《玫瑰之名》作者 暢銷學人艾柯去世
Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died on Friday in Italy. He was 84.
意大利學者翁貝託·艾柯(Umberto Eco)原本從事晦澀的符號學研究，後來成了暢銷小說作者，其轟動一時的中世紀神祕小說《玫瑰之名》(The Name of the Rose)最爲著名，他於週五在意大利逝世，享年84歲。
His Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. He died at his home in Milan, according to the Italian news website Il Post. No cause was given.
根據意大利安莎通訊社(ANSA)報道，他的死訊由意大利出版社邦皮亞尼(Bompiani)確認。意大利新聞網站Il Post報道，他於米蘭家中去世，報道中沒有給出死因。
As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university.
作爲符號學家，艾柯希望通過各種文化的符號與象徵來闡釋文化，諸如文字、神像、旗幟、衣服、樂譜，甚至是卡通；他在歐洲最古老的大學博洛尼亞大學(University of Bologna)任教期間，曾出版過20多部關於這個領域的非虛構作品。
But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.
但是他並沒有把自己的學術生涯同自己的暢銷小說創作截然分開，在他的七部小說作品裏，艾柯都灌注了大量自己的學術興趣。
In bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.)
他的第一部小說，1980年在歐洲首次出版的《玫瑰之名》便是這兩個世界最成功的結合。它被翻譯爲30餘種語言，售出了1000多萬冊。1986年，一個好萊塢改編的電影版本由讓-雅克·阿諾(Jean-Jacques Annaud)執導，由肖恩·康奈利(Sean Connery)主演，獲得的反響並不很熱烈。
The book is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery where monks are being murdered by their co-religionists bent on concealing a long-lost philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Despite devoting whole chapters to discussions of Christian theology and heresies, Mr. Eco managed to enthrall a mass audience with the book, a rollicking detective thriller.
這本書的背景設定在14世紀的意大利修道院，教士們被身邊的宗教狂熱分子殺害，兇手的目的是藏匿亞里士多德的一本遺失已久的哲學專著。儘管書中整章整章地討論基督教神學與各種異端邪說，艾柯的這本書仍不失爲一本狂歡的偵探驚悚小說，令大量讀者爲之着迷。
His subsequent novels — with protagonists like a clairvoyant crusader in the Middle Ages, a shipwrecked adventurer in the 1600s and a 19th-century physicist — also demanded that readers absorb heavy doses of semiotic ruminations along with compelling fictional tales.
他接下來的幾部小說中的主角包括中世紀一位頗具洞察力的聖戰者、17世紀從海難逃生的冒險家，以及一個19世紀的物理學家，這些小說都需要讀者在閱讀引人入勝的小說故事同時，接受大量符號學思考。
In a 1995 interview with Vogue, Mr. Eco acknowledged that he was not an easy read. “People always ask me, ‘How is it that your novels, which are so difficult, have a certain success?’” he said. “I am offended by the question. It’s as if they asked a woman, ‘How can it be that men are interested in you?’” Then, with typical irony, Mr. Eco added, “I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately.”
1995年接受《Vogue》雜誌採訪時，艾柯承認，他的小說並不好讀。“人們總是問我，‘你的小說這麼晦澀，爲什麼還總能取得一定程度的成功？’”他說。“這個問題讓我覺得受到了冒犯。就像是問一個女人，‘男人怎麼會對你感興趣的？’”然後他帶着典型的諷刺補充，“我本人喜歡能讓我很快睡着的輕鬆讀物。”
While Mr. Eco had many defenders in academia and the literary world, critics in both realms sometimes dismissed him for lacking either scholarly gravitas or novelistic talent. “No cultural artifact is too lowly or trivial for Eco’s analysis,” Ian Thomson, a literary biographer, wrote in The Guardian in 1999 in a review of “Serendipities: Language and Lunacy,” Mr. Eco’s collection of essays on how false beliefs had changed history.
