Unsinkable: Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titanic

By Daniel Mendelsohn

泰坦尼克號(hào)沉船事件發(fā)生至今已久，但人們腦海中對(duì)其的記憶卻始終沒有消逝。事件發(fā)生后相繼出現(xiàn)的文學(xué)作品、電影等，令人愛不釋手，深深著迷?！癥ou jump, I jump”這句經(jīng)典臺(tái)詞更讓無數(shù)人為之神魂顛倒。這其中到底有什么神秘的力量一直吸引著人們的目光呢？

In the early nineteen-seventies, my Uncle Walter,who wasn’t a “real” uncle but had a better intuition1. intuition: 了解。about my hobbies and interests than some of my blood relatives did, gave me a thrilling gift: membership in the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. I was only twelve,but already hooked2. hook: 著迷。. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “l(fā)ike a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s:3. magnificence: 輝煌；pathos: 痛苦；enthralling chivalry: 迷人的騎士精神。騎士精神是西方上流社會(huì)的文化精神，對(duì)風(fēng)度、禮節(jié)和外表舉止等有特別的講究；Benjamin Guggenheim: 本杰明·古根海姆，美國(guó)商人，死于泰坦尼克號(hào)沉海事件，尸體未找到；tantalizing: 吸引人的。for me, there was no better story. I had read whatever books the local public library offered,and had spent some of my allowance on a copy of Walter Lord’s indispensable A Night to Remember.4. allowance: 零用錢；indispensable: 必不可少的；Walter Lord: 沃爾特·洛德，美國(guó)知名作家，因作品《此夜永難忘》而享譽(yù)海外，該書記載了泰坦尼克號(hào)沉船事件。To this incipient5. incipient: 起初的。collection Uncle Walter added the precious gift of a biography of the man who designed the ship. It has always been among the first books I pack when I move. A little later, when I was in my midteens, I toiled for a while on a novel about two fourteen-year-old boys, one a Long Islander like myself, the other a British aristocrat, who meet during the doomed maiden voyage.6. toil: 費(fèi)力地做；aristocrat: 貴族；doomed: 注定的；maiden:首次的。Needless to say, their budding friendship was sundered by the disaster.7. 毋庸置疑，這場(chǎng)災(zāi)難將他們剛剛建立的友誼拆散。budding:萌芽的；sunder: 切斷。

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed8. obsessed: 著迷的。—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration9. exaggeration: 夸張。. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard,twenty-nine boilers, a jewelled copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,10. liner: 郵輪；boiler: 鍋爐；The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam:《魯拜集》，是波斯詩人奧馬·海亞姆的四行詩集，與中國(guó)的絕句相類似。and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “All Saved From Titanic After Collision,” the New York Evening Sun crowed less than twentyfour hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “Titanic Sinks, 1,500 Die.”11. brute: 殘忍的；conjecture: 猜測(cè)。Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan.12. 隨后，出現(xiàn)了有關(guān)早期幸存者的故事——跟隨駱駝商隊(duì)長(zhǎng)途跋涉至美國(guó)的黎巴嫩游客后裔對(duì)其進(jìn)行編寫，目前已出書。descendant: 后裔；Lebanese: 黎巴嫩人；trek: 艱苦跋涉；caravan:（穿過沙漠地帶的）旅行隊(duì)。There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut13. glut: 大量需求。that the Times was moved to print a warning: “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics14. polemics: 辯論術(shù)，論證法。by enthusiasts,and novels, numbering in the hundreds. This centennial15. centennial: 百年的。month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles.

泰坦尼克號(hào)歷史照片

The books are, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1912 and 1913 more than a hundred songs about the Titanic were published. A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie called Saved from the Titanic was released,16. scant: 不足的，勉強(qiáng)夠的；release: 上映。featuring Dorothy Gibson,an actress who had been a passenger in first class. It established a formula—a love story wrapped around the real-life catastrophe—that has resurfaced again and again,notably in a 1953 tearjerker starring Barbara Stanwyck and in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which, when it was released, was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing film of all time.17. 圍繞現(xiàn)實(shí)災(zāi)難展開的愛情故事成為了固定的情節(jié)模式，一遍又一遍地相繼上映，特別是1953年芭芭拉·斯坦威克（20世紀(jì)美國(guó)著名女演員）主演的催淚大片和詹姆斯·卡梅?。幽么笾麑?dǎo)演）1997年拍攝的大片，這部影片一上映便創(chuàng)耗資最大，票房最高的歷史紀(jì)錄。resurface: 重新露面；tearjerker: 賺人熱淚的電影或戲劇。

The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters.18. 從這無窮盡的興趣可知，人們對(duì)泰坦尼克故事的情感比對(duì)其他災(zāi)難近乎病態(tài)的著迷更深一步。inexhaustible: 無窮盡的；morbid:病態(tài)的；fascination: 著迷。The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation.19. torpedoing: 用爆破筒爆炸；Lusitania:盧西塔尼亞號(hào)，英國(guó)遠(yuǎn)洋客輪，1915年被德國(guó)潛艇擊沉；boast: 包含，容納；calamity: 災(zāi)難；obsessive: 著迷的；preoccupation: 使人全神貫注的事物。The aura of significance that surrounds the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper the Onion, in 1999,stomping across the page in dire block letters:20. aura: 光環(huán)；belated: 遲來的；Onion:《洋蔥新聞》，1988年誕生于美國(guó)，以報(bào)道諷刺性文章為特色，以真實(shí)新聞事件為藍(lán)本加工杜撰假新聞；dire:可怕的；block letter: 正楷，印刷體。

泰坦尼克號(hào)沉船歷史圖片

World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg

The “news” was accompanied by an archival image of the ship’s famous four-funnelled profile.21. 這條“新聞”旁邊配有一張舊圖片，顯示出船只著名的四個(gè)大煙囪輪廓。archival: 檔案的；funnelled: 有煙囪的；profile: 外形。The subhead pressed the joke: “Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic. 1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy.”22. 體現(xiàn)人類傲慢一面的泰坦尼克號(hào)于大西洋北部下沉，1,500人在這場(chǎng)象征性的災(zāi)難中喪生。hubris: 傲慢。

The Onion’s spoof23. spoof: 諷刺性文章。gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the Titanic seems to be about something.But what? For some, it’s a parable aabout the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that “in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.”24. parable: 寓言；Broadway: 百老匯，美國(guó)紐約市戲院集中的一條大街；admonish: 告誡；fabricate: 偽造。For others,it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era.25. 對(duì)另一些人來說，這是關(guān)于階級(jí)道德的故事，或是第一次世界大戰(zhàn)的預(yù)兆——標(biāo)志著更加天真的時(shí)代的結(jié)束。foreshadowing: 預(yù)兆。Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia;for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.26. 學(xué)術(shù)歷史學(xué)家否認(rèn)該觀點(diǎn)只傳達(dá)了人們的懷舊之情：對(duì)于他們而言，這場(chǎng)災(zāi)難不僅僅是歷史分界線，更反映了20世紀(jì)早期人們對(duì)種族、性別、階級(jí)和移民的擔(dān)憂。dismiss: 不再考慮，不接受；nostalgia: 懷舊之情；project: 投射，放映。