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一篇寫給訃告生涯的訃告

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ing-bottom: 56.29%;">一篇寫給訃告生涯的訃告

No sense in burying the lede. This week, after more than eight years of lively habitation in one of journalism’s more obscure corners, I’m making a final egress, passing on. Starting after Friday’s deadline (ha!) I am an ex-obit writer.

沒必要繞彎子。在新聞業一個不那麼爲人注意的領域愉快地駐守八年多後,我在本週最終謝幕,要往前走了。這週五是截稿期限(哈!),然後我就成爲一名前訃告作者了。

Here’s my legacy. A thousand salutes to the departed, something like that. Age range 11 to 104. Cops and criminals, actors and athletes, scientists and judges, politicians and other poobahs. Famous, infamous or as obscure as the rest of us except for one instance of memorable distinction. A man with a mountain named for him, another who hijacked a plane. A woman who changed infant care for the better, another who shot a ballplayer. High achievers who died after long and fruitful lives (Yogi Berra, Ruby Dee, E. L. Doctorow) or whose unanticipated demise (Grete Waitz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Carr) demanded furiously quick reporting and writing — and attention on the front page.

我遺留下來的是:向一千位逝者的致意,大概可以這麼說吧。他們的年齡下至11歲,上至104歲。有警察,也有罪犯;有演員和運動員,也有科學家和法官,還有政壇人物和其他大佬。有知名的、臭名昭著的,也有除了一個值得紀念的特別之處以外,與我們其他人一樣籍籍無名的人。其中,有名男子有一座山峯以他命名,也有一名男子劫持了一架飛機。有一名女性改善了嬰兒護理的狀況,另一名則射殺了一位棒球手。有的人取得了很高的成就,在度過漫長而有成果的人生之後去世(約吉•貝拉[Yogi Berra]、魯比•迪伊[Ruby Dee]、E•L•多克託羅[E. L. Doctorow]),有的人則是生命戛然而止,需要我們極其快速地組織報道和寫作,而且會在頭版刊登(格蕾特•魏茨[Grete Waitz]、菲利普•西摩•霍夫曼[Philip Seymour Hoffman]、戴維•卡爾[David Carr])。

Name a profession (Scream queen? Used car dealer? Astronaut? Guru?) or an achievement (Solved an equation? Caught a killer? Integrated a sitcom?) or an ignominious label (Pederast? Con artist? Embezzler?). For whatever reason — AIDS or Alzheimer’s, cancer or a car crash, heart failure or kidney disease, sepsis or suicide — they all went on my watch.

隨便列舉一項職業(尖叫女王?二手車經銷商?宇航員?古魯?),或一項成就(解開一個方程?抓到一名殺人犯?演活了一部情景喜劇?),或一個不光彩的標籤(戀童癖男子?大騙子?貪污者?),都有對應的人。不管是出於什麼原因——艾滋病或阿爾茨海默症,癌症或車禍,心力衰竭或腎病,敗血症或自殺——他們都進了我的寫作名單。

We’re accustomed, my colleagues and I, to saying that an obituary is not about a death, but a life. This is true, but really, we’re reporters and you can’t avoid the news, which is, of course, the same news every time. That’s one thing that distinguishes writing obituaries from anything else in journalism.

我和同事們習慣說,訃告並非關於死亡,而是關乎生命。這是真的,但我們又的確是記者,避不開新聞性。當然,這些新聞每次也都差不多。這正是訃告寫作與其他任何新聞寫作不同的地方。

Another is that we start at the end and look backward. There’s some reward in this, in the excavating we do that often unearths interesting, long-forgotten facts.

另一個不同之處在於,我們從結尾開始,向前追溯。這會讓你有所回報,在挖掘過去的過程中,我們往往會發現一些早被遺忘的有趣事實。

But it’s melancholy, too. We had a movie made about us recently, a documentary called “Obit,” and in it my former deskmate Doug Martin, who effected his own exit from the obit business a couple of years ago, made a comment of encapsulating rue. He often admired the people he wrote about, he said, but he never got to meet them.

不過,它也會令人感傷。我們最近拍了一部有關自己的紀錄片,名爲《訃告》(Obit)。兩年前退出這一寫作領域的前同事道格•馬丁(Doug Martin)在其中做了飽含遺憾之情的總結。他往往很欣賞自己的寫作對象,但卻從來沒有機會見到他們。

I’ve had a long career at this newspaper, three decades, exercising, for better or worse, a good deal of imagination. But in the last eight-plus years I haven’t had to come up with a story idea. I’ve spent hundreds of afternoons burrowing deep into cyberspace and perusing yellowed news clippings from The Times’s historical archive, a.k.a. the morgue. And then the phone interviews — necessary, sometimes grueling, often poignant with laughter or tears, half consulting with and half consoling friends and relatives of the dead who hope I’m giving credence and gravity to their anguish and not sucking the marrow out of it.

