As a practised scribbler—never truly a hack, for that word, borrowed from England, denoted a broken-down horse let out for hire—he also knew better than to squander a good nugget in the lede. Not until halfway through his article would grieving readers learn, for example, that he used to buy the unknown Ariel Sharon breakfast each time he came to New York; that Barbara Bush would wink at him on grand occasions, while her husband froze him out; or that he once wrote a spoof interview with Richard Nixon languishing in purgatory, his entry into heaven having been delayed because…he had imposed wage and price controls.

作为一名经验老到的三流作家（他从来不是英语中称为hack的雇佣文人，因为那个从英格兰借来的词本指用来出租的老弱马匹），他也知道在讣告一开头就把好 东西端出来太过浪费。哀悼他的读者需要读到他那份讣告的中间部分才会得知关于他的一些趣事珍闻，比如每次他到纽约都会吃一顿无人知晓的所谓“阿里尔•沙 龙”早饭套餐[注3a]；又比如芭芭拉•布什在庄重的场合看到他时总爱冲他眨眼睛，虽然她丈夫总给他一副冷脸；还比如他曾写过一则搞笑式采访，采访对象是 理查德•尼克松，正在炼狱里恹恹地打发时日。该君进天堂的时间被延后的愿因是他对工资和物价实施了政府管制。[注4]

Mr Safire was a pundit, or wise man, a word derived from the Hindi via Henry R. Luce at Time magazine (source also of the words tycoon, moppet and socialite, to none of which Mr Safire either ascended or aspired). As such, he wrote political and lexicological columns for the New York Times for more than 30 years. He was also, in a nod to his Jewish ancestry, a maven, meaning “he who understands”, a Hebrew-Yiddish word slipped into English in the 1960s in an ad for herring in cream sauce. He was of the old school, and had been so long in the commentary dodge that he sometimes called his computer his typewriter (though keeping up, as nimbly as any 20-something, with the blargon and cellphoney-baloney of the age). He wore plaid. An Englishman would have called it tweed, originally a misreading of tweel, the Scots form of twill. Either way, the check was loud, and rarely matched his tie.

赛菲尔先生生前是一名pundit或曰智者，这是从印地语经由《时代周刊》的亨利•R•鲁斯传入英语的一个词（鲁斯的《时代周刊》也是tycoon（大 亨）， moppet（孩童） socialite（社会名流）的来源，赛菲尔先生既没成为，也没想成为，这三个词所描述的任何一类人）。作为一名智者（或权威政治评论家），他为《纽约 时报》写了三十多年的政治和词汇专栏。又因为其犹太裔的背景，他也可以说是位maven（内行），意为“懂行的人”，这是个希伯莱－意第绪语单词，上世纪 六十年代靠一则奶油酱腌鲱鱼的广告溜进了英语。赛菲尔是个老派人物，他在评论这一行干了太久，以致于他有时管他的计算机叫打字机（虽然他也紧跟时代，熟知 blargon（部落格一族的行话）和cellphoney-baloney（打手机时的胡说八道）一类的新潮说法[注5]，在这上头俨然和二十来岁的小 青年一样身手敏捷）。他常穿彩格呢的衣服（plaid）。英格兰人会叫它粗花呢（tweed），这起初其实是tweel一词的误读，而后者是苏格兰人对 twill的拼法。但不管怎样，赛菲尔身上的彩格都太刺眼，和他的领带鲜有相配的时候。

He stood out at the Times, though, less for his clothes than his views. These were to the fiercely libertarian right, a stance rarely seen at the Gray Lady. That was exactly why Punch Sulzberger hired him. He arrived in 1973 fresh from a job as speechwriter and campaign strategist for Nixon and his veep, Spiro Agnew, after an energetic earlier career as a flack, or public-relations man. The word came from the second world war, describing the smoke from German anti-aircraft shells, and hence the puffed-up information or exaggerated shows Mr Safire and his sort provided. He liked battlefield coinings. His favourite word of all, his friend Daniel Schorr thought, was zap, as in “Let me zap him.” Failing that, snappers and zingers were regularly landed on his foes: Hillary Clinton, Lee Kuan Yew, the startled John Ashcroft when attorney-general, and anyone using singular verbs with plural nouns.

不过，他在《纽时》期间引人侧目的原因更多的倒不是他的衣着，而是他的观点。赛菲尔所持的是强烈推崇个人自由的偏右观点，而这一立场在 有“灰色娘子”之称的《纽时》[注6]是难得一见的。这正是潘趣•萨尔兹伯格当初雇他的原因。1973年他到《纽时》开始上班，不久前他还是尼克松和其副 总统斯皮罗•阿格纽的演讲撰稿人和竞选策划，再往前他曾是一名生龙活虎的flack，即公关人员。该词来自第二次世界大战，本是描述德军防空炮弹爆炸时产 生的浓烟，后来就转指赛菲尔先生和其公关业同行所提供的自吹自擂的信息或夸张的表演。他喜欢源自战场的新词。他的朋友丹尼尔•萧尔[注7]觉得他最爱用的 词是zap（电击般命中），比如”Let me zap him”(“让我把他给毙了)。”要是没法对他的敌人一击致命，他也会用脍炙人口的妙语和切中要害的警句来往敌人身上招呼。后者包括希拉里•克林顿、李光 耀、在司法部长任上受了惊吓的约翰•艾什克劳夫特、以及任何在复数名词后使用动词单数形式的人。

Hold that prognostication
先别急着预测

Nixon he did not dislike. (Nor backwards sentences, neither.) To him he was not Tricky Dick, a name first coined in 1950 by a rival in a race for junior senator from California, but rather Mr Nice Guy. Mr Safire did him a large favour, in 1959, by engineering a conversation between him and Nikita Khrushchev (Nik heated, Dick cool) at a trade fair in Moscow. Once he had joined the Times, though, Mr Safire was shocked to find himself the victim of a Nixonian wiretap. It was made no better, but much more interesting, when one of his Lexicographic Irregulars found an early usage from the civil war, a tap into the telegraph wires at Lebanon Junction during Morgan’s raid of 1863 that discovered the Louisville garrison to be “much alarmed”.

尼克松他并没有不喜欢。（赛菲尔也不讨厌倒装句。）在他看来，尼克松并不是“耍滑头的迪克”（Tricky Dick）――这个名字首见于1950年，编出这个名字的人是尼克松竞选加州资浅参议员时的一个对手――赛菲尔眼中的尼克松是好人一个（Mr. Nice Guy）[注8]。1959年，在莫斯科的一个交易会上赛菲尔安排尼克松和尼基塔•赫鲁晓夫进行了一段对话，从而帮了尼克松一个大忙（因为对话中的尼克显 得情绪激动，而迪克则态度冷静）。不过，当他加盟了《纽时》后，赛菲尔先生旋即发现他自己居然也被尼克松令人搭线偷听过，这让他震惊不已。他的一名“词典 游击队员”[注9]后来找到了南北内战期间即已出现的一则wiretap的用法――“1863年摩根突击”期间正在北方进行袭扰的“摩根突击队”在黎巴嫩 会合点(Lebanon Junction)这个地方往电报线(wires)上搭线(tap)，从而发现在路易斯维尔驻防的北方军“颇为警觉”。这则wiretap早期用法的例子 并没有让尼克松对赛菲尔进行偷听这件事变得不那么糟糕，但它让这件事有趣多了。

The most famous phrase from his speechwriting days was nattering nabobs of negativism, written for Agnew as a joke to describe “defeatists who thought we could never win in Vietnam”. Agnew liked alliteration. (So did Mr Safire; though asinine alliteration was best avoided, when pounding out the punditry he could rarely resist.) In his “Political Dictionary” he later explained that negativism was the key word; that nabob, from the Urdu, meaning governor, hence self-important potentate, was the ideal practitioner of a negative outlook (see the use by John Adams in 1776); and that nattering was meant to denote complaining, but that Stewart Alsop, his pundit-mentor, had told him that the British use was closer to chattering. Neither Agnew nor Vietnam victory-thoughts lasted too much longer.

赛菲尔担任演讲稿撰稿人期间造出的最有名的一个短语是“牢骚满腹的怀疑主义大佬”(nattering nabobs of negativism)，这本是为[副总统]阿格纽写的一个逗笑的说法，用来描述“认为我们绝不可能在越南打赢的那些个失败主义者”。阿格纽喜欢押头韵 [注10]。(赛菲尔先生在打字机上重重地敲出他那些不吐不快的权威见解时也好这一手，虽然他极少犯为头韵而头韵的错误。)  他后来在其《政治词典》一 书中解释说，“怀疑主义”(negativism)是上面这个短语的关键词；来自乌尔都语的“大佬”(nabob)本指总督，所以引申为妄自尊大的要人， 用来指持怀疑主义观点者再合适不过（见约翰•亚当斯1776年对nabob一词的用法[注11]）；而nattering这个词被用来指发牢骚，但对他进 行言传身教的权威评论家斯图亚特•阿尔索普告诉他说英国人对该词的使用接近chattering（聊天）。阿格纽不久就因丑闻辞职，而在越战中取胜的想法 也没持续太久。

He saw himself, mixing the metaphor only slightly, as a lone wolf gazing at the horizon. Since world politics was his beat as well as the English language, he loped off on wild excursions into both. He became obsessed with Iraqi spymasters meeting al-Qaeda operatives in Prague, and remained a cheerleader for the Iraq war when most folk had fallen quiet. (It was neither a total war nor quite a limited war, just a quick war, he wrote, after which joyful Iraqis would thank their liberators, and freed scientists would reveal giant stacks of weapons of mass destruction.) His legions of lefter-leaning fans wondered whether he also believed in the tooth fairy. They could look it up, in perhaps the most pleasing cross-reference from his “Political Dictionary”: “Tooth fairy, See SANTA CLAUS, NOBODY SHOOTS AT.”

