经济学人逝者 || 自封为“海伊国国王”的书商理查德·布斯

A saviour inermine

自封为王的拯救者

英文部分选自经济学人20190831期Obituary版块

Obituary：Richard Booth

讣告：理查德·布斯

A saviour inermine

自封为王的拯救者

注：ermine白色鼬皮（尤用于法官、国王等的服饰）

Richard Booth, bookseller and King of Hay, died on August 20th, aged 80

自封为“海伊国国王”的书商理查德·布斯于8月20日逝世，享年80岁

If you were presented with a town like Hay-on-Wye—a sandstone cluster of some 2,000 souls guarded by a Norman castle, cradled in green Welsh hills and watered by the loveliest river in Britain—and were told to revive its fading economy, you might not think of a second-hand bookshop. The entrepreneurial flame seldom burns bright there. Outside, a few shelves open to the weather tempt you with Proceedings of the 1957 Plumbers’ Convention and “Turnips for Fun and Profit”. Inside the stock is haphazard, unalphabetical, and sometimes in piles on the floor. Beside the till, an intellectual ancient in tweed jacket or cardigan, roughly according to sex, sits sunk in such slumbrous appreciation of a volume from the stock that they do not stir either to wish you good day when you enter, or say goodbye when you leave.

海伊是英国威尔士的一个小镇，小镇砂岩林立，拥有约2,000人口和一座诺曼式城堡，青山环抱，绿水逶迤。如果让你来掌管一座像海伊这样的小镇，使其衰退的经济重新复苏，你可能不会想到开间二手书店。毕竟，创业的火花很少在这种地方绽放。世间的二手书店似乎千篇一律。门外，露天书架上摆着几本极具诱惑的古本，像《1957年水管工大会纪实》和《芜菁之怡情与长财》。屋内，书籍杂乱无章，不按字母顺序摆放，有时甚至直接堆在地上。收银台旁坐着位智慧的老者，按男女之别，或穿花呢夹克或着开襟毛衣，低眉垂目，沉浸于捧中书，顾客进门时不会起身问好，离开时也不说再见。

Richard Booth overturned all that. He swept into Hay in 1961, fresh down from Oxford, flush with inherited money from Yardley’s soap and toilet water and sparkling with visionary schemes. First he bought the dilapidated old fire station in Lion Street and filled it with books. He did the same with the old cinema, then two premises on the high street, until he had opened 20, and the original shop had become, by his estimate, the biggest second-hand bookshop in the world. Many of his employees went on to start bookshops of their own, until the town had almost 40. Encouraged by this bonanza the Hay Festival of Literature started up in 1988, drawing up to 250,000 visitors for ten days every year. Little Hay was now world-famous. In 1999 the University of Strathclyde reported that, since Mr Booth and the books arrived, not only had the town boomed but, on the back of that, Wales had.

理查德·布斯颠覆了所有这些刻板印象。1961年，他刚从牛津大学毕业，就揣着从亚德利百货公司（主营肥皂和花露水）继承来的巨额财产，怀着远大抱负，昂首挺进了海伊小镇。首先，他收购狮子街上的破旧消防站，将其摆满书籍。接着，他如法炮制，对旧电影院和大街上的其他两处房屋进行改造，将书店开到了20多家，而最初的那家据他自己估计已经成为世界上最大的二手书店。他的许多员工也相继开了自己的书店，到最后小小的海伊镇差不多开了40家。受这一赚钱良机的激励，海伊镇从1988年开始举办“海伊文学节”，为期10天的艺术节每年为小镇引来多达25万游客，让小镇举世闻名。1999年，斯特拉斯克莱德大学报道称，自布斯带着他的书籍来到海伊，不仅小镇实现了经济复苏，整个威尔士也随之受益。

Odd, then, that Hay’s saviour did not care that much for books. His father liked browsing, and as a boy he had tagged along, but those dusty tomes might have been vegetables or shoes as far as he was concerned. You could carry them about, and use them as wallpaper; he was happy to choose books for the libraries of rich Americans simply for their bindings, not for anything inside. Books were something he could sell, piling high and flogging cheap, and the more outlets he had in a place, the more people would come. So with several strong men from Hay he toured America and the English-speaking world, buying whole libraries, until his shops were so stuffed that in the 1980s, to the horror of those who did care, he was offering books as kindling at £1.50 a car-boot-load. One famous visiting writer counted 20 copies of “The Indian Dog” in the main shop. No matter; Mr Booth reasoned that any book at all might have a buyer waiting somewhere.

