双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第9章:退隐山林(79)
日期:2020-01-24 10:27

(单词翻译:单击)

Walking up to the city centre from the Victoria University, there was a point where Oxford Road became Oxford Street, just under the railway bridge.
从维多利亚大学往市区走,会经过一个铁路桥,牛津路在这个地方转到牛津街。
There were a couple of cinemas, an amusement arcade, a pub—the Union Tavern—and a very early example of the milk bar.
这里有几家电影院,一家娱乐商场,一家酒吧"联合客栈",还有一家牛奶吧。
This stretch between the urinal and the cinema was where the male homosexual eye was focussed—perhaps the same block as trodden by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1908, such unofficial institutions lasting as long as the respectable kind. Here straggled a motley convoy of souls, and amidst them the odd independent sailing, like Alan Turing.
这是男性同性恋的乐园,也许维特根斯坦1908年就在这一片活动过。这个地下乐园存在了很长时间,各样的灵魂,在这里结队穿梭,也有一些独自飘过,比如图灵。
Here merged many kinds of desire—for physical excitement, for attention, for a life outside family and factory confines, or for money. These were not sharp divisions.
这里弥漫着不同的欲望——身体的快感,旁人的注视、家庭或工厂之外的刺激,还有金钱,这些欲望之间,并没有明确的界线。
Money, if involved, was little but the clink of 'tipping' that was heard in any encounter between different social classes;
钱不多,但不同阶级的人相遇,总会响起"小费"的叮当声。
This was how it was done in the ordinary England of 1950, outside privileged circles such as those of Cambridge or Oxford. For the young, in particular, without means or private space, homosexual desire meant street life.
在剑桥或牛津这样的特权圈子之外,这就是1950年的英国年轻人的普通生活。特别是对于年轻人来说,他们没有私人空间,同性恋就意味着这种街道生活。
Desert island sex, this was not for the respectable man. But Alan was above respectability.
孤岛性爱不是正经人能做的,但图灵早就已经超脱了世俗评判。
But what was his 'programme for the immediate future'?
不过,书归正传,图灵搬到这里之后,他接下来的打算是什么呢?
The past two years had offered flashbacks to the successes of his earlier life.
过去的两年,几乎就是他早年生活的倒叙,
The usual academic course would be to build upon those successes, extracting as much as possible from them. But this was not his path; he had to find something new in order to continue.
他可以基于这些经历,从中尽可能地榨取精华。但这不是图灵的套路,他必须找到一些新鲜的东西,以支持他继续走下去。
And he now began to draw upon something that had, in fact, been there all the time, but which only now began to emerge into light.
他开始注意到一样东西,实际上一直都存在,但现在才开始浮现出来的东西。
It was as though a long sub-routine, that had begun with Christopher Morcom, passing through Eddington and von Neumann, Hilbert and Godel, Computable Numbers, his war machines and mechanical processes, the relays and the electronics and the ACE, the programming of computers and the groping towards intelligent machinery—all that stream of enquiry had tapered off, and left him free to continue from where schooling had interrupted him.
它就像一个很长的子程序,从克里斯朵夫·默卡开始,穿过爱丁顿和冯·诺伊曼,希尔伯特和哥德尔,可计算数,战争机器,机械程序,延迟继电器,电子,ACE,计算机程序,朝着对智能机器的探索——这条溪流逐渐变细了,给图灵留下了一份自由,使他得以去探索,那个曾因上学而被迫离开的世界。

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