Obituary
逝者
Tsutomu Yamaguchi
山口疆
Jan 14th 2010
From The Economist print edition
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, died on January 6th, aged 93
山口疆，一个经历过两次原子弹爆炸的幸存者，于1月6日逝世，享年93岁
WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus. Much was on his mind that morning. He had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard; there were goodbyes to say at the office, then a 200-mile train journey back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. He was slightly stressed when he got to his stop, still with half-an-hour’s walk ahead of him on a track that led through featureless potato fields. But it was a beautiful August day; the sky was clear, his spirits high. And then—readers will feel a tremor, but he felt none—he noticed an aircraft circling, and two parachutes dropping down.
哭泣止住之后，山口疆就会告诉你们他为什么要把他这本诗集叫作《人筏》。全是因为那天，那个“他忘了带自己的姓名章去上班，所以不得不中途下车”的那天。那天早上，他的脑子里全是事儿。那天，他必须要打包离开广岛；他作为工程师已经完成了在三菱造船厂为期三个月的任务；他要向办公室其他的同仁告别，然后乘坐火车回到长崎，回到200英里以外的家中，回到妻子尚子和还在嗷嗷待哺的儿子胜敏的身边。当他到站时，不觉有些厌烦，因为前面还有半小时的脚程，要经过一片单调无奇的马铃薯地。但是美丽的八月和清澈的天空让他精神振作了起来。然后——读者读到这里会感觉脊背发颤，而他却麻木无觉——他注意到一个绕圈的飞机，还有两个正在下落的降落伞。
The next thing he knew was a blaze of white magnesium light, and a huge ball of fire. He dived to the ground. The fireball, roaring upwards, sucked him up again and threw him, blinded, face-down into the mud of the potato field. He was two miles from the epicentre of the blast, in a rain of flaming scraps of paper and clothes. His upper body and half his face were badly burned, his hair gone and his eardrums ruptured. In this state, he made his way back to the devastated city to try to do what he had meant to do that day: catch the train. The river bridges were down. But one river was full of carbonised naked bodies of men, women, children, floating face-down “like blocks of wood”, and on these—part treading, part paddling—he got to the other side. His human raft.
接下来，他感到眼前一阵炫目的镁光，还很有一颗巨大的火球。他就地扑倒。腾起的火球把他再次吸起，他眼前一黑，脸朝下被扔进土豆田的泥当中。他所处位置距离爆炸中心两英里，这里下起一阵“碎片雨”——燃烧的纸片和衣服碎片。他的上身和半张脸被严重烧伤，头发没了，耳鼓破了。在这样的情形下，他依然设法回到了被摧毁的城市，然后设法完成他那天原定的计划：赶火车。过河桥都塌了。但是却有一条河里满是碳化的裸露尸体，男人、女人、小孩，脸朝下浮在水面之上，好像“一块块木头”。借着这些“木块”——半是踏，半是划——他过到了另一边。他的人筏。
At this point in his story he would weep uncontrollably. It was by no means the end of it. When he reached Nagasaki, barely pausing to get his burns dressed, he reported for work. His boss was sceptical: how could a single bomb have destroyed Hiroshima? Then the same white magnesium light blazed in the window, and Mr Yamaguchi was tossed to the ground again. A reinforced-steel stairwell saved him. His bandages were blown off, and he spent the next weeks curled round his raw wounds in a shelter, close to death. His house was destroyed, his wife and son saved for no reason he could see. But when schoolchildren later asked him, in awed respect, “What was the most terrible thing?”, his answer was not the dangling tongues and eyeballs, not the skin that hung off the bodies of the living “like giant gloves”—but the bridge of bodies on which he had crossed the river.
故事讲到这，他会无法控制地哭泣。然而这绝不是故事的尾声。回到长崎，还未停歇来好好处理一下烧伤，他就回去单位报道。老板对于他的讲述满是问号：一颗炸弹就能把广岛给毁了？接着，窗口出现同样的白色炫目镁光，山口又一次被扔到地上。但是一段由高强度钢构建的楼梯井救了他。他的绷带被爆开，接下来的几周，他待在一个庇护所里，蜷着身子护着伤口，濒临死亡。他的家被毁了，妻子和儿子却奇迹般生还，虽然他看不到他们是如何逃脱的。之后，当小学生满是敬畏地问他，“最恐怖的事是什么？”，他的答案不是悬荡的舌头和眼球，不是活者“像巨型手套一样”悬在身体外的皮肤——而是他踩着过河的尸体桥。
He talked about all this to Charles Pellegrino, an American writer, and Richard Lloyd Parry of the London Times. He told them that he hated the atom bomb because of “what it does to the dignity of human beings”. Walking into Hiroshima, he noticed that the bewildered crowds on the streets were mostly naked, limping children. They made no sound; indeed, no one made a sound. They were reduced—like him, as he was flung into the furrows of the potato field—to the level of mute sticks or leaves, tossed in the wind and burned, or used as floats.
