译：马克吐温 - 美国的一面镜子
Mark Twain ---Mirror of America
Noel Grove
Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of freedom and adventure. In-deed, this nation's best-loved author was every bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well – one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with the frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night.
Tramp printer, river pilot , Confederate guerrilla, prospector, starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: The man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of water -- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world.
The geographic core, in Twain's early years, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nation's heart. Keelboats ， flatboats , and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses , cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In the 1850's, before the climax of westward expansion, the vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled United States.
Young Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied a cosmos. He participated abundantly in this life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds , piracies, lynchings ,medicine shows, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that seemed phonographic
Steamboat decks teemed not only with the main current of pioneering humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the difference between what people claim to be and what they really are. His four and a half year s in the steamboat trade marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twain acknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type of human nature. Those acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing, but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the people a-long the great stream.
When railroads began drying up the demand for steam-boat pilots and the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He tried soldiering for two weeks with a motley band of Confederate guerrillas who diligently avoided contact with the enemy. Twain quit after deciding, "... I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating. "
He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver fever in Nevada's Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and was rebuffed . Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, to literature's enduring gratitude.
From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.
Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. "It was a splendid population – for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home... It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day – and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says 'Well, that is California all over. '"
In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notations about the weather and the tedious mining-camp meals lies an entry noting a story he had heard that day – an entry that would determine his course forever: "Coleman with his jumping frog – bet stranger $50 – stranger had no frog, and C. got him one – in the meantime stranger filled C. 's frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won." Retold with his descriptive genius, the story was printed in newspapers across the United States and became known as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Mark Twain's national reputation was now well established as "the wild humorist of the Pacific slope."
Two year s later the opportunity came for him to take a distinctly American look at the Old World. In New York City the steamship Quaker City prepared to sail on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. For the first time, a sizable group of United States citizens planned to journey as tourists -- a milestone , of sorts, in a country's development. Twain was assigned to accompany them, as correspondent 工for a California newspaper. If readers expected the usual glowing travelogue , they were sorely surprised.
Unimpressed by the Sultan of Turkey, for example, he reported, “... one could set a trap anywhere and catch a dozen abler men in a night.” Casually he debunked revered artists and art treasures, and took unholy verbal shots at the Holy Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing his articles. America laughed with him. Upon his return to the States the book version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, became an instant best-seller.
At the age of 36 Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His best books were published while he lived there.
As early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story about the boyhood adventures of a lad he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he changed the name to Tom, and began shaping his adventures into a stage play. Not until 1874 did the story begin developing in earnest. After publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly became a classic tale of American boyhood. Tom's mischievous daring, ingenuity , and the sweet innocence of his affection for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be studied in American schools to-day as is the Declaration of Independence.
Mark Twain's own declaration of independence came from another character. Six chapters into Tom Sawyer, he drags in "the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard." Fleeing a respectable life with the puritanical Widow Douglas, Huck protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer: "I've tried it, and it don't work; it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me ... The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell – everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."
Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life of his own, in a book often consider ed the best ever written about Americans. His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave presents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.
On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamor for success.
Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: "What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges."
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis , Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter., Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub .
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic crater . In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make a better world.
The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men's final release from earthly struggles: "... they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed – a world which will lament them a day and for-get them forever.”
