一篇写给讣告生涯的讣告
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.
没必要绕弯子。在新闻业一个不那么为人注意的领域愉快地驻守八年多后，我在本周最终谢幕，要往前走了。这周五是截稿期限（哈！），然后我就成为一名前讣告作者了。
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.
我遗留下来的是：向一千位逝者的致意，大概可以这么说吧。他们的年龄下至11岁，上至104岁。有警察，也有罪犯；有演员和运动员，也有科学家和法官，还有政坛人物和其他大佬。有知名的、臭名昭著的，也有除了一个值得纪念的特别之处以外，与我们其他人一样籍籍无名的人。其中，有名男子有一座山峰以他命名，也有一名男子劫持了一架飞机。有一名女性改善了婴儿护理的状况，另一名则射杀了一位棒球手。有的人取得了很高的成就，在度过漫长而有成果的人生之后去世（约吉•贝拉[Yogi Berra]、鲁比•迪伊[Ruby Dee]、E•L•多克托罗[E. L. Doctorow]），有的人则是生命戛然而止，需要我们极其快速地组织报道和写作，而且会在头版刊登（格蕾特•魏茨[Grete Waitz]、菲利普•西摩•霍夫曼[Philip Seymour Hoffman]、戴维•卡尔[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.
随便列举一项职业（尖叫女王？二手车经销商？宇航员？古鲁？），或一项成就（解开一个方程？抓到一名杀人犯？演活了一部情景喜剧？），或一个不光彩的标签（恋童癖男子？大骗子？贪污者？），都有对应的人。不管是出于什么原因——艾滋病或阿尔茨海默症，癌症或车祸，心力衰竭或肾病，败血症或自杀——他们都进了我的写作名单。
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.
我和同事们习惯说，讣告并非关于死亡，而是关乎生命。这是真的，但我们又的确是记者，避不开新闻性。当然，这些新闻每次也都差不多。这正是讣告写作与其他任何新闻写作不同的地方。
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.
另一个不同之处在于，我们从结尾开始，向前追溯。这会让你有所回报，在挖掘过去的过程中，我们往往会发现一些早被遗忘的有趣事实。
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.
不过，它也会令人感伤。我们最近拍了一部有关自己的纪录片，名为《讣告》(Obit)。两年前退出这一写作领域的前同事道格•马丁(Doug Martin)在其中做了饱含遗憾之情的总结。他往往很欣赏自己的写作对象，但却从来没有机会见到他们。
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.
我在这份报纸度过了漫长的职业生涯，前后30年，不管好坏，挖掘出了不少创造力。但是在过去的八年多时间里，我不需要再构思故事。在数百个下午，我在网络世界里深挖，在时报的档案库——也就是“太平间”——里翻看发黄的新闻剪报。然后进行电话采访——这是必要的，有时非常折磨人，往往伴随酸楚的笑声或眼泪，一半工作是询问死者的亲友，另一半则是安慰他们。他们希望我的报道赋予他们的痛苦真实性和份量，不要丧失其中的精华。
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.
我几乎没有踏出过办公室；这让我感到困扰。去过几次图书馆或书店，偶尔去一两趟博物馆、一名曾经的万宝路香烟广告男演员遗孀的公寓，那里有我想看的旧广告资料。怎么也算不上世界上最惊险刺激的那种报道工作。
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.
话虽如此，但我认为说写讣告是一份重要的工作并不是在自夸。毕竟，讣告是对一个生命做出的最早的结语、是对一个人一生的公开评价，是对值得纪念的东西的判断。此外，虽然我们的文章当然是面向形形色色的读者，而不是特地为那些哀悼逝者的人而写，但我怀疑，我们做这一行的所有人心里都想着逝者的亲友。如果说我们并不寻求得到他们的赞同——令人不快的细节常常无法避免——我们也在力争做到他们至少能认出自己失去的那个人。新闻报道不应为私人服务，但在不破坏任何职业操守的情况下，讣告写作可以这样。也许也应该这样。无论如何，恰当处理这件事并非易事。而不当处理则可能会给本就无比痛苦的人造成实际的痛苦。
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.
讣告作者往往是上了年纪的人，至少在时报是这样。时报讣告部门的记者和编辑的平均年龄比其他任何部门都高。理应如此。我猜在一定程度上因为他们不想让接近老弱之态的我们四处奔波太多。但主要是因为，在大量时间里，我们和写作对象生活在同一个时代，我们经历了他们参与创造的大量历史。并且必须要说的是，我们所有人都有过悲伤的经历，都知道个人悲剧刚发生后的感受。
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.
从讣告部门退休这件事最具讽刺意味的是：我可能是走了，但你们却不会完全摆脱我。我的署名大概会继续出现几个月，乃至几年，因为我写的四五十篇讣告的主角尚在人世——用不客气的讣告圈行话来说叫未来的死者。也许，我的署名甚至会在自己死后出现一两次。顺便说一句，这可不是我渴望发生的事。
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.
我们把这些提前写好的讣告叫预稿。这是一种很实用的做法；你无法在一个小时甚至一天内写出一篇文章，全面介绍一位总统、教皇或电影明星的生平。但想象一下，这样的项目到底是什么情况。我们知道他们即将离去，但不知道会以什么方式，在什么时候。
Which is, of course, the main reason I’m getting out while the getting is good.
当然，这正好就是我在适当的时候离开的主要原因。
