世界100佳非小说类文学No39：The Road to Wigan Pier 乔治奥威尔

 今天推荐的是第39位作家：George Orwell （乔治·奥威尔 ） 。.

The Road to Wigan Pier (《通往维根码头之路》)

1937年，反映下层工人生活实况的报告文学《通往威根码头之路》（The Road to Wigan Pier）发表。今天这篇文章就是介绍乔治·奥威尔和解剖这本书。

乔治·奥威尔（George Orwell，1903年6月25日－1950年1月21日），原名艾里克·阿瑟·布莱尔（Eric Arthur Blair），英国左翼作家，新闻记者和社会评论家，《动物庄园》和《一九八四》为奥威尔的传世作品。他在小说中创造的“老大哥”、“新话”、“双重思想”等词汇，皆已收入英语词典，而由他的名字衍生出的“欧威尔主义”、“奥威尔式的”等新词，甚至成为日常通用语汇，可见奥威尔和其作品在英语国家的巨大影响。

这是大名鼎鼎的《1984》的作者乔治•奥威尔年轻时的作品。奥威尔深入走进了约克郡产煤区，恰是因为他想看看大规模失业会糟糕到哪种地步，近距离地了解最典型的英国工人阶级。“阶级差异总像一根可恶的倒刺，让你浑身不自在，就好比豌豆公主床垫下面的豌豆一样。” 所有在坚持一种流派的书籍，最后免不了有其局限的地方，无论这样的观点是如何撬动我们内心的呼唤。所以我这本书抛开时代的痕迹，其珍贵的地方在于向我们描绘了一幅关于贫穷的图景，而这个图景是如何让生活在里面的人在水深火热中仍泰然自处——“当每个人都一样的时候，事情就会变得很不一样。”

卫报成这部《通往维根码头之路》为：

George Orwell’s unflinchingly honest account of three northern towns during the Great Depression was a milestone in the writer’s political development

乔治 · 奥威尔在这部作品里无所畏惧、如实地描述了三个北部城镇的大萧条时期，是其作家身份的政治发展的一个里程碑。

快速阅读完毕，一份英国无产阶级的调查报告，作者由近至远分析了各阶层的现状和未来，提出自己的建议，堪称“最佳社会学报告”。

“The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.” This opening line is the sound of a great writer finding his authentic voice. With absolute confidence, after several false starts, the mature George Orwell takes charge of this idiosyncratic account of working-class life from his first page.

“清晨的第一道声音就是磨坊女孩们重重地走在鹅卵石道路上的声音。” 这个以声音为开场白是取自于奥威尔现实生活的声音，比起其他不合适的开场白这简直充满了可信度，成熟的乔治 · 奥威尔在他的第一页重重描写了工人阶级生活这个特殊群体。

The Road to Wigan Pier falls into two parts, a travelogue describing Orwell’s journey through three northern towns, and a matching, but much more contentious, quest of heart and mind. It was, declared its author, a “political book”, a mix of reportage and political commentary with a dash of autobiography. Henceforth, he would be a socialist, but a socialist with an aura of secular saintliness that some found affected, even comical.

The Road to Wigan Pier 分成两部分，一方面是奥威尔在三个北方城镇的游记，融合了争议和意志的探索。它被作者奥威尔定义成政治读物，将报道风格和含有些许自传的政治评论语言糅合。从此以后，他被定义成社会学家，但

社会主义与世俗的高尚氛围备受影响，显得滑稽。

The first half opens with a brilliant, No 22 Darlington Street. From the squalor of working-class Wigan, Orwell plunges into meetings with the unemployed, with slum-dwellers, with coalminers, and dockers.

开篇部分很惊艳，从达灵顿22号街中，奥威尔陷入了悲惨的工人阶级，煤矿工人、失业的码头工人、贫民窟。

The second half of Wigan Pier is much more uneven, and famously provocative. Even now, Orwell’s private encounter with English socialism can seem shocking. His determination “to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst” was principally to do with his own quest, a journey that was, he writes, “necessary to me as part of my approach to socialism”.

本书第二个特点是不均匀，这是文学上很难得的挑战，即使是现在，奥威尔个人对于英国社会的看法仍是很令人震惊的，他“去见一见大量的失业人究竟有多糟糕”的决定出于自我探索的原则，在他的游历上写到：“这对我去接触社会主义是很重爱透的一部分”。

Orwell is never less than self-lacerating. On the class question, he eviscerates himself: “The real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal is summed up in four frightful words: the lower classes smell.”

奥威尔经常进行自我反省，在阶级问题上，他抽丝剥茧，“欧洲国家的资产阶级离不开工人的辛勤努力，他们是平等的，但这些资产阶级的人总结了愚蠢的四字是'卑微气味'。”

Rarely, in English literature, has a writer flayed himself so mercilessly in print. But the upshot of this uniquely strange book was a kind of creative liberation: Eric Blair, who was now unequivocally George Orwell, had found his voice and his identity. For the rest of his active life – barely 10 years – he would write as a British literary socialist. From this declaration of intent come his masterpieces: Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and, finally, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s arguable that without The Road to Wigan Pier none of these would have been possible.

在英国文学里，一位作家纳罕地在不断鞭策自己，但本书唯一奇怪的结果是一种解放的创造性：埃里克 · 布莱尔，曾发现他的声音和他的身份毫不含糊地就是乔治 · 奥威尔。在其十余年活跃的生涯中，奥威尔作为一名为学社会家写作，从这个声明再来看他的作品意图就很明显，像：《向加泰罗尼亚致敬》、《动物农场》和《1984》，都不会没可能值得商榷。

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