查尔斯·狄更斯的生活 译者： Daisyyu 原作者：The Economist 发表时间：2011-09-30
查尔斯·约翰·赫芬姆·狄更斯，英国作家。1812年2月7日生于朴次茅斯市郊，1870年6月9日卒于罗切斯特附近的盖茨山庄。19世纪英国批判现实主义小说家。狄更斯特别注意描写生活在英国社会底层的“小人物”的生活遭遇，深刻地反映了当时英国复杂的社会现实，为英国批判现实主义文学的开拓和发展做出了卓越的贡献。他的作品至今依然盛行，对英国文学发展起到了深远的影响。主要作品《匹克威克外传》、《雾都孤儿》 、《老古玩店》、《艰难时世》、《我们共同的朋友》。
The life of Charles Dickens 查尔斯·狄更斯的生活
Beloved bully 十分爱
Two welcome new biographies of Charles Dickens whose birth 200 years ago will be celebrated next February
两部查尔斯·狄更斯的受欢迎的传记，下周二庆祝狄更斯诞辰200年
Oct 1st 2011 | from the print edition 2011年10月1日
Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Belknap Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and ￡20. Buy from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
《成为狄更斯：小说家的创造才能》，Robert Douglas-Fairhurst著，贝拉纳普出版社，400页，$29.95 和 ￡20
Charles Dickens: A Life. By Claire Tomalin. Penguin Press; 576 pages; $35. Viking; ￡30 . Buy from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
《查尔斯·狄更斯：一生》，Claire Tomalin著，企鹅出版社，576页，$35
THERE is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality. “If I couldn’t walk fast and far”, he once said, “I think I should explode and perish.” He exhilarated and exhausted himself. Both these biographies, timed for the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth next February, bring out the mad energy of the man.
只要有狄更斯物质性的爆发的小说，能即刻直接了解他的生活。“如果我不能走得快又远，”他曾经说道，“我想我应该爆炸，然后腐烂。”他快活了自己，也耗尽了自己。这些书特地在下周二狄更斯二百年诞辰出版，道出了这个男人疯狂的能量。
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out to counter what he sees as the literary man-of-destiny version of Dickens, to recover the uncertainty, muddle and loose ends. He concentrates therefore on the early unsettled years, up to 1838 when, at 26, Dickens decided to sign himself “Charles Dickens”. Until then he had just been “Boz”, a sketch writer and the hugely popular author of “The Pickwick Papers”.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 开始反对他所看到的狄更斯为文学应运而生的人的版本，恢复了不确定性，胡乱思考和未知结局。因而他集中于早期的未确定的年份，一直到1838年，当时狄更斯26岁，决定签自己为“查尔斯·狄更斯。”那时，他刚是“Boz”，一个速写作家以及《匹克威克别传 》的很受欢迎的作者。
But writing was hardly a proper job. Since the age of 15, he had been racing through more plausible alternatives: from legal clerk, to courtroom and parliamentary shorthand reporter, then on to journalism and ambitions in the theatre. Mr Douglas-Fairhurst’s early cut-off date enables him to slow these years down, to listen for the echoes between the life and the writings and to draw on a broad range of contemporary references.
但是写作不是一份合适的工作。从15岁后，他一直盘桓于似乎更加合理的选择：从法律工作员到法庭和议会的速记记者，然后转向新闻，在剧院里有了追求。Douglas-Fairhurst先生的早期的截止日期使得他能将这些年慢下来，能够倾听生命与作品之间的共鸣，依据广泛的当代参考。
As he shows, the question of alternatives, of the road taken or not taken, fascinated Dickens. “See how near I may have been to another sort of life,” he wrote of himself at 20 when he had been on the point of auditioning as an actor. Or, more fearfully, he wrote of his 12-year-old self: “I might easily have been…a little robber or a little vagabond.” He came that close, he believed, when his father (the model for Mr Micawber in “David Copperfield”) was imprisoned for debt and, as was customary, the family joined him—except for young Charles who took lodgings and was set to work in a blacking factory.
正如他表露的，选择的问题，这条路采取还是不采取，吸引了狄更斯。“看，我差点就过另一种生活了，”他20岁的时候写自己，彼时，他正作为一个演员去试音。或者，更恐惧地，他写道12岁地自己：“我很可能已经是……一个小强盗或者一个流浪汉。”当他的父亲（《大卫·科波菲尔》中米考伯先生的原型）因债入狱，按照习惯，他会加入那个群体时，他相信，他差一点——要不是因为年轻的查尔斯有住处，在一家黑工厂里工作。
It was the defining trauma of his life. It opened the crack in his imagination through which he saw, a hair’s breadth away, a whole world of other sorts of life: from the man next to him in the library, in his Boz sketch “Shabby-genteel People”, who blacked his clothes to hide the frays, to the terrified criminal in the condemned cell in “A Visit to Newgate”, just feet away from a whistling passer-by.
