评论
打印
FOR years I was frustrated, and a bit embarrassed, to admit that I didn’t much like the work of Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died Monday. He was, after all, Germany’s most acclaimed writer of the postwar era — not just our national poet, but for many Germans, our conscience. Yet he did not speak to me.
多年以来，每当我承认自己不太喜欢周一去世的诺贝尔奖得主君特·格拉斯(Guenter Grass)的作品时，我总是有挫败感，还有点惭愧。毕竟，他是德国战后时期最负盛名的作家——他不只是我们的民族诗人，对于许多德国人来说，他还是我们的良知。然而，他却没能引起我的共鸣。
His novel “Crabwalk,” published in 2002, was the first book I felt I didn’t have to finish. I was angry with myself. I took pride in finishing every book I started, and here was a novel I should have found impossible not to like: It dealt with memory, and the Nazis; it used the metaphor of the crab’s gait to show how Germans had to go backward to turn forward, not only with regard to what they had done as Nazis but also what the war had done to those who weren’t Nazis — and to their children, to people like me.
格拉斯2002年出版的小说《蟹行》(Crabwalk)，是第一本我觉得自己没必要读完的书。我对自己感到恼火。我一直为读完每一本自己开始看的书而感到骄傲，而且我本来绝不应该不喜欢这本小说：它关注的是记忆，以及纳粹；它用蟹步的比喻，来阐述德国人不得不后退才能转身前行，这不光涉及德国人作为纳粹所做过的事，还有战争对除了纳粹之外的人的影响，以及对他们孩子的影响，比如我。
Yet his work didn’t work on me. The best explanation I could give myself back then for giving up on him was that I simply didn’t like his style.
然而，他的这部作品没有打动我。我当时给自己放弃读他的作品找的最好的理由是，我不喜欢他的风格。
I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.
直到我见到了格拉斯本人，我才明白了我沮丧的原因。几个月前，他从位于波罗的海沿岸的吕贝克市的家，来到了位于附近的汉堡市的我们报纸的办公室。会议室挤得水泄不通：编辑、助理、实习生，所有人都挤了进来，想要一睹这个活着的传奇。尽管我不确定自己是唯一对此人怀有复杂情绪的人，现场洋溢着的几乎全都是对他的崇拜之情。那是一种非宗教式的崇拜，我估计年轻一些的作家永远不会有此体验，即使得了诺贝尔奖也一样。
Dressed in a red wool sweater and a thick tweed jacket and sipping white wine, Mr. Grass spent most of the time talking about himself, and how much his work as a public intellectual had influenced our paper, Die Zeit. The longer he spoke, the more clearly I felt what had always made me uneasy about him. And not just him, but the entire class of older left-wing German intellectuals that he represented.
格拉斯穿了一件红色羊毛衫，外面罩着厚花呢外套。他抿着白葡萄酒，多数时间都在谈论自己，以及作为一名公共知识分子，他的作品对我们的报纸——《时代》周报(Die Zeit)——产生了多大的影响。他讲话的时间越长，我就越清楚地感受到了他哪里让我觉得不对劲。这不光是他一个人，还有他所代表的所有老一代的德国左翼知识分子。
Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness.
我真想对他说，你们那一代人取得成功太容易了。在你成长的时代，强大的意识形态和坚定的判断，比努力研究我们周围究竟发生了什么更加重要。你如何看待世界比世界究竟如何运转更重要。在你们的正义之中，总是有太多自我。
Today we know that ideologies aren’t realities. Writers and intellectuals don’t have that crutch; what is demanded of them, in the first place, is not moral judgment, but clearheaded analysis of our ever-accelerating world. Only in your time, Günter Grass, could you become a moral authority. Today, you would never make it.
今天，我们知道了那些意识形态并不是真实事物。如今的作家和知识分子没有那种拐杖；他们的首要责任不是道德判断，而是对我们这个加速变化的世界的敏锐分析。只有在你们那个时代，君特·格拉斯，你才能成为一个道德权威。在今天，你永远也做不到。
I wanted to say all of this, in front of my enraptured colleagues. But I didn’t dare.
