Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died on Friday in Italy. He was 84.

意大利学者翁贝托·艾柯(Umberto Eco)原本从事晦涩的符号学研究，后来成了畅销小说作者，其轰动一时的中世纪神秘小说《玫瑰之名》(The Name of the Rose)最为著名，他于周五在意大利逝世，享年84岁。

His Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. He died at his home in Milan, according to the Italian news website Il Post. No cause was given.

根据意大利安莎通讯社(ANSA)报道，他的死讯由意大利出版社邦皮亚尼(Bompiani)确认。意大利新闻网站Il Post报道，他于米兰家中去世，报道中没有给出死因。

As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university.

作为符号学家，艾柯希望通过各种文化的符号与象征来阐释文化，诸如文字、神像、旗帜、衣服、乐谱，甚至是卡通；他在欧洲最古老的大学博洛尼亚大学(University of Bologna)任教期间，曾出版过20多部关于这个领域的非虚构作品。

But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.

但是他并没有把自己的学术生涯同自己的畅销小说创作截然分开，在他的七部小说作品里，艾柯都灌注了大量自己的学术兴趣。

In bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.)

他的第一部小说，1980年在欧洲首次出版的《玫瑰之名》便是这两个世界最成功的结合。它被翻译为30余种语言，售出了1000多万册。1986年，一个好莱坞改编的电影版本由让-雅克·阿诺(Jean-Jacques Annaud)执导，由肖恩·康奈利(Sean Connery)主演，获得的反响并不很热烈。

The book is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery where monks are being murdered by their co-religionists bent on concealing a long-lost philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Despite devoting whole chapters to discussions of Christian theology and heresies, Mr. Eco managed to enthrall a mass audience with the book, a rollicking detective thriller.

这本书的背景设定在14世纪的意大利修道院，教士们被身边的宗教狂热分子杀害，凶手的目的是藏匿亚里士多德的一本遗失已久的哲学专著。尽管书中整章整章地讨论基督教神学与各种异端邪说，艾柯的这本书仍不失为一本狂欢的侦探惊悚小说，令大量读者为之着迷。

His subsequent novels — with protagonists like a clairvoyant crusader in the Middle Ages, a shipwrecked adventurer in the 1600s and a 19th-century physicist — also demanded that readers absorb heavy doses of semiotic ruminations along with compelling fictional tales.

他接下来的几部小说中的主角包括中世纪一位颇具洞察力的圣战者、17世纪从海难逃生的冒险家，以及一个19世纪的物理学家，这些小说都需要读者在阅读引人入胜的小说故事同时，接受大量符号学思考。

In a 1995 interview with Vogue, Mr. Eco acknowledged that he was not an easy read. “People always ask me, ‘How is it that your novels, which are so difficult, have a certain success?’” he said. “I am offended by the question. It’s as if they asked a woman, ‘How can it be that men are interested in you?’” Then, with typical irony, Mr. Eco added, “I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately.”

1995年接受《Vogue》杂志采访时，艾柯承认，他的小说并不好读。“人们总是问我，‘你的小说这么晦涩，为什么还总能取得一定程度的成功？’”他说。“这个问题让我觉得受到了冒犯。就像是问一个女人，‘男人怎么会对你感兴趣的？’”然后他带着典型的讽刺补充，“我本人喜欢能让我很快睡着的轻松读物。”

While Mr. Eco had many defenders in academia and the literary world, critics in both realms sometimes dismissed him for lacking either scholarly gravitas or novelistic talent. “No cultural artifact is too lowly or trivial for Eco’s analysis,” Ian Thomson, a literary biographer, wrote in The Guardian in 1999 in a review of “Serendipities: Language and Lunacy,” Mr. Eco’s collection of essays on how false beliefs had changed history.

艾柯在学术界与文学界都有很多捍卫者，但这两个领域也有不少评论家认为他既缺乏学术的严肃性，也缺乏小说家的才能。“就算再低劣、再渺小的文化产品，艾柯也能分析一番，”1999年，伊恩·汤姆森(Ian Thomson)在《卫报》上为艾柯的《机缘巧合：语言与混乱》(Serendipities: Language and Lunacy)所做的书评中写道。这本书是艾柯的文集，阐述错误的信念如何改变了历史。

And the British novelist Salman Rushdie, in a scathing review in The London Observer, derided Mr. Eco’s 1988 novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” as “humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts.”

英国小说家萨尔曼·拉什迪(Salman Rushdie)在《伦敦观察》(The London Observer)上发表的一篇文章中，不留情面地批评艾柯1988年的小说《傅科摆》(Foucault’s Pendulum)，称其“毫无幽默感、缺乏性格、完全没有任何可以接受的口头语言，各种晦涩的术语有如天书，让人头昏脑涨。”

Appearing alongside Mr. Rushdie at a literary panel in New York in 2008, Mr. Eco wryly chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum.”

