unit5themonster课文翻译大学英语六

Unit 5 THE MONSTER
He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body -- a sickly little man. His nerves were had. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had seclusions of grandeur. He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for house, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, le tters, books … thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them -- usually at somebody else's expense -- but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He wrote operas, and no sooner did he have the synopsis of a story, but he would invite -- or rather summon -- a crowed of his friends to his house, and read it aloud to them. Not for criticism. For applause. When the complete poem was written, the friends had to come again, and hear that read aloud. Then he would publish the poem, sometimes years before the music that went with it was written. He played the piano like a composer, in the worst sense of what that implies, and he would sit down at the piano before parties that included some of the finest pianists of his time, and play for them, by the hour, his own music, needless to say. He had a composer's voice.
And he would invite eminent vocalists to his house and sing them his operas, taking all the parts.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist wonk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under ay obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan -- men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at other loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
What money he could lay his hands on he spent like an Indian rajah. The mere prospect of a performance of one of his operas was enough to set him to running up bills amounting to ten times the amount of his prospective royalties. No one will ever know -- certainly he never knew -- how much money he owed. We do know that his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000 to pay the most pressing of his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for debt.
He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of women marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a friend to inquire whether he could suggest some wealthy woman -- any wealthy woman -- whom he could marry for her money.
He was completely selfish in his other personal relationships. His liking for his friends was measured solely by the completeness of their devotion to him, or by their usefulness to him, whether financial or artistic. The minute they failed him -- even by so much as refusing dinner invitation -- or began to lessen in
usefulness, he cast them off without a second thought. At the end of his life he had exactly one friend left whom he had known even in middle age.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record -- in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn't matter in the least. Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world's greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote -- thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world's great musico-dramatic masterpieces -- when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don't seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars' worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy. What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what be dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn't burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
怪才
他身材矮小，同他的身体相比，头却很大——他是一个常生病的小个子。

他的神经有毛病，他的皮肤也有病。

要是贴身穿的衣服比丝绸粗糙一点的话，他就会非常痛苦。

而且他还患有狂想症。

他是个自负的怪才。

他是一刻都没有正眼看过世界和世人。

除了和自己和关在他看来，
他不仅是世界上最伟大的剧作家之一、最伟大的思想家之一、最伟大的作曲家之一。

听他谈话，他就是集莎士比亚、贝多芬、柏拉图于一身。

你如果听他谈话并不会有什么困难。

他是人世间最健谈的人之一。

你如果听他谈话并不会有什么困难。

他是人世间最健谈的人之一。

如果和他在一起呆上一个晚上，就等于花一个晚上听他一人独讲。

他有时讲得很精彩，有时却让人讨厌。

不过无论是精彩还是让人讨厌，他的话题只有一个，那就是他自己，他和所想和他所为。

他有一种癖号，就是认为自己总是对的。

对于来自任何人的一点点不同的意见，在这最不起眼的观点上，很可能使他夸夸其谈几个钟头。

用各种方法来证明自己是正确的。

和尽力流利的证明最后他的听众目瞪口呆，为了息事宁人，只好同意他的观点。

他从来都没有想过，他和他所做的事对于同他有联系的人来说并不是最令人感兴趣的。

他对天底下差不多作何事情都有自己的观点。

无论是素食主义、戏剧、政治还是音乐。

为了证明自已的观点，他写了小册子信，书，和成千上万的字。

共数百页。

通常是靠别人资助－而且总是坐着把这些东西大声的读。

一念就是几个小时，给他的朋友和家人。

他写歌剧，一有了故事的概要，他就邀请——说得更准确一点是召唤——他那一帮朋友去他家，听他念故事概要。

他请他们来不是听他们批评意见的，而是听他们赞扬的。

当歌剧的词全部写完后，他的朋友们还得再来听他读整部戏的歌词。

而后你就拿去发表，可有时歌词写好了，数年后其配乐才完成。

他弹钢琴象一个作曲家，一样弹得糟糕透顶，而且他还总是坐在钢琴傍，面对有他同时代的最优秀的钢琴家在场的一群人，数小时地为他们演奏；不用说，他演奏的都是自己写的音乐作品。

