【导读】：他是英国著名的历史学家，也是一位坚定的共产主义者。
Eric Hobsbawm
艾瑞克•霍布斯鲍姆
Eric Hobsbawm, historian, died on October 1st, aged 95
艾瑞克•霍布斯鲍姆，历史学家，卒于10月1日，享年95岁
Oct 6th 2012 | from the print edition
HIS boyhood enthusiasm for the countryside, especially for its birds, never left him. His heart soared at the sight of a red kite or a hen harrier. He mourned how rarely he heard the song of the yellowhammer, “a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese”, on his hikes through the hills of mid-Wales to which he had retreated, close to the River Wye.
在童年时期，霍布斯鲍姆深切地热爱着乡村，特别是那里的小鸟，这种热情从未离他远去。每当看见红色的风筝或是白尾鹞①，他都会心潮澎湃。他会穿越威尔士中部山脉，前往瓦伊河②附近他所隐居之处，途中他会带上一点点面包，但是却不带奶酪。在这样的徒步旅行中，他很少听到黄鹉的歌唱，为此他忧伤不已。
Eric Hobsbawm was a rare bird himself: “the last living Communist”, as he was teased at his 90th birthday party, and one of the last committed Marxist historians. He had become a Communist at secondary school in Berlin in 1932, and joined the party when he went up to his beloved King’s, Cambridge in 1936, because politics was his passion and it was either Hitler or the other side. But he remained for 50 years until Communism foundered, collapsing “so completely”, he wrote, “that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start.” Why, then, had he stayed? Because he was of the generation that believed the October Revolution of 1917 was the great hope of the world; and he could not bear to betray either the revolution itself, or those who had fought for it.
艾瑞克•霍布斯鲍姆他自己就是一只“稀有的鸟类”：他在90岁的生日派对上开玩笑似地说，他是“最后一位活着的共产主义者”，也是最后一位坚定的马克思主义历史学家。1932年，霍布斯鲍姆在柏林读中学，那时他就成为了一名共产主义者。1936年，霍布斯鲍姆进入他所挚爱的剑桥大学国王学院学习。在那时，要么选择希特勒，要么支持共产主义，因此政治热情高涨的霍布斯鲍姆加入了共产党。但之后的50年他都没有退党，直到共产主义失败。他写道，“共产主义崩塌了，其程度之彻底让人们清楚地看到，失败的种子早在一开始就埋下了。”那么当时他为什么没有退党呢？因为如那一代人一样，他相信1917年的十月革命是给世界带来巨大希望的革命。他不忍背叛革命本身，也不忍背叛那些为革命而奋战的人。
There were testing moments, for sure. In 1956, after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and Khrushchev exposed the crimes of the Soviet past, Mr Hobsbawm’s embrace of Stalinism was revealed for the folly it was. Most of his intellectual friends left the party. He stayed, gradually regretting that he had remained an apologist for “Uncle Joe” for so long. But just as he kept his kneejerk political obsessions—supporting, for example, any team that played football against a country, like Croatia, that had a fascist fellow-travelling past—so he remembered the Soviet Union, horrors and all, with an indulgence he could not feel for China.
当然，他也遇到过考验人的时刻。1956年，苏联政府用坦克镇压了匈牙利人的起义，赫鲁晓夫指出了苏联以前所犯的罪行，这使霍布斯鲍姆对斯大林的信奉显得十分愚蠢。他的知识分子好友大多都退出了共产党。霍布斯鲍姆没有退党，之后他开始渐渐后悔他为“乔大叔③”做了那么久的辩护者。他对政治的痴迷是本能的，比如，只要有一个足球队与克罗地亚这样曾与法西斯为伍的国家对战，他就会表示支持。正如他保留了这种痴迷一样，他沉溺在对苏联、恐怖的事和其他一切的记忆中，这种沉溺在他面对中国时是不曾有的。
Alongside his Communism, he insisted on remaining a Marxist historian. Again, he was asked why. It put him in a ghetto, when he had rather cleverly—with his blue eyes, fair hair and English father—got through a childhood in interwar Vienna as der Engländer, rather than being labelled as the Jew he also was. That Marxist tag threatened to tarnish his reputation, when his lucid and scholarly books on what he called the long 19th century, from 1789 to 1914 (“The Age of Revolution”, “The Age of Capital”, “The Age of Empire”), on nationalism and on labour movements deserved, and won, an audience well beyond leftist circles and academe.
除了坚信共产主义，霍布斯鲍姆还坚持做一个马克思主义历史学家。同样地，又有人问他为何如此。霍布斯鲍姆有着蓝色的眼睛、金色的头发，他的父亲是英国人，同时霍布斯鲍姆还是一个犹太人。他十分聪明把自己界定为英国人，而没有使自己被贴上犹太人的标签，因此在两次世界大战期间，他在维也纳安然地度过了童年。他把1789年至1914年这段时间称为漫长的19世纪，并针对这段时间写了三本书，即《革命的年代》、《资本的年代》和《帝国的年代》。他还针对民族主义和工人运动写了几本书，这些学术性著作清晰易懂，吸引了许多左派圈子和研究会的读者，这都是他应得的。但马克思主义的标签却威胁到了他的声誉。
Defiant, Mr Hobsbawm championed Marx to the last. For his intellectual force; for his grasp of the world as a whole, at once political, economic, scientific and philosophical; and not least for his conviction, as relevant in 2008 as in 1848, that the capitalist system, with its yawning inequalities and naked greed, would inevitably—irresistibly—necessarily—be destroyed by its own internal tensions, and would be superseded by something better.
