Call him Ishmael

叫他以实玛利

Born 200 years ago, Herman Melville was globalisation’s first great bard

赫尔曼•梅尔维尔出生于200年前，是全球化的第一位伟大诗人

词汇

Bard/  吟游诗人

The sailors hunting the White Whale with Captain Ahab are avatars of modernity

与亚哈船长一起猎杀白鲸的水手们是现代社会的化身

词汇

Avatar/（某种思想或品质）化身

Jul 20th 2019 

STRIKING MATCHES on their rope-roughened palms, the burly whalers who chase Moby Dick seem unlikely avatars for modernity. But in an important, even prophetic way, that is what they are. The crew of the Pequod are a wondrous deputation “from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth”. Sailors of at least 13 nationalities are “federated along one keel” with Captain Ahab: Chinese and Tahitian, Icelandic and Portuguese. Their creator, Herman Melville—who was born 200 years ago, on August 1st 1819—was the first great writer of the age of globalisation. 

在绳索般粗糙的掌心上划擦着火柴，魁梧的捕鲸者追逐着“莫比·迪克”；这幅画面似乎看不出现代社会的影子。但从一个重要的，或者说的预言性的角度看，这就是现代社会人们的缩影。"裴廓德号"上的船员是一个了不起的代表团，"来自海洋的各个岛屿，来自地球的各个角落"。至少有13个国家的水手与亚哈船长“同乘一条船”:中国人、塔希提人、冰岛人和葡萄牙人。作品的创造者赫尔曼·梅尔维尔(Herman melville)生于200年前的1819年8月1日，是全球化时代的第一位伟大作家。

词汇

Moby Dick/白鲸记（Moby Dick）是世上伟大的小说之一。全书的焦点集中于南太平洋一条名叫莫比·迪克的白鲸，裴庞德号的船长亚哈伯如何对它有不共戴天的仇恨

Burly/壮硕魁梧粗壮的

Prophetic/  预言的，预示的；先知的

Wondrous/奇妙的；令人惊奇的；非常的

Deputation/代表团，代表

Keel/（船的）龙骨；平底船

The 19th century witnessed an unprecedented international circulation of people, goods and ideas. Sailors were at the forefront of this exchange, crossing and re-crossing oceans in a “devious zig-zag world-circle”, as Melville put it, constantly exposed to exotic lands and strange customs. A shortage of manpower and the dangers of the sea meant captains often cared little who shipped with them, provided they were able mariners. This was a cosmopolitanism of necessity rather than ideology, a grassroots phenomenon largely overlooked by contemporary authors. 

19世纪见证了前所未有的人员、商品和思想的国际流通。水手们处于这种交流的最前沿，在一个“曲折的之字形世界圈”中，一次又一次地穿越海洋，正如梅尔维尔所说，他们不断地接触到异国的土地和奇怪的风俗习惯。人力的短缺和海上的危险意味着船长们往往不关心与他们一起出海的人，只要他们是能干的水手。这是一种必然的世界主义，而非意识形态，一种被当代作家普遍忽视的草根现象。

词汇

Devious/偏僻的；弯曲的；不光明正大的

zig-zag /锯齿状的

exotic/异国的；外来的

mariner/水手；船员

cosmopolitanism/世界主义；世界大同主义

grassroots/基层的；草根的【不带s就是单独的“草根”这一名词】

But not by Melville. As a Jack-Tar of 19, he sailed the New York-to-Liverpool circuit in 1839, an experience he recalled ten years later in his novel “Redburn”. He saw the awful conditions endured by Irish immigrants below decks and the hostility they encountered upon arrival in America. “If they can get here,” Melville thought, “they have God’s right to come.” The docking of an Indian vessel in Liverpool was an opportunity to swap stories with a Lascar sailor. “It is a God-send to fall in with a fellow like this,” Melville later wrote. “His experiences are like a man from the moon—wholly strange, a new revelation.”

但梅尔维尔没有。19岁时，他就开始了从纽约到利物浦的海上巡回，10年后，他在自己的小说《雷伯恩》中回忆了这段经历。他看到了爱尔兰移民在甲板下忍受的恶劣条件，以及他们抵达美国时所遭遇的敌意。“如果他们能到这儿来，”梅尔维尔想，“他们就有上帝来的权利。“一支印度船只在利物浦停靠，这是与印度水手交流故事的好机会。梅尔维尔后来写道:“能遇到这样一个家伙，真是天赐良机。”“他的经历就像一个来自月球的人——完全陌生，一个全新的视界。”

词汇

Deck/甲板；行李仓；露天平台

Lascar/印度水手（在欧洲船上工作）

He took his education on the ground—and on the water—having been withdrawn from formal schooling at 12 on the death of his bankrupt father. In January 1841 he shipped from New Bedford as a whaler; over the next four years he was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for taking part in a mutiny and hitched across the Pacific. He worked as a farmhand and as a pin-setter in a Hawaiian bowling alley. This journey, too, became material for his stories.

