旅行的艺术:旅行中的特定场所-4

4

4

波德莱尔羡慕的不仅是旅程的起点或终点，如车站、码头、机场等地方，他也羡慕那些交通工具，特别是海上行驶的轮船。他曾写道：“凝视一艘船，你会发现它散发出深邃、神秘的魅力。”他到巴黎的圣尼古拉斯港观看平底船，到鲁昂和诺曼底的港口观看更大的船只。他惊讶于和这些船只相关联的科技成就，它们竟能使如此笨重复杂的船体协调合作，优美地穿行海上。一艘巨轮让他想起“一个庞大、复杂却又灵活机敏的动物，它充满活力，承载着人类所有的嗟叹和梦想”。

Baudelaire admired not only the places of departure and arrival, but also the machines of motion, in particular ocean-going ships. He wrote of 'the profound and mysterious charm that arises from looking at a ship'. He went to see flat-bottomed boats, the 'caboteurs', in the Port Saint Nicolas in Paris and larger ships in Rouen and the Normandy ports. He marvelled at the technological achievements behind them, at how objects so heavy and multifarious could be made to move with elegance and cohesion across the seas.A great ship made him think of 'a vast, immense, complicated, but agile creature, an animal full of spirit, suffering and heaving all the sighs and ambitions of humanity'.

在观看一架较大型的飞机时也会有同样的感想：飞机也是一个很“庞大”很“复杂”的动物，尽管机身庞大，尽管低层大气一片混沌，它却仍能找准自己的航向，穿越苍穹。一架飞机停靠在一个登机口，相形之下，它周围的行李车和检修工是如此的渺小。看见如此场景，人们会抛开所有的科学解释发出惊叹：如此庞大的飞机如何能移动，哪怕只是移动几米，遑论飞到日本！楼房，也算是人类所能建造的少数可与之相比的庞然大物之一，但地球的轻微震动便可能使它们四分五裂，它们透风渗水，强风下，还会遭受损坏，比不得飞机的灵活和泰然。

Similar sentiments may arise when looking at one of the larger species of aeroplane, it too a 'vast' and 'complicated' creature which defies its size and the chaos of the lower atmosphere to steer serenely across the firmament. Seeing one parked at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, one is induced to feel surprise, overriding any scientific explanation, at how such a thing might move-a few metres, let alone to Japan. Buildings, among the few man-made structures of comparable size, do not prepare us for a plane's agility or self-possession; for these buildings are cracked by slight movements of the earth, they leak air and water and lose parts of themselves to the wind.

生活中很少有什么时刻能像飞机起飞升空时那样让人释然。飞机先是静静地停在机场跑道的一头，从机舱的玻璃窗看出去，是一长串熟悉的景观：公路、储油罐、草地和有着古铜色窗户的酒店；还有我们早已熟知的大地，在地上，即便是借助小汽车，我们的行进仍然缓慢；在地上，人和汽车正费力向山顶爬行；在地面上，每隔半英里左右，总会有一排树或建筑挡住我们的视线……而现在，随着飞机引擎的正常轰鸣（走廊的玻璃只有点轻微的颤动），我们突然平稳地升上了天空，眼前展现的是直视无碍的广阔视野。在陆地上我们得花上整个下午才能走完的旅程，在飞机上，只要眼珠微微转动便可一扫而过：我们可以穿过伯克郡，参观梅登黑德，在布拉克内尔兜圈子，俯视M4高速公路。

Few seconds in life are more releasing than those in which a plane ascends to the sky. Looking out of a window from inside a machine standing stationery at the beginning of a runway, we face a vista of familiar proportions: a road, oil cylinders, grass and hotels with copper-tinted windows; the earth as we have always known it, where we make slow progress, even with the help of a car, where calf muscles and engines strain to reach the summit of hills, where, half a mile ahead or less, there is almost always a line of trees or buildings to restrict our view. Then suddenly, accompanied by the controlled rage of the engines (with only a slight tremor from glasses in the galley), we rise fluently into the atmosphere and an immense horizon opens up across which we can wander without impediment. A journey which on earth would have taken an afternoon can be accomplished with an infinitesimal movement of the eye; we can cross Berkshire, visit Maidenhead, skirt over Bracknell and survey the M4.

飞机的起飞为我们的心灵带来愉悦，因为飞机迅疾的上升是实现人生转机的极佳象征。飞机展呈的力量能激励我们联想到人生中类似的、决定性的转机；它让我们想象自己终有一天能奋力攀升，摆脱现实中赫然迫近的人生困厄。

There is psychological pleasure in this take-off too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives; to imagine that we too might one day surge above much that now looms over us.

这种视野上新的优势使陆地上的景观整饬有序，一目了然：公路弯曲，绕过山头；河流延伸，通向湖泊；电缆塔从发电厂一直架设到各个城镇；那些在陆地上看上去布局混乱的街道，现在看来似乎是精心规划的条格布局。我们的眼睛试图把此刻所见与先前的认知连结在一起，像是用一种新的语言来解读一本熟悉的书。那些灯火所在之处一定是纽伯里，那条道路一定是A33，因为它是从M4高速公路分出来的。照此思路，我们的生活是如此狭隘，就像井底之蛙：我们生活在那个世界里，但我们几乎从未像老鹰和上帝那样睹其全貌。

The new vantage point lends order and logic to the landscape: roads curve to avoid hills, rivers trace paths to lakes, pylons lead from power stations to towns, streets that from earth seemed laid out without thought emerge as well-planned grids. The eye attempts to match what it can see with what the mind knows should be there, like a reader trying to decipher a familiar book in a new language. Those lights must be Newbury, that road the A33 as it leaves the M4. And to think that all along, hidden from our sight, our lives were this small: the world we live in but almost never see; the way we must appear to the hawk and to the gods.

