晚上十點吃飯，西班牙人的節(jié)奏

晚上十點吃飯，西班牙人的節(jié)奏

MADRID — Dipping into a bucket filled with Mahou beers, Jorge Rodríguez and his friends hunkered down on a recent Wednesday night to watch soccer at Mesón Viña, a local bar. At a nearby table a couple were cuddling, oblivious to others, as a waitress brought out potato omelets and other dinner orders. Then the game began. At 10 p.m.

馬德里——近日的一個周三晚上，豪爾赫·羅德里格斯(Jorge Rodríguez)和朋友在當?shù)鼐瓢善咸褕@小館(Mesón Viña)一邊享用著一桶馬奧(Mahou)啤酒，一邊認真地觀看足球比賽。旁邊的桌位上，一對情侶旁若無人依偎在一起，這時服務員拿來了土豆卷和他們點的其他晚餐食品。然后球賽便開始了。時間是晚上10點。

Which is not unusual. Even as people in some countries are preparing for bed, the Spanish evening is usually beginning at 10, with dinner often being served and prime-time television shows starting (and not ending until after 1 a.m.). Surveys show that nearly a quarter of Spain’s population is watching television between midnight and 1 a.m.

這并不奇怪。雖然晚上10點的時候，有些國家的人已經(jīng)準備上床睡覺了，但西班牙的夜間生活卻往往在此時開始，人們會在這時享用晚餐，黃金時段的電視節(jié)目也才剛剛開始(而且一般直到夜里1點之后才結束)。調(diào)查表明，將近四分之一的西班牙人都會在午夜時分到1點的時候看電視。

“It is the Spanish identity, to eat in another time, to sleep in another time,” said Mr. Rodríguez, 36, who had to get up the next morning for his bank job.

“這是西班牙人的特點，吃飯睡覺的時間都與眾不同，”36歲的羅德里格斯說。他次日早上還要起床去銀行上班。

Spain still operates on its own clock and rhythms. But now that it is trying to recover from a devastating economic crisis — in the absence of easy solutions — a pro-efficiency movement contends that the country can become more productive, more in sync with the rest of Europe, if it adopts a more regular schedule.

西班牙仍然在按自己的時間安排和節(jié)奏行事。但是現(xiàn)在，它正試圖從一場破壞性極大的經(jīng)濟危機中恢復過來——簡單的解決方案并不存在——一個倡導提高效率的運動認為，如果西班牙能采用更正常的作息安排，它的生產(chǎn)力就會提高，也會與歐洲其他地方更加同步。

Yet what might sound logical to many non-Spaniards would represent a fundamental change to Spanish life. For decades, many Spaniards have taken a long midday siesta break for lunch and a nap. Under a new schedule, that would be truncated to an hour or less. Television programs would be scheduled an hour earlier. And the elastic Spanish working day would be replaced by something closer to a 9-to-5 timetable.

然而，或許在許多非西班牙人聽起來比較合乎情理的事情，將意味著對西班牙生活的徹底改變。數(shù)十年來，許多西班牙人中午都會花很長的時間來吃午餐和睡午覺。根據(jù)新的日程安排，他們的午休時間將會被縮短到一個小時或者更少。電視節(jié)目的播放時間也將提前一小時。而且有彈性的西班牙工作日也將被近似于朝九晚五的日程安排所代替。

Underpinning the proposed changes is a recommendation to change time itself by turning back the clocks an hour, which would move Spain out of the time zone that includes France, Germany and Italy. Instead, Spain would join its natural geographical slot with Portugal and Britain in Coordinated Universal Time, the modern successor to Greenwich Mean Time.

有一條建議是此次提出的改變的基石，那就是把鐘表的指針往回撥一個小時，改變西班牙的時間。這樣一來，西班牙就將不再與法國、德國和意大利處于同一時區(qū)，而是加入它的自然時區(qū)，與葡萄牙和英國共處于協(xié)調(diào)世界時(UTC)，即繼承了格林威治標準時間(GMT)的現(xiàn)代時間標準。

“We want to see a more efficient culture,” said Ignacio Buqueras, the most outspoken advocate of changing the Spanish schedule. “Spain has to break the bad habits it has accumulated over the past 40 or 50 years.”

“我們希望看到一個更有效率的文化，”對于改變西班牙作息最大膽敢言的倡議者伊納西奧·布凱拉斯(Ignacio Buqueras)說。“西班牙必須改變它在過去四五十年間積累的壞習慣。”

For the moment, Spain’s government is treating the campaign seriously. In September, a parliamentary commission recommended that the government turn back the clocks an hour and introduce a regular eight-hour workday. As yet, the government has not taken any action.