他的父亲破产后，12岁时就辍学了；他开始了他在陆上和海上的学习。1841年1月，他从新贝德福德出海当成为一名捕鲸人。在接下来的四年里，他因为参与了一场叛变而被短暂地囚禁在塔希提岛，并搭顺风车横跨太平洋。他在夏威夷的保龄球馆当过农场工人和钉针工。这段旅程也成了他写故事的素材。

词汇

Hitch/搭便车

In them, rigid land-based axioms give way to social and moral fluidity. In the “watery part of the world”, categories of class, nation and race dissolve; the company includes “renegades, and castaways, and cannibals”. In “Moby Dick”, the masterpiece Melville published in 1851, Queequeg, an expert harpooner (and reputed man-eater) from the South Seas, earns more than Ishmael, the inexperienced white narrator. In his early book “Omoo” (1847), a workhouse foundling becomes a Pacific warlord. The late novella “Billy Budd” mentions African-Americans fighting under the British flag at the Battle of Trafalgar. 

其中，僵硬的基于土地的公理让位于社会和道德的流动性。在“世界的水乡”，阶级、民族和种族的类别逐渐消失;这家公司包括“叛徒、漂流者和食人族”。在梅尔维尔1851年出版的杰作《白鲸记》中，来自南海的鱼叉手魁魁格(同时也是有名的食人者)赚的钱比没有经验的白人解说者以实玛利还多。在他早期的著作《欧穆》（Omoo）(1847)中，一个济贫院的弃儿成为了太平洋的军阀。晚期的中篇小说《比利·巴德》(Billy Budd)提到，在特拉法加战役(Battle of Trafalgar)中，非裔美国人在英国国旗下作战。

词汇

Axiom/公理；格言

Renegade/叛徒；变节者

Castaway/被抛弃的人；坐船遇难者；漂流者

Cannibal/食人者

Harpooner/ 鱼叉手

Warlord/军阀

Novella/中篇小说

Or, The Whale

或者,鲸鱼

Travel led Melville to question the concepts of “savagery” and “civilisation”. “I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth,” said his more parochial contemporary, Charles Dickens. For his part, Melville jumped ship at Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas Islands, and spent a month with a tribe untouched by Western influence. That led to the radical defence of cannibalism in “Typee” (1846), his first book, as a form of justice no more barbaric than Britain’s erstwhile habit of displaying hung, drawn and quartered bodies.

旅行使梅尔维尔对“野蛮”和“文明”的概念提出了质疑。“我称野蛮人是居于地球表面，非常渴望得到教化的一群物种，”与他同时代的、更狭隘的查尔斯•狄更斯(Charles Dickens)说。而梅尔维尔则在马克萨斯群岛的努库希瓦(Nuku Hiva)下船，与一个未受西方影响的部落生活了一个月。在他的第一本书《泰比》(Typee, 1846)中，这导致了对同类相食行为的激进辩护，认为这是一种正义的形式，并不比英国人过去习惯的展示被绞死、拖出和切成四等分的尸体更野蛮。

词汇

Savage/未开化的人

Parochial/狭隘的

Since everyone saw the world through the prism of their own culture, Melville believed, no society could claim moral superiority over another. In “White-Jacket” (1850), a Polynesian aboard an American frigate bound for New England has never before ventured beyond his home. “His tastes were our abominations: ours his,” the narrator observes. “Our creed he rejected: his we.” The upshot is that “neither was wrong, but both right.” In lectures the author gave about his experiences, he advocated travel as a way to dispel bigotry. The racist, he said, “finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of colour…And learns to give up his foolish prejudice.”

梅尔维尔认为，由于每个人都是通过自己文化的棱镜来看待这个世界的，因此没有哪个社会能够宣称自己比另一个社会具有道德上的优越性。在《白夹克》(1850)中，一名波利尼西亚人登上一艘开往新英格兰的美国护卫舰，此前从未出过家门。“他的品味是我们所厌恶的:我们的品味是他他所厌恶的，”叙述者说。他拒绝了我们的信条:我们也是如此。结果是“两种说法都不对，但也都是合理的。”在作者讲述自己经历的讲座中，他提倡旅行是消除偏见的一种方式。他说，这位种族主义者“发现了数亿不同肤色的人……并学会了放弃自己愚蠢的偏见。”

词汇

Abomination/厌恶；憎恨；令人厌恶的事物

Upshot/结果，结局；要点

Bigotry/偏执；顽固；盲从

If differences are respected in Melville’s globalised world, commonalities emerge, too. Sailors learn each other’s languages and develop hybrid dialects. In moments of leisure, the crew of the Pequod lie in the forecastle swapping tales of women and wandering, singing shanties and dancing jigs. Prejudice and nationalism are too ingrained to vanish entirely; but, through mutual dependence on the high seas, interracial bonds are forged. “You sink your clan; down goes your nation; you speak a world’s language, jovially jabbering in the Lingua-Franca of the forecastle.”