他把所有这些都讲述给美国作家查尔斯·佩莱格里诺和《伦敦时报》的理查得·劳埃德·佩里。他告诉他们说他恨原子弹，因为“原子弹践踏了人性”。走进广岛市区，他看到街道上这些不知所措的人群中大部分都是赤裸跛行的儿童。他们没有声音；不仅如此，所有人都没有声音。他们被原子弹弄成了呆哑的木头，或是如他被扔进土豆田垄沟一样被风卷起，接着被火着身，或是如河上一浮子。
Painting the Buddhas
为佛陀着色
Some argued that he was lucky. A deaf left ear and weak legs were the only after-effects until, late on, stomach cancer appeared. He worked as a translator, then a teacher, and eventually returned to Mitsubishi. But, as he wrote in 1969, he was not so sanguine inside.
有人认为他很幸运。唯一的后遗症是一只聋了的左耳和不灵便的双腿，直到后来出现了胃癌的症状。他作了翻译，然后作老师，最后回到三菱公司。但是，如他在1969年写到，他的内心并不安详乐观。
Thinking of myself as a phoenix,
I cling on until now.
But how painful they have been,
those twenty-four years past.
想象自己是一只凤凰，
坚持，坚持，坚持到现在这一刻。
但是时间多么苦长，
过去这二十四年间。
His emotions mostly emerged in these tanka, or 31-syllable poems. He wrote hundreds, each one an ordeal. When he composed them, he would dream of the dead lying on the ground. One by one, they would get up and walk past him.
他的情感大都表达在这些短歌（或曰“三十一音节诗”）里。他写了上百首，每一首都是一次折磨。他在创作时会看见死者躺在地上，然后一个一个站起来，从他身边走过。
Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland
all the Buddhas died,
and never heard what killed them.
原子核爆后的焦土
面地碳焦的尸体
诸佛皆死
是什么杀死了他们
他们再也不会知道
He published these poems himself in 2002, and they might have been his only testimony. But in 2005 his son Katsutoshi died of cancer at 59, killed by the radiation he had received as a baby. Mr Yamaguchi began to feel that fate had spared him to speak out against the horrors of nuclear weapons: in schools, in a documentary, in a letter to Barack Obama and even, at 90, on his first trip abroad, in front of a committee of the United Nations in New York.
他在2002年出版了这些诗，本来很可能就此是他对于这场灾难唯一的见证词。但是2005年他的儿子胜敏在59岁的年纪死于癌症，凶手是婴儿阶段受到的辐射。这时，山口开始感到命运要他大声疾呼核武器的恐怖：在学校里，在一个纪录片里，在给巴拉克·奥巴马的一封信里，甚至在九十高龄首次国外行在纽约联合国总部的一群委员面前。
If there exists a GOD who protects
nuclear-free eternal peace
the blue earth won't perish
如果存在这样一个上帝
可以叫原子弹无踪无迹
可以让和平天长且地久
这个蓝星球将不会毁灭
At his insistence, his status was recognised by the Japanese government: he became officially (though there had been more than 100 others) the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-victim of the atom bomb.
在他的坚持下，他的位置得到了日本政府的承认：他成为官方认定（尽管还有另外100多人）唯一一名“原子弹双重受害者（nijyuu hibakusha）”。
He began to be comforted by three things. One was a set of drawings of the 88 Buddhas of the Shikoku pilgrimage, whose outlines—robes, haloes, calm hands—he devoutly painted in. The carbonised, face-down Buddhas of his tanka found peace again. The second comfort was in “simple acts of kindness”. And the third was an image of his life as a baton, passed on every time anyone heard or read his testimony. All these batons might form, together, another human raft.
有三样东西开始让他的心灵得到抚慰。一个是四国朝圣路上八十八尊佛的一组白描像，他虔诚地将他们的轮廓——佛袍，晕环，静安的手——着上颜色。他诗中那些面地碳焦的佛陀再次找到了静谧和安详。第二个安慰在“简简单单的善举”中。第三个是他把自己的生命想象成一根接力棒的图景，每当有人听到或是读到他的见证之语，也就是接到了接力棒。所有这些接力棒合在一起，可能就会组成另外一只人类之筏。