(单词翻译:单击)
Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on.
许多年前，当我还是耶鲁大学的一名初级教授时，我突然打电话给人类学系的一位同事，请他协助我做一个项目。
I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.
我对那家伙一无所知; 我选择他是因为他年轻，因此，我想，他更有可能同意谈话。
Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius.
我们共进午餐五分钟后，我意识到我是在一个天才面前。
Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There’s a qualitative difference.
不是一个非常聪明的人——而是一个天才。 有一个质的区别。
The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension.
桌子对面的那个人似乎和我属于不同的层次，就像一个来自更高维度的来客。
I had never experienced anything like it before.
我以前从未经历过这样的事情。
I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.
我很快就从努力跟上他，到死命抓住他，再到只是坐在那里惊叹。
That person was David Graeber.
那个人就是大卫·格雷伯。
In the 20 years after our lunch, he published two books;
在我们共进午餐后的20年里，他出版了两本书;
was let go by Yale despite a stellar record (a move universally attributed to his radical politics);
尽管他的成绩斐然，但还是被耶鲁大学解雇了(这一调动普遍认为是由于他的激进政治);
published two more books; got a job at Goldsmiths, University of London;
他又出版了两本书; 在伦敦大学金史密斯学院找到一份工作;
published four more books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a magisterial revisionary history of human society from Sumer to the present;
后来他又出版了四本书，其中包括《债务:首个五千年》，对苏美尔至今的人类社会史进行了权威的修正;
got a job at the London School of Economics; published two more books and co-wrote a third;
在伦敦经济学院找到了一份工作; 又出版了两本书，并与人合写了第三本书;
and established himself not only as among the foremost social thinkers of our time
这本书不仅使他成为我们这个时代最重要的社会思想家
—blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read
——极具独创性、涉猎广泛、博览群书
—but also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”
但作为大西洋两岸活动家的组织者和智力领袖，他被认为帮助发起了占领运动，并创造了口号“我们是99%的人”。
On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis while on vacation in Venice.
2020年9月2日，59岁的大卫·格雷伯在威尼斯度假时死于坏死性胰腺炎。
The news hit me like a blow. How many books have we lost, I thought, that will never get written now?
这消息对我打击很大。我想，我们已经丢失了多少本再也写不出来的书?
How many insights, how much wisdom, will remain forever unexpressed?
有多少真知灼见，有多少智慧，永远无法表达?
The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift and a reminder of what might have been.
因此，《万物的黎明:人类新历史》的出现苦乐参半，它既是一份最终的、意想不到的礼物，也是对可能发生的事情的提醒。
In his foreword, Graeber’s co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London, mentions that the two had planned no fewer than three sequels.
格雷伯的合著者、伦敦大学学院的考古学家大卫·温格罗(David Wengrow)在前言中提到，他们两人计划了至少三部续篇。