如果在梅尔维尔全球化的世界中尊重差异，那么共同点也会出现。水手们学习彼此的语言，并发展混合方言。闲暇时，"裴廓德号"的船员们就躺在水手舱里，讲着女人的故事，唱着歌，跳着舞，四处游荡。偏见和民族主义根深蒂固，无法完全消除;但是，通过对公海的相互依赖，建立了不同种族之间的联系。“你毁了你的部落;你们的民族灭亡了;你说的是一种世界语言，在水手舱里愉快地用通用语叽叽喳喳地说个不停。”

词汇

hybrid dialect/混合方言

After “Moby Dick”, a succession of Melville’s novels failed. Many contemporaries were surprised to learn he had died in 1891: they assumed he was dead already. But since its rediscovery in the early 20th century, the tale of Ahab’s hubristic vendetta against the whale has become an all-purpose political fable. In the 1950s C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian writer, described the book as “the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.” It has been deployed to decry the Vietnam war, George W. Bush’s crusade against the “axis of evil”, Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the West, Vladimir Putin’s hatred of NATO, Donald Trump’s pursuit of a border wall and Theresa May’s quest for a Brexit withdrawal agreement. 

在《白鲸记》之后，梅尔维尔的一系列小说都以失败告终。许多同时代的人得知他已于1891年去世时都很惊讶:他们以为他已经死了。但自从20世纪初它被重新发现以来，亚哈对鲸鱼的傲慢的仇杀已经成为一个通用的政治寓言。20世纪50年代，特立尼达作家C.L.R.詹姆斯(C.L.R. James)把这本书描述为“阿道夫·希特勒(Adolf Hitler)最后日子的传记”。它被用来谴责越南战争、乔治·w·布什(George W. Bush)对“邪恶轴心”(axis of evil)的讨伐、奥萨马·本·拉登(Osama bin Laden)对西方的圣战、弗拉基米尔·普京(Vladimir Putin)对北约(NATO)的仇恨、唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)对边境墙的追求，以及特蕾莎·梅(Theresa May)寻求英国退欧协议。

词汇

Hubristic/傲慢的

Vendetta/（尤指族间或血亲间的）仇杀；深仇

Crusade/改革运动；十字军东侵

Jihad/（个人基于宗教或道德原因的）内心挣扎，心灵斗争

Today the white whale spouts across the globe. In Arabic the famous first line is “Call me Isma’il”; in Japanese it is “Call me Ishumeeru”. Melville’s leviathan has become a mirror for preoccupations everywhere. Iranian scholars debate the book’s Zoroastrian and Islamic elements; Melville, some argue, believed fate trumped morality as the ancient Sasanians did. During the Cultural Revolution Chinese pedagogues claimed Melville was a rare anti-capitalist American author. Germans note the influence of Goethe; Japanese academics think Ahab’s harpooner, the mysterious Fedallah, is one of their own. On the Antarctic Peninsula, meanwhile, huddle Mount Ahab, Tashtego Point and a glacier named Pequod. Two centuries after his birth, Melville continues to federate the world along one keel. 

今天，白鲸向全球喷水。在阿拉伯语中，著名的第一句话是“叫我Isma’il”;在日语中，它是“叫我Ishumeeru”。梅尔维尔笔下的海中巨兽已成为世界各地人们关注的一面镜子。伊朗学者争论这本书的琐罗亚斯德教和伊斯兰元素;一些人认为，梅尔维尔相信命运战胜了道德，就像古代萨珊人一样。在————期间，中国的教育学家声称梅尔维尔是一个罕见的————的美国作家。德国人注意到了歌德的影响;日本学者认为，亚哈的鱼叉手神秘的费达拉是他们自己的。与此同时，在南极半岛上，亚哈山、塔斯蒂哥角和一个名叫裴廓德的冰川挤在一起。在他出生两个世纪后，梅尔维尔继续乘着平底船整合着世界。

词汇

Leviathan/海中怪兽；庞然大物；巨轮

Pedagogues/教师，教员