他把自己看作一头凝望远方地平线的独行狼（这个暗喻只是略略有些混杂[注12]）。既然世界政治和英语这一语言都是他负责报道的领域，他在这两个领域都狼 奔豕突般地走过些弯路。他喋喋不休地谈论伊拉克的间谍头目和阿尔盖达的特工在布拉格碰头一事[注13]，并且在大部分伊拉克战争支持者们都不再吱声后，他 仍然为伊战摇旗呐喊。（他写道，伊战既不是总体战(total war)，也不是有限战争(limited war)， 而只不过是一场速决战 (quick war)。战事结束后，欢天喜地的伊拉克人会感谢他们的解放者，而重获自由的科学家们(freed scientists)将会把堆积如山的大规模杀伤武器呈现在世人面前。）他的无数观点更为左倾的粉丝们纳闷他是不是也相信牙齿仙女(tooth fairy)的存在。他们可以去查阅他的《政治词典》里也许是最令人愉快的一条相互参照的注释：“牙齿仙女，参见没人会向圣诞老人开枪。”[注14]

注1：本应说take the bull by the horns，即降牛要抓角，指不畏艰险，迎难而上。牛当然没“手”，所以说降牛要抓“手”就是一个“混杂暗喻”，即用了彼此矛盾的比喻。这是修辞上的忌讳之一。

注2：Swaydo-intellectual即pseudo-intellectual。赛菲尔在2005年的一篇专栏文章中用到这个词，详见http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/opinion/24safire1.html?_r=1 。据说这可能是暗指中情局局长J. Edgar Hoover或数次竞选总统未果的George Wallace对pseudo一词的发音。不知道这两个人那样发音的原因是什么，也许是把拼写想成了psuedo，那样的话根据拉丁文的发音规则，sue 这个部分确实可以发成sway的音。

注3：Catullus是古罗马抒情诗人。他的一首著名的悼亡诗以ave atque vale(英文译为Hail and Farewell)结尾。

注3a：Ariel Sharon（沙龙）曾任以色列总理。原文中说以其名字命名的这种早餐籍籍无名，看来还真是这样。在网上找了一会，没有关于它的只言片语。想来它应该是纽 约某家犹太人餐馆里的特色早餐。沙龙军人出身，大部分时间都主张对恐怖分子和任何挑战以色列的周边势力采取强悍的打击。赛菲尔估计对沙龙同志颇为欣赏。 2006年沙龙因为中风开始昏迷，现在似乎仍然基本上处于植物人状态。感觉上他老兄离开我们已经很久了。

注4：共和党长时间以来的路线都是反对政府干预经济生活。对私人企业给自己的员工付多少工资以及商品定价进行政府干预，在共和党正统观点看来简直就是十恶不赦。

注5：《纽时》被叫做“灰色娘子”，原因是它的外观和风格都比较古板。

注6：英语中本来已有phoney-baloney（胡说八道；一派骗人的胡言）。Blargon是由blog和jargon合成的。

注7: Daniel Schorr或Dan Schorr，是美国一名资深的新闻评论员。星期六早晨的NPR一周新闻回顾中时常有他不长的一段点评。已经93岁了。

注8：Mr. Nice Guy分别是摄于1987年和1997年（后拍的叫《一个好人》，成龙主演）两部电影的名字。

注9：Lexicographical Irregulars指为赛菲尔词汇专栏志愿提供字词使用实例的人。因为并非专门干这行，所以[估计是赛菲尔吧]就管这群人叫帮他编词典的非正规军，或游击队。

注10：Alliteration，押头韵，指一句话中相邻的两个或更多单词词首辅音相同。原文这一段有好几处押了头韵。Avoid asinine alliterations那个短语是赛菲尔自己说的，详见上面给出链接的那篇文章。

注11：赛菲尔在其《政治词典》中提到John Adams在1776年使用过nabob这个词。详见该书638页。大家可以在Google books上免费看到该书的内容。

注12：狼一般是群居的，所谓独行狼大概在现实中是不怎么存在的－－狼可能偶尔会自个儿呆会儿吧，但不太可能长时间独行。狼的近亲coyote好像就和狼 在这一点上有所不同。有一次看介绍黄石公园的一个纪录片，中间一头丧夫的coyote就独自远行，后来在另一个地方生出了遗腹子。（丧夫的原因是公郊狼错 误判断了其活动范围内新来的一批狼，以为后者会和以前的那群狼一样对他的抢食行为不去较真。错误判断的后果极其严重。）

注13：布拉格事件应该是布什发动伊战的一个理由之一，因为如果阿尔盖达真和伊拉克的特工在布拉格接过头，就或许能证明伊拉克和911事件有关系。现在的共识当然是萨达姆政权根本就和911没关系。

注14：这条互见在《政治词典》第747页。Santa Claus那个词条在该书的642页。

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, a Russian reformer, died on December 16th, aged 53
俄国革命家叶戈尔•盖达尔于12月16日辞世，享年53岁

“IN RUSSIA you have to live long,” a Russian poet said once. Yegor Gaidar did not. But in his short life he did not just see historic changes, he brought them about. Journalists liked to call him the architect of Russian market reforms. As justifiably, he could be called the man who saved his country from civil war.

一位俄国诗人曾说“在俄国，你想不长寿都不行。”可叶戈尔•盖达尔却没有。但在他短暂的一生中，他不仅仅是历史性变革的见证者，而且还是它们的创造者。新闻工作们喜欢称他为俄国市场改革设计师。人们认为是他将俄国从内战中拯救出来，这一点无可非议。

In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government. Mr Gaidar was an economics graduate from Moscow State University and economics editor of an academic journal, the Communist. With his big shiny forehead and podgy face, he looked like the class swot, rather than a revolutionary. Yet his impact was no less significant: he helped to avert another revolution of the violent Bolshevik kind. Unusually, Mr Gaidar had both an academic’s close eye for facts and figures, and a sense of the weight of his own decisions in the turbulent sweep of Russian history.

1991年秋，核帝国苏维埃经济瓦解并分裂成15个国家，35岁的盖达尔不得不采取应对措施。伯瑞斯•叶尔钦（俄国第一位民选总统）先后任命其为副总理、财政大臣和政府首脑。盖达尔毕业于莫斯科国立大学经济学专业，曾担任过学术期刊《共产党》的经济类编辑。他的前额锃亮，脸胖乎乎的，看上去就像个教室里的书呆子，而不是革命家。但他的影响却不可小觑：他曾帮助俄国避免了另一场布尔什维克式的暴力革命。与众不同的是，盖达尔不但能用学术的眼光洞察事实与数字，还能在俄国的历史激流中权衡自己的决策。

He was born in March 1956, a few weeks after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality. His father was a war correspondent; his grandfather was a famous children’s writer, Arkady Gaidar, who fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war of 1918-22. In the autumn of 1991 the parallels with that civil war, and the famine that accompanied it, were self-evident. Mr Gaidar threw himself into the midst of the crisis as bravely as his grandfather had done. The task was urgent: to prevent starvation and make the economy work, or risk the consequences.

他出生于1956年3月——第二十届共产党代表大会召开的几周之后。会上，尼基塔•赫鲁晓夫谴责斯大林对个性的狂热推崇。盖达尔的父亲是一名战地记者，他的祖父阿尔卡季•盖达尔是位著名的儿童文学作家，曾在1918-22年内战期间为布尔什维克而战。1991年秋，一场类似于内战的战争即将爆发，饥荒也将随之而来，这在当时不言自明。盖达尔像他的祖父一样，勇敢地投身于这次危机之中。当时的任务很紧急：阻止饥荒蔓延、复苏经济，或承担危机所带后果的风险。

By the winter of that year Russia had two months’ worth of grain left, and producers were refusing to sell their crops to the state at regulated prices. Shops were empty. There was no money to import food, either: foreign-exchange reserves stood at $27m and the country’s foreign debt, inherited from the Soviet Union, was $72 billion. The only option for Mr Gaidar and his team was to abolish price regulation and allow free trade.

到那年冬天，俄国剩下的财物只够买两个月的粮食，而且当时生产商们拒绝以管制价格将粮食卖给俄国。商店里空空如也。也没有钱进口食物：俄国的外汇储备为270万美元，从苏维埃联合国那儿借的外债为720亿美元。废除价格管制体系，允许自由贸易，是盖达尔等人唯一的选择。

Price liberalisation made the erosion of Russians’ savings visible, and was hugely painful. But it also re-established the market economy for the first time since the 1920s. The reformers’ other task was to break the communist grip on assets as quickly and peacefully as possible. The mass privatisations of the 1990s were far from just or clean. Mr Gaidar was not to blame for the worst abuses, but he took responsibility nonetheless. He knew that reforms should preferably not be carried out without democratic institutions and public support. But he also knew that the alternative was far worse.