目前，西班牙政府對待這場運動的態(tài)度較為嚴肅。9月，一個議會委員會建議政府把時鐘回撥一小時，并采用普通的八小時工作制。但是，政府至今尚未采取任何行動。

A workday abbreviated by siestas is a Spanish cliché, yet it is not necessarily rooted in reality. Instead, many urban Spaniards complain of a never-ending workday that begins in the morning but is interrupted by a traditional late-morning break and then interrupted again by the midday lunch. If workers return to their desks at 4 p.m. (lunch starts at 2), many people say, they end up working well into the evening, especially if the boss takes a long break and then works late.

通過午休來縮短工作時間已是有關西班牙人的老套說法，但是它并不一定真的就是現(xiàn)實。事實上，許多城市里的西班牙人都對漫長的工作日心懷不滿。他們的工作日通常開始于上午，但按照習慣，上午晚些時候會稍事休息，然后又到了午餐時間。如果工作者于下午4點回到辦公桌前(午餐2點開始)，許多人都說他們就需要工作到晚上，特別是在老板中午休息很久，然后工作到很晚的情況下。

“These working hours are not good for families,” said Paula Del Pino, 37, a lawyer and the mother of two children, who said an 8-to-5 workday would ease the pressure. “Spanish society is still old-fashioned. The ones who rule are old-fashioned, and here, they like it like it is.”

“這種工作時間對家庭來說并不好，”37歲的葆拉·德爾皮諾(Paula Del Pino)說。作為律師和兩個孩子的母親，她說，朝八晚五的工作日有助于緩解壓力。“西班牙社會仍然很因循守舊。這個社會的管理者都是老古董，他們希望能維持原狀。”

The national schedule can be traced to World War II, when the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco moved the clocks forward to align with Nazi Germany, as also happened in neighboring Portugal. After the defeat of Hitler, Portugal returned to Greenwich Mean Time, but Spain did not.

這種全國時刻表可以追溯到第二次世界大戰(zhàn)，當時西班牙獨裁者弗朗西斯科·佛朗哥(Francisco Franco)為了和納粹德國保持一致，對時間做了改動，鄰國葡萄牙也是如此。在希特勒垮臺后，葡萄牙恢復了格林威治標準時間，但西班牙沒有。

At the time, Spain was a largely agrarian nation, and many farmers set their schedules by the sun, not by clocks. Farmers ate lunch and dinner as before, even if the clocks declared it was an hour later. But as Spain industrialized and urbanized, the schedule gradually pushed the country away from the European norm.

當時的西班牙主要是個農(nóng)業(yè)國家，很多農(nóng)民是根據(jù)太陽而不是時鐘來安排時間的。農(nóng)民按一向的習慣吃午飯和晚飯，盡管時鐘上顯示已經(jīng)晚了一個小時。但是隨著西班牙的工業(yè)化和城市化，這種時間安排令該國從歐洲常態(tài)中漸漸脫離出來。

“People got stuck in that time,” said Javier Díaz-Giménez, an economist. “Eventually, the clocks took over.”

“人們被困在了那個時間里，”經(jīng)濟學家哈維爾·迪亞茲-席門內(nèi)茲(Javier Díaz-Giménez)說。“最終被時鐘接管。”

In the early decades of his rule, Franco ordered radio stations to broadcast reports of news and propaganda twice a day to coincide with mealtimes at about 2:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Television arrived in the 1950s and followed the same mandate, with daily programming on the lone government channel ending at midnight with the national anthem and a portrait of Franco.

在佛朗哥掌權的頭幾十年里，他下令要電臺每天播出兩次新聞和政治宣傳節(jié)目，時間分別是下午2:30和晚上10點這兩個吃飯時間。上世紀50年代出現(xiàn)的電視也執(zhí)行了這個命令，在唯一的政府頻道上每天播出，到午夜以國歌和一張佛朗哥的肖像為結束。

“Then everyone would go to bed and procreate,” said Ricardo Vaca, chief executive of Barlovento Communications, a media consultancy in Madrid.

“然后所有人上床繁殖后代，”馬德里媒體顧問公司巴羅文托傳播(Barlovento Communications)的首席執(zhí)行官里卡多·巴卡(Ricardo Vaca)說。

By the 1990s, with Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy underway, television also began evolving. Mr. Vaca said new private networks, eager for profits on popular shows, made programs longer and pushed prime time into the early morning hours. Now, he added, surveys show that 12 million people are still watching television at 1 a.m. in Spain.

