经济学人17:加勒特·菲茨傑拉德 Garret FitzGerald

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

　　讣告;加勒特·菲茨傑拉德;

　　Garret FitzGerald, statesman, philosopher, journalist and lover of numbers, died on May 19th, aged¹ 85;

　　政治家，哲学家，记者，大众情人，于5月19日逝世，享年85岁;

　　If you had the good fortune to sit next to Garret FitzGerald at dinner—wrapped round by his natural warmth and curiosity, as well as numbed² by the sheer volume of Dublin-tinctured words that tumbled out of him—you might learn many dozens of mind-bogglingly arcane³ facts. The quickest way to fly from Reykjavik to Vilnius in 1960, a skill he had honed in his first proper job as an analyst⁵ for Aer Lingus; the route of the now-defunct railway from Farranfore to Reenard via Cahersiveen, the fruit of his love of all train timetables; the relative popularity over time of his own Fine Gael party and the rival Fianna Fail in county councils the length and breadth of Ireland, derived⁶ from an obsession⁷ with opinion polls so immense that journalists were cautioned not to mention them; and the precise geographical⁸ pattern of the decline in the use of Irish between 1770 and 1870, compiled from old census⁹ volumes which he would prop⁴ on the car dashboard when being driven, on constituency visits, from place to place.

　　如果你有幸在晚餐时坐在Garret FitzGerald旁边——置身于他天生的热情与好奇中，谈定地听着他都柏林味十足的口音在那里滔滔不绝——你也许能得知很多神秘的事实，开阔了眼界。60年代从Reykjavik飞到Vilnius最快的途径；他首次在一份体面的工作中（爱尔兰航空公司的一名分析员）习得的技能；那条已经不存在的铁路——通过Cahersiveen从Farranfore到Reenard；他最喜欢的列车时刻表；共和党对那段出风头的时光和统一党称霸爱尔兰各乡镇委的时候，民意调查里那些说不清道不明的事，有些就是记者也小心地不去提及；以及根据他拜访各选区时，从各地收集到的旧的人口普查宗卷中所得出的1770到1870间爱尔兰语的使用率，下降趋势，在地图板块上的精确表现。

　　What modesty¹⁰ would restrain him from telling you—even in the 674 small-print pages of his autobiography—was the precise route by which Ireland, while he was cheerfully inhabiting the corridors of the Seanad and the Dail, moved away from sterile¹¹, irredentist sectarianism to become a more open and tolerant place; how the sombre dominance of the Catholic church began to recede¹² from the country's moral life; how Ireland opened itself alike to Europe and to foreign investment, eventually finding it could leap off like a tiger; and, most wonderful and difficult of all, how North and South began to accommodate and make peace with each other, to such a degree that as he lay dying Queen Elizabeth was in Dublin Castle, trying out a line of Gaelic.

　　那些即使是他也不好意思说出来的——在他674页自传中也没提及——是爱尔兰各地的精确路线。那会儿他高高兴兴地游走于上议院和下议院，使统一党宗派主义远离枯燥，成为一个更开放、更有肚量的地方；阴沉的天主教支配势力是如何开始退出这个国家的日常生活的；爱尔兰是如何融入欧洲，开展对外投资，最终如龙腾虎跃；以及，最重要的是，如何让南北地区的人民融洽相处。就好像在都柏林的城堡里放倒了衰老的伊丽莎白女王，开拓出了盖尔人的一片天地。

　　His own contribution, because it was the start of these processes, often looked like failure. His referendum to amend¹³ slightly the law on abortion¹⁴ was shot down, his referendum to bring in divorce resoundingly defeated; but he had succeeded in broaching¹⁵ the subjects in a civil way. On Northern Ireland, the 1973 Sunningdale power-sharing agreement swiftly collapsed¹⁶, and his New Ireland Forum¹⁷, in which constitutional parties from both sides were to meet and talk together of the pluralist, inclusive Ireland he longed for, was ruthlessly scorned by Margaret Thatcher¹⁸. (“Out, out, out,” she cried, demolishing¹⁹ all its proposals one by one; it wasn't what she said, he reflected later, but the tone in which she said it, so sharp and condescending²⁰.) Even the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, in which Britain acknowledged for the first time the Republic's interest in the North, was pictured by unionists as betrayal and by terrorists as encouragement. In fact it was a small, determined²¹ step towards the Good Friday agreement 13 years later.