但霍布斯鲍姆不顾别人的看法，坚持拥护马克思到最后。因为他有着智慧的力量，他将世界看做是一个整体，同时也将它看做是政治的、经济的、科学的、哲学的。尤其重要的是，他坚信资本主义制度难以逾越的不平等和赤裸裸的贪婪会使其被自身的内部矛盾所推翻，并最终被更好的制度所取代，这一趋势是必然的、不可抵抗的。
The joy of mass protest
大规模抗议的乐趣
As well as naive idealism, nostalgia tinged his writings. He wrote his history of the short 20th century (1914-1991), “The Age of Extremes”, as a “participant observer”, marvelling that he could have come through the most absurd and monstrous century in human history feeling, for the most part, happy. He might leave no mark behind, as “common men” tended not to, but he had lent his boyish effort to wider collective ends: tall, ugly, gangly and mostly solitary, marching in the Berlin snow, stuffing leaflets into letterboxes, against a background of looming cataclysm.
霍布斯鲍姆的作品不仅饱含纯真的理想主义，同时还透露着怀旧之情。他以一个“参与观察者”的身份，将其在20世纪所经历的那段时间（1914-1991）写成了一本书，名叫《极端的年代》。他在书中惊讶于自己竟走过了人类历史上最荒诞最怪异的一个世纪，而且在大多数时间，他都是快乐的。作为一个“普通人”，他可能并没有留下，也不想留下什么痕迹，但他却将稚气的努力献给了更广泛的集体目标：霍布斯鲍姆又高又瘦，他的长相并不十分好看，且多数时间都喜欢隐居，在一场大变动逐渐逼近的时代背景下，他行进在柏林的风雪中，将传单塞进邮筒。
Above and beneath all, he was a romantic. He enjoyed the writings of Joseph Roth, especially “The Radetzky March”, with its image of a world where people of many languages and religions could somehow rub along together (needing only liberty and equality to achieve the Communist internationalist paradise). And he revelled in that most demotic and subversive music, jazz. He was almost as proud of being an amateur jazz critic (writing for years, under a pseudonym, for the New Statesman) as he was of being a professional historian. There too, ideology crept in. He lamented that jazz since 1960 had fossilised, losing that dynamic of change from below; and when Billie Holliday died, he wrote that it was impossible to listen to her thin, gritty voice without hating the world which had made her what she was.
然而在这一切表象的背后，霍布斯鲍姆是个浪漫的人。他喜欢读约瑟夫•罗特④的作品，特别是《拉德斯基进行曲》，在这本书所描绘的世界里，不同语言、不同信仰的人们可以以某种方式勉强相处（只需要自由和平等就可以到达共产国际主义的天堂）。霍布斯鲍姆还喜欢最通俗、最具颠覆性的音乐——爵士乐。作为一位专业的历史学家，成为一名业余的爵士评论家（他曾多年创作爵士乐评论作品，并以笔名向《新政治家》⑤投稿）给他带来的自豪感几乎可以媲美前者。这些评论作品中也潜藏着他的意识形态。自1960年开始，爵士乐失去了来自底层人民的那种活力，渐渐变得僵化，霍布斯鲍姆为此而感到遗憾；在比莉•哈乐黛死去时，霍布斯鲍姆这样写道：听着她那尖细而又坚定的声音，想要不憎恨这个雕塑出她的世界是不可能的。
By the end of the 20th century he no longer expected revolution in the West (nor in Latin America, though he was feted there, especially in Brazil and Paraguay). Shocking inequalities did not seem to urge people on to the streets. In Britain in the 1980s it was clear, even to him, that handing the Labour Party to the hard left would not stop the working man voting for Margaret Thatcher. The most famous modern manifestation of leftish fury, in Paris in May 1968, seemed to him a Club Med affair of spoiled middle-class kids.
到了20世纪末，霍布斯鲍姆不再期待西方国家的改革（同样，他也不在期盼拉美国家会发生革命，虽然在拉丁美洲他很受欢迎，特别是巴西和巴拉圭）。巨大的不平等似乎并没有促使人们走上街头进行抗议。在上个世纪80年代的英国，即使将工党交由极左派分子管理也无法阻止工人们投票给玛格丽特•撒切尔，这一点对人们，甚至于对霍布斯鲍姆来说都是十分明显的。1968年5月，巴黎愤怒的左派人士掀起了现代最为著名的示威运动，然而此次运动在霍布斯鲍姆看来也不过是一群来自中产阶级的被宠坏了的孩子组织的地中海俱乐部事件。
Yet part of him had longed to be there. Next to sex, he claimed, there was nothing so physically intense as “participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation”. Which perhaps explains why this lifelong Marxist revolutionary struggled on his Zimmer frame to get to a neighbour’s house in Wales to watch the Thames Jubilee pageant this summer—and to enthuse about how he had just seen a buzzard circling overhead.
然而，还是有一部分的他渴望着能参与其中。他说，除了性，没有什么能像“在群众激情高昂时参与游行示威”那样让人在生理上如此激动紧张。或许这一点能解释为什么这位一生都执着于马克思主义的革命者会在齐默式助行架的支撑下，挣扎着走到威尔士一位邻居家中，去看看今年夏天在泰晤士河上举行的钻禧巡游活动，并因看到一只秃鹰在头顶盘旋而兴奋不已。
from the print edition | Obituary
背景参考：
①白尾鹞
②瓦伊河
③乔大叔
④约瑟夫•罗特
⑤ 《新政治家》