【中英文独家连载】罗宾博士看陕西之（西安印象）Shaanxi Through Dr. Robin’s Eyes
胡宗锋和（英）罗宾·吉尔班克 独家授权
中国出版集团、中译出版社“外国人写作中国计划”丛书之中、英文版《罗宾博士看陕西》
胡宗锋和（英）罗宾·吉尔班克中、英文版《罗宾博士看陕西》在第二十四届国际图书博览会上发布
Shaanxi Through Dr. Robin’s Eyes
罗宾博士看陕西
西安印象
（英） 罗宾·吉尔班克 胡宗锋 译
There is a saying in the Chinese language to the effect that "until one has seen the Great Wall one cannot truly be considered to be a man." This, for me, is problematic. I first glimpsed that mighty edifice for myself, not as a package holiday tourist being ferried agog around the environs of Beijing, but incidentally and from the back of a 4 by 4 vehicle. Surging through the countryside of Hebei Province to the minor walled city of Xuanhua the structure was our erstwhile companion. Snaking sinuously about the hills, up and down at angles more redolent of an outstretched, flaccid concertina than a bastion, it was apt to elicit gasps of amusement rather than of awe. Should this be the established litmus test for having come of age in China, the nation evidently has a more acutely-developed sense of the absurd than I had given it credit.
中国有句话叫“不到长城非好汉”，这对我来说非也。我第一次见识宏伟的长城，不是像那些跟着旅行团的人，在北京的郊区兴致勃勃的跑来跑去，而是坐在一辆越野车的后面。在河北省，我们驱车穿过乡下，要到一个被城墙围着的小城市——宣化，这儿的建筑保持着往昔的风貌。我们在山间蜿蜒驰骋，上下颠簸的程度让人联想到的不是棱堡，而是绵延无力的波纹皱褶，带给人的与其说是乐趣，倒不如说是畏惧。如果这是对一个人是否到达法定年龄的测试，那么这个国家练就的荒诞感显然超越了我的想象。
Foreigners, since the 1970s at least, have esteemed the Terracotta Army as being a worthy peer to the Great Wall. That other creative feat associated with Qin Shihuang lures thousands and thousands of holiday makers or day trippers to Xi'an. The Qin warriors, with their raised hair-knots and expressively matte eyes, are perceived to be of such magisterial value to global civilization that there are plenty who presume the city itself to be a "one-trick pony," or, far more grievously, something of a concrete wasteland. True enough, there was a time not so long ago when the splendour of Chang'an was subsumed beneath the utilitarian mantle of modernity, and the many monasteries, shrines and nunneries were treated with ambivalence. The late Simon Leys, one of the few foreigners to be allowed inside Xi'an during the Cultural Revolution, wrote of how, being left at the mercy of "dogmatic and disagreeable" official tour-guides of 1972, the only two attractions he was steered towards were the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and the Shaanxi Provincial Museum (then located within the precinct of the Forest of Stones Tablets). Wandering astray and locating the custodian of the key, he discovered that the City God Temple "has lost all its statues, the great gate with five carved wooden arches which marked the principal entrance has disappeared, (and) the sanctuary itself is now a warehouse. " The Five Western Terraces (西五台）had recently been torched to the ground by the Red Guards and nobody was forthcoming enough to tell him if anything remained of the Wolong Temple and the Temple of the Eight Immortals (Leys, Chinese Shadows, pp. 70-4). Probably unbeknownst to the Belgian Sinologist a short time after he grappled with officialdom the Yang family in Lintong County were to uncover the first remnant of the subterranean Qin army. That timeliest of discoveries, closely presaging as it did the national Reform and Opening-up programme, served as the main fillip for the emerging heritage industry of Shaanxi, now worth an estimated 25billion yuan per annum.