那是他生活中起决定作用的创伤。通过他的所见，另一种生活的全新世界打开了他的想象力：从图书馆里他身旁的那个男人，在他的Boz 里他素描为“死要面子的人”，把衣服染黑以遮掩破损的地方，到《访问纽盖特监狱》死刑监狱里那个非常惧怕的罪犯，也只是那个吹着口哨一英尺远的过路人。
Mr Douglas-Fairhurst covers much ground, but one of his central ideas is Dickens’s pervasive sense of what might have been. He sees it in the false trails and shadow plots (take “Great Expectations”, where Pip imagines himself in one story though is really in another), in his doublings among characters and in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes (for instance in “A Christmas Carol”).
Douglas-Fairhurst 先生涵盖了很多方面，但是他的中心思想之一是狄更斯对他所见的普遍感知。他在虚假的痕迹和影子情节里能见到（比如《远大前程》，Pip 想象自己在一个故事里尽管在另一个故事里是真的），也能在他对性格的放大、动荡的可能性和相互矛盾的结果中能看到（比如在《圣诞颂歌》里）。
“Becoming Dickens” is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative. In a sense, Claire Tomalin’s enormous task is more straightforward. She tells a story. Clear-eyed, sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas, alive with incident and detail, with places and people. She writes of publishers, illustrators, collaborators and all Dickens’s intersecting circles of friends and family. It is wonderfully done.
《成为狄更斯》是一本有独创性的、幽默的、才华横溢的分析，因为它差不多就是一个故事。在某种意义上，Claire Tomalin的浩大任务更直接。她讲故事。头脑清晰、有同情心、博学，她展开在整块画布上，充满了在一些地方和一些人的事件和细节。她写了出版社、插画家、合作者以及狄更斯所有的朋友和家人的兴趣圈。简直是项惊人的工作。
Mr Douglas-Fairhurst observes that almost nothing can be said of Dickens of which the opposite is not also true. Ms Tomalin richly bears that out. Here is the loyal friend and philanthropist, the champion of the poor—and also the bully. Here too is the man who could light up a room, the clown, the mimic and dancer of hornpipes—but also the obsessive who prowled the streets unable to “get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds”.
Douglas-Fairhurst先生观察到，几乎没有任何可以说的，狄更斯相反面也不一定是真实的。Tomalin女士有力地证实了。有忠实的朋友、慈善家，穷人的战士——也有欺凌弱小者。有可以照亮整个房间的人、小丑、模仿者以及角笛舞者——但是也有徘徊在街道上无法“摆脱阴影除非我在人群中失去了他们”的强迫性神经患者。
After his death, Dickens’s daughter Katey (shown above, with her sister Mamie, being read to by their father) said that she had loved him immeasurably, but that he was “a wicked man”. She was thinking of her mother Catherine, so passive, so overlooked and so constantly pregnant (they had ten children). Having decided she was the wrong wife for him, Dickens literally partitioned off her bed, then forced her into a separation while mocking her to their friends. Ms Tomalin takes care to notice Catherine and the other women in Dickens’s life. Power was vital to him, the power to make his public laugh and cry and love him for it—better still, to see them do it at his famous public readings. But a brutal streak went with it.
他死后，狄更斯的女儿Katey（ 上图有显示，和她的姐姐Mamie，和她们的父亲一起阅读）说她很爱他，但是他是一个“恶人”。她想起了她母亲凯瑟琳，消极被动，总是被忽略，不断怀孕（他们有十个孩子）。决定做他的妻子是错误的，狄更斯随便隔开她的床，然后强迫她分居，在他们的朋友面前嘲笑她。Tomalin 女士坚持注意凯瑟琳和狄更斯生命中的其他女人。至关重要的是他的力量，让公众为他哭、笑以及爱他——更好的是，在他有名的公共读物上看见他们这样做。但是伴随着一个残酷的倾向。
Ms Tomalin ends with an exhausted Dickens splashing his head in a bucket of water, and writing on. After all, it is the writer she is interested in, his range, invention and universality. Everyone read him in his lifetime, high and low. Speaking of Pickwick, she remarks that Dickens seemed to feed his story “directly into the bloodstream of the nation…making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them.” When he died, among the flowers at his graveside in Westminster Abbey were small bunches tied with rags.
Tomalin 女士最终以精疲力竭的狄更斯将头埋在一桶水里，然后继续写作结尾。毕竟，他是她感兴趣的作家，不论是他的领域、创造才能还是多面性。每个人一生中在读他，不论高低贵贱。说道匹克威，她评论道，狄更斯似乎注入他的故事“直接进入国家的血液里……让他的读者觉得他就是每个人的个人朋友。”他死后，威斯特敏教堂他的坟墓边的花间有一小束一小束的捆绑的碎布。
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