译：
马克-吐温 — 美国的一面镜子
大多数美国人心中，马克吐温是一位伟大的作家，他描写了哈克-费恩永恒童年时代中充满诗情画意的旅程和汤姆森-索亚在漫长的夏日里自由自在的历险的故事。
的确，这位美国最受欢迎的作家把冒险精神，爱国思想，浪漫主义和幽默风格的笔调发挥的淋漓尽致。我也发现了另外一个马克吐温，一个深受人生悲剧打击而变得愤世嫉俗，尖酸刻薄的马克吐温。一个对人性的人点忧心忧心忡忡，明显看到前途是一片黑暗的人。
印刷工，领航员，游击队员，淘金者，过于乐观的乐观主义者，尖酸刻薄的讽刺家：马克吐温原名 塞缪尔·兰霍恩·克莱门斯 他一生中有超过三分之一的时间浪迹在美国各地. 体验着美国的新生活，而后，作为作家和演讲者的身份将他所感受到的这一切分享给全世界。 他的笔名采自他在蒸汽船工作时听到的12英寻声 — 一个可航行深度。他的作品中有二十几部流传至今，而且他的翻译作品依旧在全球范围内饱受阅读，由此可见他享誉的程度。
吐温青年时代，美国的地理中心是密西西比河流域，而密西西比河是这个年轻国家中部的交通大动脉。平底货船, 平底船，和皮筏带来了大量的商业。木材，玉米，烟草，小麦，和皮草后期转移到这个三角洲国家；糖，糖蜜，棉花，和威士忌则运往南方。在1850年，在这西部领土开发高潮到来之前，辽阔的密西西比河流域已经开发了美国已开发土地的3/4面积。
年轻的马克吐温在1857年作为一个在蒸汽船上的见习领航员步入这个社会。在他的新的工作中，接触到了各式各样的人，还有多姿多彩的世界。他完全投身到这种生活中去，经常在操舵室里的听人们谈论，民间争斗，海盗抢劫，私刑案件，游街卖药以及河边的村民的故事。所有这一切，连同他那留声机般准确可靠的记忆所吸收的丰富多彩的语言，都有机会得以再现在他的书籍中。
蒸汽船甲板上不仅承载着人类先创的主流，也有一些分散在各地的皮条客，赌徒，和暴徒。 从所有这些来看，马克吐温敏捷地察觉到了人类种族问题，即人的真实地位和他们以为的样子的差异性。他的四年半的蒸汽船贸易标记着开始了他的教育，和持续的坚持于此。在他之后的生活中，马克吐温承认他已经认识到这片流域的人类文化。这些人问琐事加强了他的写作，但他从未比他写这个流域的民族更好的了
当公路开始榨干了蒸汽船的需求和公民战争暂停了的交易，马克吐温离开了这片流域。他尝试从军勤于与敌人避免交火的游击队。马克吐温最终决定退军，他说，我更懂关于撤退的方式比这部分人发明出来的撤退。
他乘坐马车来到了西部，在内华达-华苏地区 卷入了风靡一时的淘金热。他和那些幸运而又契而不舍的才能取得巨大财富的人三心二意的打了八个月交道之后，他遭到了失败，在破产和即将放弃之际，他接受了一份为弗吉尼亚市《领土开发报》做记者的工作。这一行动获得了文学界永久的感激。
在经历过矿业失败的挫折之后，马克吐温便开始努力用他的新闻记者和幽默家身份博取区域性声望。从事新闻报道工作并不能像淘金的成功者一样立成巨富，但拿赚钱来说，他的笔杆要比锄头好用的多。在1864年重天，也就是加入《领土开发报》不到两年的时间的他搭乘驿站马车去旧金山，那里在当时和现在都是有前途的年轻作家成长的摇篮。
马克吐温磨练并试验他的新的写作技能，但他因为写了一些对政府尖酸刻薄的专栏文章，导致他不得不离开这座城市一段时间。他围绕着诸如虐待华人等类问题对市政府提出尖锐批评，惹得一些官员非常恼火，因此他被迫逃到了萨克拉门托山谷的金矿区。他对那里的拓荒者们的描写使西海岸地区富有创新精神的现代人感觉到亲切。”这儿的人太牛逼了 —— 所有的呆头呆脑，笨手笨脚，无精打采的人都在家呆着… 正是这样的人为加利福尼亚赢得了这样的声誉，当他们着手进行一项宏伟的事业时，他们还会不计代价或后果带着一种豪迈的气魄和勇敢勇往直前，一干到底 — 然而，每当他们发起一项新的惊人的举动时，那些素来稳重的人便会像往常一样微笑着说：’看吧，这太加利福尼亚了’ “。