艾柯在學術界與文學界都有很多捍衛者，但這兩個領域也有不少評論家認爲他既缺乏學術的嚴肅性，也缺乏小說家的才能。“就算再低劣、再渺小的文化產品，艾柯也能分析一番，”1999年，伊恩·湯姆森(Ian Thomson)在《衛報》上爲艾柯的《機緣巧合：語言與混亂》(Serendipities: Language and Lunacy)所做的書評中寫道。這本書是艾柯的文集，闡述錯誤的信念如何改變了歷史。
And the British novelist Salman Rushdie, in a scathing review in The London Observer, derided Mr. Eco’s 1988 novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” as “humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts.”
英國小說家薩爾曼·拉什迪(Salman Rushdie)在《倫敦觀察》(The London Observer)上發表的一篇文章中，不留情面地批評艾柯1988年的小說《傅科擺》(Foucault’s Pendulum)，稱其“毫無幽默感、缺乏性格、完全沒有任何可以接受的口頭語言，各種晦澀的術語有如天書，讓人頭昏腦漲。”
Appearing alongside Mr. Rushdie at a literary panel in New York in 2008, Mr. Eco wryly chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum.”
2008年，在紐約的一個文學研討會上，坐在拉什迪旁邊的艾柯面帶嘲諷，讀了《傅科擺》中的一段文字。
As a global superstar in both highbrow and popular cultural circles, Mr. Eco accepted such criticism with equanimity. “I’m not a fundamentalist, saying there’s no difference between Homer and Walt Disney,” he told a Guardian journalist who was exploring his juxtaposition of scholarship and pop iconography in 2002. “But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is.”
艾柯在高端文學與通俗文學界都是全球超級明星，對於這樣的評論，他總是心平氣和地接受。“我不是原教旨主義者，非要說荷馬和沃爾特·迪士尼(Walt Disney)之間毫無區別，”2002年，他在接受《衛報》採訪時說，對方想知道他爲何把學術研究和流行符號相提並論。“但是米老鼠和日本俳句可以具有同樣的意義。”
Able to deliver lectures in five modern languages, as well as in Latin and classical Greek, Mr. Eco crisscrossed the Atlantic for academic conferences, book tours and celebrity cocktail parties. Impish, bearded and a chain-smoker, he enjoyed bantering over cheap wine with his students late into the night at taverns in Bologna.
艾柯能以五種現代語言授課，還通曉拉丁文與古典希臘文，他經常赴美參加學術會議、做新書的巡迴宣傳，參加名人雞尾酒會。留着山羊鬍子，古靈精怪的他總是一支接一支地吸菸，喜歡在博洛尼亞的酒館喝便宜的葡萄酒，和學生們說笑直到深夜。
He and his German-born wife, Renate Ramge, an architecture and arts teacher, kept apartments in Paris and Milan and a 17th-century manor once owned by the Jesuits in the hills near Rimini, on the Adriatic Sea. They had two children, Stefano, a television producer in Rome, and Carlotta, an architect in Milan.
他的妻子雷娜特·拉姆格(Renate Ramge)出生於德國，是一位建築與藝術教師，兩人在巴黎與米蘭都有住所，在亞德里亞海濱距離裏米尼(Rimini)不遠的羣山之間，還擁有一棟17世紀的宅邸，原本是耶穌會會士的修道院。他們有兩個孩子，斯特凡諾(Stefano)在羅馬當電視製作人，夏洛塔(Charlotta)在米蘭當建築師。
Umberto Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932, in Alessandria, an industrial town in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant at a metals firm; his mother, Giovanna, was an office worker there.
翁貝託·艾柯於1932年1月5日生於亞歷山德里亞，這是意大利西北部皮埃蒙特地區(Piedmont)一座工業城鎮。他的父親朱利奧(Giulio)是一家五金公司的會計，母親喬萬娜是那裏的辦公室文員。
As a child, Umberto spent hours every day in his grandfather’s cellar, reading through the older man’s eclectic collection of Jules Verne, Marco Polo and Charles Darwin and adventure comics. During the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, he remembered wearing a fascist uniform and winning first prize in a writing competition for young fascists.