价格自由化使人们看见了腐败的俄国储蓄体制，给人们带来的巨大的痛苦。但它也重建了市场经济，这是自20世纪20年代以来的第一次。改革者们的另一项任务是以最和平的方式尽快夺取共产党对资产的控制权。20世纪90年代的私有制远没有彻底清除干净。尽管人们对政府的漫天骂声并非由盖达尔引起，但盖达尔却负起了相应的责任。他知道唯拥有民主的制度和公众的支持才能完美地实施变革。但他也知道这一选择更加艰难。

He got little support from the West, which was more interested in recovering Soviet-era debts. Nor did his reforms win him friends inside the country. In December 1992 parliament refused to approve him as head of government. But in September 1993 he returned as economy minister. Once again, civil war was close: in October 1993 the stand-off between Yeltsin and his parliament turned into armed conflict. Mr Gaidar, on television, appealed to Russians to defend democracy.

西方国家几乎没有给予盖达尔任何支持，它们对追回苏维埃时期的债务更为感兴趣。盖达尔国内的朋友们也不支持他的改革。1992年12月，盖达尔政府首脑的职位遭到了国会否认。但在1993年9月，他又以经济部部长的身份重回国会。内战双方的实力再次势均力敌：1993年10月叶利钦与国会之间的对峙演变成武装冲突。盖达尔在电视上呼吁俄国人们捍卫民主。

An honest man
一个诚实的人

He was not a politician. Though he was amiable, bounding to greet visitors with a beefy handshake, he lacked the common touch, and often talked in economic jargon. Neither he nor other reformers managed to convince ordinary Russians that the reforms would be long and painful, but that the country would triumph in the end.

他并非政客。虽然他和蔼可亲，总是奔到来客面前与之热情地握手打招呼，但他缺乏平易近人的美德，经常使用经济类术语交谈。他和其他革命家没能成功使俄国平民相信虽然革命的道路充满艰难与痛苦，但它们国家终将获得胜利。

Still, Mr Gaidar knew his country, its history and its perils better than most Russian politicians. After leaving office, he continued to advise the government. In his book “Collapse of an Empire”, he warned against the dangers of post-imperial nostalgia and attempts to exploit it. He drew powerful and disturbing parallels between the Nazis in Germany and similar voices in Russia. Many of his fears were borne out by Russia’s war in Georgia in August 2008. “The situation is extremely dangerous. The post-imperial syndrome is in full blossom. We have to get through the next five to ten years and not start doing something stupid,” he said.

但是，盖达尔比大多数俄国政客更为了解俄国、俄国的历史以及俄国的危险。他在卸任之后，仍继续为政府出谋划策。在盖达尔的著作《帝国的坍塌》中，他警告俄国提防留恋后帝国主义的危险，防止这种留恋情绪被人利用。他提出，德国的纳粹和俄国相似的呼声有着强有力的相同点，令人极其不安。他的担心主要来自于2008年8月在几内亚爆发的俄国战争。他表示，“形势极其危险。后帝国症状全部都显现出来了。未来5至10年，我们不得不小心翼翼，不能做任何蠢事。”

He was honest, both intellectually and personally. Unlike many of the current Kremlin-dwellers, he did not enrich himself in the 1990s. His office was spartan and stacked with papers; good food (and drink) were his main indulgence. And as an academic, he never compromised his analysis for the sake of political expediency.

他诚实、聪明，有个性。与很多现居住于克里姆林宫的人不同的是，他直到20世纪90年代才富有起来。他的办公室简洁朴素，堆满了各种各样的文件；食用优质的食物（及饮品）就是他主要的享受方式。作为一名专业学者，他从未为政治利益而妥协自己的分析结果。

One of Russia’s biggest problems, as he saw it, was the growing accumulation of wealth and power by bureaucrats and their friends in the name of a “strong state”. People who argued for such a state, he wrote, “have only one purpose—to preserve the status quo…A self-serving state destroys society, oppresses it and in the end destroys itself. Will we be able to break away from this vicious circle?”

他认为，俄国最大的一个问题是官僚及他们的朋友们正以一个“强大的政治集团“之名不断积聚财富和力量。他写道，为这样一个政治集团辩解的人“只有一个目的——维持现状…一个自私的政治集团会破坏和镇压社会，最终导致自我毁灭。我们能够脱离这个这个恶性循环吗？”

Mr Gaidar argued that modernisation was impossible without political liberalisation. Yet just before he died, he agreed to apply his economics institute to the Kremlin’s proclaimed task of modernising the Russian economy without touching its political system. Perhaps he sensed it was a vicious circle he could not square.

盖达尔坚持认为，只有在政治自由的条件下才能实现现代化。就在他辞世之前，他同意了在不改变政治体系的前提下，将他的经济体制运用于克里姆林宫宣布的实现俄国经济现代化的任务。或许他感到这是一个他无力结束的恶性循环。

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The last of the great general economists died on December 13th, aged 94
12月13日，最后一位经济学通才去世，享年94岁

“I WAS reborn, born as an economist, at 8.00am on January 2nd 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom,” wrote Paul Samuelson in a memoir published earlier this month. He became probably the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century. For his work in several branches of the dismal science he became the first American economics Nobel laureate. Through his bestselling textbook, he introduced millions of people to the subject. And right to the end he kept on mentoring the profession’s brightest stars.
“1932年1月2日，在芝加哥大学的讲堂中，我得到了第二次生命——作为经济学家重生了。”本月早些时候出版的保罗.萨缪尔森回忆录中，他如是写道。他或许是20世纪下半叶最具影响的经济学家。沉闷如经济学，他在该领域数分支都有著作于世，并因此成为第一位荣膺诺贝尔奖的美国经济学家。在自己的畅销课本中，他向千百万人介绍了这门学科。直至生命垂暮，萨缪尔森仍在谆谆教诲着经济领域中最闪亮的学者。

His actual birth took place almost 17 years earlier in the steel town of Gary, Indiana, to a family of upwardly mobile Polish immigrants. His earliest memories—of the recession of 1919-21 and strikebreaking immigrant workers from Mexico, and of the boom and bust that followed—shaped Mr Samuelson’s macroeconomic views throughout his life. He approved of massive government spending to help an economy escape from recession when monetary policy can do no more. When the Obama administration introduced just that sort of stimulus this year, partly on the advice of Mr Samuelson’s nephew, Larry Summers, who is Mr Obama’s chief economic adviser, he was quick to approve.
其实，萨缪尔森在此17年前生于印第安纳州“钢都”加里市的一个波兰移民家庭中，当时正值家族兴旺。他儿时经历1919-21年经济衰退和墨西哥民工罢工，以及随后的繁荣萧条更迭，而这些早期的记忆对他的宏观经济理论产生了毕生影响。他同意如货币政策力不能及，政府应大幅出资避免经济萧条。今年奥巴马政府引入上述经济刺激，其首席经济顾问，萨缪尔森的侄子拉里.萨默斯谏言有功，而萨缪尔森毫不含糊，双手赞成。

Though regarded as America’s leading standard-bearer for Keynesian economics, he called himself a “cafeteria Keynesian”, just picking the bits he liked. His combination of Keynesian and classical economic ideas became known as the “neoclassical synthesis”. From his chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in his column in Newsweek, the self-described “dull centrist” became a fierce critic of the libertarian Chicago School, and especially of Milton Friedman (writer of a rival Newsweek column). Markets are not perfect, he believed, and dire warnings from Friedman, and earlier from Friedrich von Hayek, about the regulation of markets “tells us something about them rather than something about Genghis Khan or Franklin Roosevelt. It is paranoid to warn against inevitable slippery slopes…once individual commercial freedoms are in any way infringed upon.”
纵使萨缪尔森被推崇为凯恩斯经济理论的倡导先锋，却自称“自助餐厅凯恩斯主义者”，发扬理论全凭爱好。他综合凯恩斯和古典经济思想成就“新古典综合”，传扬于世。在麻省理工大学的讲台上，在《新闻周刊》的专栏中，他自诩“沉闷中间派”却激烈批判倡导自由主义的芝加哥学派，尤其是同为《新闻周刊》专栏写手的弥尔顿.弗雷德曼。他认为市场并不完美，而弗雷德曼——以及从前弗雷德里希.冯.海因克——的耸人听闻“只能揭示他们心底的脆弱，而看不到一丝一毫成吉思汗和罗斯福的身影。下坡路不可避免……看到个体商业自由受到侵犯就发出防范警告，纯属偏执抓狂。”

As for Mr Samuelson’s friend of 50 years, Alan Greenspan, once chairman of the Federal Reserve, “the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander”—a devotee of laissez-faire capitalism. “You can take the boy out of the cult but you can’t take the cult out of the boy,” Mr Samuelson told the Atlantic this summer. “He actually had [an] instruction, probably pinned on the wall: ‘Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good’.”
萨缪尔森曾经评价自己五十年老友——美联储前主席艾伦.格林斯潘：“他就是曾经追随艾茵.兰德，才不慎失足。”艾茵.兰德是放任资本主义的忠实拥趸。“改邪归正易，浪子回头难呐。”萨缪尔森今年夏天接受《大西洋月刊》采访时说，“他还真有个座右铭，还钉在了办公室墙上，写着：‘轻渎资本主义，一律不准出门。人皆贪婪，此乃常情。’”

