Carlos Fuentes
卡洛斯·富恩特斯
Carlos Fuentes, man of letters, died on May 15th, aged 83
学者卡洛斯·富恩特斯于5月15日逝世，享年83岁

EVERY summer holiday when he was at school, Carlos Fuentes would stay with his grandmothers, one in Veracruz, on the steamy Gulf coast, the other from Mazatlán, near the badlands of Sinaloa on the Pacific. The women told the young boy stories, tales of Mexico, of revolution, of peasants who were leaving the land to make great cities, of bandits, of love and lust, of feud and food, of Indians, of Spaniards and baroque Spanish towns in America. He took these stories back with him to Washington, to Santiago, to Buenos Aires, to wherever his father, a Mexican diplomat, was posted (Carlos himself was born in Panama). The solitude of this peripatetic childhood turned the boy into a writer: he began to publish his stories when he was 11, and never stopped until the day he died.

上学时的每个暑假，卡洛斯·富恩特斯都会与他的祖母们呆在一起，一位在潮湿的墨西哥海湾维拉克鲁斯州，另一位来自太平洋锡那罗亚州不毛之地上的马萨兰特。两位女士给这只小男孩讲故事，讲关于墨西哥，关于革命，关于离开这片土地去建设城市的农民，关于歹徒、爱与欲望、封地与食物、印第安人、美洲的西班牙人和巴洛克西班牙城镇的故事。他把这些故事揣在身边去到华盛顿、圣地亚哥、布宜诺斯艾利斯，以及他老爸被派遣去的地方任何地方，他老爸是一位墨西哥外交官（卡洛斯本人是出生在巴拿马的）。孤独辗转的童年把他变成了一位作家：他11岁就开始出版自己写的故事了，出到死才停下来。

The routine was always the same. He rose early and wrote, in longhand on the right-hand page of large blocks, later correcting on the left-hand page. E-mail he did not use, not even a computer. He was, in the old-fashioned sense, a man of letters. There were some 60 books, novels mainly but plays and essays too, as well as much political commentary and journalism. Afternoons and evenings, whether in Mexico City or London, where in recent decades he lived for part of each year to escape celebrity, were for reading (his tastes were wide, including Wordsworth), the cinema (a lifelong passion), for seeing friends and for seduction, at which he was a master. He was always elegantly dressed, his suits as sharp as his conversation; his verbal thrusts were often delivered with a wicked twinkle in his eye. A dandy, his detractors said, but women loved that in him. He claimed that his conquests included Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau, and perhaps they did.

他的日常工作一成不变。他早起先在右手页的大格子里执笔写作，过一会儿在左手页上进行修改。他不用伊妹儿，甚至连电脑也不碰。他是一位传统的学者。有大约60本书，大多数是小说但也有戏剧和论文，还有很多政论和新闻体文章。下午和晚上，无论是在墨西哥城或是伦敦，这些地方他在最近几十年内每年都要住一段时间来避世，是为了阅读（他的口味很广泛，包括华兹华斯）、电影（毕生的激情），为了见朋友和勾引人，在这方面他是老手。他总是穿着考究，他的穿着与它的言谈一样犀利；他的口头抨击总是带着调皮的眼光。爱贬低他的人说他是花花公子，而女士们通常很吃他那一套。他声称他的战利品包括珍﹒西宝和珍妮﹒摩露，也许她们是臣服于他了。

Clearing the air

净化空气

So prolific was his output that it was inevitably uneven. Some of the early novels will last the best. They are panoramic, richly-textured reflections on Mexican history, its underlying contradictions of world view between Indian and Spaniard and their sometimes awkward melding in mestizaje and in the country’s revolution of 1910-17. “La Región Más Transparente” (translated as “Where the Air is Clear”), his ambitious debut novel set in Mexico City, reflects on the challenge to Mexican identity posed by modernity. “The Death of Artemio Cruz”, published in 1962, chronicles the descent from the idealism of revolution to the cynicism of the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) through the life of a politician and newspaper tycoon enriched by graft.

他的太多产难免会造成不平衡。一些早期的作品将会维持在最佳。它们是墨西哥丰富历史的完整写照，印度人和西班牙人之间世界观的根本矛盾，麦士蒂索人和这个国家在1910-17改革的一段尴尬融合。“La Región Más Transparente”（译为“空气清新的地方”）是他首次野心勃勃在墨西哥城写的小说，反映了现代性对墨西哥身份提出的挑战。1962年出版的“阿特米奥克鲁斯之死”记录了在从理想主义革命沦为制度革命党（PRI）长期统治的犬儒主义背景下，他从一位政客变为报业大亨贪污肥足的一生。

The creative antagonism of the relationship between Spain and America was an obsession for Mr Fuentes, recurring in “Terra Nostra”, a sprawling historical fantasy, and “The Buried Mirror”, an extended essay. The narrator in “Artemio Cruz” imagines in a baroque church

西班牙和美国之间创造性的对立关系是富恩特斯偏执的意淫，并反复出现在一部叫做“Terra Nostra”的庞大历史幻想中和一篇叫做“The Buried Mirror”的拓展性论文里。“阿特米奥克鲁斯”里的叙述者想象在一个巴洛克风格的教堂里

“the fa?ade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New, which did not begin here but on the other side of the ocean: the New World arrived when they arrived; fa?ade of austere walls to protect their avaricious, sensual, happy hearts. You will enter the nave, where all that was Spanish will be conquered by the macabre smiling lavishness of Indian saints, angels, and gods.”