童年時代，艾柯每天都要花好幾個小時在祖父的地下室裏閱讀這位老人五花八門的藏書，其中包括了儒勒·凡爾納(Jules Verne)、馬可·波羅(Marco Polo)與查爾斯·達爾文(Charles Darwin)的著作，以及各種冒險漫畫。在貝尼託·墨索里尼(Benito Mussolini)獨裁統治的歲月，他記得兒時的自己身穿納粹軍裝，在青年法西斯的寫作競賽裏獲得了生平第一個獎項。
After World War II, Mr. Eco joined a Catholic youth organization and rose to become its national leader. He resigned in 1954 during protests against the conservative policies of Pope Pius XII. But Mr. Eco maintained a strong attachment to the church, writing his 1956 doctoral thesis at the University of Turin on St. Thomas Aquinas.
“二戰”結束後，艾柯加入了一個天主教青年組織，後來成了它的全國領導人。1954年，在抗議教皇庇護十二世(Pope Pius XII)的活動中，艾柯退出了這個組織。但他在都靈大學(University of Turin)撰寫關於聖托馬斯·阿奎那(St. Thomas Aquinas)的博士論文期間，仍然對這個教會懷有強烈好感。
He went on to teach philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also gained fame in Italy for his weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L’Espresso, the country’s leading magazine.
後來他到博洛尼亞大學教授哲學，後來又教授符號學。他每週爲意大利最有影響力的雜誌《快報》(L’Espresso)撰寫專欄，評點流行文化與政治，並因此出名。
But it was the publication of “The Name of the Rose” that vaulted Mr. Eco to global renown. The monk-detective of the novel, William of Baskerville, was named after one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The novel is narrated by a young novice who accompanies William through his investigation at the murder-prone monastery and acts as a medieval Doctor Watson.
但是爲艾柯帶來國際聲譽的，還要算是《玫瑰之名》的出版。書中的教士兼偵探，“巴斯克維爾的威廉”(William of Baskerville)是以福爾摩斯探案中的《巴斯克維爾的獵犬》(The Hound of the Baskervilles)命名的。一個年輕學徒陪伴威廉來到這座籠罩着謀殺陰影的修道院，充當中世紀的華生醫生角色，小說也由他來敘述。
In another literary allusion, this time to the blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who set one of his stories in an encyclopedic library, Mr. Eco named the villain of the novel Jorge de Burgos and portrays him as the monastery’s blind librarian. De Burgos and his accomplices carry out their killings to prevent the disclosure of a supposedly lost Aristotle tome exalting the role of humor. The murderers believe the book is an instrument of Satan.
書中還有另一個文學指涉，即阿根廷的失明作家豪爾赫·路易斯·博爾赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges)，他曾把自己的一個短篇小說背景設在包羅萬有的圖書館，艾柯給書中的反派命名爲豪爾赫·德·布爾霍斯，他的同夥們執行了謀殺，目的是防止遺失的亞里士多德鉅著泄露於世，書中歌頌了幽默的地位。兇手們認爲，這本書是撒旦的工具。
In “Foucault’s Pendulum,” his second novel, Mr. Eco tells the story of Léon Foucault, a French physicist in the 1800s who devised a mechanism to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Despite mixing allusions to the Kabbalah, mathematical formulas and Disney characters, the novel also became a worldwide best seller — even though it did not receive the near unanimous acclaim that critics had accorded to “The Name of the Rose.”
