The art of Giorgio Morandi
大师乔治·莫兰迪的杰作
Games of perception
观察游戏
An artist of still lifes, including his own
一生未出远门的静物画艺术大师
Jan 19th 2013|From the print edition
Still yet vital
看起来仍然很有生气
A SINGLE twisted sea shell; a tall vase tightly crammed with roses; a bunch of weeds: each was the subject of a still life by Giorgio Morandi, an Italian artist who died in 1964, aged 73. He was also drawn to bleached-out houses in scraggly landscapes and, occasionally, to portraiture. Yet he is known almost exclusively for his luminous, pale paintings of bottles, bowls and jugs. He transformed these seemingly banal, utilitarian objects into works of art.
一只形状扭曲的海贝,一个紧紧插满玫瑰的高脚花瓶,一束花花草草,乔治·布兰迪(意大利艺术家,死于1964年,73岁)的每一个静物画都是此类主题。他还画一些风景画,画中高低起伏的山上,房子像漂白过似的,偶尔他还画些人物肖像画,但是他最为人所知的是他那明亮而又灰白的瓶瓶罐罐的静物画。他把这些生活中很平常实用的东西变成了艺术。
Morandi created more than a thousand paintings. He also drew and learned how to etch, which he then taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, his hometown.
of Poetry”, an exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London. The show is timed to celebrate the 15th anniversary of this intimate museum.
莫兰迪创作了一千多张画,他还画版画,同时还在博洛尼亚(他的家乡)波伦亚艺术学院教授版画。他的75幅版画(占他创作的版画总量的一半以上)在位于伦敦的现代意大利艺术Estorick展览作为中心展出。这次展览同时庆祝这座宁静怡人的博物馆建馆15周年。
The etchings fill two spacious ground-floor galleries. A cosy room upstairs is hung with ten of Morandi’s delicate drawings, all from the Estorick’s collection. White-washed walls and stripped pine floors provide the calm setting for this lovely and instructive show.
他的版画布满了底层两个画廊,楼上一个温暖舒适的房间里悬挂着十幅莫兰迪的精致的绘画,这十幅画全来自Estorick展馆。白色的墙壁和条纹相间的松木地板为这次美好而又给人启发的展览提供了一个宁静的环境。
The display is chronological. The first work is a 1912 view over a bridge in Bologna;
a mass of darkly inked straight lines. Within a decade Morandi became a master of the medium, although not every etching is a masterpiece. The only two portraits in the show, from 1925-26, are tight, even crude. The subjects, a man and woman, manage to be less animated than the shells and flowers of his still lifes.
这次展览是按照作品年代顺序布置的。第一件作品是1912年博洛尼亚的一座桥的总体概貌,画中使用了大量的黑色墨水线条。在1912年的十年里莫兰迪从一个普通的画家蜕变成一个大师,尽管他的每一幅版图画并不都是杰作。此次展览的唯一的两幅肖像画(创作于1925-26年),线条紧凑,甚至有些粗糙,此类题材静物作品中,相对于人物来说,他让那些贝壳和花草显得更有生气。
The many images of bottles and jugs, in rows or huddled in groups, seem like a world unto themselves. Created between 1915 and 1961, they are poetic, amusing and occasionally ominous. “Still Life of Vases on a Table”from 1931 is particularly arresting. At first it looks like a single line of vessels separated by unetched, white spaces. Another look reveals that these are not gaps but another row of vessels. Pleasure replaces perplexity as the viewer joins Morandi in a game of perceptual hide and seek. The exhibition concludes with four watercolours; two created in the last years of his life. Each one has only a few swift, bright strokes of colour, like Technicolour telegrams. But their message is not “less is more”. It is “less is everything”.
这些瓶子,罐子的静物画成排地放在一起就像一个世界。这些创作于1915~1916之间的画,看起来很有诗意,有趣,有的还预示着不祥之兆。“桌子上的花瓶”(创作于1931年)尤其引人注目,初眼看去只有那一排花瓶,被未雕刻的空白
视觉的“捉迷藏”的游戏中,内心的疑惑逐渐转为发现秘密时的欢喜。展览最后以四幅水彩画作为结束,其中两幅是莫兰迪生命的最后几年里创作的,每一幅水彩画都是少量的一笔迅速带过的鲜艳色彩,就像色彩艳丽的电报一样。这些画所给人们的启示不是“少就是多”,而是“简单就可表达一切”。
Morandi’s spare, dreamlike works helped reinforce the myth that the artist was something of a Zen monk, living at a remove from worldly demands and temptations. Certain facts of his life would seem to support this view. From the age of 19 until his death, he lived in the same Bologna flat, often with his three sisters. He did not go abroad until he was in his 60s, and then not far. He and his friends encouraged the belief that the artist shunned society, abhorred fame and had nothing to do with politics. Like some of Morandi’s etchings, this was a game; one that had the benefit of boosting sales.
莫兰迪简约,梦幻般的艺术作品似乎印证了这种观念:这位艺术家就像佛教禅师一样,远离尘世的欲望和诱惑。他的那些确凿的生活事实也表明了这一点:从19岁直到他去世,他一直博洛尼亚的同一所公寓里,还经常和他的三个姐妹住在一起。直到60岁时他才第一次出国,而且走的还不远。他和他的朋友坚守的一条信仰就是:艺术家应该远离社会,憎恶名誉,还有不要和政治扯上关系。就像莫兰迪的其他版画一样,这就像一个游戏,人人都可以通过提高价格来获利。
Posthumous accounts of his life based on previously unknown material exploded this myth. Morandi—a handsome if shy man with a winning smile, a quick wit and a towering stature—was formidably well connected with Italy’s cultural leaders before, during and after the fascist decades. He first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1928, and Mussolini was a proud owner of several of his etchings. Later, as ever more intellectuals and the artsy rich wanted his work, from Federico Fellini to Sophia Loren, Morandi would pick and choose who could own one and which work they could have. 基于他生前一些不为人所知的资料,关于莫兰迪生前的描述揭开了他神秘的面纱。莫兰迪,这位青年才俊——纵然害羞的他带着一丝迷人的微笑,一副灵活的头脑,崇高的威望,在法西斯统治的先后数十年里,和意大利的文化先驱们联系十分紧密。1928年他首次在威尼斯双年展上展览他的作品,墨索里尼也以拥有他的一些版画而自豪。后来,越来越多的知识分子和附庸风雅的富人向他求取作品,比如费德里科·费里尼,索菲亚·罗兰。莫兰迪会挑选一些有资格拥有他的作品的人,还挑选这些人可以拥有他的哪些作品。
Giorgio Morandi was not a simple soul and he did not make simple art. He altered the colours of bottles, bowls and vases before arranging his still lifes. He played with shadows, scale and light. In a 1955 radio interview he explained: “I want to communicate those images and feelings that the natural world awakens in us.” This he achieved, often brilliantly. Doubts may remain about the facts of his life, but these etchings, like his paintings, are proof of his artistic success.
乔治·莫兰迪并不是只拥有一颗简单的内心,他也不是在创作简单艺术,他在构思静物画之前变换着瓶罐的色彩,他在与光影,比例共舞。1955年在一次电波采访中他说道:“我想和那些唤醒我们的大自然的光影、知觉交流。”他做到了,而且做得十分成功。可能关于他的生前生活经历仍有疑惑,就像他的许多画一样,这些版画都是他艺术辉煌的印证。
Traditional societies 传统社会
No beating about the bush 不绕弯子
America’s best-known geographer shows what there is to learn from early man
美国最为知名的地理学家认为我们应该向早期人类学习
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
《昨日世界:传统社会有何借鉴之处?》
1 JARED DIAMOND has made a name for himself explaining why some societies do well and others do not. In “Guns, Germs and Steel”, his 1997 bestseller, he brushed aside the arrogant view that ascribed Europe’s dominance to human biology, stressing instead the continent’s environmental advantages, notably its native wheat and barley and its easily domesticated animals. He followed this up eight years later with “Collapse”, another exhaustive study, this time about how certain societies caused
civilisation-scale books about survival.
