英文部分选自经济学人Obituary版块
Amos Oz
阿莫斯•奥兹
A torn Israeli
分崩离析的以色列
Amos Oz , a celebrated writer of novels and essays, died on December 28th, aged 79
2018年12月28日，以色列著名小说及散文作家阿莫斯•奥兹与世长辞，享年79岁
WHEN HIS father had to choose a primary school, Amos Oz had two alternatives within walking distance of the family home in 1940s Jerusalem— a religious institution and one belonging to a socialist-Zionist workers’ union. A staunchly secular librarian and right-wing nationalist, Mr Oz’s father chose to send the boy to the religious school, reckoning the important thing was that young Amos did not become a Bolshevik. Socialism was spreading like wildfire, he thought, but religion was on the wane and would soon disappear from the land.
上世纪40年代阿莫斯•奥兹一家居于耶路撒冷，父亲在为他选小学时面临两个选择，都离家较近:一所是教会办的小学，另一所是社会主义犹太复国主义工人联盟办的小学。父亲是位图书馆管理员，还是一位立场坚定的犹太世俗派兼右翼民族主义者，他认为决不能让小阿莫斯成为布尔什维克党员，于是选择送他去教会学校就读。彼时，奥兹父亲对时局的判断是，社会主义正呈野火燎原之势，而宗教却日渐衰落，很快就会从这片土地上绝迹。
注：Bolshevik：“布尔什维克”是俄文“多数派”（Большевики́）的音译，是列宁创建的俄国无产阶级政党。与之相对的是“孟什维克”，俄语意指“少数派”。在1903年俄国社会民主工党第二次代表大会上，一个新型的无产阶级政党——布尔什维克党宣告诞生。布尔什维克党的建立是俄国工人运动史上的重大转折点，推动了俄国革命运动的发展，它不但对俄国革命历史的进程而且对后来的整个国际共运产生了深远的影响----摘自百度百科
That proved short-sighted, both on a national and a personal level. In the new state of Israel, the socialists would dominate for the first three decades but then gradually lose their dominance. Whereas religion endured. As for young Amos, shaken by his mother’s depression-driven suicide, he would rebel against his father, leaving Jerusalem at 14 to become a member of a kibbutz, a socialist-Zionist collective agricultural community. Haunted, he would try to use his life there to recreate himself, even changing his name from the Ashkenazi Klausner, to “Oz”, a short, stark Hebrew word meaning strength and courage. Years later he said it was the only thing he lacked.
时间证明，无论是在国家层面还是个人层面，奥兹父亲都是目光短浅的。以色列建国后，社会主义者在头三十年虽占据主导地位，随后却逐渐衰败没落。然而，宗教却隐忍而厚积，愈久弥坚。阿莫斯的母亲饱受抑郁症折磨，最终自杀；年轻的他不堪丧母之痛，愤而抗父，14岁即离开耶路撒冷，成为基布兹（社会主义犹太复国主义集体农场）的社员。母亲自杀于他是挥之不去的梦魇，他尝试着利用在农庄的生活来重建自己，甚至将名字从Ashkenazi Klausner改为“Oz”，一个简短的希伯来词，意为力量和勇气。多年之后，他表示唯有力量和勇气是他欠缺的品质。
At the kibbutz he had the status of a yeled chutz—an outside child, striving to belong, but also constantly observing from without. He tried to conform with the austere mores, working in the fields and, at 18, serving in a tough combat unit while writing at night. Fortunately for him, the kibbutz movement also saw the need for ideologues. He was appointed a teacher and allowed to study philosophy and literature, back in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. His early work, like him, was split by the challenges of the Utopian experiment of the kibbutz he tried so hard to be a part of and the ancient phobia of Jerusalem that he never escaped.
在基布兹，他生活得如同一名yeled chutz (希伯来语来自外面世界的孩子)， 一名外来者，竭尽全力想要融入其中，同时却也常常以一名旁观者的角度观察着一切。他耕田种地，努力地适应严厉的道德观念，18岁的他白天艰苦卓绝地战斗，晚上则笔耕不辍。于他而言幸运的是，基布兹运动也需要理论家。他于是被任命为教师，获准回到耶路撒冷就职，同时在希伯来大学学习哲学和文学。文如其人，他的早期作品被他费尽心力要想融入的基布兹的乌托邦实验所提出的诸多挑战与他从未逃脱的古老的耶路撒冷之惧所撕裂，充满矛盾与对立。
His first collection of short stories, “Where the Jackals Howl” (1965), and his first novel, “Elsewhere, Perhaps” (1966), dealt with kibbutz life. But instead of describing his fellow young kibbutzniks as having found peace and satisfaction tilling the land, he wrote of their “sadness of distance”, how “their hearts go out to other places that are not specific, but are far.” His own heart returned to his birthplace. The novel that made his name, “My Michael” (1968), was about the tortured fantasies of an anguished young woman, married to a mediocre academic and struggling to raise her young son in 1950s Jerusalem.
