TE||The man in the white suit
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汤姆·沃尔夫
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The man in the white suit
穿白西服的美国记者
英文部分选自经济学人Obituary版块
The man in the white suit
穿白西服的美国记者
Tom Wolfe died on May 14th
The unsparing chronicler of American society and mores was 88
汤姆·沃尔夫（Tom Wolfe），曾对美国社会与风情进行辛辣报道的传奇记者，于5月14日去世，享年88岁
AT SOME convenient point in any morning, Tom Wolfe would put on his working clothes. Over a silk shirt, maybe ultramarine, maybe striped, he knotted a silk tie.A proper Windsor knot! No plastic cheaters, like Marshal McLuhan! Then a perfectly tailored white suit of linen or silk tweed…with double-breasted vest…dark blue trim of the matching square peeking from the breast pocket…cream socks....leather spectator spat boots…the summer passeggiata gear of Richmond, Virginia, his home town, transposed to New York.A glance in the mirror—the face fine, a china doll’s, with hardly a suggestion of shaving. The underlip puppet-stiff, but the hair floppy in the English style, falling almost to the intertragic notch of his ear.
每天早晨特定的时间里，汤姆·沃尔夫都会穿好自己的工作服。在纯蓝或条纹丝绸衬衫上打个标准的温莎式丝绸领结，不像马歇尔·麦克卢汉（Marshal McLuhan）那样用塑料钉钉一个假领带结。外面穿上双排扣背心，再套上一件麻料或真丝花呢白色西服外套，胸口露出深蓝色领带底部配饰花边。脚穿奶油色袜子，一双带着鞋套的皮靴。这是他家乡维吉尼亚里士满的夏季工作服款式，后来这种穿法传到了纽约。穿好后，沃尔夫会站在镜子前打量一番。他长着一张瓷娃娃脸，五官端正，没有胡渣，相貌堂堂，表情严肃。他留着齐耳头发，梳着一头英式发型。
Work was not far to find, across a few dozen metres of parquet flooring, past orchids and butter-yellow sofas, to his study in his apartment on the Upper East Side. There stood his desk. His desk! A brass-galleried horseshoe in light oak sporting silver inkwells in the shape of top hats, paperweights of millefiori Murano glass, an apothecary’s balance scale, family pictures in silver frames, a silver-footed chalice of blue Bohemian glass and a figurine of Bugs Bunny. At 90 degrees to the command centre of the desk was a typewriter with the blank paper set. Ready to write! Ten pages a day! Triple-spaced! Forcing himself to do it! But every so often—he would pause—smoothly swivel—to consult his huge thumb-indexed and stand-mounted Webster’s for “tabescent” or “prognathous”.
他的公寓在纽约上东城，一进屋门，向前走不到几十米的木地板，再经过老式的带有兰花图案的黄油色沙发，不远处就是他的办公室。里面有一个书桌，桌上摆着一个浅色橡木镀了银的大礼帽状墨水池，可以灵活转动，内有黄铜马蹄铁；一个穆拉诺玻璃镇尺；一座药剂天平称；镶了银框的家庭照；一只蓝色波西米亚玻璃酒杯，杯底是银质的；还有一只小兔子雕像，这就是他的书桌！桌子中心90度处有一台打字机，上面放着一沓白纸。桌上贴了几行标识语：随时准备写作！一天十页！三倍间距！强迫自己执行！但往往，在真正的写作过程中，他会不时地停下来，转过身去，查阅他那本放在支架上带有拇指索引的韦氏词典，以便找到“tabescent” 或 “prognathous” 这样的生僻词。
On this typewriter, or its predecessors, with shoulders braced and pinkie finger delicately raised, he banged out the excoriating articles and books that made his reputation. As leader of the New Journalism in the 1960s he piled up detail, drama and the flash of fiction to tell of trips, bus and otherwise, of the LSD crowd across America (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), the business of customising cars in Los Angeles (“The Kandy-Koloured Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”), and status battles among pilots and astronauts in the first space programme (“The Right Stuff”). Status and power! The key to how the human beast worked! The motive for all activity in America, the new Rome, a nation so prodigiously wealthy and militarily mighty it would have made Caesar twitch.