至少从二十世纪七十年代起，外国人就觉得“兵马俑”比长城更值得一看。而那些和秦始皇有联系的其它丰功伟绩每年吸引着成千上万的游客在节假日和平时来西安观光和旅游。 秦俑那挽起的发髻，动人的眼神让人感知到了全球文明的权威价值，以致于有很多人觉得这个城市本身不过是个惟有“小马”炫耀的地方，或者更过分的说，就是个实实在在的荒原。这倒也是，曾经一度长安的辉煌被淹没在了现代的功利外表下，这儿的许多寺庙、圣殿和庵院都没有得到妥善的利用。已故的西门·利思是“文化大革命”中仅有的被允许到过西安的几个外国人之一，他描述过1972年在“教条和难说话”的政府导游支配下，他在西安只看到了两个旅游点，一个是大雁塔，另一个是陕西省历史博物馆（当时还在“碑林”里面）。摆脱看管自己乱转时，他发现：
“城隍庙”里的雕塑都不见了，大门口的标志性建筑，宏伟的五座木雕拱门也消失了。神殿被改成了百货店。“西五台”在最近被红卫兵一把火给烧了，没有人敢告诉他“乌龙寺”和“八仙庵”里留下的有什么。
——引自西门·利思著《中国的影子》第70-74页
也许这位比利时汉学家不知道，就在他与当地的官僚打过交道后不久，临潼县一家姓杨的人首次发现了地下的“秦俑”残骸。这一恰逢其时的发现，和即将到来的改革与开放一样，成了陕西脱颖而出的主要遗产产业，现在每年的收入估计超过了2500 亿元。
As somebody who relocated to Xi'an in the summer of 2008 I have witnessed only the fruition of the large-scale investment in the area. When I arrived the sky was not quite so rich a shade of azure in the months of May and June, though I missed out on the very worst side effects of rapid industrialization. Bill Holm, a Minnesota native who taught for a spell at Jiaotong University in the 1980s dubbed it "the ancient Tang capital grown into a grimy cement industrial city," and observed that so omnipresent was the dust and coal grit that when he hung his freshly-laundered shirts outside to dry within a few hours they would be transformed from pure white to grey (Holm, An Alphabet of China Essays: Coming Home Crazy, pp. 19 and 104). The bushes over which the garments were hung would also stand out as being the only clean ones in the row. Holm's less than snug experience of life in Xi'an seems such a far cry from the twenty-first century metropolis with its shiny jutting high-rises and multi-tower hotel complexes sporting piercings as brazenly as Henry Moore statues. The British author Colin Thubron, who breezed through Xi'an circa 1986, had the good fortune to revisit the city when researching his tome on the Silk Road. He sums up the sea change he witnessed thus:-
作为一个在2008年夏天来到西安的人，我看到的是这个地方大规模投资的丰硕成果。我刚到的时候，虽然错过了快速工业化带来的恶果，但五六月份的天空还不是多么湛蓝。在二十世纪八十年代，美国已故明尼苏达作家比尔·霍姆（Bill Holm）曾在西安交通大学做过一段时间的外教。他写到：“这座古代的唐朝首都化作了一个脏兮兮的水泥工业城”。他观察到尘土和煤灰无处不在，当他把刚洗好的衬衫挂到户外晾干时，不到几个小时，衣服就从白的变成了灰的。衣服下面的树丛反而显得成了惟一干净的东西。比尔·霍姆在西安不如意的经历，在二十一世纪的这个大都市里， 明亮的高楼大厦林立，高层宾馆比比皆是，像亨利·莫尔的雕塑一样让人震撼（亨利·斯宾赛·摩尔 Henry Spencer Moore，1898年7月30日－1986年8 月31日)，是英国雕塑家。以其大型铸铜雕塑和大理石雕塑而闻名——译者注）。英国作家科林·休布伦（Colin Thubron,）在为其大作《丝绸之路》收集素材时，曾重访这个城市。他大约在1986年到过这里，他对当地巨大的变化描述如下：
Eighteen years before, I trudged through a run-down provincial capital. It's somber ramparts, survivors of the Cultural Revolution, had enclosed little but concrete blocks and half-empty state emporia. There is a stench of coal dust in my memory, and autumnal mud. Rusting trucks and a river of bicycles had meandered the ghostly grid of ancient streets. The colours along the sidewalks were regulation brown, grey, and serge blue. It seemed a place of inert history, and fatal patience.
But now it had shattered into life. It had not frozen to grandeur like Beijing, but transformed into a hectic procession of overcrowded shopping malls, restaurants, and high-tech industrial suburbs.
(Thubron, The Silk Road, p. 7).
十八年前，我曾艰难的到访过一个衰败的省会，那里忧郁的城墙，“文化大革命”后幸存下来的一切，除了混凝土砖和半空的国营商店，几乎啥都没有。我的记忆里只有发臭的煤灰，秋天的烂泥。幽灵般四通八达的古老街道上跑的是锈蚀斑斑的卡车，溪流一样的自行车到处乱窜。沿着人行道的色彩通常是褐色、灰色和哔叽蓝。这里的历史仿佛很呆滞，有致命的耐性。
然而现在这里焕发出了生命的光彩。不像北京那样凝结在了其宏伟中，而是活力四射，到处都是挤满了人的大商场和饭店，城郊都是高新产业开发区。
——引自科林·休布伦著《丝绸之路》第7页
Urbanization may have brought with it something of a loss of distinctiveness as far as the "high street" is concerned, long-established family-run retailers bowing to pressure from chain stores and the tinkers and hawkers who once plied their trade all over becoming a dying species. What redeems Xi'an in my mind, and what the casual observer like Thubron might be inclined not to grasp, is its rootedness within the Guanzhong Plain. Almost uniquely for any inland province of Mainland China, Shaanxi has a single urban centre with a population greater than one million souls, making city life hard to extricate from the countryside.
从商业街的角度讲，城市化可能带来特色的丧失，祖传的百年老店挡不住连锁店的压力，以前从事各行各业的小匠人和小商贩正在逐渐消失。在我心里休布伦那样的走马观花者没有注意到的是，西安的救赎在于扎根关中平原。在中国大陆的所有省份里，陕西几乎是独一无二的，拥有百万人口以上的城市只有一个，故人们很难摆脱乡村生活的影子。
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