閱讀陪伴奧巴馬度過白宮歲月

Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama.

自林肯(Lincoln)以來，沒有哪位總統(tǒng)像貝拉克·奧巴馬這樣深受閱讀和寫作的影響，包括他的生活以及他對世界的信念和看法。

Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life — from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.

上周五，在離開白宮七天前，奧巴馬在橢圓形辦公室談論書籍在他的總統(tǒng)任期和整個人生中扮演的重要角色——在顛沛流離、時而孤獨的少年時代，“這些可以隨身攜帶的世界”陪伴著他;到了青年時代，又是書籍幫他弄清了自己是誰，自己的想法，以及什么是重要的。

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

他在白宮的八年是一個信息超載、黨派分歧嚴重、人們不假思索就做出反應的喧囂時代，在這段時期里，書籍是觀念與靈感的持久來源，讓他能夠重新思考人類境況的復雜性和模糊性。

“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”

“在這個時代，事件發(fā)展得很快，信息傳播量很大，”他說，閱讀能讓他偶爾“慢下來，獲得新的角度”，并且能讓他“獲得設身處地為他人著想的能力”。他還說，這兩件事“對我來說無比珍貴。我不好說它們是否讓我成為了一個更好的總統(tǒng)。但可以說，它們讓我在這八年里保持了平衡，因為這個地方總是緊密控制著你，不會放松”。

The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Obama found, were “particularly helpful” when “what you wanted was a sense of solidarity,” adding “during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating. So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.” There is a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Bedroom, and sometimes, in the evening, Obama says, he would wander over from his home office to read it.

奧巴馬發(fā)現(xiàn)，林肯、小馬丁·路德·金牧師(Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)、甘地(Gandhi)和納爾遜·曼德拉(Nelson Mandela)的文章在“你需要感受到團結支持的時候尤為有用”，他補充說，“在非常艱難的時刻，這份工作可能會讓你覺得非常孤立。所以，有時你必須穿越歷史，尋找也曾有過類似孤立感的人，那很有用”。白宮中的林肯臥室有一份《葛底斯堡演說》(Gettysburg Address)的手寫底稿，奧巴馬說，有時他會在夜里從自己的家庭辦公室漫步到那里去閱讀。

Like Lincoln, Obama taught himself how to write, and for him too, words became a way to define himself, and to communicate his ideas and ideals to the world. In fact, there is a clear, shining line connecting Lincoln and King, and Obama. In speeches like the ones delivered in Charleston and Selma, he has followed in their footsteps, putting his mastery of language in the service of a sweeping historical vision, which, like theirs, situates our current struggles with race and injustice in a historical continuum that traces how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

和林肯一樣，奧巴馬也是自學寫作，對他來說，文字也是定義自己、向世界傳達自己的想法和理想的一種方式。實際上，林肯、金博士和奧巴馬之間存在清晰、明顯的聯(lián)系。在查爾斯頓和塞爾瑪?shù)鹊匕l(fā)表的演講中，他追隨他們的腳步，用精湛的語言闡述意義深遠的歷史觀，和他們的演講一樣，把我們目前在種族和不公正方面進行的斗爭置于歷史的長河中，追溯我們走過的道路，展望我們還要走多遠。

Context in Presidential Biographies

總統(tǒng)傳記的背景

Presidential biographies also provided context, countering the tendency to think “that whatever’s going on right now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult,” he said. “It just serves you well to think about Roosevelt trying to navigate through World War II.”

他說，諸多總統(tǒng)傳記也提供了背景，防止你認為“現(xiàn)在發(fā)生的任何災難、精彩和困難都是前所未有的。想到羅斯福(Roosevelt)努力領導這個國家度過二戰(zhàn)時，你會很有啟發(fā)”。

To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Golden Notebook” and “The Woman Warrior”). And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”) to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction.”

直到今天，閱讀仍是他日常生活的一個重要組成部分。前不久，他送給女兒馬莉婭(Malia)一個Kindle，里面裝滿了他想與女兒分享的書，其中包括《百年孤獨》(One Hundred Years of Solitude)、《金色筆記本》(The Golden Notebook)和《女勇士》(The Woman Warrior)。在白宮的大部分時間，他會在夜里讀一個小時左右的書——有深奧的，也有通俗的，從當代小說(他讀的上一本小說是科爾森·懷特黑德[Colson Whitehead]的《地下鐵路》[The Underground Railroad])、經(jīng)典小說、到開創(chuàng)性的非虛構類作品，比如丹尼爾·卡納曼(Daniel Kahneman)的《思考：快與慢》(Thinking, Fast and Slow)和伊麗莎白·科爾伯特(Elizabeth Kolbert)的《第六次滅絕》(The Sixth Extinction)。

Such books were a way for the president to shift mental gears from the briefs and policy papers he studied during the day, a way “to get out of my own head,” a way to escape the White House bubble. Some novels helped him to better “imagine what’s going on in the lives of people” across the country — for instance, he found that Marilynne Robinson’s novels connected him emotionally to the people he was meeting in Iowa during the 2008 campaign, and to his own grandparents, who were from the Midwest, and the small town values of hard work and honesty and humility.