征服者的嘴脸严峻而快乐，一只脚在旧世界另一只脚在新世界，它不是从这儿开始的但在大洋的另一边：当它们到达的时候新世界也来到了；严峻的外墙用来保护贪婪、世俗、快乐的心。你将进入教堂正厅，那里西班牙人的一切都将被印度圣徒、天使和上帝的死亡微笑所征服。“

Mr Fuentes was a leading figure in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, a friend of both Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa (as well as of Octavio Paz until their relationship was destroyed by an intemperate attack on Mr Fuentes in Mr Paz’s literary magazine). Many thought it unjust that he alone of these four did not receive the Nobel prize.

富恩特斯先生在20世纪六七十年代繁荣的拉丁美洲文坛是头号人物，他是Gabriel García Márquez和马里奥·巴尔加斯·略萨的朋友（也是奥柯塔维欧·派兹的朋友，直到他们的友谊被一篇写在派兹先生文学杂志里对富恩特斯先生的过激批判所摧毁）。很多人认为四个人当中就只有他没有得到诺贝尔奖这件事是不公平的。

He was no magical realist. His inspirations were Cervantes and Borges. His language was complex. He employed multiple voices and styles. His upbringing in two cultures, Latin American and Anglo-Saxon, made him both a Mexican and a universal writer.

他不是魔幻现实主义作家。他的灵感是赛凡提斯和博格斯。他的语言很复杂。他使用了多种声音和风格。他是在两种文化背景下成长的，拉丁美洲和安格鲁-撒克逊，使他变成了一位墨西哥及世界级的作家。

He was a man of the left, but a democratic one. He was initially enthusiastic about both the Cuban revolution and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but later criticised their authoritarianism. He had no time for Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, calling him a “tropical Mussolini”.

他曾是个左翼，但却是个民主的左翼。他曾热衷于古巴革命和尼加拉瓜政党桑蒂诺政权，但之后又抨击了他们的专制主义。他没有时间给委内瑞拉的雨果﹒查韦斯，称他为“热带墨索里尼”。

His later years were marked by personal tragedy. Both his children with Silvia Lemus, his second wife who was a television presenter, died before him, one of complications from haemophilia and the other from drug addiction. As Mexico descended into drug-related violence, his later novels became darker. “La Voluntad y La Fortuna” (“Destiny and Desire”) begins with the musings of a severed head, floating in the Pacific. He dismissed Enrique Pe?a Nieto, the PRI candidate and front-runner in Mexico’s presidential election, due on July 1st, as a lightweight, unequal to the country’s problems.

他的晚年基本上就是个悲剧。他的孩子和第二任夫人职业是电视节目主持人的西尔维娅﹒莱姆斯，都死得比他早，一位死于血友病的并发症，另一位死于吸毒成瘾。当墨西哥落入与毒品有关的暴力行为时，他的后期作品也变得黑暗起来。“La Voluntad y La Fortuna”（“命运与欲望”）以一只漂浮在大西洋上断头的沉思开篇。他不理睬Enrique Pe?a Nieto，制度革命党的候选人也是墨西哥总统竞选的领先人物，7月1日任期到期，他认为此人无足轻重，也没有能力解决这个国家存在的问题。

Mr Fuentes was at home in Europe, New York and Mexico. But he still felt the pull of Veracruz, where Cortes and the Spaniards first landed. When asked in 2009 to write an article about his favourite museum for Intelligent Life, our sister magazine, he instantly offered to return to the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, the state capital, with its colossal Olmec stone heads and laughing figurines, the union of the sacred and the human. Veracruz, he declared, was “where I belong”.

富恩特斯先生在欧洲、纽约和墨西哥的时候感到自由自在。但是他仍然能够感受到维拉克鲁斯的召唤，那里是科尔特斯和西班牙人第一次登陆的地方。2009年要求他为我们的姐妹杂志智慧生活写一篇关于他最喜爱的博物馆时，他立刻表示愿意回到州府哈拉帕的人类学博物馆，摆着巨大奥尔梅克石雕像和神圣笑俑的地方。他声明维拉克鲁斯是他的“归属”。