我在這份報紙度過了漫長的職業生涯,前後30年,不管好壞,挖掘出了不少創造力。但是在過去的八年多時間裏,我不需要再構思故事。在數百個下午,我在網絡世界裏深挖,在時報的檔案庫——也就是“太平間”——裏翻看發黃的新聞剪報。然後進行電話採訪——這是必要的,有時非常折磨人,往往伴隨酸楚的笑聲或眼淚,一半工作是詢問死者的親友,另一半則是安慰他們。他們希望我的報道賦予他們的痛苦真實性和份量,不要喪失其中的精華。

I hardly ever left the office; that bugs me. A few trips to the library or a bookstore, once or twice to a museum, the apartment of the widow of a former Marlboro Man who had some old ads I wanted to see. Not the most adventurous reporting in the world.

我幾乎沒有踏出過辦公室;這讓我感到困擾。去過幾次圖書館或書店,偶爾去一兩趟博物館、一名曾經的萬寶路香菸廣告男演員遺孀的公寓,那裏有我想看的舊廣告資料。怎麼也算不上世界上最驚險刺激的那種報道工作。

All that said, I don’t think it’s self-aggrandizing to say that obituary writing is important work. An obituary is, after all, the first last word on a life, a public assessment of a human being’s time on earth, a judgment on what deserves to be remembered. In addition, though we write for readers of all stripes, of course, and not especially for those in mourning, I suspect all of us who do this keep the loved ones in mind, and if we don’t seek their approval exactly — unsavory details are often unavoidable — we strive to write so that they at least recognize the person they’ve lost. Journalism isn’t supposed to be a personal service, but obituary writing, without compromising any professional integrity, can be. Maybe should be. In any case, getting it right is not easy. And getting it wrong can cause real distress to the already distressed.

話雖如此,但我認爲說寫訃告是一份重要的工作並不是在自誇。畢竟,訃告是對一個生命做出的最早的結語、是對一個人一生的公開評價,是對值得紀念的東西的判斷。此外,雖然我們的文章當然是面向形形色色的讀者,而不是特地爲那些哀悼逝者的人而寫,但我懷疑,我們做這一行的所有人心裏都想着逝者的親友。如果說我們並不尋求得到他們的贊同——令人不快的細節常常無法避免——我們也在力爭做到他們至少能認出自己失去的那個人。新聞報道不應爲私人服務,但在不破壞任何職業操守的情況下,訃告寫作可以這樣。也許也應該這樣。無論如何,恰當處理這件事並非易事。而不當處理則可能會給本就無比痛苦的人造成實際的痛苦。

Obituary writers tend to be older people, at least at The Times, where the average age of the reporters and editors on the obits desk is higher than that of any other department. This is as it should be. Partly, I guess, they don’t want us running around too much, approaching decrepitude as we are. But mostly it’s because we’ve shared a lot of time on earth with our subjects and have lived through much of the history they helped make. Not incidentally, we’ve all had the experience of grief and know what it feels like to live in the immediate aftermath of personal tragedy.

訃告作者往往是上了年紀的人,至少在時報是這樣。時報訃告部門的記者和編輯的平均年齡比其他任何部門都高。理應如此。我猜在一定程度上因爲他們不想讓接近老弱之態的我們四處奔波太多。但主要是因爲,在大量時間裏,我們和寫作對象生活在同一個時代,我們經歷了他們參與創造的大量歷史。並且必須要說的是,我們所有人都有過悲傷的經歷,都知道個人悲劇剛發生後的感受。

The significant irony to retiring from the obits department is this: I may be going but you’re not quite rid of me. My byline is likely to continue to appear for months, even years, because of the 40 or 50 obituaries I’ve written of people who are still living — the future dead, as we say, in mordant obit-speak. Perhaps I’ll even have a posthumous byline or two — not something I aspire to, by the way.

從訃告部門退休這件事最具諷刺意味的是:我可能是走了,但你們卻不會完全擺脫我。我的署名大概會繼續出現幾個月,乃至幾年,因爲我寫的四五十篇訃告的主角尚在人世——用不客氣的訃告圈行話來說叫未來的死者。也許,我的署名甚至會在自己死後出現一兩次。順便說一句,這可不是我渴望發生的事。

Advances are what we call these obituaries written in, well, advance. It’s a practical matter; you can’t write the comprehensive life story of a president or a pope or a movie star in an hour or even a day. But think about the presumption of such an enterprise. We know they’re going. We don’t know how. We don’t know when.

我們把這些提前寫好的訃告叫預稿。這是一種很實用的做法;你無法在一個小時甚至一天內寫出一篇文章,全面介紹一位總統、教皇或電影明星的生平。但想象一下,這樣的項目到底是什麼情況。我們知道他們即將離去,但不知道會以什麼方式,在什麼時候。

Which is, of course, the main reason I’m getting out while the getting is good.

當然,這正好就是我在適當的時候離開的主要原因。