贾雷德?戴蒙德(Jared Diamond)因为分析了一些社会运行良好一些社会难以为继的原因而名声大噪。他执笔的《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》是1997年的畅销书。书中,他对“欧洲社会之所以运行良好,是因为其主导了人类生物学领域”这一自负论断不屑一顾,在他看来,欧洲大陆的昌盛是因为欧洲优越的环境特别适合种植小麦、大麦以及饲养家畜。八年后,他奉献了耗时良久的又一力作--《崩溃:社会如何选择成败兴亡》。书中主要内容是介绍一些人类社会是如何毁掉自己赖以生存的周遭环境,进而导致自己灭亡的。两本书都是文明层面上有关人类生存的书籍。
2 But they cover only a small portion of the human story. In his new book Mr Diamond, a geographer at UCLA, points out that life on this scale is a recent phenomenon. For most of history human beings lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. Agriculture began 11,000 years ago; state government not even half as recently.But Mr Diamond, who has spent years studying in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and learning from local tribes people, argues that mankind retains important links to its distant past and can still learn a thing or two from traditional societies.
不过,这两本书中写到的只是人类故事的冰山一角。现任教于美国加州洛杉矶分校地理学系的贾雷德.戴蒙德(Jared Diamond)在他的新书中写到人类今天以这种模式生存只是近代才有的一种现象。在历史的大部分时期,人们一直以类似于狩猎者一样聚居的方式生存,毕竟人类开始从事农业生产的历史也才11,000多年,国家政府也是在近代5500多年前才出现。戴蒙德教授花了八年时间呆在巴布亚新几内亚的丛林里,研究当地的部落居民,得出了这样的结论:人类仍旧与遥远的过去保持着重要的联系,传统社会有很多事情值得我们借鉴。
3 Mr Diamond writes, for example, that most societies have held on to some form of religion as a way of maintaining social order, comforting the anxious and teaching political obedience. Tribal societies in New Guinea rarely, if ever, fight over religious matters. These societies also tend to be more multilingual, helpful for diplomacy perhaps, and as it turns out, also a way of protecting against Alzheimer’s. There are 1,000 different languages in New Guinea alone. Traditional societies resolve disputes by making do entirely without the state. In stark contrast to the American criminal-justice system, the leopard-skin-draped chief of Sudan’s Nuer people has no role in settling disputes but works to facilitate mediation and calculate traditional forms of compensation.
比如,戴蒙德教授在书中就这样写到:大部分人类社会都保留了某种宗教形式,用于维持社会治安、安抚社会急躁情绪、维持政治统治。不过,新几内亚的部落居民却从未因为宗教事务发生过冲突。这些原始的部落使用的语言不止一种,或许这样有助于人们交往。事实上证明,使用多种语言也是防治老年痴呆症的好
态下,就能解决所有冲突。与美国刑事司法系统截然不同的是,苏丹身穿豹纹皮的努尔部落首领没有权力解决纠纷,但是可以采用传统的计算方法核算补偿,从中进行调停。
4 Other things have changed, not all of them for the better. The gluttonous industrialised world could benefit from a more Palaeolithic diet. Traditional societies have hardly a trace of the West’s main non-communicable diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and many forms of cancer—the hallmarks of a diet rich in salt and saturated fat.
Thanks to a cuisine of mainly low-sodium bananas, Brazil’s Yanomamo Indians consume only 50 milligrams of salt a day. One Big Mac would give them a month’s worth. Tribespeople who adopt a sedentary lifestyle and eat processed food show a sharp increase in the same diseases that afflict Westerners. A third of urbanised Australian aboriginals suffer from type-2 diabetes, and among the Wanigela in Port Moresby, New Guinea’s modern capital city, the figure is closer to 40%.
很多事情已经改变,但是并不尽如人意。生活在贪婪的工业社会的人们可以多学学旧石器时代的饮食习惯,相信会受益良多。生活在传统社会的人,几乎没人得过类似于心脏病、中风、糖尿病和多种癌症等困扰西方人的常见非传染疾病。这些疾病是食用含盐量高和脂肪饱和食物的有力证明。
多亏了食用含钠较低的香蕉,巴西的雅诺玛莫印度人一天食盐摄入量只有仅仅50毫克。一个大苹果,就能让他们大快朵颐。那些习惯了长时间坐着工作、食用加工食品生活方式的部落居民,患上那些困扰西方人疾病的几率聚居上升。生活在城里的澳大利亚原住民,有三分之一患上了Ⅱ型糖尿病。生活在巴布亚新几内亚的现代化首都摩尔贝斯港的Wanigela(没查找)人,患该类糖尿病的比例将近40%。
5 Mr Diamond is at his most impressed when it comes to tribal family life. He writes of missionary children who prefer the playgroups of traditional societies that bring together children of different ages to the solitary fixation on video games that are common back home. Raising children is a communal affair in which the elderly are deeply involved, unlike what happens in most Western countries. He cites studies that show that an African Aka pygmy infant, for example, is looked after by at least seven people and babies in the Efe tribe by as many as 14.
At the same time, he writes, children in traditional households seem to enjoy more autonomy. In the Kalahari the !Kung do not resort to physical punishment; instead children are allowed to slap and insult their parents. And New Guinea Highlander children are encouraged to play with knives and with fire, precisely so that they are able to learn from their mistakes.
死盯着电动游戏的孩子相比,传教士的孩子更喜欢在传统社会的操场上玩,在那里,不同年纪的孩子能在一起嬉闹追逐。与大部分西方国家不同的是,在部落家庭里,抚养孩子是集体的事情,老人是这个过程中绝对的主角。有研究显示,非洲地区的阿卡俾格米矮人族的婴儿由至少7人照顾,埃菲社里的婴儿至少由14个人照顾。他书中就引用了这项研究。
同时,他还写到,传统家庭长大的孩子似乎想要更多的自主性。喀拉哈沙漠the!Kung(查不着)人种不会体罚孩子,相反允许孩子侮辱、打骂家长。为了让孩子可以从错误中切身地汲取教训,新几内亚的高地人鼓励孩子玩火,耍刀。
6 In all this, the author’s argument is not that we should abandon our modern way of life—he certainly has not—nor does he romanticise traditional people as earth-loving peaceniks. A tribal life can, after all, be nasty and brutish. Few people live past the age of 50, mostly because of curable diseases. For the !Kung, infanticide has been permitted in order to preserve resources in lean times. Bolivia’s Siriono Indians abandoned their elderly once they became a burden. North American Crow Indians encouraged them to commit suicide. Tribal warfare may kill far fewer than 21st-century mechanised versions, but there is still a constant fear of raids and revenge killings. And a higher percentage of the population dies fighting.
作者这么写,不是说人们应该放弃现代生活方式,他也没有这层意思。他也没有把传统社会生活的人们美化成和平分子。毕竟,部落里的生活是不文明而且残酷的。部落里的人很少有活过50的,大部分死于可以治疗的疾病。在the!kung 民族里,收成不好的时节,为了节省资源,人们可以屠杀婴儿。玻利维亚的西瑞诺娜民族会遗弃拖累族群的老人。北美的客如印第安人鼓励孩子杀人。部落争斗中丧生的人大大少于21世纪机械化战争中死亡的人数,但是部落居民一直都有遭受突袭、仇杀之类的担忧。部落人口中很大一部分死于部落斗争。
7 Nor is subsistence living for the faint- hearted. Shortages can mean starvation. Taro,
a tropical-root vegetable, is the staple food of the Kaulong people of New Britain, an island off Papua New Guinea. But in the dry season they are forced to scour the forest for insects, snails and unpalatable plants. Toxic wild nuts must be soaked in water for days to leach out the poison.