The huge sales of Mr Samuelson’s textbook, “Economics”, first published in 1948 and updated every three years, owed much to his lively writing. (The abstract of his recent memoir ended with the words: “Boo hoo.”) The book transformed how economics was—and is—taught around the world. If the earlier editions too readily believed that an economy could achieve equilibrium, that may have stemmed from the author’s conviction that mathematics could be a useful tool for economists, and that economics had much to learn from physics and the laws of thermodynamics. Today it is fashionable to argue that economics was led astray by “physics envy”, which blinded it to the subtleties of human behaviour, yet after winning his Nobel prize in 1970 Mr Samuelson anticipated economists’ current interest in biological systems by writing several papers on Mendelian dynamics.
1948年，萨缪尔森的课本《经济学》首次出版，此后每三年就进行一次修订，其销量之大，盖因老人家笔调鲜活。（他最近出版的回忆录摘要中，便以“呜呼”二字结尾。）《经济学》一书颠覆了经济教学，并对其产生了持久影响。如果说早期版次过于相信经济可以达到均衡，那大概是因为作者坚信数学可以成为经济学家的有效工具，经济学可汲物理和热力学定律之长。今天，许多人认为经济学因“物理嫉妒”才会忽视人类细微行为，从而误入歧途；而1970年赢得诺贝尔奖之后，萨缪尔森就孟德尔动量撰写数篇论文，成功预见了今日经济学家对生物系统的盎然兴趣。

The inefficient market
低效市场

He was the last of the great general economists, making important contributions on trade, macroeconomics, public finance and consumer behaviour. Yet he decided, at around 50, that to remain academically competitive he had to specialise. Perhaps because it was close to his beloved mathematics, the specialist field he chose was financial economics.
他是经济领域最后一位通才，在贸易、宏观经济、财政和消费行为领域均有建树。年近半百，萨老却决定为保持学术竞争力，他必须专攻。他选择了金融经济，大概因为这同他挚爱的数学密不可分。

His work helped lay the foundations for two of the field’s biggest ideas: the efficient-market hypothesis and options pricing. In 1965 he published a paper explaining that in well-informed and competitive speculative markets, price movements over time will be essentially random—a concept at the heart of the efficient-market hypothesis later described in its full majesty by Eugene Fama, whom Mr Samuelson believed ought to win a Nobel prize. In the 1950s it was Mr Samuelson who had rediscovered the pioneering early work of Louis Bachelier, a French mathematician whose insights would later underpin the Black-Scholes option-pricing model; and it was Mr Samuelson who suggested the assumption, that share prices move according to geometric Brownian motion, which makes this model workable. Mr Samuelson remained close to Robert Merton, who won a Nobel for his work with Fischer Black and Myron Scholes on options pricing.
萨缪尔森的著作奠定了有效市场假说和期权定价这两大经济学观念的基础。1965年，萨老发表论文，解释在消息灵通而具竞争力的投机市场中，只要假以时日，价格变动就会出现随机倾向——这是有效市场假说的核心概念；此后，萨老认为应为诺贝尔奖获得者的尤金.法玛对此概念进行了雄辩阐述。20世纪50年代，是萨老掸去法国数学家路易.巴舍利耶的先锋性早期著作尘封，成就了布莱克-斯科尔斯期权定价模型；同样，萨老提出股票价格遵循几何布朗运动假说，这一期权定价模型才得以运转。长期以来，萨缪尔森同罗伯特.默顿常有往来，而费希尔.布莱克和迈伦.斯科尔斯所创这一模型，又助默顿戴上诺贝尔桂冠。

Yet Mr Samuelson also understood that beyond the ivory tower the conditions necessary for efficient markets rarely existed; they needed regulating. “To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances,” Mr Samuelson would explain. “When someone preaches ‘Economics in one lesson’ I advise: Go back for the second lesson.” The latest crisis (for which he felt some responsibility, since he had helped develop financial derivatives that company executives did not understand) proved that “free markets do not stabilise themselves. Zero regulating is vastly suboptimal to rational regulating. Libertarianism is its own worst enemy!”
然而，萨缪尔森同样清楚，走下象牙塔，有效市场的必要条件鲜有存在；市场需要规范。“要理解经济学，不能只明白其中的基本原则，还要理解里面的细微差别。”萨缪尔森解释道，“有人说什么‘一课经济学’，我看，给我回去再上一课吧。”萨老认为自己对眼下的金融危机责任不可推卸，因为他曾经也帮助创造公司高管无法理解的金融衍生品。而这次金融危机也证明“自由市场不能自我调控。零监管远远不如合理调控。自由主义最大的敌人，正是自己！”

Mr Samuelson was happy to be “linked with such Methuselah masters as Verdi” who did some of their best work in old age. He was able to do so, not least, because of his interest in evidence-based medicine. For decades he read the New England Journal of Medicine, and—noting a weakness in his male ancestors—he was an early adopter of cholesterol-reducing statin pills, as well as skimmed milk. His passion for “looking for theoretical understandings of empirical reality” may help explain his long life, as well as his lengthy list of achievements.
萨缪尔森称，能与老年有成的“玛土撒拉大师威尔第比肩”，荣幸至极。他晚年多产，是因为对循证药物学颇感兴趣。几十年来，他一直阅读《新英格兰医学杂志》，并且因家族遗传之故，降胆固醇药他汀类药物推出初期就予以支持。对于脱脂乳，他也推崇备至。萨老热衷“在经验事实中寻求理论理解”，故而长寿，故而才能著作等身。

Reinhard Mohn
莱因哈德·摩恩

Oct 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Reinhard Mohn, German media magnate, died on October 3rd, aged 88

德国传媒大亨莱因哈德·摩恩于10月3日逝世，享年88岁

CAPITALISM red in tooth and claw never seemed to appeal to Reinhard Mohn. Asked to write an essay entitled “My Thoughts on Choosing a Profession”, the 16-year-old schoolboy dwelt on his obligations to society, his natural abilities and the desire for a useful life. These concerns, he said, were to stay with him throughout his career. Indeed “co-operation and compassionate leadership” were the key to his success. And success he surely found. Not long before he died, his family-owned company, Bertelsmann, was the world’s sixth-biggest media group, with over 100,000 employees in 50-odd countries.

莱因哈德·摩恩对于资本主义的血雨腥风似乎从来就不感冒。16岁时，在学校布置的命题作文“择业之我见”中，他大谈自己的禀赋和对于社会的责任，并渴望成为一个有用的人。他说，这些信条将会一直贯穿自己的整个职业生涯，除此之外，“合作精神和人性化领导”也将是成功的关键要素。他的确是成功了。在他去世前不久，他拥有的家族企业贝塔斯曼是世界第六大媒体集团，分支遍及50多个国家，员工数量超过10万。

Bertelsmann had been founded in 1835, as a publisher and printer of religious books. It was, and still is, based in Gütersloh, a dozy town in eastern Westphalia, where Mr Mohn’s great-great-grandfather, Carl Bertelsmann, was a Protestant lithographer. The firm prospered until the great Weimar inflation cut its workforce from 84 to six in 1921-23. But it bounced back, and was employing 440 people in 1939. Then it did even better, producing quantities of Nazi novels and propaganda. When Mr Mohn came home from the war, though, the buildings had been bombed, so the young would-be engineer persuaded by his father to join the family firm was hardly taking on a thriving business.

贝塔斯曼的总部位于德国东威斯特伐利亚的居特斯洛，这是一座生活节奏较慢的城镇。1835年，也是在那里，贝塔斯曼的雏形出现了（起初印刷和出版宗教书籍，摩恩的曾曾祖父卡尔·贝塔斯曼是当地一名信奉新教的石板印刷工）。公司的生意红红火火，直到魏玛共和国时期那次恶性通胀的到来——在1921-1923年间，公司员工从84人减少到6人。通胀过后，公司迅速恢复元气，1939年时员工总数达到440人。之后，公司生意又是更上一层（通过印刷大量充斥纳粹思想的小说和宣传品）。但当摩恩从（二战）战场归来之时，眼前却是炸弹摧残后的楼房。这个年轻人本是想作一名工程师，却被父亲拉进了这个家族企业。应该说，摩恩是在公司处于低潮时承接重任的。

Reluctant he may have been, but he had already learned some useful lessons. One, he would claim, was the value of trust. This he came to appreciate as an officer in the Afrika Korps, lying wounded on a hillside in Tunisia. The American soldier who found him helped him down the mountain, instead of suspecting an attempt to escape and shooting him dead. Perhaps this example of humanity was later responsible for Mr Mohn’s readiness to give his managers their head (so long as their units were profitable) and his workers a share in the company’s profits (though not voting shares). Perhaps not. But never in his day did Bertelsmann have a strike.