到了上世紀90年代，后佛朗哥時代的西班牙正在向一個民主國家過渡，電視也開始發(fā)展。巴卡說，新成立的私營電視網(wǎng)盼望著靠熱播節(jié)目掙錢，因此延長了播出時間，把黃金時段推到了凌晨。他還說，調(diào)查表明現(xiàn)在西班牙有1200萬人在凌晨1點還在看電視。

Changing the prime-time schedule is one of the recommendations bundled together by Mr. Buqueras, president of the Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Working Hours. At his office in Madrid, Mr. Buqueras burst into a conference room and immediately checked his watch.

在西班牙工作時間合理化改革協(xié)會(Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Working Hours)會長布凱拉斯提出的一攬子建議中，改變黃金時段也是其中一項。在馬德里的協(xié)會辦公室里，布凱拉斯急匆匆走進一間會議室，第一時間看了看手表。

“Thank you for being on time!” he declared.

“感謝你能準時到!”他表示。

Mr. Buqueras argues that changing the Spanish schedule would be a boon to working mothers, allow families more free time together and help Spain’s economic recovery. “If Spain had a rational timetable, the country would be more productive,” he said.

布凱拉斯指出，改變西班牙的時刻表對在上班的母親是有好處的，這樣家人就有更多閑暇時間在一起，有助于西班牙的經(jīng)濟復蘇。他說，“如果有一個合理的時間表，這個國家就可以有更高的生產(chǎn)力。”

Whether an earlier, more regimented schedule will translate into higher productivity is a matter of dispute. Mr. Buqueras’s group says Spanish workers are on the job longer than German workers but complete only 59 percent of their daily tasks. Measuring productivity is an imprecise science, and while many experts say Spanish productivity is too low, Spain actually outperforms many European countries in some calculations, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency.

一個提早的、更嚴謹?shù)臅r刻表是否能轉化為更高的生產(chǎn)效率，目前是有爭議的。布凱拉斯所在的一方認為，西班牙工人每天的在崗時間比德國工人長，但完成的工作只有后者的59%。生產(chǎn)效率的衡量并不是一門精確的科學，雖然許多專家說西班牙的生產(chǎn)效率太低，但根據(jù)歐盟統(tǒng)計機構Eurostat的數(shù)據(jù)，在某些方面西班牙的表現(xiàn)其實是比歐洲許多國家好的。

“These three-hour siestas don’t exist,” said Carlos Angulo Martín, who oversees social analysis at the National Statistics Institute in Madrid. Nor are habits uniform across the country, he said, noting that in the Catalonia region, mealtimes and work schedules are aligned more with those of other European countries.

“這些三小時的午睡是不存在的，”馬德里國家統(tǒng)計研究所(National Statistics Institute)分管社會分析的卡洛斯·安古洛·馬丁(Carlos Angulo Martín)說。而且這些習慣也并非全國統(tǒng)一的，他提到加泰羅尼亞地區(qū)的進餐和工作時間安排跟其他歐洲國家要更一致一些。

At the Mesón Viña bar, Mr. Rodríguez and his friends contemplated the Spanish clock. One friend, Miguel Carbayo, 26, was appalled at the notion of a nap-free lunch. He had worked as an intern in the Netherlands, where his co-workers arrived at 8 and left at 5, with a half-hour to munch on a sandwich for lunch, a regimen he found shocking.

在“葡萄園小館”，羅德里格茲和他的朋友對西班牙時間進行了深入思考。其中一位朋友，26歲的米凱爾·卡拉巴約(Miguel Carbayo)對沒有打盹時間的午餐感到厭惡。他在荷蘭做過一份實習工作，那里的同事早上8點上班，下午5點下班，中間半個小時午餐，一個三明治三兩口下肚了事，如此的安排讓他覺得不可思議。

“Reduce lunchtime?” he said. “No, I’m completely against that. It is one thing to eat. It is another thing to nourish oneself. Our culture and customs are our way of living.”

“減少午餐時間?”他說，“不行，我完全反對。吃飯是一回事，讓自己獲得養(yǎng)分是另一回事。我們的文化和風俗就是我們的生活方式。”

But, he admitted, a shorter nap might be acceptable. “They say 20 minutes is enough to boost productivity,” he said.

但是他承認，縮短的午睡還是可以接受的。“他們說睡個20分鐘足夠促進工作效率了，”他說。