书中,他也没有说胆小鬼有生存的可能。物资短缺可意味着要挨饿。巴布亚新几内亚群岛附近的一座名为新英格兰的岛生活着卡隆民族,他们的主食就是热带根茎蔬菜芋头。但是一到旱季,他们就得去森林捉昆虫,蜗牛以及不怎么美味的植物充饥。他们还会把有毒的野生坚果浸在水里数日,溶解毒性后食用。
8 Mr Diamond’s book is mostly a fascinating survey of a rapidly fading world. Only when it tries to pose as a handbook for tribal living does it fall flat. Comparing traditional strategies for maximising crop yields with modern ways of managing financial investments is more banal than original. Our forebears have been around for
很大程度上来说,戴蒙德教授的新书是对快速消亡世界的一次引人入胜的探寻。如果把这本书当成部落生活的手册,那么这本书就完全算不上好书。把最大程度上提高收成的传统方法与现代金融投资管理方式相比是一种没有创意而且很迂腐的行为。我们的祖先先于我们存在很久,弄明白他们是如何做到这一点就足够我们学一辈子的了。
New fiction新小说
Not easily forgotten难以磨灭
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition
Self-made man 靠自己力量成功的人
Umbrella. By Will Self. Grove Press; 488 pages; $25. Bloomsbury; £18.99. Buy from https://www.doczj.com/doc/6a10538722.html,, https://www.doczj.com/doc/6a10538722.html,
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MODERNIST fiction has left a tricky legacy for contemporary novelists. Few can hope to match James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, while those that try risk seeming pale imitators of their literary heroes, self-consciously allusive rather than vanguards in their own right.
现代主义小说给当代小说家留下了棘手的难题。几乎没人奢望可与詹姆斯?乔伊斯或是塞谬尔?贝克特匹敌,而那些甘冒风险貌似照搬主人公的人自发地引经据典,而不是凭自身的实力另辟溪径。
Will Self’s “Umbrella”, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker prize and is now about to come out in America for the first time, manages to break away from this general rule. Very much a literary novel, it is over 450 pages of near-continuous prose, without chapter divisions or much in terms of conventional punctuation and with few paragraph breaks. On first glance, it may not immediately appeal to a general reader. 威尔?塞谬尔的《伞》却设法摆脱了这个一般规则,它不只入围了2012年布克奖,也即将首次在美国出版。这本小说相当纯文艺,它有450多页是近乎连续的散文,没有分章或是传统的标点分隔,也很少有段落中断。一般读者乍看之下,可能不会立即感受到它的吸引力。
And yet this would be a shame. “Umbrella”is also an entertaining and enthralling book. Set around a psychiatric institution in north London, it follows the progressive Dr Zachary Busner, who believes “whatever the damage…these derelict brains are still inhabited” and his favourite patient, Audrey Death, who has been catatonic since her admission in 1922. Mr Self flickers between these two characters as he moves between the 1970s, when Busner is practising, the present-day, when he is retired, and the early 20th century, when Audrey and her brothers are working in munitions or fighting in the first world war.
然而读者将会为此感到羞愧。《伞》也是一本有趣迷人的书。故事以伦敦北部的精神病院为背景,情节围绕进步的扎迦利?布斯勒医生和他最喜爱的病人奥黛丽?戴施展开。布斯勒医生相信“任何伤害......始终占据着遗忘了这些伤害的大脑”,奥黛丽是紧张性精神症患者,1922年入住精神病院。塞尔夫笔下的场景一直在这两个人物中间切换,有时是在布斯勒践行理念的20世纪70年代,有时是布斯勒退休后的今天,有时是在奥黛丽和她的兄弟在兵工厂工作或为第一次世界大战而战的二十世纪初。
Mr Self manages to keep up the momentum between these differing narratives. Both the “greasily damp” London streets of the 1900s and the starched hospital rooms of the 1970s are convincingly evoked, while the details of the inner workings of psychiatric wards—their drugs, methods and changing ideologies—have been
塞尔夫尽量在这些不同的叙述之间保持要素。无论是20世纪初“滑腻潮湿”的伦敦街道还是20世纪70年代拘泥刻板的医院病房,都刻画得令人信服,而精神病院的内部运作细节,从药物、方法到不断变化的观念也都经过了广泛的研究。
Two things give the novel coherence. The first is the city of London, where Mr Self has set most of his eight previous novels, and which he and his characters like to map out and tramp about in. The second is Mr Self’s delight in language and the “fluttering sensation”of words. Some may find this wearing—as Busner reprimands himself, “another uncalled for Latinism”. But descriptions such as “his splayed shoes crêping along the floor, sliding across patches of lino”or “the day is an elegant parasol tasselled with clouds” stay with you long after you have read them.
有两件事体现了小说的连贯性。首先是伦敦城,塞尔夫以前写的八部小说大都以此为背景,他和他的笔下人物都喜欢在伦敦城内运筹帷幄筹以及四下奔波。其次则是塞尔夫语言上的喜乐以及遣词用字的“飘忽感”。有些可能让人感到疲惫——比如在布斯勒斥责自己“又一个不请自来的拉丁语“的时候。但是,诸如“他那张开的鞋沿着地板起皱,滑过片片亚麻油地毡”或者“白天是优雅的阳伞,装饰有浮云流苏”这样的描述在读过之后令你久久难忘。
Mr Self’s previous novels have gained him a cult readership, and can divide readers. But with “Umbrella”he has managed to write an experimental novel that is also a compassionate and thrilling book—and one that, despite its difficulty, deserves to be read.
塞尔夫以前的小说使他赢得了读者群的疯狂崇拜,也是读者的分水岭。然而他成功地把《伞》这部实验性小说写得悲天悯人又引人入胜,尽管颇有难度,但值得一读。
New film: “Zero Dark Thirty”
影讯:猎杀本·拉登
American night
美国之夜
The OBL thriller has landed
“本·拉登”来袭
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition
Maya the maven(CIA专家玛雅)
KATHRYN BIGELOW’S superb new thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty”, hits the ground running like its heroine—and never draws breath. After a montage of emergency calls made on September 11th 2001 by doomed people in the twin towers, the film jumps ahead two years to Maya (Jessica Chastain, pictured), a red-headed avenging angel and ferocious CIA analyst, who is watching the interrogation of an al-Qaeda paymaster in a so-called “black prison”run by the American agency.
凯瑟琳·毕格罗的一部十分精彩的惊悚电影——猎杀本·拉登,就像剧中女主角一样大获成功。电影首先出现的2001年9月11日双子塔上一些将要死去的人的拨打紧急电话一些列画面,接着镜头转入两年后,一位有着强烈复仇愿望的红发女郎玛雅(CIA分析人员)(上图,杰西卡·查斯坦饰)查看“黑暗监狱”【注1】(由美国机构控制)里的基地组织幕后老板的审讯。
Maya accepts the methods used by Dan, her CIA mentor (Jason Clarke), on the unfortunate Ammar (Reda Kateb) to get information that could prevent an attack on a hotel in Saudi Arabia. She even fetches the water for the water-boarding. In the mercifully brief scene where Dan uses humiliation and confinement to break his
because the Saudis fail to act on the CIA’s tip.
玛雅采用了CIA顾问丹(Jason Clarke杰森克拉克饰)的方法,在可怜的的阿尔玛(Reda Kateb饰)身上获取情报去阻止一场沙特阿拉伯(Saudi Arabia)的宾馆袭击,她甚至取来水对犯人施以水刑【注2】。丹处罚犯人比较宽容,在一简短的画面里,他通过羞辱和禁闭让他饱受虐待的犯人得以屈服说出情报,玛雅像往常一样出现。尽管如此,后来袭击还是发生了,因为那个沙特阿拉伯人没有按照CIA的掌握的线索行事。
Maya suggests that they hide this detail from Abbar, one of Osama bin Laden’s many relatives, to extract more information from him. He duly names a certain Abu Ahmed as the al-Qaeda leader’s personal courier and Maya spends the rest of the film following that name through a labyrinth where a “detainee video” is just another lead, like the background noise on a mobile phone, into the dusty arena where the first stealth helicopter touches down inside the Abbottabad compound at half-past midnight (“zero dark thirty” in popular military parlance).