在他的第二本小說《傅科擺》中，艾柯講述了19世紀初的物理學家裏昂·傅科的故事，他發明了一種機械，演示地球的轉動。小說中融匯了卡巴拉教、數學公式與迪士尼動畫人物，但卻成爲世界範圍內的暢銷書，不過卻沒有像《玫瑰之名》那樣，贏得評論界的一致好評。
The pattern repeated itself with Mr. Eco’s other novels, which were often disparaged by critics but devoured by readers in spite of their dense prose and difficult concepts. Reviewing Mr. Eco’s fourth novel, “Baudolino” (2000), in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that it “will make you wonder how a storyteller as crafty as Mr. Eco ended up producing a novel so formulaic and cluttered as this one.”
艾柯的其他小說延續了這種模式，它們有着密集的長篇大論和晦澀的概念，受到評論家的批評，卻被讀者喜愛。理查德·伯恩斯坦(Richard Bernstein)在《紐約時報》發表書評，評論艾柯2000年出版的第四部小說《波多裏諾》(Baudolino)時寫道，這本書“會讓你疑惑，像艾柯這樣擅長講故事的人，最終怎麼會寫出這麼一本充滿套話、雜亂無章的小說”。
Set amid the religious disputes and wars of the 12th century, “Baudolino” became the best-selling hardcover novel of all time in Germany and a commercial success elsewhere in the world.
《波多裏諾》發生在充滿宗教爭端與戰亂的12世紀，在德國成爲有史以來最暢銷的精裝小說，在世界各地都獲得了商業成功。
Critics were kinder to Mr. Eco’s third novel, “The Island of the Day Before” (1994), in which an Italian nobleman, who cannot swim, survives on his shipwrecked vessel at a point in the tropical Pacific Ocean where the dateline divides one day from another.
評論界對艾柯1994年的第三部小說《昨日之島》(The Island of the Day Before)態度稍微溫和一點，書中寫了一個不會游泳的意大利貴族從失事的船隻中逃生，地點在熱帶太平洋海域，正處於分日經度線上。
“Eco has abandoned his familiar Middle Ages to create an extravagant celebration of the obsessions of the seventeenth century,” a reviewer in The New Yorker wrote, alluding to the author’s many anecdotes and explanations on the philosophy, politics and superstitions of Europe in that era.
“艾柯拋棄了他熟悉的中世紀，創造了一個豐富的17世紀妄想之慶典，”《紐約客》上的一篇書評寫道，這裏是指作者筆下對17世紀歐洲的哲學、政治與迷信的衆多趣聞軼事與闡釋。
Last fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a new Eco novel, “Numero Zero,” translated by Richard Dixon. The story, set in 1992, revolves around a ghostwriter who is pulled into an underworld of media politics and murder conspiracies, with a suggestion that Mussolini did not actually die in 1945 but lived in the shadows for decades. “This slender novel, which feels like a mere diversion compared with his more epic works, is nonetheless stuffed with ideas and energy,” John Williams wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
去年秋天，霍頓·米夫林·哈考特(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)出版社出版了艾柯的最新小說《許多零》(Numero Zero)，英文版由理查德·迪克森(Richard Dixon)翻譯。故事設定在1992年，圍繞着一個影子寫手進行，他被捲入一個媒體政治與謀殺陰謀的地下世界，還認爲墨索里尼沒有在1945年死去，而是隱姓埋名活了幾十年。“這本薄薄的小說與他那些史詩般的鉅著相比，更像是一種消遣，但卻同樣充滿創意與能量，”約翰·威廉姆斯(John Williams)爲《紐約時報書評》撰文寫道。
Mr. Eco received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
艾柯曾獲意大利最高文學獎“雷佳獎”(Premio Strega)，被法國政府授予榮譽軍團騎士勳章(Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur)，亦是美國藝術及文學學會(American Academy of Arts and Letters)的榮譽成員。
While he continued to make his scholarly peers uncomfortable with his pop culture celebrity, Mr. Eco saw no contradiction in his dual status. “I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels,” he said.
儘管艾柯在流行文化界的名聲一直令他在學術界同行們頗爲不適，他本人卻覺得這種雙重身份中沒有任何矛盾之處。“我覺得我是個嚴肅的教授，用週末時間寫寫小說，”他說。