我当时很想把这番话说给我兴奋的同事们。但我不敢。
Someone once said that the days in which politicians decided the fate of entire nations over a glass of whiskey are gone. But so are the days when writers could sit down and divide the world into good and evil through the haze of a tobacco pipe, as Mr. Grass and other members of Gruppe 47, a writers’ group formed to renew German literature, did so famously in the 1950s and ’60s.
有人曾说过，政治家们在喝一杯威士忌的功夫决定整个国家命运的时代已经过去了。然而，作家们坐在那里叼着烟斗，在烟雾缭绕中把世界按善恶划分的时代，也一去不复返了。众所周知，格拉斯和47社(Gruppe 47)的其他成员上世纪五六十年代就是这么做的。47社是为振兴德国文学而成立的作家组织。
To say that this is a healthy development does not mean to slight their achievement. World War II left Germany without a moral compass; writers like Mr. Grass, Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz provided it. The country needed intellectual leaders who epitomized certainty, however vain they came across.
这是一种好的变化，但这么说并不是在贬低他们的成就。第二次世界大战让德国失去了道德指南针，格拉斯、海因里希·伯尔(Heinrich Böll)和齐格飞·蓝茨(Siegfried Lenz)等作家拿出了它。这个国家当时需要知识领袖，他们代表着确定性，无论他们显得多么自负。
There are times when moral rigor is needed, but they pass. And yet Mr. Grass was never able to move beyond them. Worse, he seemed to believe that, as the nation’s conscience, the rules he applied to others didn’t apply to him.
有时候，道德上的严苛是必须的，但那个时代已经远去了。然而，格拉斯却没有走出那个时代。更糟糕的是，作为民族的良知，他似乎认为，应用于其他人的规则不适用于自己。
In 2006 he revealed, just before the release of his much-awaited memoir, that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the most murderous branch of the Nazi war machine. He maintained that he never fired a shot himself, but nevertheless his confession had a disturbing anticipation of impunity to it. Did Mr. Grass believe that being declared Germany’s most important contemporary writer outweighed the fact that he had been active in one of the worst Nazi organizations?
2006年，就在格拉斯备受期待的回忆录出版之前，他透露自己曾加入党卫军，即纳粹战争机器中最残忍的那一部分。他坚称，自己一枪未发，不过，他的坦白中包含了对于免责的期待，这让人不安。格拉斯是否认为，被认定为德国最重要的当代作家，比他曾是最恶劣的一个纳粹机构的成员的事实更重要？
He seemed to take his moral superiority for granted, even as he drifted farther from the mainstream. In 2012 he didn’t just publish a poem — “What Must Be Said” — accusing Israel of endangering world peace; he seemed to believe he spoke for all of Germany when he did.
他似乎习惯了自己在道德上的优越感，即使他已经和主流渐行渐远。2012年，他不仅是发表了一首诗——《一定要说的话》(What must be said)——指责以色列威胁世界和平；他似乎还认为，自己代表了所有德国人的心声。
He took the same tone at our meeting in Hamburg, when he accused the European Union and NATO of provoking war with Russia. Sitting face to face with Mr. Grass, I decided to clothe my unease in a question. Did he not think that a war was already going on, sparked by an illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine?
在汉堡的会面中，他用了同样的口气，指责欧盟(European Union)和北约(NATO)挑起了与俄罗斯的战争。坐在格拉斯对面的我，决定借一个提问委婉表达自己的不安。他难道不认为战争已经开始，而且是俄罗斯非法入侵乌克兰触发了战争吗？
Mr. Grass didn’t answer. Instead, he made some broader remarks on Russia and the West. But there was no reason to be disappointed. I felt, clearly, that I came from a different Germany. And that it was all right if he had the impression that I had not spoken to him at all.
格拉斯没有回答这个问题。相反，他说了一些有关俄罗斯和西方的大道理。不过，我没有什么好失望的。我清晰地感到，我和他来自不同的德国。如果他感觉我们完全无法沟通，那也无所谓。