玛雅认为基地组织对Abbar(本拉登众多亲戚之一)隐瞒了很多细节,以防CIA 人员从他身上获取情报。Abbar此时恰好说出一个叫Abu Ahmed的人事基地组织头目的私人送信人,这部电影接下来都在讲玛雅顺着Abu Ahmed这个名字发现这好像一个“迷宫”,被关押犯人的审讯录像又是一个误导,就好像手机的背景噪声一样,接下来她来到了一个布满灰尘的体育场,在这个地方,第一架偷袭直升机在降落在Abbottabad的一个院子里,当时刚好午夜过了半小时(“0点30分”在军事术语中很常用)
Maya is finishing the job that was started by her predecessor in Ms Bigelow’s 2008 film, “The Hurt Locker”, which was also written by Mark Boal, a journalist. Her work poses the same risks; after a tour of duty in Baghdad defusing bombs that all appear to have been built by the same shadowy bomb-maker, Ms Bigelow’s hero could not return home and re-enlisted to continue the hunt.
玛雅正在做的这项工作是由她的前任在凯瑟琳·毕格罗的电影——《拆弹部队》(书也是由一记者Mark Boal写的)里着手开始的。她的工作同样充满危险,在拆除了似乎由同一个神秘的炸弹制造者制造的炸弹的任务后,玛雅没有回家而是在队伍里继续寻找本拉登。
In “Zero Dark Thirty” Maya is hunting the serial-killer-in-chief whom she believes to be the author not just of September 11th, but of all the subsequent attacks—in Saudi Arabia, London, Indonesia and Afghanistan—that are shown in the film. Like many such cinematic heroines, the CIA’s Joan of Arc (Maya has not had a boyfriend for ten years) is sometimes in danger of becoming what she is hunting. The question of where she goes next, asked by the pilot who is taking her home, is left unanswered in the final, rare close-up of Maya. It is a shot—and a question—that lingers.
这《猎杀本·拉登》这部电影里,玛雅一直在杀人狂魔头目追寻本拉登,她认为本拉登不仅是9·11事件的策划者,而且还是所有随后在沙特阿拉伯(Saudi Arabia)、伦敦(London)、印度尼西亚(Indonesia)、阿富汗(Afghanistan)的袭击制造者,这些袭击都在电影里出现了。就像许多银幕女主角一样,玛雅就像CIA里的圣女贞德【注3】(玛雅十年内一直没有男朋友),有时她因追查而陷入危险。带她回家的飞行员问她接下来她将要去哪里,关于这个问题,影片结尾没有给出答案,只给了玛雅很少有的的特写镜头。留给大家一个一闪而过的镜头,一丝疑问。
from the print edition | Books and arts
【注1】黑暗监狱(black prison)也叫Black jails,参见维基百科:
https://www.doczj.com/doc/6a10538722.html,/wiki/Black_jails
【注2】水刑(waterboarding):是指一种使犯人以为自己快被溺毙的刑讯方式,犯人被绑成脚比头高的姿势,脸部被毛巾盖住,然后把水倒在犯人脸上。有关专家说,这种酷刑会使犯人产生快要窒息和淹死的感觉。水刑就像是个单向阀。水不断涌入,而毛巾又防止你把水吐出来,因此你只能呼一次气。即便屏住呼吸,还是感觉空气在被吸走,就像个吸尘器。
【注3】贞德(Jeanned'Arc、JeannelaPucelle、JoanofArc)(1412年1月6日~1431年5月30日),被称为“奥尔良的少女”和“圣女贞德”,法国民族英雄、军事家,天主教会的“圣女”。英法百年战争(1337年~1453年)时她带领法国军队对抗英军的入侵,支持法查理七世加冕,为法国胜利做出了巨大贡献。后为勃艮第公国所俘,宗教裁判所以“异端”和“女巫罪”判处她火刑。
20th-century music 二十世纪音乐
Notes and noise 乐音与喧哗
Reassessing the cacophony of sound that was 20th-century classical music
重审二十世纪古典音乐的喧哗之声
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
“IS MUSIC such a serious business?” So asked Franz Joseph, the Austrian emperor, at the end of the 19th century after a performance of new music in Vienna. “I always thought”, he continued, “it was meant to make people happy.”
“音乐非得一本正经吗?”19世纪末维也纳一场新音乐演奏会结束后,奥地利皇帝弗郎茨.约瑟夫一世曾这样问,“我一直觉得,音乐得让人快乐。”
Contrary to expectation, interest in classical music (the happy or serious kind) may be on the up. A recent YouGov poll optimistically found that, in Britain, those under 25 were as keen to learn about it as those over 55. In China, between 30m and 100m children are learning to play the piano or the violin. The Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu alone is said to have more than 14,000 students.
与原先的料想不同,现在人们对于古典音乐(让人快乐或一本正经的音乐)的兴趣不减反增。最近YouGov的一项调查结果显示:在英国,25岁以下的年轻人对古典音乐的兴趣,不亚于55岁以上的人群。在中国,约三千万到一亿左右的儿童学习钢琴或小提琴。仅在位于成都的四川音乐学院,学生数就超过了14,000人。
However, classical music composed during the 20th century still has a reputation for being too difficult, too serious and too perplexing. Experimenting with atonality, microtonality, electronic distortion of sound and the role of chance: the developments favoured by the more innovative 20th-century composers do not make for easy listening. In concert-hall programmes and orchestral schedules in Britain and America works by Arnold Schoenberg, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Gyorgy Ligeti are almost always sandwiched between better-known and loved pieces by Beethoven or Brahms. It is as if an evening of 20th-century composition, even by a famous name, still needs its spoonful of sugar.
然而,二十世纪的古典音乐仍被冠以这样的形容:晦涩不明,过分严肃,寓义模糊。先锋性的二十世纪作曲家们可不那么明白易懂——他们大胆试验着无调性,微分音和电子畸变,铺陈出一条为机缘所催化的音乐道路。在美国或英国,音乐会或管弦乐队的节目单上;阿诺尔德.勋伯格、B.A.齐默尔曼和乔治.李盖蒂的作品总是被委委屈屈地夹在贝多芬和勃拉姆斯更为人熟知也更广受喜爱的作品之间。二十世纪的音乐晚宴,即使由大师精心烹制,似乎也总缺了一勺甜蜜的砂糖。
“The Rest is Noise”, a year-long festival that is due to start on January 19th at London’s Southbank Centre, hopes to change all that. Inspired by the 2007 book of the same name by Alex Ross, a music critic at the New Yorker, more than 250 events and 100 concerts—starting with Richard Strauss’s opera “Salome”(pictured), and finishing with “El Ni?o”, an oratorio by a contemporary American composer, John Adams—will trace the arc of music composed in the 20th century.
一场时长一年名为“其余皆是喧嚣”的音乐节,旨在改变对20世纪古典音乐的成见。音乐节将于今年1月19日在伦敦南岸中心开幕,其灵感来源于《纽约客》音乐评论家亚历克斯.罗斯2007年的一本同名著作。届时将有250多场活动和100多场音乐会。从理查德.施特劳斯的歌剧《莎乐美》(见图)到当代美国作曲家约翰.亚当斯的清唱曲《厄尔尼诺》,听众们将漫步游憩于20世纪的音乐长廊。
Academics, curators, theatre directors, composers and writers are all giving talks on related topics: the invention of the production line, the influence of jazz on classical music, and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Over the course of the year 18 orchestras will perform and the London Philharmonic, the leading orchestral partner, has dedicated its 2013 season exclusively to music that was written in the 1900s.
学者,策馆人、剧院经理、作曲家和作家们纷纷热烈谈论相关主题:流水线的发
乐队进行表演,包括英国最知名的爱乐乐团;后者将在整个2013季度专门演奏20世纪的音乐作品。
It is an audacious move. As Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank Centre explains, concert series are usually held around “the journey of a composer’s life, or how they may have taken their references from a previous composer.” This is the first to do so through the “march of history”, grappling with how music was coloured by, say, Weimar Berlin or 1920s Paris, the two world wars or by the New Deal in America in the 1930s. It is a way, says Ms Kelly, of “giving context to classical music, which has so often talked about itself in relation to itself.”
