Unit 6 Being There 课文翻译

Unit 6

Being There

Anatole Broyard

1. Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men a centrifugal tendency. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

2. Only while traveling can we appreciate age. At home, for Americans at least, everything must be young, new, but when we go abroad we are interested only in the old. We want to see what has been saved, defended against time.

3. When we travel, we put aside our defenses, our anxiety, and invite regression. We go backward instead of forward. We cultivate our hysteria.

4. It is our best selves that travel, just as we dress in our best clothes. Only our passport reminds us how ordinary we actually are. We go abroad to meet our foreign persona, that thrilling stranger born on the plane. We’re going to see in Europe everything we have eliminated or edited out of our own culture in the name of convenience: religion, royalty, picturesqueness, otherness — and passion. We cling to the belief that other peoples are more passionate than we are.

5. There’s an impostor in each of us — why else would we put on dark glasses and try to speak and look like the natives of another place? At home, we impersonate ourselves; when we’re abroad, we can try to be what we’ve always wanted to be. In spite of all the recent talk about roots, many of us are tired of our roots, which may be shallow anyway, and so we travel in search of rootlessness.

6. Traveling began when men grew curious. The influence of the church, the traditional pattern of life, the lack of money and leisure had all restrained curiosity until the seventeenth century, when under pressure of scientific discoveries, the physical world began to gape open. It was then that people began to travel in search of the profane.

7. Travel arrived together with sophistication, with the ability to see through or beyond one’s own culture, with the modern faculty of boredom. Something o f the Crusades survives in the modern traveler — only this is a personal crusade, an impulse to go off and fight certain obscure battles of his own spirit.

8. Of course, one of the most common reasons for traveling is simply to get away. Freud said that we travel to escape father and the family, and we might add the familiar. There is a recurrent desire to drop our lives, to simply walk out of them.

9. When we travel, we are on vacation —vacant, waiting to be filled. The frenzied shopping of some travelers is an attempt to buy a new life. To get away to a strange place produces a luxurious feeling of disengagement, of irresponsible free association. One is an onlooker, impregnable.

10. We travel in summer, when life comes out of doors, and so we see only summery people, nothing of their sad falls, their long, dark winters and cruel springs. The places we visit are gold-plated by the sun. The flowers and trees are like bouquets thrown to history.

11. And language — what a pleasure to leave our own language, with its clichés stuck in our teeth. How much better things sound in another tongue! It’s like having our ears cleaned out. So long as we don’t understand it too well, every other language is poetry.

12. Because we travel for so many reasons —some of them contradictory —travel writing is like a suitcase into which the writer tries to cram everything. At its most interesting, it’s a continual tasting, the expression of a nostalgia for the particular. It’s a childish game of playing countries, as we used to play house.

13. Travel writing describes a tragic arc: it begins with a rising of the spirit and ends in a dying fall. The earliest travelers went to see marvels, to admire the wonderful diversity of the world — but the latest travelers are like visitors sitting at the bedside of dying cultures. Early travelers fell in love at first sight with foreign places — but now we know only love at last sight, a kiss before dying, a breathing in of the last gasp. In some ancient societies, it used to be the c ustom for the son to inhale his father’s last breath, which contained his departing soul, and today’s travelers do something like this, too.

14. Travel writing has become a quintessentially modern thing, the present regretting the past. We travel like insurance appraisers, assessing the damage. Militantly opposed to any kind of ethnic distinctions at home, we adore ethnicity abroad. Ironically, Americans need Europe more than Europeans do. To Parisians, for example, Paris is a place to live; for Americans, it’s a place to dream.

15. “I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1946. He saw the world turning into a “monoculture,” the sense of place giving way to

placelessness. What Waugh didn’t foresee was that travel books would change as novels and poetry have, that every slippage of culture would provoke its peculiar literature. He underestimated the variousness of our reasons for traveling.

16. There have always been travelers who went to look for the worst, to find rationalizations for their anxiety or despair, to cover their disillusionment with labels, as steamer trunks used to be covered with them. Why else would Paul Theroux go to South America, which he so obviously detested? Shiva Naipaul’s worst fears were confirmed in Africa, just as his brother’s were in Asia. Graham Greene spent four months traveling in the Liberian jungle as a private penance.