不过奇怪的是这位海伊镇的救星其实对书并不怎么在意，他爸爸喜欢走马观花式的浏览，年少的他也跟着囫囵吞枣。但要真问起来，那些蒙灰的大部头于他的意义和蔬菜、鞋子并无二致。书可以带着到处走，可以当墙纸。他给美国富人的图书馆选书时，只看装帧，不看内容，乐此不疲。对他而言，书就是能买卖，能大量囤货，还能廉价出售的东西，且销售点越多，慕名而来的顾客也越多。于是，他带着一帮海伊镇的壮汉周游美国和其他英语国家，买下一个个图书馆的所有藏书，把店铺塞得满满当当，直到上世纪80年代，他的店里书满为患，以1.5英磅一后备箱当引火柴卖，让真正爱书之人大为惊骇。一位著名作家到访总店，发现单是《印第安狗》就有20本。没关系，布斯先生认为，任何一本书都可能有个买主在某处等待与之邂逅。

And books were a means to his glorious end: to make his home town stand proudly on its own two feet, freed from the shackles of the useless town council, the Welsh Tourist Board and the quangos of the Development Board for Rural Wales. Government bureaucrats had no idea how to make a town like Hay thrive. Everything they came up with—chain motels employing the slave-labour of the locals, theme parks, supermarkets selling them bad bland food—stripped away the distinctiveness of the place. Local voices went unheard. The answer was to give the town back to the talents and good sense of its citizens, and books were just the start. He already lived in the half-ruined castle, knocked about a bit by both bad King John and Owen Glyndwr, and parked his Rolls-Royce outside, so the next move came naturally. In 1977, when 20 journalists were in town—searching for the pop star Marianne Faithfull, not for him—he seceded from Britain in a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and crowned himself king.

书是帮助他完成宏愿的工具：让他的家乡顶天立地、自力更生，免受毫无用处的镇委会、威尔士旅游局以及半官方的威尔士乡村发展局的束缚。政府对于如何让像海伊镇这样的城镇繁荣束手无策。他们能想到的招数，例如引进连锁便捷酒店，雇佣当地廉价劳动力，修建主题公园和开设大型超市贩卖糟糕的平庸食品，都会让小镇丧失自己的特色。当地人的心声却无人关心。解决问题的方法在于把这些城镇归还给有能力有想法的当地居民，而卖书只是一个好的开始。他所居住的城堡本就毁了一半，还时不时的被邪恶的约翰王和欧文·格林德沃骚扰。他把劳斯莱斯停在城堡外，接下来的举动也就自然而然了。1977年，镇上来了20多名记者，追逐流行明星玛丽安妮·菲斯福尔，而不是他——于是他单边发表了独立宣言，宣布脱离英国，然后自己加冕成为国王。

Coverage was immense. The national press relayed his triumphal entry into the town, clad in a tin-foil crown and ermine cloak and bearing his regalia of gilded ballcock and copper piping, while the biplane of the Hay air force did a flypast and the rowing boat of the Hay navy went down the Wye, firing blanks through a drainpipe. After a three-minute speech, in which he hoped that “Haypotage” and “the Hay loaf” would become real, not theoretical, he raised the flag of independence, the green and white of Wales with the black Booth arms, to the cheers of 20,000 people.

