Dear Mother,

亲爱的妈妈：

Thank you for socks etc.

谢谢你的短袜等等

Am thinking of going to Russia some time in vac but have not yet quite made up my mind.

我想放假某时去苏联待一阵子，但还没决定。

I have joined an organisation called the 'Anti-War Council'.Politically rather communist.

我加入了一个组织叫作反战委员会，在政治上相当于共产主义。

Its programme is principally to organize strikes amongst munitions and chemical workers when government intends to go to war.

我们的主要计划是，当政府想要发动战争时，就组织军火和化工行业罢工。

It gets up a guarantee fund to support the workers who strike.

我们建立了保障基金，来支持罢工的工人。

There has been a very good play on here by Bernard Shaw called 'Back to Methuselah'.

最近这边有一部很好的戏剧，作者是萧伯纳，叫作《千岁人》。

Yours, Alan

你的 艾伦

For a short time, Anti-War Councils sprung up across Britain and united pacifists, communists and internationalists against a 'national' war.

在不久的一段时间里，反战委员会在英国蓬勃发展，并联合了和平主义者、共产主义者和国际主义者，共同反对全国性的大规模战争。

Selective strikes had, in fact, prevented the British government from intervening on the Polish side against the Soviet Union in 1920.

精心安排的罢工，在1920年确实阻止了英国政府插手波兰反苏。

But for Alan the real point lay not in political commitments, but in the resolve to question authority.

但对于艾伦来说，真正的重点不在于政治贡献，而在于一种质疑权威的决心。

Since 1917 Britain had been deluged by propaganda to the effect that Bolshevik Russia was the kingdom of the devil, but in 1933 anyone could see that something had gone completely wrong with the western trading and business system.

自从1917年，英国拼命地鼓吹，布尔什维克主义的苏联是恶魔的王国，但到了1933年，每个人都看到，西方资本主义的某些东西是完全错误的。

With two million people unemployed, there was no precedent for what was above all a baffling situation, in which no one knew what should be done.

两百万人罢工，这种令人迷惘的情形没有先例，在这种情况下，谁也不知道该怎么办。

Soviet Russia, after its second revolution of 1929, offered the solution of state planning and control, and there was great interest among intellectual circles in how it was working.

苏联在1929年的第二次革命后，提出宏观调控作为解决办法，知识界都很感兴趣这要如何运作，

It was the testing-ground of the Modern.

这是现代世界的试验田。

Alan probably enjoyed riling his mother with a nonchalant 'rather communist': the point lay not in this or that label, but in the fact that his generation were going to think for themselves, take a wider view of the world than their parents had done, and not be frightened by bogey words.

艾伦也许很喜欢用假装平静的相当于共产主义这样的话来惹怒他的母亲──重点不在于标签，而在于他这一代人要独立思考，用比父母更广阔的视角去看世界，而不是被舆论吓倒。