(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
JUDY WOODRUFF: Yesterday marked 75 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The attack shocked the world, but it would be another year before Americans would get firsthand accounts from people who lived through it, thanks to trailblazing reporting by New Yorker writer John Hersey. Author Lesley Blume has a new book about Hersey and how his reporting exposed the bomb's lasting damage, which the U.S. government tried initially to downplay. And she spoke with Jeffrey Brown as part of our continuing coverage of this solemn anniversary. This is also part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
JEFFREY BROWN: August 6, 1945, the future of warfare and humanity itself would change, when the U.S. detonated a single atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. But while everyone saw the mushroom cloud, it would be a year before the world fully understood what had happened on the ground that day, a story told in the pages of The New Yorker magazine by journalist John Hersey.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME, Author, Fallout: We know what the aftermath of nuclear warfare looks like because John Hersey showed us.
JEFFREY BROWN: In her new book, Fallout, author Lesley Blume explores how Hersey came to write a profoundly influential work. She calls it one of the most important works of journalism ever created that has shaped generations since.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: Even if people, his eventual readers, could not understand the physics that went into the nuclear bomb, they could certainly relate to the stories of six regular people.
JEFFREY BROWN: The bomb in Hiroshima, followed days later by one destroying Nagasaki, led to Japan's surrender and ecstatic celebrations of a hard-earned American victory. The U.S. government justified use of these experimental weapons as necessary to end the war, but, Blume writes, covered up the bombs' horrifying impact on humans, including the after-effects of radiation.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: On the one hand, they wanted to showcase the might of their weapon, because they now had a weapon that nobody else did. But, on the other hand, they didn't want to reveal the true devastation of the bomb, and also reveal the fact that it was a weapon that went on killing long after detonation in a really gruesome way.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hersey was just 31, but already a veteran war correspondent.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: He had seen the worst of human nature. And he felt that, at the end of what remains the deadliest conflict in human history, the only way that human civilization had a chance of surviving is if we began to see the humanity in each other again.
JEFFREY BROWN: He was also a writer. His 1944 novel, A Bell for Adano, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Working with legendary New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, Hersey proposed a novelistic approach, tell the intersecting stories of six individuals who'd crossed paths that day.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: A lot of the reporting that had been done on the major devastation caused by the bombs, it was rendered in a very eye-of-God kind of way. This is the end of days, and you were just seeing massive, roiling mushroom clouds. And so what Hersey decided to do was to dial it back from sort of a point-of-view-of-God narrative to the point of view of six regular folks on the ground.
JEFFREY BROWN: The subjects included two doctors, two clergy, a widow caring for three children, and a young clerk. The humanizing style is there from the famous first line: At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Ms. Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office, and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: And instead of being incinerated on the spot, she was almost crushed by falling bookshelves and was covered in books. And when Hersey met her and heard her story, he found himself thinking that it was incredibly ironic that this life was nearly taken by books in the first moments of the atomic age. And even when he was still in Hiroshima, he knew that he was going to write about that in his own article.
JEFFREY BROWN: That article would take up the entire issue of The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, and would itself become a bombshell, capturing headlines around the world. In book form, it has sold more than three million copies to date. There is much more to the tale Blume tells, including the surprising role of General Leslie Groves, one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, who tried to suppress information about the bomb, but then saw benefits to Hersey's reporting. And years later, a bizarre appearance by one of Hersey's subjects, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, on an episode of This Is Your Life.
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: They trotted out not only people from his life, but they even trotted out one of the bombers from the Enola Gay, who had bombed Hiroshima, and forced a meeting between the two, the two gentlemen. And it's some pretty skin-crawling stuff, for sure.
JEFFREY BROWN: John Hersey donated part of the proceeds from his work to the American Red Cross. He didn't return to Japan for 40 years, wrote many more books, and died in 1993. It's been argued that that article and then the book afterwards played an important role in the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since. Do you believe that?
LESLEY M.M. BLUME: Well, John Hersey definitely believed that. I know a lot of people don't realize how perilous the nuclear landscape is right now. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has its famous doomsday clock, has now set it closer to midnight, i.e., nuclear apocalypse, than it has ever been since its advent in the late 1940s. One of the things that John Hersey was especially worried about by the time the Cold War accelerated again in the 1980s was that the memory of Hiroshima was fading. And if you didn't have the memory as a deterrent anymore, was it going to be as potent a deterrent? And I think that remains a really crucial question today.
JEFFREY BROWN: For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown.
重点解析
1.live through 度过；经受过
The government should take effective measures to live through this economical crisis.
政府应采取有效的措施度过这场经济危机。
2.lead to 导致
Policies of tax reduction must lead to reduced public expenditure.
减税政策必然导致公共开支减少。
3.hard-earned 来之不易的
Despite significant progress in 2010, the projected shortfall in malaria funding threatens the hard-earned gains of the last decade.
虽然2010年取得了重大进展，预计将出现的抗疟资金短缺将威胁过去十年来之不易的成就。
4.human civilization 人类文明
Cultural diversity is a defining feature of human civilization.
文化的多样性是人类文明最本质的特征。
5.trot out 重复，翻出（老一套的借口、事实、解释等）
They trotted out the same old excuses for the lack of jobs in the area.