加入公司尽管并非摩恩所愿，他却是带着一些（从战争经历中）学到的有用东西进的公司。其中一点，就是人与人之间的信任（摩恩绝对不会否认这个价值观），这是他在德意志非洲军团作军官时体会到的：在突尼斯，他受了伤，躺在半山腰。找到他的那个美国士兵并没有怀疑他是企图逃跑，然后再一枪打死他，而是扶着他下了山。摩恩后来之所以乐于向手下的经理人放权（只要他们负责的部门是盈利的），乐于将公司的一部分利润分给员工 [然后员工再用分到的钱购买公司的股票，即下段提到的“利润共享计划” ——译者]（尽管员工得到的并不是有表决权的股份），可能就是因为这次受到的人性化对待。也可能不是。但是在摩恩掌权期间，贝塔斯曼没有发生过一次罢工。

A useful captivity

一次有益的囚禁

Less open to doubt was the value of being a prisoner-of-war in America. There Mr Mohn learnt English and, more surprising, something of American business practices. In particular, he came to see obstacles as inspirations for opportunities. Thus, if post-war Germans would not go to bookshops to buy relatively expensive books, he would set up a club whose members would receive discounted ones, so long as they agreed to pay for a regular supply—which they did, in their hundreds of thousands. Similarly, when Bertelsmann had bought so many German companies that the anti-competition authorities were calling a halt, he stepped up expansion abroad. In America he bought record labels like Arista and RCA Victor, and publishers like Bantam, Doubleday and, eventually, Random House; in Europe, he acquired 90% of RTL Group, a huge radio and television company. Even the Bertelsmann profit-sharing scheme was partly a response to the scarcity of capital, since some payments were deferred until workers retired, so profits were booked as liabilities, with tax benefits for the company.

摩恩在美国作战俘的收获应该较少会有人质疑。摩恩在那里不仅掌握了英语，竟然还学会了一套美国人的生意经。尤其值得一提的是，他开始学着把困难当作机会的生发剂。于是，当战后的德国人因为经济拮据而不去书店买书的时候，摩恩就建立了一个俱乐部，为会员提供上万种打折图书，只要他们同意定期交纳一定的会费（他们当然乐意）。再有，当贝塔斯曼因为收购太多国内的公司而被（反竞争的）政府叫停的时候，摩恩就开始加速海外扩张的步伐。在美国，他买下了几家唱片公司（像阿里斯塔唱片公司和RCA Victor唱片公司）和出版社（像矮脚鸡出版社和双日出版社，最后买下的是兰登书屋）；在欧洲，他收购了大型广播电视公司RTL集团90%的股份。甚至贝塔斯曼推出的“利润共享计划”也部分是拜困难所赐：是为了解决公司的资本短缺，因为一部分红利要等到员工退休之后才能到达他们手上，之前这些钱会记作公司的负债，于是公司就能因此而得到税收的减免。

As time went by, Mr Mohn came increasingly to be seen as a benign patriarch who personified the collaborative, we-all-eat-together-in-the-canteen way in which Germans did business. This helped him brush off a few embarrassments, notably the publication by Stern, one of his magazines, of some bogus diaries supposedly written by Hitler. Potentially more damaging, because it showed that Bertelsmann had not come clean earlier, was the revelation in 2002 by a commission appointed by the company that it had co-operated closely with the Nazis during the war and used Jews as cheap labour.

随着时间的流逝，摩恩作为公司“家长”的形象越发变得亲近温和。他是德国商人的典范：那种讲究合作，“大家一起吃食堂”的经商方式。良好的公众形象帮他化解了几次尴尬，值得一提的一次是他旗下的《明星周刊》杂志刊登了几则伪造的希特勒日记。而可能会对公司造成更大危害的一次是2002年的大揭底（之所以说会造成更大的危害，是因为这些史实揭露了贝塔斯曼不光彩的过去）：贝塔斯曼委任的一个调查机构发现该公司在二战期间与纳粹合作密切，并且雇佣犹太人作廉价劳工。

In 1977 Mr Mohn set up a non-profit foundation, which now holds 76.9% of Bertelsmann’s shares, though the voting rights lie with another company, half of whose directors are members of the family. Ultimate control, however, has for some time rested with Liz, Mr Mohn’s second wife, whom he met at a company party when she was a 17-year-old switchboard operator. They married 24 years later.

摩恩在1977年建立了一个非盈利性质的基金会，现持有贝塔斯曼76.9%的股份。但是拥有贝塔斯曼绝对控股权的却是另一家公司 [即贝塔斯曼管理公司，Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft ——译者]，该公司管理层的半数都来自这个家族。而摩恩的第二任妻子利兹曾一度拥有贝塔斯曼的最终控股权。两人相识于一次公司聚会，利兹当时17岁，是一个电话接线员。24年以后，两人结了婚。

She is seen as a stout defender of the family’s interests, seeing off those who might have taken the company public and insisting, in 2006, on buying back a 25% holding sold five years earlier. The borrowing then undertaken to pay the bill of €4.5 billion ($5.7 billion), coupled with falling CD sales and waning book-club revenues, has narrowed Bertelsmann’s prospects.

利兹被认为是家族利益坚实的捍卫者，对于那些可能会将公司引入上市之路的人，她会一律说拜拜 [贝塔斯曼集团前CEO托马斯·米德尔霍夫曾试图让公司通过IPO上市，后在董事会的压力之下，被迫辞职。——译者]，并在2006年坚持购回了5年前卖掉股权中的25%。而购买这45亿欧元（57亿美元）股权所用的贷款，再加上CD销售额的下降和书友会收入的缩减，使得贝塔斯曼的前景变得愈加的不乐观。

In his heyday, Mr Mohn might have seen all this as another opportunity. A quiet man, he liked to take an hour’s walk in the woods around Gütersloh each day during which he pondered his next move. What that would be now, in the face of Bertelsmann’s straitened finances, the elusiveness of internet revenues and changes in publishing and advertising, is uncertain.

如果将时光扭转到当年，摩恩可能会将所有的这些都看成是另外一个机会。他是一个安静的男人，喜欢在居特斯洛附近的树林里散步，每天一小时，一边散步，一边思考下一步的动作。现在呢？在面对吃紧的财政，难以把握的互联网收益，出版和广告领域的变革时，他的下步棋会怎么走？没有人知道。

His avowed belief was to put social responsibility before the amassing of great wealth. As a dictum, it served him well, but it hardly amounts to a business model. In truth, he ran his companies with enterprise, ingenuity and a large dose of red-blooded capitalism. Without more of those, Bertelsmann is unlikely to survive as the media giant he made it. But then he also said he did not want to found a thousand-year Reich. That wish, at least, may well be granted.

他曾公开说到自己信奉的准则是社会责任先于财富积累。这个作为谨行的信条还可以（他也因此受益），但是很难成为一种商业模式。而实际上，他经营公司时还运用了自己的魄力，创新力，和很大程度的资本主义的适者生存法则。没有这些，贝塔斯曼很难成为他一手打造的如今的媒体巨人。但是他接着还提到，自己并不想建立一个千年帝国。这个理想——至少该不会落空。

Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish-born Oxford philosopher, died on July 17th, aged 81
生于波兰的牛津哲学家莱谢克•柯拉柯夫斯基于7月17日去世，享年81岁。

 

HIS life was learning—about history, about his times, about himself. Like some other erstwhile true believers, he became one of most cogent critics of his former faith. Having spent his youthful years as an ardent communist and atheist, Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great minds of the modern era, turned into Marxism’s most perceptive opponent, and one with a profound respect for religion.

柯拉柯夫斯基终其一生，求知不止：既研习历史、理解时代，又省悟自身。如同昔日的某些真正信徒一样，他也成为其原有信仰最有力的批判者之一。跻身当代伟大思想家之列的莱谢克•柯拉柯夫斯基在青年时代曾是一名热忱的共产党员和无神论者，但日后他转变为马克思主义最富见解的劲敌，同时也成为一位对宗教抱有深深敬意的人物。

His intellectual life started in the misery of Nazi-occupied Poland—he had to study in secret, mostly alone—and finished in one of the nicest places imaginable: Oxford’s All Souls College. In a university tailor-made for gifted misfits, Mr Kolakowski was happy: he was left alone to read, write, and, less often, talk. All Souls provided a glorious academic retreat: the only obligation is to dine there regularly. His distinctive hat, craggy features, idiosyncratic English and perspex walking stick established him as a landmark even in a city studded with oddities and treasures.

柯氏的知识生涯始于纳粹占领时期波兰的悲惨环境中，为此他只能几乎独自一人、潜行于求学之路上；而其终点却是人们所能想到的最佳场所之一——牛津万灵学院。在这所为天赋异常之人量身打造的大学中，柯拉柯夫斯基如鱼得水：他可以不受打扰地读书、写作，偶尔也可谈话。万灵学院提供了一片极好的学术净土，身处其中之人的唯一义务便是定期于此聚餐。与众不同的帽子、皱纹密布的脸庞、风格古怪的英语以及塑胶质地的拐杖，这些特征使得柯拉柯夫斯基甚至能从这座异客高人密布的城市中脱颖而出，成为标志性的人物。

“Philosopher” was his usual label, but not a wholly accurate one: historian of ideas would be better. Mr Kolakowski showed little interest in the Oxford tradition of analytical philosophy; like his great Oxonian philosophical contemporary, Isaiah Berlin, he formulated no grand scheme of ideas. His forte was to explain the development, attractiveness and shortcomings of political ideas and systems, particularly the communism invented by Karl Marx and practised across the Soviet empire.

柯氏通常被冠以“哲学家”的头衔，但这并不完全准确：思想史家这个称号将更为贴切。柯拉柯夫斯基对于牛津的分析哲学传统并未表现出多大的兴趣；与伟大的牛津哲学同辈以赛亚•伯林一样，柯氏也没有构建起宏大的理念体系。他的长项在于对各种政治理念与体制的发展、亮点和不足加以解释，尤其精通由卡尔•马克思创造出的、在苏维埃帝国全境付诸实践的共产主义。

His magnum opus was the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution”, published in the 1970s. It calmly and expertly demolished the pillars of Marxist thought: the labour theory of value, the idea of class struggle, historical materialism and the like. He also pointed out, again without unnecessary polemics, the practical shortcomings of communist systems. Stalinism was not an aberration, he argued, but the inevitable consequence of pursuing a communist utopia. For that, powerful left-wing voices such as the historian E.P. Thompson berated him as a traitor to the noble socialist ideals that he once espoused.