在这台打字机上，或是更老的机器上，他立着肩膀，小指不断轻轻地抬起，敲打出了那些针砭时弊、并使他声名远扬的文章和书籍。作为20世纪60年代“新新闻”的领军人，他把细节、戏剧和小说的描写方法融为一体，讲述不同的旅行、公交车或其他故事，介绍美国各地的嬉皮士（《令人振奋的兴奋剂实验》），讲述洛杉矶的汽车订制服务（《The Kandy-Koloured Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby》），描写第一批航天工程中飞行员和航天员之间的地位之争（《太空先锋》）。他认为，地位和能力，这才是驱使人类这种动物做事的原因。也是推动美国—这个新兴罗马所有进步的动力，让这个国家不管在财富或者军事上足够强大，甚至可以把凯撒吓到抽搐。
Nostalgie de la boue
佛系青年时代
In college he had studied Max Weber—imbibed his theories whole and gratefully, letting them seep through him like hot coffee. Men were not individuals so much as social products…inevitably tied to their race and class…but struggling! Fighting to impress, to rise! And nowhere more than in New York, where he lived ever after coming to work on the Herald Tribune in 1962, wallowing too in the city of unbridled appetites and ambition, of overbuilt ugliness, shoving oneupmanship…his favourite that party in 1970 at the Park Avenue duplex of Lenny Bernstein, in the days when status required nostalgie de la boue, real revolutionaries at your soirée, hence Black Panthers in leather pieces and wild Afros gobbling tiny morsels of Roquefort rolled in crushed nuts on gadrooned silver platters…Frisson of bomb-throwing danger!!! Delicious counterpoint! Radical Chic!
大学期间，他研究了马克斯·韦伯，满怀感激地将他的理论照单全收，让这些理论像热咖啡一样渗入他的身体。他发现，与其说是单独存在的个体，不如说人类是社会的产物，难免与所属阶级和种族产生关联，但每个人都可以奋斗！战斗！崛起！自1962年调到《先驱论坛报》工作后，汤姆就一直住在纽约。没有任何一个地方能像纽约那样，让他完全沉浸在人们肆无忌惮的野心和欲望当中，目睹了各种扭曲的人性和个人主义。。。他最喜欢的聚会是1970年在伦尼伯恩斯坦的帕克街二层公寓内组织的聚会。在那个时间和地点，参与者要变成佛系青年。那些夜晚足够将你彻底洗脑，于是，那些穿着皮革小口嚼着乳酪的黑豹队员和野蛮黑人都在精雕细琢的银盘子上品尝坚果。享受扔炸弹一般的悸动！美味的对立论点！兼顾激进与华丽的词藻！
注：Nostalgie de la boue，牛津英语词典上的定义是："A longing for sexual or social degradation; a desire to regress to more primitive social conditions or behaviour than those to which a person is accustomed. "个人感觉类似于那种厌倦了无趣的竞争、想当个流浪汉或农民工、想大中午地躺在宽敞明亮的银行网点门口睡觉的渴望。
On that typewriter too he had written the Great American Novel. For at just the moment when American society had become so wild, bizarre, Hog-stomping and Baroque that it cried out to be chronicled by a Zola or a Balzac, the novel had died. Those old bone-piles of American literature, Mailer, Updike and Irving, were writing psychological fantasies or books of otherworldly preciousness. Never left their studies! But he embarked on a novel as detailed as his journalism. A novel of the real world. From the trading floors of Wall Street to the police holding-pens of the Bronx he told the story of Sherman McCoy, bond-trader and Master of the Universe, and his fall from grace. “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was everyone’s vanity. New York’s. America’s. Sherman in the stinking cells…his terrifying stumbles into the black netherworld…baying money fever…racism on every side…no redemption…
同样是在这台打字机上，他写出了美国最伟大的小说。当时美国社会局势动荡不安，巴洛克风格盛行。这样的时代呼唤着自己的左拉和巴尔札克，小说已死。那时老一辈的美国文学大家们，像诺曼·梅勒、约翰·厄普代克、华盛顿·欧文创造了一些关于心理的幻想作品或者赞颂宗教世界美好的作品。如今依旧孜孜不倦地做他们的老派文章！但汤姆·伍尔夫的小说和他的报道一样充满细节，反应了现实世界。他塑造了债券交易员谢尔曼·麦考伊这个文学经典。作为宇宙公司的老板，他从华尔街的交易所沦落到在布朗克斯被警察盘问，误入歧途。《虚荣的篝火》中描绘的虚荣是每个人的，整个纽约都是这样，整个美国亦然。这个国家就像谢尔曼一样，被关进又脏又臭的监牢里……他恐惧极了……对金钱满目崇拜……种族主义到处都是……没有救赎……”
There were more novels, further investigations of the social mores of Atlanta (“A Man in Full”), of sex and society at university (“I am Charlotte Simmons”) and of immigrants in Miami (“Back to Blood”). The research took years. Each item of cheap clothing was traced to its store, each chair and lamp surveyed and each remark rendered in its exact patois. “If you ain’t off’n’at roof, you best be growing some wangs, ’cause they’s gonna be a load a 12-gauge budshot haidin’ up yo’ ayus!” His eye and ear were so meticulously malicious that he surely loathed the world, but he was courtly…spoke softly…had a wife and children…opened doors for ladies…and was every inch a WASP southern conservative, holding the ring for God, Country and—usually—the Republican Party.