17. Even ruins have changed. Instead of the classical ruins of antiquity, we now have places that are merely “ruined.” And there are travelers who take a positive delight in them, who love awfulness for its own sake. For them, awfulness is the contemporary equivalent of the exotic. It’s a negative sublime, a swoon or ecstasy of spoliation.

18. As other countries offer fewer exotic phenomena, the travel writer is forced to find the exotic in himself —and the picturesque as well. The centrifugal tendency turns centripetal, and modern travel books may be about the absence of things just as the classic books are about their presence. In Journey to Kars, Philip Glazebrook seems to have visited several unappealing villages in Turkey simply for the irony of being there. (Irony is the contemporary traveler’s drip-dry shirt.) One of the things a severely sophisticated traveler like Glazebrook seeks is a place where he himself can stand out in absolute relief.

19. Perhaps in the future we shall have to travel like James Holman, who, after being invalided out of the British navy because he had gone blind, set out in 1819 to see the world. Traveling mostly alone, speaking no foreign languages, using only public transport, Holman got as far as Siberia and returned home to publish in several thick volumes all that he had experienced. He rarely felt, he said, that he had missed anything through being blind. (At one point, he met a deaf man and they traveled together.)

20. Since he could not see, people often invited Holman to squeeze things as a way of perceiving them —and this is what today’s traveler has to do. He has to squee ze the places he visits, until they yield something, anything.

1. 旅行好比私通：人总受到背叛自己国家的诱惑。拥有想象力，必定意味着对自己生活的地方不再满意。男人都有一种离心倾向，我们渴望旅行，恰似那些寻欢的情人。

2. 也只有在旅行之时，我们才赞赏古旧之物。在国内——至少对美国人而言，所有东西都必须得是新近的。但是我们走出国门的时候，却只对古老的东西感兴趣，因为我们想看看那些历经时间侵袭而保存下来的遗迹。

3. 我们旅行的时候，会放下戒备和忧虑，渴望回归过去；我们是向后倒退而非向前迈进；我们培养着自己的歇斯底里。

4. 我们旅行的时候会呈现出自己最好的一面，正如我们穿上自己最漂亮的衣服出行一般，只有我们的护照才会提醒我们，实际上自己是多么平淡无奇！我们出国去认识我们那个陌生的自己，那个诞生在飞机上且令人激动的陌生人。我们去欧洲观赏那些借便利之名已经从我们的文化中废掉或剔除的一切：宗教、皇室、古雅、差异以及激情。我们深信其他国家的人民比我们更加热情奔放。

5. 我们每个人都在伪装——不然缘何我们会戴上墨镜并在谈吐举止中尽力模仿另一个地方的本土居民呢？在家里，我们才做回自己；出国后，我们则尽力成为自己始终想做的人。尽管最近大家都在谈论有关根的话题，但我们中的许多人都厌倦了自己的根，而这根本身也可能入土很浅，于是我们四处旅行，寻找无根的感觉。

6. 人变得好奇起来，旅行也就开始了。教会的影响力、传统的生活方式、缺乏钱财、难得闲暇, 都制约了人们的好奇心。直到17世纪，在科学发现的促进之下，物质世界的大门才被撬开。也只有那时，人们才开始旅行，寻求世俗的快慰。

7. 旅行可增长见识，可洞悉本国或异域的文化，可造就现代人的厌倦感。类似十字军东征的元素在现代旅行者身上依然存在，只不过他是个人出征，这是驱使他远离家乡，进行说不清道不明的精神征战的一种冲动。

8. 当然，旅行最普通的原因就是为了远离家乡。弗洛伊德说我们旅行是为了逃离父亲和家庭，而我们也可以补充说是为了逃离我们熟悉的一切。人们经常会有放弃生活的念头，走出自己的生活。

9. 旅行之时，我们是在度假休闲——即生活空闲有待填补。有些游客疯狂购物，那是他们试图在购买新的生活。身在异乡的人会有种解脱的奢华享受，他可以自由交往，无需承担任何责任。个人顿时成了看客，永远立于不败之地的看客。