柯氏的代表作是出版于上世纪七十年代的三卷本著作——《马克思主义的主要流派：其兴起、成长与消亡》。本书用平静而娴熟的论述将马克思主义学说的支柱一一击碎：劳动价值论、阶级斗争观念、历史唯物主义，凡此种种，概莫能外。他也毫不拖泥带水地指出了共产主义体制的实际缺陷。在他笔下，斯大林主义并非怪胎，而是对共产主义乌托邦的追求所必然导致的结果。因为这一论断，诸如历史学家E.P.汤普森等强力左翼人士指责柯拉柯夫斯基背叛了他曾一度信奉的社会主义高贵理念。

Against the devil
对抗魔鬼

Both his experience and beliefs made such criticism seem patronising. Mr Kolakowski had lived under two kinds of totalitarianism, Nazism and communism; his ideas had been censored even in the supposedly more liberal communist Poland of the late 1950s and 1960s. What finally drove him, and his Jewish wife Tamara, to emigrate was the communist-inspired anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Few if any of his leftist critics had such experiences. In a spirited rejoinder to Thompson, Mr Kolakowski wrote: “The only medicine communism has invented—the centralised, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule—is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle.”

不过，在柯拉柯夫斯基的阅历和信念面前，上述的批评看上去颇为傲慢。柯氏曾亲身经历过纳粹主义和共产主义这两种极权制度；即便是在被认为更加自由的、上世纪五十年代后期与六十年代的共产主义波兰，他的思想也受到审查。最终，1968年由共产党挑起的反犹运动使得他与犹太裔夫人塔玛拉远走他乡。在他的左翼批评者中，鲜有人曾有这般经历。柯拉柯夫斯基在一篇针对汤普森的激情洋溢的驳文中写道：“共产主义发明的唯一药物便是将权力集于一身、不受社会控制的国家财富国有和一党专政制度，而这一模式比它原本准备治疗的弊病更加糟糕；它在经济上的效率更低，此外它还使得官僚特征成为社会关系的绝对准则。”

His opponents in that argument seem to have landed on the dustheap of history. But Mr Kolakowski’s distaste for communism did not make him an evangelist for free-market liberalism: he was too inquisitive, sceptical and irreverent to support any particular doctrine strongly. He was particularly critical of those who relied solely on science for answers to the big questions about life. He criticised too the emptiness of secular materialism. Increasingly, he became convinced that religion, in some form or other, was a necessary part of human existence. He was no churchgoer, but asked what his next target would be after communism, he replied, only half-jokingly, “the devil”.

柯氏在这场争论中的对手们似乎已被扫落于历史的垃圾堆[注1]之中。但柯拉柯夫斯基对共产主义的厌恶并未令他成为一名崇尚自由市场的自由主义狂热传道者：他过于好奇、满腹猜疑、又不带敬畏之心，因此绝不会坚定地支持某种特定的学说。对于那些一心仰仗科学给出关于人生重大问题答案的人，他的批判尤为激烈；而世俗唯物主义的虚无也是他的抨击目标。日复一日，他渐渐相信种种类型的宗教是人类生存必不可少的一部分。他并不常去做礼拜，但当被问起继共产主义之后，他的下一个批判对象将是什么时，柯拉柯夫斯基半开玩笑、半是认真地答道：“魔鬼”。

For those involved in the struggle against communism, on both sides of the iron curtain, he became a guru, ranking along with Czeslaw Milosz, the émigré Polish poet whose book “The Captive Mind”, published in 1953, unpicked the mind-mangling effects of communist thought.

对于铁幕两侧那些被卷入这场对抗共产主义之争的人们来说，柯氏成了一位与波兰流亡诗人切斯拉夫•米沃什齐名的权威导师，后者于1953年出版的《被禁锢的思想》一书消解了共产主义思想带来的魅惑效果。

In those early days, of course, Mr Kolakowski was still a loyal, if critical, party member. Some of his fans preferred to forget that. They also overlooked his youthful tirades against Poland’s Catholic church. As a zealous party member when the remnants of wartime anti-communism were still strong, he used to carry a pistol for fear of assassination. Remembering his father’s murder during the Nazi occupation, the young Kolakowski accepted communism as an alternative both to Nazi militarism and to the failures of Poland’s pre-war system of semi-authoritarian capitalism. Indeed his country’s post-war communist rulers saw the brainy, determined youngster as a prize prospect and rewarded him with a trip to Moscow in 1950 to experience the delights of Soviet rule.

当然在那段早年岁月中，柯拉柯夫斯基仍然是一位忠诚的党员，只是或许有一些批判性。对这段历史，他的部分崇拜者试图加以遗忘；他们也无视其年轻时针对波兰天主教会的激烈抨击。彼时，战时反共产主义势力的残余依旧强大，因此身为一名狂热党员的他，习惯于携带手枪以防暗杀。对父亲在纳粹占领时期被人谋杀一事的记忆犹新，使得年轻的柯拉柯夫斯基将共产主义视为纳粹军国主义与波兰战前半威权资本主义制度失败的替代品。事实上，该国战后的共产主义统治者也将这位聪颖而坚定的青年视为宝贵的希望。作为奖励，柯拉柯夫斯基在1950年获得了前往莫斯科的机会，以体验苏维埃统治带给人们的欢悦。

That backfired. He wrote later of the “material and spiritual desolation” he saw there, though it took two decades for his faith in Poland’s socialist system to erode entirely. In the late 1960s, he made his way to America but found the radical campus leftism “pathetic and disgusting”; no place to bring up his daughter, he felt. He visited America regularly, though, and it was in his Jefferson lecture, the highest honour the federal government gives for intellectual achievement, that he coined his best-known aphorism: “We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

这一计划适得其反，日后他记录下了在苏联所见到的“物质与精神的荒漠”，不过待他彻底丧失对波兰社会主义体制的信仰，又过去了二十年时间。在上世纪六十年代后期，他前往美国，但却发现激进的校园左翼运动“可悲又可恶”；他觉得这儿不适合女儿的成长。不过他仍然会定期访问美国，而且正是在“杰弗逊讲座”这一联邦政府对于知识成就所能给予的最高荣誉活动中，柯拉柯夫斯基说出了他那句最为人所熟知的名言：“学习历史，不是为了知道该怎么做或者怎样取得成功，而是为了认识自己。”

注1：“历史的垃圾堆”指里根总统在1982年对共产主义所作的预言。
有兴趣了解这一短语不同版本历史的同学还可以参见这篇文章http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004250.html

Margaret Gelling
玛格丽特·婕玲

May 14th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Margaret Gelling, an expert on English place names, died on April 24th, aged 84

玛格丽特·婕玲，研究英国地名的专家，于4月24日去世，享年84岁

AT WIVENHOE, in Essex, the low line of the hills has the shape of the heels of a person lying face-down. The name contains the shape: a hoh is a ridge that rises to a point and has a concave end. At Wooller in Northumberland, however, the hilltop is level, with a convex sloping shoulder. The hidden word here is ofer, “a flat-topped ridge”. Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling.

Essex郡的Wivenhoe镇（Wiven的脚跟[0]），低矮的山脊线好像一个趴在地上的人的脚跟。这种形状其实已经包含在小镇的名字当中：hoh指的就是这样形状的山脊——一边陡，一边缓，缓那边在最低处成凹状。而Northumberland郡的Wooler镇（泉水山=well+ofer），山顶是平的，山坡则向外鼓起。Wooler这个名字里藏的词是ofer——“平顶山”。早期到英格兰定居的盎格鲁·撒克逊人在行走山间，开地垦荒的过程中，对山势的高低起伏观察入微，山有多少种形态，就被定居者们赋予了多少种名字。这种细微在急速膨胀而成的现代英语中已很少见到。而如今，开着汽车穿越群山的英国人，已几乎感觉不到这些细微的差别。古英语中会有几十个不同的词来描绘山的样与貌，坡的陡与缓，林的疏与密，并且每个词都有每个词的独特意思。而盎格鲁·撒克逊人后代们眼中的山已是“千山一律”，直到玛格丽特·婕玲的横空出世。

She was a neat, keen, merry woman, “prissy” as she described herself, and sensibly shod and clad. The gear was appropriate for slopping through slæp, fenn, myrr and slohtre (the disappointing origin of Upper and Lower Slaughter), or stomping through leah, hurst, holt and græfe, where trees were felled and coppiced and axes rang in the woods. Though she spent much of the time with her nose in one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, tracking the contour lines, she found them a “coarse instrument” for her purpose. When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.