飞机引擎似乎毫不费力便将我们带到高空。悬在高空，周围是难以想象的寒冷，这些飞机引擎用一种我们看不到的方式持久地驱动飞机，在它们内侧表层上，用红色字母印出的是它们惟一的请求，要求我们不要在引擎上行走，要求我们只给它们添加D50TFI-S4号油，这些请求是给四千英里外还在睡梦中的一帮穿着工作服的人的信息。

The engines show none of the effort required to take us to this place. They hang in the inconceivable cold, patiently and invisibly powering the craft, their sole requests, painted on their inner flanks in red letters, being that we not walk on them and feed them 'Oil only: D50 TFI-S4', a message for a forthcoming set of men in overalls, 4,000 miles away and still asleep.

身处高空，可以看见很多的云，但对此人们似乎谈论不多。在某处海洋的上空，我们飞过一大片像是棉花糖似的白色云岛，对此，没有人觉得这值得大惊小怪，尽管在弗兰西斯卡 [4] 的绘画作品中，这云岛可以是天使，甚至是上帝的一个绝佳的座位。机舱内，没有人起身煞有其事地宣布说，从窗户看出去，我们正在云海上飞行；而对达·芬奇 [5] 、普桑 [6] 、克劳德·洛兰 [7] 和康斯特布尔 [8] 等人而言，这景致恐怕会让他们留恋。

There is not much talk about the clouds visible up here. No one seems to think it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we are flying past a vast white candy-floss island which would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that, out of the window, we are flying over a cloud , a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.

飞机上的食物，如果是坐在厨房里享用，可以说是毫无特色，甚至让人倒胃，但现在，因为面对的是云海，这些食品却有了不同的滋味和情趣（一如坐在海边峭壁之巅，一边看惊涛拍岸，一边野炊，这时吃哪怕是普通的面包和奶酪也会让人神采高扬）。仅依赖飞行中的小餐板，在原本毫无家的情趣的机舱内我们感觉到了如家的自在：我们吃的是冷面包卷和一小盘土豆色拉，赏的是星际美景。

Food that, if sampled in a kitchen, would have been banal or even offensive, acquires a new taste and interest in the presence of the clouds (like a picnic of bread and cheese that delights us when eaten on a cliff-top above a pounding sea). With the inflight tray, we make ourselves at home in this unhomely place: we appropriate the extraterrestrial landscape with the help of a chilled bread roll and a plastic tray of potato salad.

细看之下，我们发觉机舱外陪伴着我们的云朵并非是我们想象中的情形。在一些油画作品中，或者是从地面上看去，这些云朵看上去是平平的椭圆体，但从飞机上看去，它们像是由剃须泡沫层层堆砌而成的巨型方尖塔。它们和水气的关联是显而易见的，但它们更容易散发，更加变幻无常，因而更像是刚刚爆炸的东西所产生的尘雾，仍然在变异之中。人们至今还在困惑，为什么不可以坐在一团云上。

Our airborne companions outside the window look unexpected when scrutinized. In paintings and from the ground, they appear like horizontal ovaloids, but here they resemble giant obelisks made of piles of unsteady shaving foam. Their kinship with steam is clearer, they are more volatile, the product of something that may have just exploded and is still mutating. It remains perplexing that it would be impossible to sit on one.

波德莱尔清楚如何表达对这些云朵的喜爱。

Baudelaire knew how to love the clouds.

陌生人

THE OUTSIDER

Tell me, whom do you love most, you enigmatic man: your

告诉我，你这个神秘的人，你说说你最爱谁呢？父亲还是母亲？姐妹还是兄弟？

father, your mother, your sister or your brother?

哦……我没有父亲也没有母亲，没有姐妹也没有兄弟。

I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

那朋友呢？

Your friends?

这……您说出了一个我至今还一无所知的词儿。

You're using a word I've never understood.

祖国呢？

Your country?

我不知道这个地方在哪。

I don't know where that might lie.

美人呢？

Beauty?

I would love her with all my heart, if only she were a goddess

如果她真的美若天仙，长生不老，我会很爱她，全心全意。

and immortal.

金钱呢？

Money?

我恨它，就像你恨上帝一样。

I hate it as you hate God.

那么，你究竟爱什么呀？你这个不同寻常的陌生人！

Well then, what do you love, you strange outsider?

I love the clouds …the clouds that pass by …over there…

我爱云……过往的浮云……那边……那边……美妙的云！

over there …those lovely clouds!

云朵带来的是一种宁静。在我们的下面，是我们恐惧和悲伤之所，那里有我们的敌人和同仁，而现在，他们都在地面上，微不足道，也无足轻重。也许我们早已参透了这样的真谛，但现在，我们倚着飞机冰凉的舷窗，这种感觉变得从未有过的真切——我们乘坐的飞机是一位渊博的哲学老师，是听从波德莱尔的召唤的信徒：

The clouds usher in tranquillity. Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs; all of them now infinitesimal, scratches on the earth. We may know this old lesson in perspective well enough, but rarely does it seem as true as when we are pressed against the cold plane window, our craft a teacher of profound philosophy-and a faithful disciple of the Baudelairean command:

列车，让我和你同行！轮船，带我离开这里！

Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!

带我走，到远方。此地，土俱是泪！

Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!