2008年，在纽约的一个文学研讨会上，坐在拉什迪旁边的艾柯面带嘲讽，读了《傅科摆》中的一段文字。

As a global superstar in both highbrow and popular cultural circles, Mr. Eco accepted such criticism with equanimity. “I’m not a fundamentalist, saying there’s no difference between Homer and Walt Disney,” he told a Guardian journalist who was exploring his juxtaposition of scholarship and pop iconography in 2002. “But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is.”

艾柯在高端文学与通俗文学界都是全球超级明星，对于这样的评论，他总是心平气和地接受。“我不是原教旨主义者，非要说荷马和沃尔特·迪士尼(Walt Disney)之间毫无区别，”2002年，他在接受《卫报》采访时说，对方想知道他为何把学术研究和流行符号相提并论。“但是米老鼠和日本俳句可以具有同样的意义。”

Able to deliver lectures in five modern languages, as well as in Latin and classical Greek, Mr. Eco crisscrossed the Atlantic for academic conferences, book tours and celebrity cocktail parties. Impish, bearded and a chain-smoker, he enjoyed bantering over cheap wine with his students late into the night at taverns in Bologna.

艾柯能以五种现代语言授课，还通晓拉丁文与古典希腊文，他经常赴美参加学术会议、做新书的巡回宣传，参加名人鸡尾酒会。留着山羊胡子，古灵精怪的他总是一支接一支地吸烟，喜欢在博洛尼亚的酒馆喝便宜的葡萄酒，和学生们说笑直到深夜。

He and his German-born wife, Renate Ramge, an architecture and arts teacher, kept apartments in Paris and Milan and a 17th-century manor once owned by the Jesuits in the hills near Rimini, on the Adriatic Sea. They had two children, Stefano, a television producer in Rome, and Carlotta, an architect in Milan.

他的妻子雷娜特·拉姆格(Renate Ramge)出生于德国，是一位建筑与艺术教师，两人在巴黎与米兰都有住所，在亚德里亚海滨距离里米尼(Rimini)不远的群山之间，还拥有一栋17世纪的宅邸，原本是耶稣会会士的修道院。他们有两个孩子，斯特凡诺(Stefano)在罗马当电视制作人，夏洛塔(Charlotta)在米兰当建筑师。

Umberto Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932, in Alessandria, an industrial town in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant at a metals firm; his mother, Giovanna, was an office worker there.

翁贝托·艾柯于1932年1月5日生于亚历山德里亚，这是意大利西北部皮埃蒙特地区(Piedmont)一座工业城镇。他的父亲朱利奥(Giulio)是一家五金公司的会计，母亲乔万娜是那里的办公室文员。

As a child, Umberto spent hours every day in his grandfather’s cellar, reading through the older man’s eclectic collection of Jules Verne, Marco Polo and Charles Darwin and adventure comics. During the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, he remembered wearing a fascist uniform and winning first prize in a writing competition for young fascists.

童年时代，艾柯每天都要花好几个小时在祖父的地下室里阅读这位老人五花八门的藏书，其中包括了儒勒·凡尔纳(Jules Verne)、马可·波罗(Marco Polo)与查尔斯·达尔文(Charles Darwin)的著作，以及各种冒险漫画。在贝尼托·墨索里尼(Benito Mussolini)独裁统治的岁月，他记得儿时的自己身穿纳粹军装，在青年法西斯的写作竞赛里获得了生平第一个奖项。

After World War II, Mr. Eco joined a Catholic youth organization and rose to become its national leader. He resigned in 1954 during protests against the conservative policies of Pope Pius XII. But Mr. Eco maintained a strong attachment to the church, writing his 1956 doctoral thesis at the University of Turin on St. Thomas Aquinas.

“二战”结束后，艾柯加入了一个天主教青年组织，后来成了它的全国领导人。1954年，在抗议教皇庇护十二世(Pope Pius XII)的活动中，艾柯退出了这个组织。但他在都灵大学(University of Turin)撰写关于圣托马斯·阿奎那(St. Thomas Aquinas)的博士论文期间，仍然对这个教会怀有强烈好感。

He went on to teach philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also gained fame in Italy for his weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L’Espresso, the country’s leading magazine.

后来他到博洛尼亚大学教授哲学，后来又教授符号学。他每周为意大利最有影响力的杂志《快报》(L’Espresso)撰写专栏，评点流行文化与政治，并因此出名。

But it was the publication of “The Name of the Rose” that vaulted Mr. Eco to global renown. The monk-detective of the novel, William of Baskerville, was named after one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The novel is narrated by a young novice who accompanies William through his investigation at the murder-prone monastery and acts as a medieval Doctor Watson.

但是为艾柯带来国际声誉的，还要算是《玫瑰之名》的出版。书中的教士兼侦探，“巴斯克维尔的威廉”(William of Baskerville)是以福尔摩斯探案中的《巴斯克维尔的猎犬》(The Hound of the Baskervilles)命名的。一个年轻学徒陪伴威廉来到这座笼罩着谋杀阴影的修道院，充当中世纪的华生医生角色，小说也由他来叙述。

In another literary allusion, this time to the blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who set one of his stories in an encyclopedic library, Mr. Eco named the villain of the novel Jorge de Burgos and portrays him as the monastery’s blind librarian. De Burgos and his accomplices carry out their killings to prevent the disclosure of a supposedly lost Aristotle tome exalting the role of humor. The murderers believe the book is an instrument of Satan.

