Unsinkable: Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titanic

By Daniel Mendelsohn

泰坦尼克号沉船事件发生至今已久，但人们脑海中对其的记忆却始终没有消逝。事件发生后相继出现的文学作品、电影等，令人爱不释手，深深着迷。“You jump, I jump”这句经典台词更让无数人为之神魂颠倒。这其中到底有什么神秘的力量一直吸引着人们的目光呢？

In the early nineteen-seventies, my Uncle Walter,who wasn’t a “real” uncle but had a better intuition1. intuition: 了解。about my hobbies and interests than some of my blood relatives did, gave me a thrilling gift: membership in the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. I was only twelve,but already hooked2. hook: 着迷。. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “like a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s:3. magnificence: 辉煌；pathos: 痛苦；enthralling chivalry: 迷人的骑士精神。骑士精神是西方上流社会的文化精神，对风度、礼节和外表举止等有特别的讲究；Benjamin Guggenheim: 本杰明·古根海姆，美国商人，死于泰坦尼克号沉海事件，尸体未找到；tantalizing: 吸引人的。for me, there was no better story. I had read whatever books the local public library offered,and had spent some of my allowance on a copy of Walter Lord’s indispensable A Night to Remember.4. allowance: 零用钱；indispensable: 必不可少的；Walter Lord: 沃尔特·洛德，美国知名作家，因作品《此夜永难忘》而享誉海外，该书记载了泰坦尼克号沉船事件。To this incipient5. incipient: 起初的。collection Uncle Walter added the precious gift of a biography of the man who designed the ship. It has always been among the first books I pack when I move. A little later, when I was in my midteens, I toiled for a while on a novel about two fourteen-year-old boys, one a Long Islander like myself, the other a British aristocrat, who meet during the doomed maiden voyage.6. toil: 费力地做；aristocrat: 贵族；doomed: 注定的；maiden:首次的。Needless to say, their budding friendship was sundered by the disaster.7. 毋庸置疑，这场灾难将他们刚刚建立的友谊拆散。budding:萌芽的；sunder: 切断。

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed8. obsessed: 着迷的。—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration9. exaggeration: 夸张。. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard,twenty-nine boilers, a jewelled copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,10. liner: 邮轮；boiler: 锅炉；The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam:《鲁拜集》，是波斯诗人奥马·海亚姆的四行诗集，与中国的绝句相类似。and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “All Saved From Titanic After Collision,” the New York Evening Sun crowed less than twentyfour hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “Titanic Sinks, 1,500 Die.”11. brute: 残忍的；conjecture: 猜测。Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan.12. 随后，出现了有关早期幸存者的故事——跟随骆驼商队长途跋涉至美国的黎巴嫩游客后裔对其进行编写，目前已出书。descendant: 后裔；Lebanese: 黎巴嫩人；trek: 艰苦跋涉；caravan:（穿过沙漠地带的）旅行队。There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut13. glut: 大量需求。that the Times was moved to print a warning: “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics14. polemics: 辩论术，论证法。by enthusiasts,and novels, numbering in the hundreds. This centennial15. centennial: 百年的。month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles.

泰坦尼克号历史照片

The books are, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1912 and 1913 more than a hundred songs about the Titanic were published. A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie called Saved from the Titanic was released,16. scant: 不足的，勉强够的；release: 上映。featuring Dorothy Gibson,an actress who had been a passenger in first class. It established a formula—a love story wrapped around the real-life catastrophe—that has resurfaced again and again,notably in a 1953 tearjerker starring Barbara Stanwyck and in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which, when it was released, was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing film of all time.17. 围绕现实灾难展开的爱情故事成为了固定的情节模式，一遍又一遍地相继上映，特别是1953年芭芭拉·斯坦威克（20世纪美国著名女演员）主演的催泪大片和詹姆斯·卡梅隆（加拿大著名导演）1997年拍摄的大片，这部影片一上映便创耗资最大，票房最高的历史纪录。resurface: 重新露面；tearjerker: 赚人热泪的电影或戏剧。

The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters.18. 从这无穷尽的兴趣可知，人们对泰坦尼克故事的情感比对其他灾难近乎病态的着迷更深一步。inexhaustible: 无穷尽的；morbid:病态的；fascination: 着迷。The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation.19. torpedoing: 用爆破筒爆炸；Lusitania:卢西塔尼亚号，英国远洋客轮，1915年被德国潜艇击沉；boast: 包含，容纳；calamity: 灾难；obsessive: 着迷的；preoccupation: 使人全神贯注的事物。The aura of significance that surrounds the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper the Onion, in 1999,stomping across the page in dire block letters:20. aura: 光环；belated: 迟来的；Onion:《洋葱新闻》，1988年诞生于美国，以报道讽刺性文章为特色，以真实新闻事件为蓝本加工杜撰假新闻；dire:可怕的；block letter: 正楷，印刷体。

泰坦尼克号沉船历史图片

World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg

The “news” was accompanied by an archival image of the ship’s famous four-funnelled profile.21. 这条“新闻”旁边配有一张旧图片，显示出船只著名的四个大烟囱轮廓。archival: 档案的；funnelled: 有烟囱的；profile: 外形。The subhead pressed the joke: “Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic. 1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy.”22. 体现人类傲慢一面的泰坦尼克号于大西洋北部下沉，1,500人在这场象征性的灾难中丧生。hubris: 傲慢。

The Onion’s spoof23. spoof: 讽刺性文章。gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the Titanic seems to be about something.But what? For some, it’s a parable aabout the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that “in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.”24. parable: 寓言；Broadway: 百老汇，美国纽约市戏院集中的一条大街；admonish: 告诫；fabricate: 伪造。For others,it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era.25. 对另一些人来说，这是关于阶级道德的故事，或是第一次世界大战的预兆——标志着更加天真的时代的结束。foreshadowing: 预兆。Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia;for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.26. 学术历史学家否认该观点只传达了人们的怀旧之情：对于他们而言，这场灾难不仅仅是历史分界线，更反映了20世纪早期人们对种族、性别、阶级和移民的担忧。dismiss: 不再考虑，不接受；nostalgia: 怀旧之情；project: 投射，放映。