他又写了许多小说，进一步深刻探讨了亚特兰大的社会风俗（《完美的人》），大学中的性行为与环境（《我是夏洛特·西蒙斯》），迈阿密的移民（《重回故土》）。他花费了数年对每件物品仔细研究。每件廉价的衣服都能在商店里找到，椅子和台灯的尺寸都仔细测量好，每句话也是和当地方言一模一样。“如果你不从屋顶下来，你最好长一双翅膀，不然的话你就会像被12号猎枪打穿屁股一样！”他观察着生活的各处细节，甚至产生了厌世情感，但他本人却温文尔雅，轻声细语，家庭美满，举止绅士，会为女士开门。他也是个不折不扣的盎格鲁-撒克逊裔白人新教徒，南方的保守党党员，虔诚的信仰国家和上帝，大部分时候，他都赞同共和党派的政策。
And he retained the suit. Always the suit, even with the perpetually stoned Merry Pranksters in “Acid Test”. Even in barracks, sagebrush, slums. A necktie was his pride. So was the green spiral-top steno notebook in which, like some exquisitely coutured man from Mars, he jotted down everything around him in shorthand with a ballpoint pen. Ken Kesey, leader of the Pranksters, once told him to put his tools away and Be Here!But he already Was! Ecce vates! Prophet and seer of the age!
他保留了这套西装，并且总是保持着在任何场合都穿着它的习惯，即使是和总是把自己弄得醉醺醺的Merry Pranksters一起在Acid Test活动上娱乐的时候，亦或是在军营，灌木丛里还是贫民窟这种地方，他总是西装革履，佩带着领带，并引以为豪，当然还有时刻保持的手里拿着一本绿色的速记笔记本。像一些着装异常精致的人一样，他喜欢用一枝圆珠笔快速简短地记下任何在他身边发生的事情。Pranksters组织的领导人Ken Kesey曾经要求他把他的那一套都扔掉，真正融入进来，但其实Tom Wolfe早就已经融入进来了，这就是他融入的方式！Ecce vates！（拉丁文，一句感叹词，推测应该是：伟大的先知啊！），时代的先知和预言家！
附注：
The Acid Tests were a series of parties held by author Ken Kesey in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, centered entirely on the use of, and advocacy of, the psychedelic drug LSD, also known as "acid". LSD-25 had not been made illegal in California until October 6th,1966The Acid Tests是1960年代中期由Ken Kesey在旧金山湾区举办的一系列聚会，完全集中在使用和宣传迷幻药LSD，也被称为“ Acid ”。 直到1966年10月6日，LSD-25在加利福尼亚州依旧合法。
The Pranksters的网址：http://pranksters.com/category/viral-content/
翻译组：
Yao,男，英专本科生，北大苗子
Cece，女，消防工作者，CATTI三笔
Amber，女，文学研究生，经济学人爱好者
Lucia ，女，翻译学硕士三年制，经济学人粉丝
校核组：
Lee，男，医学英译 Timberland爱好者
Dave，大学老师，二级口译笔译，科幻文学译者
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现有一经济学人大群,如果您也有兴趣，可联系小编WeChat : foxwulihua。大群的规则如下:
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