10. 我们在户外生机盎然的夏日出行，因此我们仅能看到人们夏日的模样，而难见他们令人悲伤的秋天、黑暗漫长的冬天以及残酷的春天。我们所到之处都镀上了金色的阳光，花朵和

树木则好比抛向历史的花束。

11. 还有语言——撇开自己那满口陈词滥调的语言是多么令人愉快！用另一种语言去交谈又是多么动听！仿佛我们的耳朵经清洗过一般。只要我们不太理解其意，任何外语都是诗歌。

12. 正因为旅行的缘由很多——有些还自相矛盾——所以游记就好比行李箱，作家努力将所有东西都塞入其中。游记最有趣的部分是一个逐渐品味的过程，它表达了对某种特殊事物的怀旧情感。旅行好比在异国他乡玩的童真游戏，犹如我们儿时玩过家家一样。

13. 游记所描绘的是悲剧的弧线：它开场时兴高采烈，落幕时心情低落。最早的游客。出国看奇观，去赞赏世界的丰富多彩——而当下的游客好比是坐在垂死文化床边的访客；早期的游客对陌生之地一见钟情——而现在我们只有在最后一眼、死前最后一吻、最后一息之际才懂得爱。在古代有些社会中，儿子要吸入父亲去世前最后一口气，其中含有他父亲将要离体的魂魄，如今的游客也做着类似的事情。

14. 游记创作现已成为真正的现代事物，充满了当前对过去的惋惜。我们旅行时像保险评估员，评估着每处的损失。在国内我们强硬反对任何类型的种族差异，而在国外我们却崇拜这种差异。具有讽刺意味的是，美国人比欧洲人更需要欧洲。譬如对巴黎人而言，巴黎是生活的地方，但对美国人而言，那里是梦想的地方。

15. “我不期待在不久的将来看到很多游记，”伊夫林·沃1946年写道。他看到世界正朝“单一文化”方向发展，不同的地域感正在滑向无感状态。但沃没能预见的是，游记也会像小说和诗歌那样发生变化，而且文化的任何滑移都会产生独特的文学。他低估了我们旅行动机的多样性。

16. 也总有些游客外出旅行是为了自讨苦头，为他们的焦虑与绝望寻找合理的解释，为他们梦想的幻灭贴上标签，恰如以前蒸汽船的行李箱上贴满标签一样。要不为何保罗·索鲁要去他显然很厌恶的南美旅行？施瓦·奈保尔最怕的噩梦在非洲得到了证实，正如他弟弟的噩梦在亚洲得到证实一样。格雷厄姆·格林则为了独自忏悔而在利比里亚丛林游荡了四个月。

17. 甚至连废墟也变了。古典的废墟已荡然无存，现在很多地方纯粹已被“毁坏”。对此也有游客乐不可支，他们为破败而喜欢破败。对他们而言，破败就是当代异域风情的代名词。这是一种极端负面的情绪，一种见毁心喜的病态。

18. 当国外可寻的异域风情越来越少的时候，游记作家就被迫从自身寻找异域特色——以及优美风景——离心倾向由此变为向心运动。现代游记会记录某些东西的缺失，正如经典著作会讲述它们的存在一样。在《卡尔斯之行》中，具有讽刺意味的是，菲利普·格雷兹布鲁克游访了几个毫无特色的土耳其村庄，似乎仅仅是为了去一下那些地方。（讽刺似乎已经成为了当代游客随洗随干的汗衫。）像格雷兹布鲁克那样极具见识的游客所要追求的东西之一

就是一个可以突显他自身的地方。

19. 或许我们将来得像詹姆士·霍尔曼那样旅行。他由于失明从英国海军病退以后，于1819年开始环游世界。虽然他基本上是单独旅行，也不会讲外语，且只乘公共交通，但他旅行的脚步却远至西伯利亚。返回家乡之后，他出版了几部厚厚的著作，描述他的所见所闻。他说他虽然失明了，但却很少觉得错过什么东西。（他途中曾经遇到过一位聋子，两人还结伴而行。）

20. 由于失明，人们常常会请霍尔曼挤捏东西以感知它们——这也正是现今游客必须做的事情。他必须挤挤他到访的地方，以便能挤出点东西，任何东西都行。