他们又用那老一套的借口解释这个地区缺少就业机会的问题。
参考译文
朱迪·伍德乐夫：昨天是日本广岛原子弹爆炸75周年纪念日，该次爆炸震惊了全世界。而由于《纽约客》作家约翰·赫西的开创性报道，美国人要再过一年才能从经历过该袭击的幸存者那里获得一手资料。此外，作家莱斯利·布鲁姆写了一本关于赫西的新书，书中讲述了赫西的报道对该爆炸造成的持久性破坏的揭露，而美国政府从一开始就试图淡化这一点。莱斯利·布鲁姆接受了杰弗里·布朗的采访，采访内容将归于PBS新闻一小时对该庄严的周年纪念日进行系列报道的一部分，同时也归于PBS新闻一小时艺术和文化系列Canvas的一部分。
杰弗里·布朗：1945年8月6日，当美国在日本广岛引爆原子弹时，战争和人类命运就此改变。记者约翰·赫西在《纽约客》杂志上讲述了一则故事：当人们看到(原子弹爆炸)蘑菇云时，世界要过一年才能完全熟知那一天地面上究竟发生了什么。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆，《辐射》作者：我们清楚核战争的后果是什么，因为约翰·赫西向我们展示了该后果。
杰弗里·布朗：在她的新书《辐射》中，作者莱斯利·布鲁姆探讨了赫西是如何写出该部影响深远的作品的。她称该著作是自那之后塑造了几代人的最重要的新闻作品之一。
莱斯利·布鲁姆：即使人们(他的读者)无法理解原子弹的物理原理，他们也肯定会对六个普通人的故事产生共鸣。
杰弗里·布朗：先是一枚原子弹在广岛爆炸，几天后又有一枚原子弹炸毁了长崎，致使日本最终投降，美国为来之不易的胜利欢欣鼓舞。美国政府认为使用这些实验武器是结束战争的必要手段，但是，布卢姆写道：美国政府掩盖了原子弹对人类的可怕影响，包括辐射带来的后遗症。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：一方面，美国想要展示自身武器的威力，因为他现在拥有一种别人没有的武器。然而，另一方面，美国并不想揭露原子弹带来的真正破坏，它不想揭露这样一个事实，即原子弹在爆炸之后还会以一种可怕的方式继续杀人。
杰弗里·布朗：赫西只有31岁，但他已经是一位资深的战地记者。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：他见过人性最丑恶的一面。他认为，在这场人类历史上最致命的冲突结束之时，人类文明得以幸存的唯一途径就是重新审视人性。
杰弗里·布朗：他也是一名作家，他1944年的小说《阿达诺的钟声》获得了普利策小说奖。赫西与《纽约客》的传奇编辑哈罗德·罗斯、威廉·肖恩合作，提出用一种小说化的方式来讲述那天那六个相遇的人发生的交叉性故事。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：很多关于“原子弹爆炸造成的重大破坏”的报道都是以上帝的视角展现出来的：这就是世界末日，你看到的只是巨大的、翻滚的蘑菇云。而赫西决定将这种上帝的视角转变成普通人的视角。
杰弗里·布朗：主人公包括两名医生、两名神职人员、一名照顾三个孩子的寡妇以及一名年轻的职员。我们从其著名的第一句话当中便能看到其人性化的写作风格：日本时间1945年8月6日上午8点15分，当原子弹在广岛上空闪过时，东亚锡公司人事部的一名职员佐佐木敏子女士正坐在工厂办公室里的座位上侧着头和旁边的女孩说话。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：她没有被当场烧死，而是被掉下来的书架差点砸死，她的身上堆满了书。当赫西见到她、听到她的故事时，他发现自己在想：真是太讽刺了，在原子弹爆炸的那一刻生活却被书所占据，甚至当他还在广岛的时候他就知道自己会撰写相关文章。
杰弗里·布朗：1946年8月31日，该文章占据了整期《纽约客》，它本身也成为了一枚重磅炸弹，占据了世界各地的头条。到目前为止，这本书已经卖出了300多万册。布卢姆还讲述了很多其它的故事，包括莱斯利格罗夫斯将军这个令人惊讶的角色，他是曼哈顿计划的领导人之一，曾试图隐瞒原子弹爆炸的相关信息，直到后来看到赫西的报道带来的好处。几年后，赫西的主人公之一Tanimoto Kiyoshi以一种怪异的方式出现在《这就是你的生活》的一集里。
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：他们不仅翻出了他生活里的一些人，甚至还翻出了曾经轰炸过广岛的其中一架艾诺拉·盖号轰炸机。此外还迫使这两位绅士见面，都是一些比较肉麻的情节。
杰弗里·布朗：约翰·赫西将他工作所得的部分收入捐给美国红十字会，并在40年年里从未回到过日本。他写了更多的书，后来于1993年去世。有人认为那篇文章及之后的那本书是导致核武器从此再也未被使用的主要原因。你怎么看？
莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：约翰·赫西肯定是这么认为的。我知道有很多人没有意识到现在的核环境有多危险。《原子科学家公报》里有一个著名的末日钟，而现在它指向的时间已经接近午夜(即核灾难)，这是自20世纪40年代末以来最接近的一次。约翰·赫西极其担忧的一点是，到20世纪80年代冷战再次加速时人们对广岛的记忆已经开始消退，如果说记忆不再是一种威慑，那么它还能起到同样强大的威慑作用吗？我觉得直至今日这仍是一个十分关键的问题。
杰弗里·布朗：这里是PBS新闻一小时，我是杰弗里·布朗。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