　　他自身的那些贡献，作为这一系列的开端看起来总像是个失败。他提出的对流产法的小幅度修改，民意惨淡；他提出的关于离婚的法案遭到民众的强烈抵抗；但他成功地带起了民法方面的课题。在北爱尔兰，1973年的Sunningdale，权利分享协议在签署不久后就瓦解了，而他的新爱尔兰论坛又遭到玛格丽特?撒切尔的强烈鄙视（“滚，滚，滚”，她一边喊，一边一个接一个的否定那些题案；后来他补充道这不是她的原话，但就是这种犀利而又“客气”的语气）。该论坛实现了他渴望的一幕——双方的正式代表就教堂等问题沟通交流。即使是1985年的Anglo-Irish协议也被共和党看做背叛，被恐怖分子视为一种鼓励。英国在该条约中首次公认了共和国在北方的利益，不过事实上只是比13年前的Good Friday协议前进了一小步。

　　A mislaid overcoat

　　一件记不起放在哪的大衣

　　He had the ideal background for conciliation²², with a Catholic father from the South and a Protestant mother from the North (though it was she who taught him his catechism, forbearing only to instruct him how to sign himself at the gospel). Sectarianism was so foreign to him that when he met rank prejudice, he often burst out laughing. Politics was in his blood, his father having been in independent Ireland's first government in 1922; though he himself wandered into it from academia, reluctant to give partisan²³ speeches in the open air or at dance halls, and quite inept²⁴ at the plotting and manipulation so dazzlingly displayed by his Fianna Fail nemesis²⁵, Charles Haughey. Though he was foreign minister from 1973-77 and taoiseach twice, in 1981-82 and 1982-87, he remained somehow an innocent, mislaying as he travelled overcoat, pyjamas²⁶, watch; and not realising, so carried away was he with his theories for redistributing wealth in Ireland, that to put value-added tax on children's shoes might spell suicide at the polls.

　　作为调和主义者，他有个理想的背景，出身天主教的南方父亲和出身新教徒的北方母亲（尽管是母亲教他教义，不过只教了他如何在福音书上签名）。宗派那些对他来说是如此不着边际，以至于当他接触到等级偏见的内容时经常会突然笑起来。政治早已融入他的血液，他的父亲在1922年曾为爱尔兰独立政府效力；尽管他本人犹豫着要不要从学术界转到政界，心不甘情不愿地在公共场所或舞厅里发表党派性演讲，就那相当笨拙地安排和操作，理所当然的败给了他统一党的对手，Charles Haughey。尽管他在1973-77年间任外长，1981-82及1982-87年间担任总理，但仍保持着纯真的心。就像放错了旅行要用的外套，睡衣和手表（而不自知），他就带着他的爱尔兰财富再分配理论各处奔走，宣称买童鞋要付增值税，此举可能在民调中引发自杀。

　　Economics was a relatively²⁷ late interest. He said he learned it at the Irish Times, where he wrote to the end of his life a Saturday column full of figures under the pen-name “Analyst”. Over 50 years, he reckoned, he produced 2,250,000 words for the Times (besides providing copy, briefly²⁸, for The Economist). History and French were his degree subjects, and his verbosity²⁹ in French a source of pride. He embraced the European Economic Community not just because it let Ireland reach over Britain to the world, but also because it gave him the excuse, before meetings in Brussels, to discuss with Fran?ois Mitterrand some puzzling lacunae in the Catholic intellectual tradition of 19th-century France.

　　《经济学人》是个相对较晚开始的兴趣。他说是在爱尔兰时报上读到里面的文章，他本人直到临终一直以“分析家”这个笔名投稿，周六专栏里那些数据就是他的作品。他估计在50多年里，为时报写了225万字（除了为《经济学人》写的，简短的摘要）。作为历史及法文科班出身，他为自己冗长的法语骄傲。他欢迎欧洲经济体不仅是因为经济体使爱尔兰跨过英国，走向世界，也因为这给了他一个借口——在布鲁塞尔会议前，与Francois Mitterrand讨论一些关于天主教在19世界法国传统教育里出现的那些令人困惑的空白。

　　He was tender and naive³⁰, losing his life-savings on an unwise investment in 1992; yet he was also tough. Meeting the families of IRA hunger-strikers in the 1980s, he would be sympathetic as ever, but would never let himself be swayed by terrorists or “crawthumpers”. Though mocked as otherworldly, he stuck to his crusade for a “new Ireland”—reunified or not, as the majority in the North wanted it—in which Catholic and Protestant identities would be equally celebrated³¹. For, when all was said and done, he was a statistician first; and when shown any air-traffic controller's chart he could tell, to a high degree of accuracy, that at such-and-such a time and place the different flightpaths, no matter how divergent, were bound to cross.

　　此人温柔又天真，在1982年的一次不明智的投资中失去了其一生的积蓄。即使如此，他做事还是雷厉风行。80年代会见那些愤怒罢工者的家属时，他仍会抱有有同情心，但再也不会让自己受恐怖分子或“暴徒”的影响。尽管被嘲讽为“不现实”，他仍然卖力地推行他的“新爱尔兰”革命——无论统一与否，介于北方大多数希望如此——以天主教徒和新教徒的身份一样庆祝。因此，当一切尘埃落定时，起初他是个统计员，之后当有提及他所知的空中航线，他都能准确的说出，如什么时间、什么地点，不同的航线，无论怎么分散，都必定能越过。

分享到：