他有作曲家的嗓子。

他总是邀请杰出的声乐家到家里，给他们演唱自己写的歌剧，一个人演所有的角色。

他的感情就象6岁孩子那样极不稳定。

只要感到不舒服，他总是乱骂一通，直跺脚，要么就情绪极其低落，伤心地说要去东方当和尚，度过余生。

十分钟后如果有什么事让他高兴的话，他就会冲出门，在花园里跑来跑去，或者在沙发上跳上跳下，或头朝下倒立着。

一只爱犬死了他会痛不欲生，可他要是冷酷起来，连罗马皇帝也会发抖的。

他简直缺乏任何责任感。

他不仅好象没有能力养活自己，而且他也从来没有想到有这么做的责任。

他坚信人们该养活自己。

由于是这样认为的，他向所有的人——无论是男人还是女人，无论是朋友还是陌生人——谁有能力拿出钱来，他就向谁借。

他写信向别人乞讨，一写就是二十封；有时奴颜婢膝，毫无羞耻，有时却非常傲慢地把别人给他的特权赏给他心目中的捐助人，如果领受者拒绝接受，他就会万分愤怒。

我没有找到他把钱付给或还给没有法律依据的借款人的任何记录。

只要弄得到钱，他就象印度王公那样花销。

一旦他的某部歌剧有望演出，就足以使他欠下的帐单十倍于预计给他的版税。

无人会知道——他本人也一定不曾知道——他欠别人多少钱。

但我们肯定知道的是，资助他最多的人曾经给过他六千块钱来偿还在某个城市要得最多的欠款。

而一年后为了能使他在另一城市生活而不会因债务入狱又不得不给他一万六千元。

在其他方面，他同样肆无忌惮。

在他一生中，与他有过关系的女人无计其数。

他的第一
位妻子和他生活了二十年，容忍、原谅他的种种不忠行为。

他的第二位妻子原来是对他最忠诚、最崇拜的朋友的妻子，可他却把她从朋友那里夺走了。

更有甚者，当他还在设法说服她离开第一位丈夫时就写信给朋友，问他能否穿针引线介绍某位有钱的女人——只有她有钱，他都会为了她的钱而娶她。

在和他人交往中他也非常自私。

他对朋友的喜好完全是由他们对他是否忠诚，或者他们是否在经济上或艺术上对他有用来决定的。

要是他们让他有所失望——哪怕是拒绝宴会邀请——或是开始不是那么有用了，他就会毫不犹豫地不与他们往来了。

他在晚年只剩一个朋友，而且还是在中年时认识的。

这个怪才名叫理查德·瓦格纳。

我所讲的在关他的一切都有案可查——在报纸上，在警方报告中，在认识他的人的证词里，在他自己的信件中，和他自传的字里行间里都能可以找到记录。

这个记录奇怪的是它对此人没有丝毫影响。

因为这位身材矮小、多病、难以相处、让人着魔的人一直是正确的。

这就给我们开了一个玩笑。

他是世界上最伟大的戏剧家之一；他是伟大的思想家；他是最伟大的音乐天才之一。

迄今为止世人所看到的。

世人的确应养着他。

当你细想他所写的东西时——十三部歌剧和音乐剧，其中十一部仍在上演，八部无可争议地列入世界音乐剧名着——当你倾听他所写的一切时，他无论是欠债还是让人伤心，所有这些代价似乎算不了什么。

想想曾经给予的那份奢侈吧，由于拿破仑的命运，他毁来了法国，肆虐了欧洲。

这样一想，也许你就会同意，几千元的债务用来换取《指环》三部曲，代价并不算高。

就是他对朋友和妻子不忠，又算得了什么他有一位至死都能忠心耿耿的爱人：音乐。

他一刻都没有与自己信仰的，梦想的东西进行妥协。

他的音乐中没有一行是一般人所能构思出来的。

即使他乏味或极其糟糕，也只是大手笔中的乏味。

就是他最严重的错误中也有伟大之处。

这可不是原谅不原谅的事情。

又抓又扯，想冲出来，尖叫着，要他把身体的乐曲谱出来。

奇迹是在短暂的七十年中，他竟然完成了这一切。

就算是一个天才，他没有时间做普通人这奇怪吗。