他的第一本短篇小说集《胡狼嗥叫的地方》（1965）和第一本小说《何去何从》（1966）都与他在基布兹（kibbutz）的生活有关。但他并没有去讲述基布兹的年轻人们在耕种中所找到的平静与满足，而是刻画了一种“远方的感伤”。他笔下的年轻人心向远方却飘忽不定。奥兹的心是向着家乡的。1968年，《我的米海尔》使他一举成名。故事的背景设定在二十世纪五十年代的耶路撒冷，讲述的是一位嫁给了迂腐的学究的年轻女人，饱受幻想摧残，想方设法去抚养自己的小儿子的故事。
注：Kibbutz（吉布茲/基布兹），純猶太人聚落，是一種混合猶太復國主義（錫安主義）和共產主義，試圖建立烏托邦社會的集體聚落。無論是 CEO 還是一般清潔工，所有成員財產共享，收入均分，由社區免費供應三餐、水電、交通、教育甚至醫療等，讓每個成員都可以享受齊頭均等的生活，也能自由選擇加入或退出。
“My Michael” established him as Israel’s foremost young writer and over the years was translated into more than 30 languages. Only in 2002, when his epic memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness”, was published, did it become clear that all along he had been writing about his own parents. Yet literary success and confronting his own personal demons was never enough for him; he publicly wrestled with Israel’s internal furies throughout his writing career, struggling to realise, in his work, as in his life, the brave new Jewish state.
《我的米海尔》一书也奠定了奥兹在国际文坛的地位，使其成为以色列年轻作家的代表。短短几年之内，该书便被译作三十多种语言。 直到2002年他的史诗回忆录《爱与黑暗的故事》出版后，人们才陡然发觉原来他笔下刻画的人物正是他父母的映射。这些还不够，对他而言文坛上的成功和直面生活中的恶魔还不足以让他满足，他要做的是公开地与以色列的内在势利搏斗，为此他可以奋斗终生。他所想的是建立一个全新的犹太国度，不仅是在他的作品里，还有现实生活中。
In 1967 he was drafted during the six-day war to serve as a speechwriter for Israel’s victorious generals. He believed in the war as a justified action of defence against hostile Arab neighbours, but soon after, as Israel began to grapple with the realities of a military occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, he was one of the first to give warning to his fellow citizens. “We were not born to be a nation of masters,” he wrote in a column in Davar, the ruling Socialist Party’s newspaper. Ten years later, Likud came to power. Except for brief periods, Israel has been ruled ever since by a coalition of right-wing and religious nationalists bent on remaining masters of the land.
1967年时，奥兹征召为获胜的将军们撰写发言稿，此战为期六天。他认为这场反抗阿拉伯敌对势力的战争属于正当防御。但不久之后, 当以色列开始侵占西岸和加沙数百万巴勒斯坦人的家乡时, 他又率先向同胞们发出警示。他在执政的社会党的党报《达瓦尔》（Davar）的一篇专栏中写道: "我们的国度并无侵略统治他邦之传统。” 十年后, 利库德集团（Likud）上台。此后, 除了短暂的时期外, 以色列一直由右翼人士和宗教民族主义者联盟统治, 他们执意要继续掌控这片土地。
注：LIKUD：利库德集团。以色列右翼党派的政治联盟，长期为以色列执政党。1973年9月由加哈尔集团、自由中心、拉姆党、人民党、国土完整运动等党联合组成。2013年，利库德在第19届议会选举中与“我们的家园以色列”党组成竞选联盟，共获得31席，内塔尼亚胡再次成功组阁，连任总理。
Success as a fiction writer did not curb his burning need to be a political polemicist as well. He became one of the leading lights of Israel’s peace camp, a confidant of politicians including prime minister and president Shimon Peres. At the same time he tried repeatedly to engage with the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and others in Israeli society with whom he had bitter differences. Much of his international renown was owing to his 19 novels and short-story collections, but for many Israelis, the accounts of his journeys across the land and his meetings with its inhabitants were of even greater importance. “In the Land of Israel”, a collection of his journalistic essays from the early 1980s, focusing on conversations with Israelis and Palestinians, became a pivotal documentary on life in Israel and the West Bank, mapping out the fault-lines that divided the different groups living in a contested land.
