安东尼·波登：成名后，每一天都是磨难 | 经济学人文化

Culture | World in a dish

盘中世界

A candid new book explores Anthony Bourdain’s trials

《天堂赶路人》：直击安东尼·波登的磨难

Sometimes getting everything you want can be as disastrous as failing to

尽在我手的天堂，也是一无所有的地狱

By the time Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a French hotel room on June 8th 2018, he was the envy of food-obsessed travellers the world over. Twenty years earlier he had been a competent but unknown chef with frustrated literary ambitions and a louche, drug-filled past. Then “Kitchen Confidential”, his book of 2000, became a surprise bestseller, and launched a series of increasingly ambitious television shows built around a simple concept: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”

2018年6月8日，安东尼·波登（Anthony Bourdain）在法国一家酒店自缢身亡。生前，他活成了全世界美食旅行家都想成为的样子。而在20年前，他是一位厨艺精湛却默默无闻的主厨，怀揣着文学梦，却郁郁不得志，终日吸毒不断，过着离经叛道的生活。他2000年出版的《厨房机密档案》意外畅销，由此推出了一档电视节目，并越发倾注自己的心血。整档节目围绕一个简单的主题：“周游世界，尝遍美食，凡我所愿，基本实现。”

It turned out that a lot of people liked watching him do just that: between 2002 and his death he made hundreds of episodes. Off-screen, he had two failed marriages, a rocky relationship with Asia Argento, an Italian actor, and a punishing schedule that kept him on the road for most of the year. As “Down and Out in Paradise”, Charles Leerhsen’s gritty, well-researched new biography makes clear, Bourdain carried with him an array of compulsions, addictions and insecurities. Mr Leerhsen tries to explain why a man with legions of adoring fans and the best job in the world would end his life and why, years later, so many people still care about him.

事实证明，很多人都喜欢看他的节目。自2002年开始到他自杀，他出品了数百期节目。但荧幕之外，他离过两次婚，与意大利演员艾西亚·阿基多（Asia Argento）的恋爱也难以维系，繁忙的工作让他一年中大部分时间都在四处奔波。查理斯·李尔森（Charles Leerhsen）认真地做了大量研究，出版了《天堂赶路人》。书中明确指出，波登容易冲动，嗜好成瘾，一直没有安全感。李尔森试图弄清楚，波登有着这么多粉丝，做着世界上最好的工作，又为什么要自杀，并且为什么多年以后依旧有很多人在乎他。

Bourdain left no note, making Mr Leerhsen’s first task speculative. He was drinking heavily, taking steroids and human-growth hormone and, on some level, deeply unhappy. “I hate my fans,” he texted his second wife a few months before he died. “I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.” But after a shoot on the last night of his life he went to a beer garden in Germany, where “he lit up like the Tony I once knew”, a companion said. “Everything was normal.” The only person who knew what was going through Bourdain’s mind that night was Bourdain himself.

波登未留遗言，因此李尔森只能先作出猜测。波登当时酗酒严重，还服用类固醇和生长激素，而且可以说是十分消沉。“我讨厌粉丝，”他在离世的几个月前曾给第二任妻子发信息：“我讨厌成名。我讨厌我的工作。我觉得好孤独，也一直没有安全感。”然而，在结束人生前一天晚上，波登结束拍摄后，去了德国的一家啤酒餐吧。他的同行友人说道，在那里“他容光焕发，还是我熟悉的那个他，一切都很正常。”那晚波登究竟在想些什么，知道的人恐怕只有他自己。

But biographers and friends alike have looked for clues. Certainly, he put himself under tremendous pressure. He worked far more than he needed to. Before his screen and literary careers took off, he was distinguished more by his organisational skills than his culinary imagination. He could oversee a kitchen cooking hundreds of meals per shift, but did not devise new techniques or recipes. He never lost this driven, line-cook’s mentality.

波登的传记作家和朋友们也都寻找过线索。他确实让自己承担了巨大的压力，他大可不必这么拼命工作。在荧幕和写作事业腾飞之前，他的过人之处在于他的组织能力，而非烹饪想象力。波登可以盯着厨房每班做几百顿饭，却不创造新烹饪技巧，也不开发新菜谱。他一直保持着这种干劲十足的流水线厨师心态。

His TV shows, which began as a sort of lark (“scary and amateurish”, an early colleague called his approach), had become an enterprise. And he had become what he had once mocked: a television personality. He did it on his terms, with a sort of punk-rock soulfulness—curious, intrepid and warm, yet also a little shy and diffident. But he was still a brand. As Mr Leerhsen explains, “authenticity, in the sense of being the real thing and not a pretender, was [a] lifelong preoccupation” for Bourdain. The pretence involved in the brand-building may ultimately have been intolerable.

他的电视节目在最开始不过是自娱自乐（波登早期的一名同事称他的表现“业余得可怕”），后来却成就了一番事业。而他本人也变成了自己嘲笑过的电视名人。在他主持期间，波登以一种朋克摇滚的热情对待工作，他充满求知欲、无所畏惧、满怀热情，还略带一点羞怯。但他个人本身仍然是个品牌，就像李尔森说的，“保持真实，而不装模作样，真实是波登一生的追求。”品牌打造（保持人设）难免需要逢场作戏，大概最终还是令他忍无可忍了。

It made him rich and famous—but tragedy, as Oscar Wilde knew, can sometimes stem from getting everything you want, rather than from failing to. “What do you do”, Bourdain asked his viewers, near the end of a show shot in Sardinia, “when all of your dreams come true?”

他的电视节目让他名利双收，但用奥斯卡·王尔德（Oscar Wilde）的话来说，即悲剧有时是想得到的都得到了，而非得不到。在撒丁岛的一次节目拍摄接近尾声时，波登问他的观众：“当你的一切愿望都实现了，你会做什么呢？”

翻译组：

Selten，理想主义是底色，一直在路上

Cathy，魔都卧客er不躺平，好好翻译

Lavender，MTI在读，不会做模特的追星女孩不是好的话剧爱好者

校对组：

Dossver，男，是错永不对真永是真

Sean，男大学生，相信奶茶在手翻译无忧

奥莉，梦想讲相声的中二病患者，猫是本体

3