在1864 - 1865年间那个枯燥的冬天，马克吐温在安吉尔斯矿区度过的，在杂乱无章有关天气的杂趣无味的关于矿区饮食情况的条目中，夹着一条叙述当天听到的一个故事的记录 — 这一条记录决定了他一生的职业发展方向：“科尔曼用他的跳蛙和陌生人赌50美元，然而陌生人没有跳蛙，然后科尔曼给他了一只，陌生人利用这段时间把科尔曼的蛙的肚子塞满铅弹，导致它跳不起来了，最后这个陌生人的蛙赢了”。经过马克吐温这个天才描写之后，这个故事打印在没干过的各个报纸上，成为了著名的“卡拉韦拉斯县有名的跳蛙”，马克吐温作为“太平洋海岸狂放的幽默大师”的声望以在全国范围内建立起来了。
两年后，他得到了一个以一个美国人特有的杨过取看待这个时间的机会。在纽约这个“费城号”蒸汽船准备进行一次到欧洲和圣地的观光旅行。这也是美国人第一次组织这么大的观光旅行 — 也可以是看做一个国家发展史上的一座里程碑。如果读者们期望马克吐温作为加利福尼一家报社的记者被委派随同出游。读者们非常期待，他们能否读到一如既往的，热情洋溢的旅行见闻。
举例来说，他对那没有给他留下好的印象的土耳其君主苏丹是这样报道的： “人们可以在任何地方设置陷阱，还可以在一夜之间捕获到十几个更有能耐的人”，他随随便便对那些令人景仰的艺术家和艺术珍品吐槽，甚至对宗教圣地也敢于以亵渎性的言辞加以侮辱，回国后，他的文章登到越来越多的报纸上。整个美国同他一齐欢笑，他一回到美国，他的旅行杂记《傻子出国旅行记》立即成为畅销书。
三十六岁时，马克·吐温开始定居于康涅狄格州哈特福德镇，他的最优秀的作品全是在那段时间里问世的。
早在1870年，马克·吐温就试着写了一篇关于一个他名之为比利·罗杰斯的男孩子的童年历险故事。两年后，他又将主人公的名字改为汤姆，并着手将故事改编成剧本。直到1874年他才开始认真地扩展故事情节。《汤姆·索亚》于1876年出版后，很快成为美国儿童故事的经典之作。这部描写汤姆的顽皮、勇敢、机智以及他对贝琪·莎切尔的天真纯洁的感情的故事几乎像《独立宣言》一样成了今天美国学校里的必读书本。
马克·吐温本人的独立宣言却是由另一个人物表达出来的。第六章里，他引出了"村里的流浪少年，镇上酒鬼的儿子哈克贝利·费恩"。哈克不愿在清教徒道格拉斯寡妇家过上等人的体面生活，从那里逃出来后对他的朋友汤姆·索亚发牢骚说："我试过了，还是不行；不行啊，汤姆。那不是我过的日子……那寡妇家吃饭要听钟声，睡觉要听钟声，起床也要听钟声，什么事情都得规规矩矩，简直叫人受不了。”
《汤姆·索亚》风靡美国九年之后，哈克被赋予独立的生命，成为一本被许多人认为是最成功的描写美国人的作品的书中的主人公。他同一个逃跑出来的奴隶一起乘坐木筏沿着密西西比河顺流而下的漂流航程展现了一幅幅揭示美国社会生活全貌的生动画面。
通过对密西西比河，尤其是对哈克·费恩这一人物的描写，马克·吐温想将自己从那束缚着自己并常常令自己苦恼的生活步调中摆脱出来，从生活中的各种清规戒律以及为了事业成功而进行的艰苦挣扎中解放出来的愿望表达得淋漓尽致。
马克吐温认为美国人缺少了一种朝气蓬勃的元素，他说：“我们只需要偶尔休息一下，并且保持我们传统优点，我们将会是一个多么朝气蓬勃的民族，多么富有思想的民族啊”。
马克吐温一生都被缠在悲剧的阴影之中，那些他挚爱的人们死去：他的父亲在他12岁时死于肺炎；他的兄弟亨利在一次汽船爆炸事故中遇难，他的儿子朗顿才满19个月就离开人世，他的大女儿苏西，死于角膜炎；克莱门斯夫人在佛罗伦萨死于心脏病；而他的小女儿也因癫痫病的发作淹死在楼上的浴盆里。
这位曾令全世界欢笑的人自己却饱尝了人世的辛酸。他早期作品中的人品道德教育充满着丰富的幽默感，现在幽默换成了辛辣的讽刺。对于美国军队在一个火山口上屠杀六百名菲律宾摩洛人的行为，他没有直接进行抨击，而是假装为之高唱赞歌。在《神秘的陌生人》中，他指出人类应该抛弃宗教幻想，依靠自己而不是上帝的力量去创造一个更加美好的世界。
他自己的最后一个幻想到后来似乎也破灭了，在晚年口述自传时，他以极端绝望的心情谈到人从尘世的苦难最终解脱，“他们从这个世界上消失了，在这个世界上，他们无足轻重，无所成句。甚至他们的存在就是一个错误，失败，愚蠢。这个世界上也没有留下丝毫能表明他们存在过的痕迹。这个世界赠给他们的只是一日的哀伤和永久的遗忘。”