此举不可谓不大胆。南岸中心的艺术总监朱迪.凯利说,系列音乐会一般都会围绕着“一个作曲家一生的作品回顾,或者是一位作曲者曾影响过的音乐作品”;像这样一个“历史的进程”还是头一次。这次的音乐节将展现历史——例如魏玛共和国时期的柏林或二十世纪二十年代的巴黎,两次世界大战以及二十世纪三十年代的罗斯福新政——是如何丰富音乐的内涵的。凯利女士说,通过这种方式,我们可以了解古典音乐的历史背景;而不是仅仅就事论事般执著于音乐本身。
Those familiar with Mr Ross’s book will not be surprised that it has inspired a festival. “The Rest is Noise”, which was nominated for a Pulitzer prize, always seemed bigger than its parts, even as it skilfully condensed the history of the 20th century through its music. The original manuscript had to be cut in half, and the book was eventually accompanied by a website, where visitors could listen to selected tracks and read more of Mr Ross’s essays. And although Mr Ross’s gift as a critic lies in his ability to write about music so lucidly that you can almost hear it, this festival will bring to life his belief, as he writes in the book, that “unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience.”
一本书竟然成了一个音乐节的灵感来源;不过对于熟悉该书的读者来说,这并非奇事。这本曾获普利策奖提名的《其余皆是喧嚣》,对20世纪音乐史的浓缩提炼固然巧妙地道,然而该书之妙不仅于此:原书稿被删节了一半;书内附有网址——在该网址可以听到音乐选段,读到更多罗斯的文章。罗斯身怀音乐评论家的独特天赋:他关于音乐的书写让读者如临其境,如闻其声。而这个音乐节将呈现的将是罗斯的理念,也就是他在书中所写的:“不像小说或绘画;曲谱只有在听众面前演奏的时候,其意义才臻至圆满。
Specialist festivals apart, however, it is still unusual to have a concert series solely dedicated to modern music. Vladimir Jurowski, the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, admits that the Southbank festival will offer “a much more austere menu” than is usually common, something that may not appeal to everyone—at least at first.
除了专门的音乐会之外,很少有完全致力于演奏现代音乐的演奏会系列。伦敦爱
能风格“更加严肃冷峻”,乍听之下,难以取悦每位听众的耳朵。
Mr Ross senses increasing openness to the modern repertoire, but “it depends on where you are”. That is as true of New York as it is of London or Berlin. At the New York Philharmonic or the Metropolitan, he feels “a sense from the audience around me that there’s an old automatic…bigoted and prejudicial response to this music…It is a very frustrating attitude; people have grown up with it, and it can be devilishly hard to persuade them to evolve away from it.”
罗斯觉察到对现代音乐越来越开放的态度;然而,无论在纽约、伦敦还是柏林,“这仍得取决于你身在何处”。在纽约爱乐乐团或大都会博物馆,他都感受到了“观众对这种音乐的一种陈腐的无意识的……固执的偏见……这种态度让人沮丧;人们伴着这种偏见长大,甩脱它简直是困难重重。”
Ms Kelly is confident that the festival will go some way to persuade reluctant listeners. “Audiences who are interested in geopolitics, the history of the 20th century, the economic situation [can find] a route via these things, for them to care who Bela Bartok was.” Mr Jurowski is even more confident of the enlightened attitude of his audience. “My next aspiration would be to do a year that consists solely of music written in the 21st century. But I would need somebody else to write a new book first.”
凯利女士认为,这个音乐节会冲淡一些顽固听众的成见。“对地缘政治学感兴趣的听众,可以在这些音乐中找到一条20世纪的历史路径,并因此对巴拉.巴多克这样的作曲家感兴趣。”尤洛维斯基地于启迪他的听众则更有信心,“我下一个愿望是:一年之内只演奏21世纪作曲家的作品。不过事先得有人再写本新书才行。”
[2013.1.03] Encounters with the dead 亡灵之遇
Heaven help them 上天垂怜
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition
The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead. By Carl Watkins. Bodley Head; 318 pages;
《隐藏的国度:亡灵之旅》卡尔. 沃特金斯著鲍利海出版公司;318页£20. Buy from https://www.doczj.com/doc/6a10538722.html,
WINTER is the time for ghost stories, for “fire and fleet and candlelight”and the terror of shadows; it is also a good season for Carl Watkins’s book. For this is only partly an historical study of attitudes to the dead. More enthusiastically, it is a gazetteer of weird goings-on in remote corners of England. Here is the delightfully named Mr Snowball, who on a ride to Ampleforth in North Yorkshire around 1400 encountered a fiery raven that became a dog, the ghost of an excommunicated man; James Tankerlay, a wicked priest who, after death, “blew out”the eye of his concubine; and Major George Sydenham,who in the 1660s returned from the dead to tell his captain that there was indeed immortal life, seized the captain’s sword, and vanished away. Spirits knock on walls, poltergeists throw chairs, and through the chill night air floats the howling of “Gabble Ratchets”, or phantom dogs.
滋生泛滥的鬼怪奇谈,亡者流连的温暖屋舍,诡谲无迹的奇形暗影——没有什么比冬天更适合这些的了。因此,卡尔.沃特金斯的这本书可谓正当其时。此书不仅仅是对亡灵态度的历史研究;更是一本叫人兴味盎然的地名索引,记录了英格兰边隅角落的奇谈异事。例如,公元一四零零年左右,有个叫“雪球”的滑稽家伙,正驾车前往北约克郡的艾姆培尔福斯;路上他目睹了一只燃烧的渡鸦变成了一条狗:原来那是一个鬼魂,生前被开除了教籍。一个叫詹姆斯.坦克雷的邪恶牧师,过世之后居然吹炸了他小妾的眼睛。一名叫乔治.辛德汉姆的士兵,在一六六零年重回人间,告诉自己的队长永生确实存在,然后夺过队长的剑消失无踪。亡魂们敲打墙壁,鬼怪们乱扔椅子,地狱犬和幽灵狗的嚎叫在寒风中摇曳飘荡。
Religion, both established and popular, has changed mightily in England over the centuries, but beliefs about the dead have proved remarkably deep-rooted. Medieval people believed that souls wandered out of Purgatory, haunting their enemies and pleading for release. The Reformation did away with Purgatory, but ghosts still walked and sought revenge. In the 16th century prayers for the dead were banned as popish superstition, but survived because people thought it necessary and compassionate to remember them.
多少世纪以来,尽管英国国教与其他流行的宗教变动不居;关于亡灵的信仰却根深蒂固,宛如磐石。在中世纪,人们相信亡魂们游走于炼狱之外,缠绕其敌,苦求解脱。宗教改革摒弃了炼狱,然而亡魂们复仇之心犹在,游荡之途不止。十六世纪时,向亡灵祈祷被当作迷信而取缔;然而这一习俗至今犹存,人们相信:亡者不仅应该被铭记,而且应该得到宽恕和慈悲。
By and large, people believed in life after death—half of all Englishmen and Englishwomen still do—but heaven was a concept too vague to give proper comfort. Accordingly the bereaved clung to the dead in life, like poor Kenelm Digby, who in 1633 found his young wife dead in bed “as she was alive, like an Angel”, had her portrait painted by Van Dyck there and then, and shut himself up with it.
难以给人慰藉;于是他们寄寓于亡灵。一六三三年,科而姆.狄克比发现自己年轻的妻子死于床上,“面色如生,宛若天使”。他请画家凡戴克来,画了一幅她死时的肖像;之后他便摒绝他人,独守此像。
To memorialise the dead with stones or monuments, to wear their hair in brooches and to treat their bodies reverently, assured them another kind of life after death. Beyond that, only pious hope remained.