這些書可以幫助總統(tǒng)把腦子從白天研究的簡報和政策文件中轉(zhuǎn)換過來，是“跳出自己頭腦”的一種方式，是逃離白宮樊籬的一種方式。有些小說能幫他更容易“想像美國各地人們的生活情況”——比如，在2008年的競選中，他發(fā)現(xiàn)瑪麗蓮·羅賓遜(Marilynne Robinson)的小說在情感上把他與在艾奧瓦州見到的人們、他來自美國中西部的外祖父母，以及勤勞、誠實和謙遜的小鎮(zhèn)價值觀聯(lián)系到了一起。

A Writer of Short Stories

短篇小說的作者

Obama taught himself to write as a young man by keeping a journal and writing short stories when he was a community organizer in Chicago — working on them after he came home from work and drawing upon the stories of the people he met. Many of the tales were about older people, and were informed by a sense of disappointment and loss: “There is not a lot of Jack Kerouac open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff,” he says. “It’s more melancholy and reflective.”

在芝加哥擔任社區(qū)組織者時，奧巴馬通過寫日記和短篇小說自學寫作——下班回家后寫，以他見到的人的故事為素材。很多故事是關于年長的人，充滿失望和失落的情緒。“不太像杰克·凱魯亞克(Jack Kerouac)那種自由上路，成長中的年輕人發(fā)現(xiàn)事物的故事，”他說，“它們更憂郁，有更多反思。”

That experience underscored the power of empathy. An outsider himself — with a father from Kenya, who left when he was 2, and a mother from Kansas, who took him to live for a time in Indonesia — he could relate to many of the people he met in the churches and streets of Chicago, who felt dislocated by change and isolation, and he took to heart his boss’ observation that “the thing that brings people together to share the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issues, it’s that they have shared stories.”

這種經(jīng)歷突顯了同理心的力量。奧巴馬自己也是一名局外人，他父親來自肯尼亞，在他兩歲的時候離開了他，他母親來自堪薩斯州，曾帶著他在印度尼西亞生活過一段時間。他可以理解他在芝加哥的教堂和街頭遇到的很多人的處境，那些人無法在變革中找到自己的位置，覺得受到了孤立;他老板的觀點深深影響著他——“人們之所以能聚到一起，共同鼓起勇氣，為了自己的生活而采取行動，不僅僅是因為他們關心共同的議題，還因為他們有共同的故事。”

This lesson would become a cornerstone of the president’s vision of an America where shared concerns — simple dreams of a decent job, a secure future for one’s children — might bridge differences and divisions. After all, many people saw their own stories in his — an American story, as he said in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention possible “in no other country on Earth.”

這一課日后成了奧巴馬總統(tǒng)對美國愿景的基石，在這個國家里，人們共同的關切——譬如讓自己擁有一份體面的工作、讓孩子擁有一個安全無虞的未來等等簡單的夢想——或許可以彌合分歧與分裂。畢竟，很多人都在他的故事里看到了他們自己的故事——一個美國故事，一個就如他在2004年民主黨全國代表大會(Democratic National Convention)的主旨演講中所說的，“在其他任何國家”都不可能發(fā)生的故事。

Obama entered office as a writer, and he will soon return to a private life as a writer, planning to work on his memoirs, which will draw on journals he’s kept in the White House (“but not with the sort of discipline that I would have hoped for”). He has a writer’s sensibility — an ability to be in the moment while standing apart as an observer, a novelist’s eye and ear for detail, and a precise but elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound.

奧巴馬上任時就是一名寫作者，而且很快就會以寫作者的身份回歸自己的私人生活。他打算寫回憶錄，并把在白宮期間的日記用作素材(“但不會按照我本來希望的那種原則”)。他具有作家的敏感——一種在置身其中的同時超然事外、冷眼旁觀的能力，一種小說家所特有的對細節(jié)的留意，一種精準而又頗具彈性、可以輕松游走在抒情、土語和深刻之間的表達。

He had lunch last week with five novelists he admires — Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz and Barbara Kingsolver. He not only talked with them about the political and media landscape, but he also talked shop, asking how their book tours were going and remarking that he likes to write first drafts, longhand, on yellow legal pads.

上周，他和他欽慕的五位小說家共進了午餐——戴夫·埃格斯(Dave Eggers)、科爾森·懷特黑德(Colson Whitehead)、扎迪·史密斯(Zadie Smith)、胡諾特·迪亞斯(Junot Díaz)及芭芭拉·金索沃(Barbara Kingsolver)。他不僅同他們討論政治和媒體格局，還談到了書店，問及他們的巡回售書活動進行得怎么樣，并表示他喜歡把初稿手寫在黃色便箋簿上。

Obama says he is hoping to eventually use his presidential center website “to widen the audience for good books” — something he’s already done with regular lists of book recommendations — and then encourage a public “conversation about books.”

奧巴馬說他希望最終可以借助奧巴馬總統(tǒng)中心的網(wǎng)站“拓展好書的讀者群”——通過定期開列書單，他已經(jīng)在做這件事了——然后促使公眾“就書籍展開對話”。

“At a time,” he says, “when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.”

他說：“故事可以凝聚人心而非制造分歧、建立聯(lián)系而非將人邊緣化，在我們試圖以很多政策應對這種由全球化、科技和移民引發(fā)的文化沖突之際，故事所扮演的角色比以往任何時候都更重要。”