书中还有另一个文学指涉，即阿根廷的失明作家豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges)，他曾把自己的一个短篇小说背景设在包罗万有的图书馆，艾柯给书中的反派命名为豪尔赫·德·布尔霍斯，他的同伙们执行了谋杀，目的是防止遗失的亚里士多德巨著泄露于世，书中歌颂了幽默的地位。凶手们认为，这本书是撒旦的工具。

In “Foucault’s Pendulum,” his second novel, Mr. Eco tells the story of Léon Foucault, a French physicist in the 1800s who devised a mechanism to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Despite mixing allusions to the Kabbalah, mathematical formulas and Disney characters, the novel also became a worldwide best seller — even though it did not receive the near unanimous acclaim that critics had accorded to “The Name of the Rose.”

在他的第二本小说《傅科摆》中，艾柯讲述了19世纪初的物理学家里昂·傅科的故事，他发明了一种机械，演示地球的转动。小说中融汇了卡巴拉教、数学公式与迪士尼动画人物，但却成为世界范围内的畅销书，不过却没有像《玫瑰之名》那样，赢得评论界的一致好评。

The pattern repeated itself with Mr. Eco’s other novels, which were often disparaged by critics but devoured by readers in spite of their dense prose and difficult concepts. Reviewing Mr. Eco’s fourth novel, “Baudolino” (2000), in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that it “will make you wonder how a storyteller as crafty as Mr. Eco ended up producing a novel so formulaic and cluttered as this one.”

艾柯的其他小说延续了这种模式，它们有着密集的长篇大论和晦涩的概念，受到评论家的批评，却被读者喜爱。理查德·伯恩斯坦(Richard Bernstein)在《纽约时报》发表书评，评论艾柯2000年出版的第四部小说《波多里诺》(Baudolino)时写道，这本书“会让你疑惑，像艾柯这样擅长讲故事的人，最终怎么会写出这么一本充满套话、杂乱无章的小说”。

Set amid the religious disputes and wars of the 12th century, “Baudolino” became the best-selling hardcover novel of all time in Germany and a commercial success elsewhere in the world.

《波多里诺》发生在充满宗教争端与战乱的12世纪，在德国成为有史以来最畅销的精装小说，在世界各地都获得了商业成功。

Critics were kinder to Mr. Eco’s third novel, “The Island of the Day Before” (1994), in which an Italian nobleman, who cannot swim, survives on his shipwrecked vessel at a point in the tropical Pacific Ocean where the dateline divides one day from another.

评论界对艾柯1994年的第三部小说《昨日之岛》(The Island of the Day Before)态度稍微温和一点，书中写了一个不会游泳的意大利贵族从失事的船只中逃生，地点在热带太平洋海域，正处于分日经度线上。

“Eco has abandoned his familiar Middle Ages to create an extravagant celebration of the obsessions of the seventeenth century,” a reviewer in The New Yorker wrote, alluding to the author’s many anecdotes and explanations on the philosophy, politics and superstitions of Europe in that era.

“艾柯抛弃了他熟悉的中世纪，创造了一个丰富的17世纪妄想之庆典，”《纽约客》上的一篇书评写道，这里是指作者笔下对17世纪欧洲的哲学、政治与迷信的众多趣闻轶事与阐释。

Last fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a new Eco novel, “Numero Zero,” translated by Richard Dixon. The story, set in 1992, revolves around a ghostwriter who is pulled into an underworld of media politics and murder conspiracies, with a suggestion that Mussolini did not actually die in 1945 but lived in the shadows for decades. “This slender novel, which feels like a mere diversion compared with his more epic works, is nonetheless stuffed with ideas and energy,” John Williams wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

去年秋天，霍顿·米夫林·哈考特(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)出版社出版了艾柯的最新小说《许多零》(Numero Zero)，英文版由理查德·迪克森(Richard Dixon)翻译。故事设定在1992年，围绕着一个影子写手进行，他被卷入一个媒体政治与谋杀阴谋的地下世界，还认为墨索里尼没有在1945年死去，而是隐姓埋名活了几十年。“这本薄薄的小说与他那些史诗般的巨著相比，更像是一种消遣，但却同样充满创意与能量，”约翰·威廉姆斯(John Williams)为《纽约时报书评》撰文写道。

Mr. Eco received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

艾柯曾获意大利最高文学奖“雷佳奖”(Premio Strega)，被法国政府授予荣誉军团骑士勋章(Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur)，亦是美国艺术及文学学会(American Academy of Arts and Letters)的荣誉成员。

While he continued to make his scholarly peers uncomfortable with his pop culture celebrity, Mr. Eco saw no contradiction in his dual status. “I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels,” he said.

尽管艾柯在流行文化界的名声一直令他在学术界同行们颇为不适，他本人却觉得这种双重身份中没有任何矛盾之处。“我觉得我是个严肃的教授，用周末时间写写小说，”他说。