婕玲是一个性格很阳光的女人，她对于工作充满了热情，而且做起事来有条不紊；她说到自己性格的时候用了“过分讲究”这个词，她对于穿衣戴帽也确实讲究。上面这些“装备”足以让她能够涉足经过slæp，fenn，myrr和slohtre[1]（这是Upper and Lower Slaughter[2]中slaughter这个词的由来，有点失望是吧）四块脚感不同的泥泞之地，或者脚踏实地地穿过leah，hurst，holt和græfe[3]（这里的树被一棵棵伐倒，锯木声响彻树林）四块树木高矮各异，疏密有别的林地。尽管她在那种比例尺为“一英寸比一英里”大小的地形测量地图上花费了大量时间，寻找等高线，她却认为地形图并不能完全满足自己的要求，因为它们太“粗糙”了。如果要寻求英国地名的正确含义，别无它法，只有穿上雨靴，实地观察。

Mrs Gelling worked for the English Place-Name Society, formally and informally, from 1946. From 1986 to 1998 she was its president. She never held an academic post, but lectured widely, wrote a dozen books and produced three of the county surveys of place names. She was devoted to the proposition that names drawn from the landscape were not or accidental, but original and important. All her passion for argument was employed to prove that hamm, a piece of land almost enclosed by water, was as vital a suffix as ham, a man-made enclosure; that an ending in -den might come from denu, a long and sinuous valley, rather than denn, a woodland pig-pasture; and that the hall in Coggeshall came from halh, a nook or a hollow, not some grand building. Cogg’s nook, a little recess tucked into the 150-foot contour line, was perhaps the best place where he could put his hut. With Mrs Gelling, topography always came first.

从1946年起，婕玲开始在英国地名研究会工作，时而全职，时而兼职。1986年到1998年间，她是该研究会会长。她从未在任何学术机构任过职，却四处演讲，写了十来本书，并且编写了《各郡地名概览》系列丛书中的三本。她坚信从山水地貌中得来的名字并非不起眼，而是非常重要；并非是随意编造，而是各有各的来历。她在证明地名的由来上面投入了极大的热情；她证明了hamm（一块几乎被水包围的陆地）和ham（一种人造防御）（一片人工围起来的区域）一样都是很活跃的后缀；词尾-den可能来源于denu（狭长迂回的山谷），而不是来自denn（一块用来牧猪的林地）；Coggeshall镇（Cogg的藏身洞）名字里的hall来自halh（藏身洞），而不是什么高楼大厦。Cogg的藏身洞隐蔽在150英尺等高线处，可能是栖身的最佳选择。对婕玲来说，地形学是她最重要的研究武器。

No subtlety escaped her. The suffix fyrhth was not simply wood, but “scrubland at the edge of the forest”. The word wæss was not just swamp, but—she was particularly proud of this—“land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly”. She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land “as if a plug had been pulled out”. A feld was not necessarily ground broken for arable, but any open country in the almost all-covering fifth-century forest. And an ærn was not merely a house, but a place where something was stored in bulk and worked on: so that Brewerne, in Cambridgeshire, acquired a smell of beer, and Colerne, in Wiltshire, a dusting of charcoal.

没有任何细微之处能逃得过她的火眼。后缀fyrhth不仅仅指木头，应该是“森林边上的灌木丛”。wæss 这个词意为沼泽未免过于简单，而是“蜿蜒的河流旁边的陆地；如果河水溢出河岸，来得快，走得也快”，她对这个发现尤为得意。在Shropshire郡的Buildwas村，她在流经而过的Severn河边上看到了这种现象，溢上岸的河水在周六早上到周日下午短短的时间之内便退却了，“就像拔掉了排水塞一样”。Feld不一定只指开垦为农耕用途的土地，而是指任何空旷的地方（五世纪的英国，森林几乎覆盖了所有地方）。an ærn不仅仅是一个房子，而是成批地生产加工并且储存的场所：这样一来，Cambridgeshire郡的Brewerne镇（brew+ærn），当年一定是到处飘荡着酒气；Wiltshire郡的Colerne镇（cole/coal+ærn），空气中的煤灰好似浓雾。

Reading Spaghetti Junction

读懂“通心面”

This “obsession”, as she happily called it, seemed to have begun at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where she found her English course boring, but was encouraged by Dorothy Whitelock to look at place names. They appealed immediately to the socialist, even communist, instincts with which she liked to shock her parents. Most of the place names of England had been bestowed not by officialdom, or in deference to knights, earls or kings, but by ordinary peasants coping with flooded pasture or looking over the hills. That habit had long died out; but as a resident of Birmingham (“village of Beorma’s people”) for most of her life, she liked to think that Spaghetti Junction, the giant intersection of roads just north of the city, was a solitary modern example of the will of the people expressed in a name.

她乐于把自己对于地名研究的喜好叫作“痴迷”，这样的“痴迷”应该最早源于她在牛津的圣·希尔达学校求学期间，讨厌英语课的她却被多萝西·怀特罗克鼓励去研究地名。这些地名当中体现出的社会主义甚至共产主义思想立刻就合了她的胃口，她还喜欢用这些“异端邪说”吓唬自己的父母。英国的大多数地方都不是由官方命名，也不是为了表示对骑士，伯爵或国王的顺从而得名，这些名字是来自那些普普通通的农民，这些人会修复被淹的牧场，会在群山间行走巡视。这样的人早已消逝远去；且慢，她喜欢拿Spaghetti Junction（通心面立交桥）做例子，认为这个称谓是现代仅有的可以体现民意的名字。Spaghetti Junction在她住了大半辈子的Birmingham市（“Beorma人的村庄”），位于城市北部，是一座巨型立交桥。

She was less egalitarian when it came to the business of sorting out what names meant. There were too many snares and snags involved “to invite general participation in the process of suggesting etymologies”. Who, for example, would catch that Chiswick and Keswick both meant “cheese-farm”, or that the tasty-sounding Fryup, in Yorkshire, meant “Frig’s remote valley”? Who could safely sort out ea, as in Eton, meaning a river, from ey, Old Norse for island? Who would dare to hazard a meaning for Wixhill and Wingfield, if she herself left them as “obscure”?

她的这种平等思想却无法被她拿来用在地名研究上面。“如果所有的地名都参与到寻祖寻根中来如果普通大众都参与进来的话”，会遇到许多阻碍，或是走入歧途。比方说，谁能解释清楚为什么Chiswick和Keswick都指“乳酪作坊”；为什么Yorkshire郡的Fryup镇，名字听起来能让人流口水，意思却是“Frig的遥远山谷”？谁能分辨出Eton[4]中的ea（意为“河”）和古诺斯语[5]中的ey（意为“岛”）之间的异同，并敢肯定自己的结论确凿无差。谁敢自作聪明地臆测Wixhill和Wingfield两个地名的由来？要知道婕玲早已给这两个名字贴上了“难以解释”的标签。

Nonetheless, she was grateful when locals got in touch with her: telling her, for example, that the stream at Winsor in Hampshire was too tiny to carry the meaning, “river-bank where boats are pulled by a windlass”, she had posited for Windsor in Berkshire. She was delighted to think that the public, reading her books, would suddenly learn to read their habitat, and see it with completely different eyes. At Hartside in Cumbria, for example, a white deer would suddenly flash through the woods; at Earley, in Berkshire, white-tailed eagles would fly above a clearing. And better still, in the soulless suburbs of south London, Penge now marked “the wood’s end”, and Croydon became “the valley where wild saffron grows”.

但是，她很感谢那些与她接触过的当地人：她从他们那里得到许多有用的信息；比如， Hampshire郡Winsor镇的人告诉她，当地的那条小河根本就是名不副实，因为它实在是太小了，“河里的船靠着河岸上绞盘拖拉前行”，于是她又将词的来源定位到Berkshire郡的Windsor镇。当地的那条小河实在太小了，因此“河里的船靠着河岸上绞盘拖拉前行”（她对“Windsor”的解释）这个说法有些名不副其实。她很希望人们读了她的书后，马上就学会读解自己的居住地，换一种全新视角来看待这个地方。比如，在Cumbria郡的Hartside镇，一头白色的鹿会突然从眼前闪现，穿过树林；在Berkshire郡的Earley镇，白尾鹰会在空地上方盘旋。更好的例子在这里：在了无生气的伦敦南部郊区，Penge那里其实原来是“树林的尽头”，Croydon则变成了“生长着野生藏红花的山谷”。

注：
[0]文中斜体部分为译者添加。
[1]slæp，fenn，myrr，slohtre这四个词是古英语，意思上都接近mud或marsh，但是之间应该有细微差别。
[2]Upper and Lower Slaughter分为Upper Slaughter和Lower Slaughter，是两个比邻的小镇。
[3]leah，hurst，holt，græfe这四个词在古英语里表示四种样貌不同的林地。
[4]Eton来自古英语Ēa-tūn, = River-Town
[5]古诺斯语（Old Norse）又称斯堪的那维亚语，当年被斯堪的那维亚人带到英国，对古英语有很大的影响。

《经济学人》（The Economist ( http://www.economist.com ))
仅同意本网站翻译其杂志内容，并未对上述翻译内容进行任何审阅查对

eastx:   http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=19283&extra=&page=1

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

John Hope Franklin, historian of race in America, died on March 25th, aged 94
美国种族问题史学家J.H.富兰克林于3月25日去世，享年94岁

HIS chief pleasures were contemplative and patient. With watering can and clippers, he would potter in his greenhouse among hundreds of varieties of orchids. Or, standing in a river, he would wait for hours until a fish tickled his line. These were, one could say, typical historian’s amusements; very close, in rhythm and character, to the painstaking, careful accumulation of tiny pieces of fact.