以石刻或念物寄托哀思,佩戴藏有死者头发的胸针,或是对他们的遗体珍而重之,这些做法仿佛赐予了死者另一种生命。除此之外,仅余几分虔诚的希望了。
Secularism and rationalism made little difference. Cremation caught on so slowly at the end of the 19th century, because many still believed in the resurrection of the body, which therefore should not be burned. After the first world war the bereaved attended séances in crowds, hoping to make physical contact with those they had lost. Famous atheists mocked them and then capitulated themselves to the mysteries of the spirit world: like Annie Besant, a social reformer who ended up as a credulous theosophist. 即使是世俗化和理性化的今日,对亡灵的信仰也未动摇几分。十九世纪末很多人依旧相信亡者可能复活,不能焚毁遗体,因此当时火化的推行极为缓慢。一战之后,丧失亲友之人纷纷参加降神会,祈望能触碰所失之人。一些有名的无神论者先是对这种行为嗤之以鼻,之后却纷纷投入神秘的亡灵之域。例如,一位叫安妮.本森特的社会改革家,最后却成了一名轻信的见神论者。
Mr Watkins has fun. He enjoys the strange little towns his research takes him to, and the odd people he meets. Like Charles Dickens’s Fat Boy, he “wants to make your flesh creep”. Nothing goes very deep,as if he is afraid of treading on still-live sensibilities. An almost pathological aversion to commas makes his book much harder reading than it should be, and the amount of repetition suggests that he assumes no great intelligence in his readers. But perhaps that is fair enough, when this is a subject on which all men and women, in truth, are as ignorant as each other.
沃特金斯先生显然乐在其中。他乐此不疲于他的研究,走遍了一个个偏远小镇,拜访了无数怪异之人。就像查尔斯.狄更斯作品里的“胖男孩”一样,他“想让你浑身起鸡皮疙瘩”。书中并无深入追索和探讨,也许作者害怕触动那些尚存的敏感神经。他对于逗号几乎是病态般的厌恶和回避使得此书更加艰涩;可是大量的重复似乎又暗示着作者对读者的智力水平期待不高。不过这倒也在理;毕竟,对于亡灵的主题,我们都是一样的懵懂无知。
Short fiction
In search of happiness
追寻幸福
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
Seek and ye shall not find
寻之,不得
Something Like Happy. By John Burnside. Jonathan Cape; 244 pages; £16.99. Buy https://www.doczj.com/doc/6a10538722.html,
《类似幸福》,约翰?伯恩赛德著,乔纳森海角出版社:244页,售价16.99英镑。亚马逊有售。
SHORT STORIES are due a revival. In recent years, there have been critically acclaimed collections by American writers such as Lydia Davis and Junot Díaz. But few others manage to reach the bestseller lists, and they are all too often overshadowed by novels. In contrast to their heyday in the early 20th century, short stories are mostly viewed as trials or experiments before an author cracks on with the real thing.
短篇小说将再度流行。近年来,美国作家(如Lydia Davis和Junot Díaz)也写过一些广受好评的短篇小说集,但鲜有其他短篇小说跻身畅销书之列,而且在长篇小说的光芒之下它们往往黯然失色。短篇小说曾在20世纪初鼎盛一时,如今却风光不再。人们现在大多认为短篇小说就是作家“动真格”前拿来练手或试水的。
John Burnside, a Scottish poet and novelist, challenges this preconception in his latest
What went wrong IN RECENT months many economists and policymakers, including such unlikely bedfellows as Paul Krugman, an economist and New York Times columnist, and Hank Paulson, a former American treasury secretary, have put “global imbalances”—the huge current-account surpluses run by countries like China, alongside America’s huge deficit—at the root of the financial crisis. But the IMF disagrees. It argues, in new papers released on Friday March 6th, that the “main culprit” was deficient regulation of t he financial system, together with a failure of market discipline. Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist, said this week that global imbalances contributed only “indirectly” to the crisis. This may sound like buck-passing by the world’s main interna tional macroeconomic organisation. But the distinction has important consequences for whether macroeconomic policy or more regulation of financial markets will provide the solutions to the mess. In broad strokes, the global imbalances view of the crisis argues that a glut of money from countries with high savings rates, such as China and the oil-producing states, came flooding into America. This kept interest rates low and fuelled the credit boom and the related boom in the prices of assets, such as houses and equity, whose collapse precipitated the financial crisis. A workable long-term fix for the problems of the world economy would, therefore, involve figuring out what to do about these imbalances. But the IMF argues that imbalances could not have caused the crisis without the creative ability of financial institutions to develop new structures and instruments to cater to investors’ demand for higher yields. These instruments turned out to be more risky than they appeared. Investors, overly optimistic about continued rises in asset prices, did not look closely into the nature of the assets that they bought, preferring to rely on the analysis of credit-rating agencies which were, in some cases, also selling advice on how to game the ratings system. This “failure of market discipline”, the fund argues, played a big role in the crisis. As big a problem, according to the IMF, was that financial regulation was flawed, ineffective and too limited in scope. What it calls the “shadow banking system”—the loosely regulated but highly interconnected network of investment banks, hedge funds, mortgage originators, and the like—was not subject to the sorts of prudential regulation (capital-adequacy norms, for example) that applied to banks. In part, the fund argues, this was because they were not thought to be systemically important, in the sense that banks were understood to be. But their being unregulated made it more attractive for banks (whose affiliates the non-banks often were) to evade capital requirements by pushing risk into these entities. In time, this network of institutions grew so large that they were indeed systemically important: in the now-familiar phrase, they were “too big” or “too interconnected” to fail. By late 2007, some estimates of the assets of the bank-like institutions in America outside the scope of existing prudential regulation, was around $10 trillion, as large as the assets of the regulated American banking system itself. Given this interpretation, it is not surprising that the IMF has thrown its weight strongly behind an enormous increase in the scale and scope of financial regulation in a series of papers leading up to the G20 meetings. Among many other proposals, it wants the shadow banking system to be subjected to the same sorts of prudential requirements that banks must follow. Sensibly, it is calling for regulation to concentrate on what an institution does, not what it is called (that is, the basis of regulation should be activities, not entities). It also wants regulators to focus more broadly on
The Brain Activity Map 绘制大脑活动地图 Hard cell 棘手的细胞 An ambitious project to map the brain is in the works. Possibly too ambitious 一个绘制大脑活动地图的宏伟计划正在准备当中,或许有些太宏伟了 NEWS of what protagonists hope will be America’s next big science project continues to dribble out. 有关其发起人心中下一个科学大工程的新闻报道层出不穷。 A leak to the New York Times, published on February 17th, let the cat out of the bag, with a report that Barack Obama’s administration is thinking of sponsoring what will be known as the Brain Activity Map. 2月17日,《纽约时报》刊登的一位线人报告终于泄露了秘密,报告称奥巴马政府正在考虑赞助将被称为“大脑活动地图”的计划。 And on March 7th several of those protagonists published a manifesto for the project in Science. 3月7日,部分发起人在《科学》杂志上发表声明证实了这一计划。 The purpose of BAM is to change the scale at which the brain is understood. “大脑活动地图”计划的目标是改变人们在认知大脑时采用的度量方法。 At the moment, neuroscience operates at two disconnected levels. 眼下,神经学的研究处在两个断开的层次。 The higher one, where the dimensions of features are measured in centimetres, has many techniques at its disposal, notably functional magnetic-res onance imaging, which measures changes in tissues’ fuel consumption. 在相对宏观的层次当中各个特征的规模用厘米来衡量,有很多技术可以使用,尤其是用来测量组织中能量消耗变动情况的核磁共振成像技术。 This lets researchers see which bits of the brain are active in particular tasks—as long as those tasks can be performed by a person lying down inside a scanner. 该技术可使研究人员找出在完成具体的任务时,大脑的哪些部分处于活跃状态。At the other end of the scale, where features are measured in microns, lots of research has been done on how individual nerve cells work, how messages are sent from one to another, and how the connections between cells strengthen and weaken as memories are formed. 而另一个度量的层次则要求用微米来测量各种特征,这一层次的研究很多都是关于单个神经细胞是如何工作的、信息在神经细胞之间是如何传递的以及当产生记忆的时候神经细胞之间的联系是如何得到加强和减弱的。 Between these two, though, all is darkness. 然而,位于这两个层次之间的研究还处于一片漆黑当中。 It is like trying to navigate America with an atlas that shows the states, the big cities and the main highways, and has a few street maps of local neighbourhoods, but displays nothing in between.
