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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.
他在白宫的八年是一个信息超载、党派分歧严重、人们不假思索就做出反应的喧嚣时代，在这段时期里，书籍是观念与灵感的持久来源，让他能够重新思考人类境况的复杂性和模糊性。 “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.” “在这个时代，事件发展得很快，信息传播量很大，”他说，阅读能让他偶尔“慢下来，获得新的角度”，并且能让他“获得设身处地为他人着想的能力”。他还说，这两件事“对我来说无比珍贵。我不好说它们是否让我成为了一个更好的总统。但可以说，它们让我在这八年里保持了平衡，因为这个地方总是紧密控制着你，不会放松”。 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. 奥巴马发现，林肯、小马丁·路德·金牧师(Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)、甘地(Gandhi)和纳尔逊·曼德拉(Nelson Mandela)的文章在“你需要感受到团结支持的时候尤为有用”，他补充说，“在非常艰难的时刻，这份工作可能会让你觉得非常孤立。所以，有时你必须穿越历史，寻找也曾有过类似孤立感的人，那很有用”。白宫中的林肯卧室有一份《葛底斯堡演说》(Gettysburg Address)的手写底稿，奥巴马说，有时他会在夜里从自己的家庭办公室漫步到那里去阅读。 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. 和林肯一样，奥巴马也是自学写作，对他来说，文字也是定义自己、向世界传达自己的想法和理想的一种方式。实际上，林肯、金博士和奥巴马之间存在清晰、明显的联系。在查尔斯顿和塞尔玛等地发表的演讲中，他追随他们的脚步，用精湛的语言阐述意义深远的历史观，和他们的演讲一样，把我们目前在种族和不公正方面进行的斗争置于历史的长河中，追溯我们走过的道路，展望我们还要走多远。 Context in Presidential Biographies 总统传记的背景 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.” 他说，诸多总统传记也提供了背景，防止你认为“现在发生的任何灾难、精彩和困难都是前所未有的。想到罗斯福(Roosevelt)努力领导这个国家度过二战时，你会很有启发”。 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，阅读仍是他日常生活的一个重要组成部分。前不久，他送给女儿马莉娅(Malia)一个Kindle，里面装满了他想与女儿分享的书，其中包括《百年孤独》(One Hundred Years of Solitude)、《金色笔记本》(The Golden Notebook)和《女勇士》(The Woman Warrior)。在白宫的大部分时间，他会在夜里读一个小时左右的书——有深奥的，也有通俗的，从当代小说（他读的上一本小说是科尔森·怀特黑德[Colson Whitehead]的《地下铁路》[The Underground Railroad]）、经典小说、到开创性的非虚构类作品，比如丹尼尔·卡纳曼(Daniel Kahneman)的《思考：快与慢》(Thinking, Fast and Slow)和伊丽莎白·科尔伯特(Elizabeth Kolbert)的《第六次灭绝》(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. 这些书可以帮助总统把脑子从白天研究的简报和政策文件中转换过来，是“跳出自己头脑”的一种方式，是逃离白宫樊篱的一种方式。有些小说能帮他更容易“想像美国各地人们的生活情况”——比如，在2008年的竞选中，他发现玛丽莲·罗宾逊(Marilynne Robinson)的小说在情感上把他与在艾奥瓦州见到的人们、他来自美国中西部的外祖父母，以及勤劳、诚实和谦逊的小镇价值观联系到了一起。 A Writer of Short Stories 短篇小说的作者 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.” 在芝加哥担任社区组织者时，奥巴马通过写日记和短篇小说自学写作——下班回家后写，以他见到的人的故事为素材。很多故事是关于年长的人，充满失望和失落的情绪。“不太像杰克·凯鲁亚克(Jack Kerouac)那种自由上路，成长中的年轻人发现事物的故事，”他说，“它们更忧郁，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.” 这种经历突显了同理心的力量。奥巴马自己也是一名局外人，他父亲来自肯尼亚，在他两岁的时候离开了他，他母亲来自堪萨斯州，曾带着他在印度尼西亚生活过一段时间。他可以理解他在芝加哥的教堂和街头遇到的很多人的处境，那些人无法在变革中找到自己的位置，觉得受到了孤立；他老板的观点深深影响着他——“人们之所以能聚到一起，共同鼓起勇气，为了自己的生活而采取行动，不仅仅是因为他们关心共同的议题，还因为他们有共同的故事。” 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.” 这一课日后成了奥巴马总统对美国愿景的基石，在这个国家里，人们共同的关切——譬如让自己拥有一份体面的工作、让孩子拥有一个安全无虞的未来等等简单的梦想——或许可以弥合分歧与分裂。毕竟，很多人都在他的故事里看到了他们自己的故事——一个美国故事，一个就如他在2004年民主党全国代表大会(Democratic National Convention)的主旨演讲中所说的，“在其他任何国家”都不可能发生的故事。 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. 奥巴马上任时就是一名写作者，而且很快就会以写作者的身份回归自己的私人生活。他打算写回忆录，并把在白宫期间的日记用作素材（“但不会按照我本来希望的那种原则”）。他具有作家的敏感——一种在置身其中的同时超然事外、冷眼旁观的能力，一种小说家所特有的对细节的留意，一种精准而又颇具弹性、可以轻松游走在抒情、土语和深刻之间的表达。 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，他和他钦慕的五位小说家共进了午餐——戴夫·埃格斯(Dave Eggers)、科尔森·怀特黑德(Colson Whitehead)、扎迪·史密斯(Zadie Smith)、胡诺特·迪亚斯(Junot Díaz)及芭芭拉·金索沃(Barbara Kingsolver)。他不仅同他们讨论政治和媒体格局，还谈到了书店，问及他们的巡回售书活动进行得怎么样，并表示他喜欢把初稿手写在黄色便笺簿上。 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.” 奥巴马说他希望最终可以借助奥巴马总统中心的网站“拓展好书的读者群”——通过定期开列书单，他已经在做这件事了——然后促使公众“就书籍展开对话”。 “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.” 他说：“故事可以凝聚人心而非制造分歧、建立联系而非将人边缘化，在我们试图以很多政策应对这种由全球化、科技和移民引发的文化冲突之际，故事所扮演的角色比以往任何时候都更重要。” 欢迎在Twitter上关注本文作者Michiko Kakutani@michikokakutani。 翻译：王相宜、李琼 |
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