      劳神费心的事儿，冥思苦想的活儿，都成了J.H.富兰克林平生最主要的乐儿。若是给他一个浇花壶，再加一把剪子，他就会忘情地泡在自家的花房里，悠游于那数百株品种各异姹紫嫣红的兰花中。或者，他又会整个人插在河里，石雕般地站上好几小时，直到那鱼儿“胳肢”他的鱼线。有人说，这没什么，一个历史学家的典型消遣不就是这些么；那种节奏舒缓而又心无旁骛的娱乐精神，与他在认真聚拢、梳理那些极琐碎的真人真事中所表现出来的细腻之风是合拍的，也是融通的。

And yet what John Hope Franklin collected, over a lifetime of scholarship, were scraps of horror. Five dollars for the cost of a branding iron. A deed of sale, in Virginia in 1829, for a male slave “of a yellow colour” who “is not in the habit of running away”. Or the testimony from 1860 of Edward Johnson, a black child apprentice:

      不过，终其学术生涯一生，富氏所收集的却是零散的惊怖之材：一块价值五美元的烙铁；一桩发生在1829年的弗吉尼亚的奴隶买卖，该名待售的“黄皮肤”男奴“并不惯于潜逃”；抑或是幼小的爱德华·约翰逊于1860年提供的一段证词。这名黑人学徒如是说道：

I was tacon and plased with a rope a round my rists my back intiarly naked and swong up then and there Each of [the men] tuck a cow hide one on Either side and beet me in such a manner when they let me down I fanted and lay on the ground 2 hours

     “俺被一根麻绳密密匝匝地绑着它缠俺的手腕绕俺的裸背俺被吊在半空中站在两旁的每个（男人）都拿着牛皮鞭然后他们就用这种方式对俺一阵鞭打等俺被放下来时俺都晕死过去在地上趴了2个小时”

To these Mr Franklin could add from his own experience. The train journey to Checotah, Oklahoma, when he was six, that ended when his mother refused to move from the whites-only carriage. His father’s small law office in Tulsa, reduced to rubble after a race riot in 1921. The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his “filthy hands” off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi—a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses—only to find as he left the store that a semi-circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line.

      富氏也能添加这类源于亲身经历的生动素材。6岁时，他曾和母亲一道乘车去俄州的Checotah旅行。因其母拒绝离开白人专属车厢，这段旅程于是中途夭折。其父在塔尔萨的小律师事务所亦因1921年的一次种族骚乱而被夷为平地。那天，12岁的他搀着一名白人女子过马路，那女人却提醒“黑雷锋”应当把那“肮脏的手”从她身上缩回去。若干年后，这名密西西比州的男孩已成长为菲斯克大学的一名戴眼镜、儒雅气十足的19岁高个子男生。那个暖夜，他跑到梅肯去买冰激淋，正欲离开商店，却发现一群务农的白人崽围成个半圆形，早已截断了他的去路。这白茫茫半片的包围圈无声地暗示他———你，别想从这突围出去，想都不应该想。

Academia offered no shelter. He excelled from high school onwards, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard and becoming, in 1956, the first black head of an all-white history department at a mostly white university, Brooklyn College. Later, the University of Chicago recruited him. But in Montgomery, Louisiana, the archivist called him a “Harvard nigger” to his face. In the state archives in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was confined to a tiny separate room and allowed free run of the stacks because the white assistants would not serve him. At Duke in 1943, a university to which he returned 40 years later as a teaching professor, he could not use the library cafeteria or the washrooms.

      学术界竟也无处藏身。从中学开始，他在学业上便是同龄人中的佼佼者，最后还拿到哈佛的博士学位。1956年，他成为布鲁克林大学历史系系主任。该职破天荒授予一位黑人。而该校的白人堪称绝对主流，至于该系，则人人肤色皆白。随后他任教于芝大。但在路易斯安那的蒙哥马利，一名档案保管员曾当面呼他为“来自哈佛的黑鬼”。而在北卡州Raleigh的州立档案馆，他像是被关了禁闭，活动范围仅限于一所局促不堪且遭隔离的房间，可自由使用的也仅是那种尘封已久的书库，这一切不得不归因于那名不愿受其“差遣”的白人助教。1943年的他甚至连杜克大学（四十年后富氏作为授课教授重返该校）图书馆的自助餐厅或盥洗室都进不了。

Whites, he noted, had no qualms about “undervaluing an entire race”. Blacks were excluded both from their histories, and from their understanding of how America had been made. Mr Franklin’s intention was to weave the black experience back into the national story. Unlike many after him, he did not see “black history” as an independent discipline, and never taught a formal course in it. What he was doing was revising American history as a whole. His books, especially “From Slavery to Freedom” (1947), offered Americans their first complete view of themselves.

      富氏特别提到，白人在“低估一个完整的种族的价值”上乃是心安理得的。在他们的历史中，在他们对于美利坚如何孕育而来的诠释与理解中，你找不到任何有关黑色人种的位置，黑人被“理所当然”地排除了。而他的意图便是将黑人的群体经验与个体经历重新编入该国的民族故事中。与诸多后来者不同的是，他并未自立门户，视“黑人历史”为一门独立学科，他也从未把它当成一门正式课程前去教授。他所作的一切不啻为将原先残缺的美国史打磨成一个较完满的修订版。富氏的著述中，尤其是那部《从奴隶制到自由》（1947年）可谓为美国人提供了如何全面完整认识他们自身的原初路径。

Thomas Jefferson’s wine
托马斯·杰斐逊的红酒

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, “right by where the Smithsonian is”. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America’s banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had “never got over”.

      富兰克林天生就不是好勇斗狠之人。（对激进的革命派而言，）作为一名历史学家，他过于耿直审慎；而他的为人则显得太过谦卑。有人问其是否痛恨南方，他却回答，恰好相反，我热爱那块土地。他职业生涯中最深切的人情债莫过于一名白人———泰德·柯里尔对他的帮助。此人曾鼓励他以史为业，曾资助他500美元助其度过哈佛的艰难岁月。然而在他庄重与谦和的微笑之下，内心却燃烧着愤怒。他渴望告诉那些涌向华盛顿的白人游客，国会大厦乃是无数奴隶一砖一瓦地垒起来的。他还想说，宾夕法尼亚大道昔日的奴隶市场，“正好就坐落在现今的史密森尼博物院旁边”。奴役黑人所得的丰厚利润不单是让托马斯·杰斐逊享受到精美的法国红酒，它们同样也夯实了美国众多银行的根基，巩固了这个国家的经济活力及全球统治力。他也承认，提及美利坚对黑人的剥削，他便如鲠在喉，心结“从未解开”。

Nor had America got over it, despite the march from Selma, in which Mr Franklin led a posse of historians, and Brown v Board of Education, where he lent his scholarship to help prove that the Framers had not meant to impose segregation on the public schools. The “colour line”, as he called it, remained “the most tragic and persistent social problem” the country faced. His own many black firsts—president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association, membership of Washington’s Cosmos Club—had not necessarily opened the door to others. The night before he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a woman at the Cosmos Club asked him to fetch her coat. He was overjoyed by Barack Obama’s election, but could not forget the poor, immobile blacks revealed by Hurricane Katrina.

      美利坚也难“恢复”过来。虽然富氏曾领导一群志同道合的同行参加了始于塞尔玛的游行示威，也不管“布朗诉教育委员会案”（Brown v Board of Education）取得多么辉煌的成果（此案中的他才学并用，力证国家的宪法制定者并非要对公共学校施加“种族隔离”），似乎她都难以释怀。如他所言，那道“肤色分界线”仍是横亘在这个国家面前的“一个最可悲也最顽固的社会问题”。反观富氏自身，所取得的空前成就包括：曾任美国历史协会与南方历史学会的会长，亦是华盛顿科斯莫俱乐部（Cosmos Club）的会员。而这些显赫之位此前根本就没必要对他人开放。1995年，他获得“总统自由勋章”。之前的那晚，科斯莫俱乐部的一名女子还冲他一阵吆喝，命他去取她的外套。奥巴马成功当选总统几乎让他喜极而泣，但卡特里娜飓风席卷下的那些仓皇四顾、穷途末路的黑人同胞却在脑海中始终挥之不去。

He yearned to improve things, but wondered how. Financial reparations he was doubtful about; apologies seemed trifling. Only time, in historical quantities, seemed likely to make a difference. For some months he was chairman of Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race, a disorganised effort that ended by recommending “community co-operation”. Hostile letters poured in, mostly from people who did not think the subject worth talking about. Mr Franklin took them in his stride. He would go and work on his next book, or retire to the greenhouse, implements in hand; and practise patience.

      他渴求改良，却又叹无良策。财政赔款令其疑虑重重，而道歉，仿佛也并不重要。或许惟有时间才能在历史的长河中透出关键的光亮来。富氏担任“克林顿种族方案”主席期间（任期仅数月），因举荐“社区合作互助”计划，致使本就缺乏条理的克氏方案最终流产。威胁信随即纷至沓来（大多出自于那些认为该话题不值一提的人们），富氏却处之泰然。他会继续去写他的下一本书，间或溜进他那安静的花房，手执修剪，修行“耐心”二字。

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欲知本讣告的背景、细节及对富氏著述的介绍（绝对的著作等身），请参见杜克大学有关富兰克林（美国史学界研究“非裔美国人历史”的权威之一）的纪念网页：http://www.duke.edu/johnhopefranklin/

译者/alex147:  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=18422&extra=page%3D1