Youngsters’job preferences and prospects are mismatched 年轻人的工作偏好与就业前景不相匹配 Teenage picks 青少年的选择 The world of work is changing.Are people ready for the new job outlook? A survey of15-year-olds across41countries by the OECD,a club of mostly rich countries,found that teenagers may have unrealistic expectations about the kind of work that will be available. 职业的世界正在发生变化。人们做好准备接受新的就业观了吗?世界经合组织(一个以发达国家为主的组织)对41个国家的15岁青少年进行了一项调查,结果发现青少年对于未来可能从事的工作抱有不切实际的期望。 Four of the five most popular choices were traditional professional roles: doctors,teachers,business managers and lawyers. Teenagers clustered around the most popular jobs,with the top ten being chosen by47%of boys and53%of girls.Those shares were significantly higher than when the survey was conducted back in2000. 在五个最受欢迎的职业选择中有四个是传统的职业角色:医生、教师、企业经理和律师。青少年对于最受欢迎工作的选择呈现了聚集性,有47%的男孩和53%的女孩选择了排在前十位的职业。这一比例显著高于2000年调查时的水平。 The rationale for this selection was partly down to wishful thinking on the part of those surveyed(designers,actors and musical performers were three of the top15jobs).Youth must be allowed a bit of hope. 受访者做出这一选择往往是出于自己的一厢情愿(最受欢迎的15个职业中有3个分别是设计师、演员和歌手)。我们必须给年轻人一点希望。
经济学人:中国乡村教育 写在前面的话: 篇章阅读一直是高考英语拉分重点,也是同学们一直头疼的问题。对于阅读部分,同学们一方面要掌握答题技巧,扩充词汇量,另一方面也要拓展自己的阅读面,尤其是阅读一些外刊原文,体会英文地道表达和文章结构的呈现方式。虽然一开始会很难,但是长期坚持下去,阅读能力就会有质的提升! 对于本资料的使用: 如果你是阅读一般,平时不能完全看懂文章,答题正确率较低的同学,先不要阅读原文,直接阅读每个段落的词汇详解部分,打好词汇基础。然后看每个段落的句子分析,再打开本文,进行阅读,回顾词汇及句子分析,感受原文风采。 如果你是阅读能力强,词汇储备量高,答题正确率高的同学,可直接阅读本篇外刊文章,挑战自己,尽最大能力去理解文章中的句子含义,了解文章大意。之后再看下面的词汇详细介绍,查缺补漏。如此,进一步提升自己的阅读能力,强化语言实力。 So, are you ready now ? Let's read it! 篇章总览 来源:本文来自经济学人2017.4.15. 主要内容:中国乡村教育现状。 语言特点:中国特色表达;高频中等词汇;写作亮点短语;固定搭配短语;熟词僻义。Rural education in China :Separate and unequal Last year some images spread on the internet in China. They showed children descending an 800-metre (2,600-foot) rock face on rickety ladders made of vines, wood and rusty metal. Their destination: school. The photographer was told by a local official that "seven or eight" people had died after losing their grip. Yet the children did this regularly—there is no school at the top of the mountain in Sichuan province where they live. The photographs conveyed two striking aspects of life in the Chinese countryside: a hunger for education so strong that children will risk their lives for it, and a lack of government attention to the needs of rural students. In many ways, education in China is improving. Since 2000 the annual tally of students graduating from university has increased nearly eightfold, to more than 7.5 million. But many rural students are neglected by China's school system, and they are not the only ones. So too are the children of migrants who have moved to the cities from the countryside and poor students who want to go to senior high school. This is not only unfair; it is also counterproductive. China faces a demographic crunch: its workforce is shrinking and it can no longer depend on cheap, low-skilled migrant labour to
China in Laos Busted flush How a Sino-Lao special economic zone hit the skids May 26th 2011 | BOTEN, LAOS | from the print edition ?Tweet ? Soon all this will be jungle again AT HOME and abroad, China is a byword for fast-track development, where yesterday’s paddy field is tomorrow’s factory, highway or hotel. Less noticed is that such development can just as quickly go into reverse. Golden City, in Boten, just over the border from China in tiny Laos, is a case in point. When a Hong Kong-registered company signed a 30-year, renewable lease with the Lao government in 2003 to set up a 1,640-hectare special economic zone built with mainland money and expertise, Golden City was touted as a
中文导读 外资风投:黯然离场? 上世纪90年代开始,“copy to China”风潮涌起,外资在中国这块赚钱的风水宝地如鱼得水。 如今,中国市场的魅力依然吸引着众多外资入局,但他们日子并不好过。 中国本土孵化器遍地开花、本土企业不断崛起,对外资风投形成了强有力的挤压。 当下中国科技大爆发、政策逐渐健全,“copy from China”的时代已经开启。未来,外资还会青睐中国市场吗? less where that came from 与文章最后一句呼应,改用习语More Where that Came from:A greater number of similar things can be pro-vided in the future 陆续有来 skittish adj.not very serious and with ideas and feelings that keep changing 轻浮的;易变的;反复无常的 venture capitalist n.someone who makes money by investing in high risk projects 风险投资者 demo (=demostration)n.an act of showing or explaining how sth works or is done 示范;示范表演;演示 Y Combinator 美国著名创业孵化器,Y Combinator 扶持初创企业并为其提供创业指南 startup n.a small business that has recently been started by someone 新创办的小公司 vie (with sb)(for sth)与某人争夺某物SYN contend with sb for sth high-profile adj.receiving or involving a lot of attention and discus-sion on television,in newspapers,etc.经常出镜/见报的;高姿态的 accelerator a company that helps new companies get started by giving them such things as office space,legal help and marketing services in exchange for payment 企业加速器/孵化器SYN incubator the like of sb/sth (also sb’s/sth’s like )something similar to someone or a particular person or thing,or of equal importance or value 像某人(物)一样的人/物SYN equivalent ,match Dropbox 一款网络文件同步工具,提供在线存储服务,类似于百度云pull out of to move away from sth or stop being involved in it 脱离,退出 nurture v.to help sb/sth to develop and be successful 扶持;帮助;支持SYN foster It’s important to nurture a good working relationship.维持良好的工作关系非常重要。 localised adj.地方化的,本土化的incarnation n.化身,代表 in the context of 在?情况下;在?背景下 rift a serious disagreement between people that stops their relation- ship from continuing 分裂;分歧;严重不和SYN rupture ominous suggesting that sth bad is going to happen in the future 预兆的;恶兆的;不吉利的SYN foreboding By China,For China,Of China 建于中国、为了中国、属于中国,陆奇加入YC 时提的条件 arm a section of a large organization that deals with one particular activity 分部;职能部门 at odds with to be different from sth,when the two things should be the same (与?)有差异,相矛盾SYN conflict with venture capital money that is invested in a new company to help it develop,which may involve a lot of risk 风险资本(投入新公司的资金,风险很大) red-hot adj.new,exciting and of great interest to people 热门的,火爆的SYN sizzling operation n.a business organization;a company 商业机构;公司 Sand Hill Road 沙山路,硅谷一个普通地名,被称为“西海岸华尔街”,上百家声名如雷贯耳的风险投资公司在这里汇集,与华尔街不同,这里以投资高新技术产业为主 heavyweight n.a very important person,organization or thing that influences others 有影响力的人(或组织、事物)covet v.to want sth very much,especially sth that belongs to sb else 渴望;贪求(尤指别人的东西);觊觎 exchange n.a building where business people met in the past to buy and sell a particular type of goods 交易所 Investing in Chinese technology Less where that came from Homegrown rivals and skittish American investors are making life harder for foreign venture capitalists in China T HE FIRST “demo day”in Beijing last November of Y Combinator (YC)hosted two dozen local startups vying for the attention of high-profile investors.It marked the entrance into China of Silicon Valley’s most famous accelerator ,which has helped launch the likes of Airbnb and Dropbox .Then,days later,YC abruptly announced it was pulling out of the country. In a statement YC said that it was returning,under a new boss,to in- vesting in startups from its Californian base.Its Chinese startups will be nurtured by MiraclePlus,YC China’s new,fully localised incarna- tion .Yet in the context of a deepening Sino-American rift ,the retreat looks ominous .“Under the current global environment,to realise our mission—By China,For China,Of China —we must have the ability to master our own destiny,”wrote MiraclePlus in a social-media post,citing Lu Qi,its boss,whom YC had hired to set up its Chinese arm in 2018.(Mr Lu declined to be interviewed for this article.) At first glance,YC’s fate seems at odds with the broader health of foreign venture capital (VC)in China,with its red-hot tech indus-try.The Chinese operations of Sand Hill Road heavyweights such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital—whose fifth Chinese growth-stage fund raised $1.8bn,twice as much as its last—are thriv-ing.Chinese founders have coveted attention from foreign funds,seen as the best route to listing on American exchanges and keener than Chinese counterparts to back ideas that take longer to make money.