尽管作为一名小说家，奥兹已是功成名就，但他依旧热切渴望成为一位政治辩论家。他是以色列和平阵营的重要人物之一，和平阵营里都是以色列总理和总统西蒙·佩雷斯(Shimon Peres)等政界人士的心腹密友。与此同时，他还不遗余力坚持与西岸的犹太定居者沟通交流，与以色列社会中和自己有严重分歧者融洽相处。在世人看来，奥兹是因为自己创作的19部小说和短篇故事集，得以美名远播；但就以色列人而言，他奔波于这片土地之上，并在书中记录下与居民的见面与交流，才是更加深入人心之所在。《在以色列的土地上》(In the Land of Israel)是奥兹从20世纪80年代初开始撰写的新闻杂文集，主要记叙他与以色列人及巴勒斯坦人之间的对话。这部杂文集是对以色列和约旦河西岸人们生活的真实写照，可谓是一部至关重要的纪录片，同时也描绘出了将这片是非之地上的居民，区分为不同群体的断层线。
As the Israeli occupation of Palestinians continued unresolved, Mr Oz increasingly found himself harshly criticising his country at home, while defending it abroad—as did other liberal Israelis with prominent voices. On his 75th birthday in Tel Aviv, he warned of the presence of “Hebrew neo-Nazis” in Israel. However, he supported Israel’s recent wars in Lebanon and Gaza as necessary acts of defence against “the dark shadows of Iran, Syria and fanatic Islam” and argued Israel’s case with a historical comparison he had made in his memoir: “Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: ‘Yids, go back to Palestine’, so we came back to Palestine, and now the world at large shouts at us: ‘Yids, get out of Palestine.’”
由于以色列对巴勒斯坦的占领问题迟迟得不到解决，奥兹先生在国内严厉批评自己的祖国，但是在国外却又竭力为它辩护——与其他有威望的自由派以色列人所做的一样。奥兹在特拉维夫过75岁生日时，曾发出警告，指出以色列存在”希伯来新纳粹分子”。尽管如此, 他却支持以色列最近对黎巴嫩和加沙发动的战争，因为这是防备“伊朗、叙利亚和狂热伊斯兰教的黑暗阴影”的必要之举。通过历史的比较，他在回忆录中对以色列的情况给出了自己的看法：世界上所有的墙壁上都写满着:“犹太人,回到巴勒斯坦吧”，因此我们回到了巴勒斯坦；但现在，全世界所有人又都对着我们大声叫嚷:“犹太人，滚出巴勒斯坦！”
His last novel, “Judas” (2014), marked his literary return to Jerusalem, to those young doomed academics, like his parents in Israel’s early years, struggling to make sense of Jewish history and of their own present. The characters tear themselves apart over questions of loyalty and treachery to each other, their nation and their ideals.
他的最后一部小说《犹大》(Judas, 2014年出版)标志着他的文学生涯回归到了耶路撒冷，回到了那些注定失败的年轻学者身边，正如那个早期的以色列中的他父母一般，竭尽全力想要理解犹太历史及自己的当下。书中人物面对忠诚、背叛，祖国与理想等等诸多议题无可适从，苦不堪言。
Like the Judas of his book, he never found peace. He had left the divided city 60 years earlier, but was never fully at home in the kibbutz. In 1985 he moved to the desert town of Arad, but lived his last years in liberal, secular Tel Aviv. He continued to write, publishing collections of essays on Jewish literature, fanaticism and love. In one of his last interviews, two months before his death, he called himself simply “an involved citizen who writes a lot”.
就像书中的犹大，奥兹从未到达过内心之平静。他早在60年前就离开了这个四分五裂的城市，但在基布兹，他却从未感到过真正的无拘无束。1985年，他搬到了荒漠小镇阿拉德，却最终在自由世俗的特拉维夫度过了晚年。他笔耕不辍，孜孜不倦，出版了大量关于犹太文学、狂热主义和爱情的文集。在他去世前两个月接受的最后一次采访中，他简单地称自己是“一名爱写东西的参政公民”。
翻译组：
Cece，消防人，经济学人爱好者
Kemay，女决心练好笔译的未来口译员
Echo，女，翻译专业学生，经济学人铁粉
Li Xia，女， 爱爬山的自由翻译，美食狂人
校核组：
Forest，女，意义之网编织中，经济学人爱好者
Dave，肌肉男大学教师，文学翻译，CATTI一笔二口