GMAT备考:《经济学人》The Economist 常用词汇总结(8) 141、富有价格弹性(Price elastic) 如果需求的价格弹性大于1,那么商品的需求就是富有价格弹性。 142、需求的价格弹性(Price elasticity of demand) 需求的价格弹性是指价格变化1%导致的需求量变化的百分比(习惯上通常以正数表示)。 143、供给的价格弹性(Price elasticity of supply) 供给的价格弹性是指价格变化1%导致的供给量变化的百分比。 144、最低限价(Price floor) 最低限价是指政府对某种商品所规定的。例如,联邦农业计划规定了小麦和玉米的。 145、缺乏价格弹性(Price inelastic) 如果需求的价格弹性小于1,那么商品的需求就是缺乏价格弹性。 146、价格( Price leader) 价格是指在寡头垄断的行业中制定价格并且其他厂商愿意
跟随的厂商。 147、价格系统(Price system) 在价格系统下,商品和服务都有一个价格,在纯粹的资本主义经济中价格执行一个经济系统的基本职能(决定生产什么、怎样生产、每个人应该得到多少以及一个国家的增长率应该是多少)。 148、委托--代理问题(Principal-agent problem) 由于经理或工人可能会追求自己的目标,即便这样做会减少企业所有者的利润,从而导致了委托--代理问题。经理或工人是为所有者工作的代理人,所有者是委托人。 149、囚犯困境(Prisoner`s dilemma) 囚犯困境是指这样一种情形,此时两个人(或厂商)合作要比不合作好,但是每个人都觉得不合作符合他的利益,因此每个人的状况都要坏于如果他们合作时的境况。 150、私人成本(Private cost) 私人成本是指单个使用者为了能够使用某一资源而带来的费用。
Cloth of gold 一块价值堪比黄金的布 Why the economic value of a face mask is$56.14 为什么说一个口罩的经济价值是56.14美元 After a brutal first six months of the year,governments across the world are hoping for an economic bounce-back.Rich-world GDP fell by about 10%in the first half of2020. 在经历今年上半年的残酷考验后,世界各国政府都期待经济能够触底反弹。2020年上半年,发达国家的GDP下降了约10%。 Yet much has changed since—including that more people are now wearing masks.Economists,obsessed with translating everything into GDP,wonder if more widespread face-covering could help the recovery.然而,自从越来越多的人戴上口罩后,情况发生了显著变化。经济学家痴迷于用GDP来解释一切事物,如今他们想知道,随着更多的人戴上了口罩,经济能否走向复苏。The thinking goes that masks can,in part,substitute for lockdowns. People wearing them need not be discouraged as much from using public transport.More shops and offices might be able to reopen,albeit while practising social distancing. 这种想法基于这样一个逻辑,戴口罩在一定程度上可以代替封锁措施。当人们戴上口罩后,就不必再对公共交通工具进行限制了。更多的商店和办公室也将重新开放,尽管是在保持社交距离的前提下。 Calculations from Goldman Sachs,a bank,suggest that a15 percentage-point rise in the share of the population that wears masks
《经济学家》读译参考(第13篇):一路繁衍——你知道外来入侵物种吗? Go forth and multiply 一往无前,生生不息 WHAT makes for a successful invasion? Often, the answer is to have better weapons than the enemy. And, as it is with people, so it is with plants—at least, that is the conclusion of a p_______①published in ★Biology Letters[1] by Naomi Cappuccino, of Carleton University, and Thor Arnason, of the University of Ottawa, both in Canada. 怎样才能成功入侵?答案常常是:拥有比敌人更好的武器。人是这样,植物也是如此——至少,《生物书简》上发表的一篇论文是这么认为的,作者是来自加拿大加里敦大学的纳奥米?卡普奇诺和渥太华大学的索尔?阿纳森。 The phenomenon of alien species ★popping up[2] in unexpected parts of the world has grown over the past few d________② as people and goods become more mobile and (1)?plant seeds and animal larvae have ★hitched[3] along for the ride?. Most such aliens blend into the ecosystem in which they arrive without too much fuss. (Indeed, many probably fail to establish themselves at all—but those failures, of course, are never noticed.) Occasionally, though, something ★goes bananas[4] and starts trying to take the place over, and an invasive species is born. Dr Cappuccino and Dr Arnason asked themselves w_______③. 过去的几十年,随着人和货物的流动日益频繁,植物种子和动物幼体也乘机“搭便车”四处播散,世界各地无意间出现了越来越多的外来物种。这些外来物种大多数都轻而易举地融入了所到之处的生态系统。(事实上,许多物种可能还没有站稳脚跟——当然,人们从未注意到这一点。)不过,偶尔也有某些物种疯狂繁殖,开始企图占领原有物种的生长空间,一种入侵物种就这样形成了。卡普奇诺和阿纳森对此感到百思不得其解。 One hypothesis is that aliens leave their predators b________④. Since the predators in their new homelands are not adapted to exploit them, they are able to reproduce unchecked. That is a nice idea, but it does not explain why only certain aliens become invasive. Dr Cappuccino and Dr Arnason suspected this might be because native predators are [b](2)
(创业指南)创新创业在武汉(补考完整答案版)
《创新创业于武汉》试卷 2011-07-0721:41:43|分类:学校|标签:|字号大中小订阅 试卷壹 1、单选题 鼓励就业和再就业,对军队转业干部从事个体运营,其雇工7人(含7人)以下的,自领取税务登记证 之日起()内免征营业税和个人所得税。 A.1年 B.2年 C.3年 D.4年 用户答案:C 对符合贷款条件的劳动密集型小企业,当年新招用持《再就业优惠证》人员达到企业现有于职职工总数30%之上,且和其签订1年之上期限劳动合同的,根据实际招用人数,可享受最高()万元贴息贷款优惠政 策。 A.200 B.300 C.500 D.800 用户答案:B 创新人才开发资金采取()的方式,对于武汉市高新技术领域及新兴产业、支柱产业内拥有自主知识产权且开展创新活动的高层次领军人才和团队进行资助。 A.无偿资助,择优支持 B.适度补偿,适度资助 C.有偿补偿,择优支持 D.无偿资助,适度支持 用户答案:A 于创业环境中有壹种情况是由于创业环境较好,便有壹大批同类型的创业企业聚集。这些集聚的创业企业会把周边的空气和饮水环境给恶化了。这种造成相邻关系恶化的情况,也影响了创业机会。这属于()。 A.表象关系 B.单要素攀升关系 C.同因影响相邻关系 D.不能确定 用户答案:C 要改善全民创业环境,对个人而言,要()。 A.不断提高资金供给 B.快速降低创业者创业的门槛 C.逐渐降低创业者创业的门槛 D.无法确定 用户答案:C 新产品、新过程、新系统和新服务的首次商业性转化是指()。 A.自主创新 B.技术创新 C.模仿创新 D.产品创新 用户答案:B 渐进式的创新,突破性、革命性的创新是从()的角度对创新进行分类。 A.创新的方法 B.创新的过程 C.创业 D.创新的本质 用户答案:C