报道铺天盖地。国家媒体循环报道了理查德凯旋般的入城仪式。他头戴锡制皇冠，身披貂皮斗篷，手握着镀金球形勋章和铜管权杖；随着理查德入城，海伊镇空军的一架双翼飞机从头顶上飞过，沿瓦伊河而下的海伊镇海军划艇通过排水管道放起了空炮。他发表了3分钟的演讲，其中提到他希望“海伊镇浓汤”和“海伊镇面包”能从理论变成现实。在2万人的欢呼中，他举起了独立的旗帜，旗帜上画着布斯的两条手臂剪影托起代表威尔士的绿色和白色。

His demeanour was royal, right down to fits of royal pique; yet he was not a monarchist. He invoked the divine right of kings only as a perfect foil to the divine right claimed by officialdom. Democracy was his real love, as his rule showed. Almost everyone in town could have a post in his government. His drinking pals from The Rose and Crown made up his cabinet; the minister for social security had been on the dole for six years. He sold titles to anyone who fancied being a duke, an earl or a Polish count. His subjects were also decorated at random: two small boys in the crowd at his coronation were knighted, and a woman was declared queen of her street, receiving a gold-dipped flower. Every month the back room at The Swan became the Royal University of Cusop Dingle, dedicated to topics cruelly ignored by the rest of academia. In this centre of learning, anyone could be a professor.

他虽穿衣打扮，行为举止都遵照皇室规范，塑造王室气质，但从不独裁统治。他“行使”国王神圣的权力只为完美衬托官方宣称的神圣权利。在他的统治下，民主才是钟爱与追求。镇上几乎每个人在他管治的政府下都谋有一职。在玫瑰与皇冠餐厅（The Rose and Crown）结识的酒友组成了他的内阁成员；社会保障部部长六年来一直发放政府救济金。布斯对外出售公爵、伯爵或波兰伯爵的贵族头衔。他的臣民随时获得封号：在他的加冕典礼上，他赐予人群中两个小男孩爵士的封号，封一位女士为街道女王，赠与一支镀金花朵。每个月天鹅书屋（The Swan）后面的房间都会变成卡索普丁格尔皇家大学（University of Cusop Dingle），，讨论学术界严重忽视的话题。在这个学习中心地，每个人都能当教授。

注：
1. demeanour: appearance; behaviour 外表，举止。

2. invoke: to use a law, principle, or theory to support your views援引

3. foil: to emphasize the good qualities of another person or thing, by being very different from them 衬托出某人/某物；作为某人/某物的陪衬

4. be/go >领取政府失业救济金

What with the books and its giddy freedom, Hay now thrived, becoming a model of revival for failing rural towns the world over, from Nebraska to South Korea. Its king was delighted by that, though he himself rose and fell, going bust at one point (he was hopeless with money), failing to win a seat in the Welsh Assembly and, by 2007, selling all his shops. He gained enemies as well as friends, and in 2009 was executed in effigy in the old Butter Market by a rival bookseller, who set up a Commonwealth.

浩如烟海的书籍和引人入胜的自由氛围使海伊小镇蓬勃发展。从内布拉斯加州到韩国，它成为了没落乡镇崛起的典范。理查德国王为此感到欣慰，尽管他曾历经跌宕起伏，一度破产（身无分文、绝望至极），也未能赢得威尔士议会席位，甚至在2007年卖掉他所有的书店。纵其一生，理查德交友甚广，也树敌不少。2009年，一位建立了联邦的书商成为他的竞争对手，在古老的“黄油市场”广场上，摧毁了他的雕像。

Nor did he ever embrace the Festival, which to him was a piece of Murdochite sponsorship which brought crowds for a while but did not sustain the town month in, month out. Worse, it celebrated new books, a million words of mumbo-jumbo nonsense. He dreamed of a polis of creative citizens working nobly with their hands, fed by cheery peasants from the green surrounding hills who brought in ungraded eggs and home-cured bacon, unbound by fussy regulations. Whether they read or not—whether they could read or not—mattered less than that the bureaucrats were felled at last, clobbered by 20 copies of “The Indian Dog”.

至于文学节，他从来就没支持过。对他而言，文学节犹如默多克式赞助仪式一般，短暂吸引众人，不能维持小镇长久发展。更严重的是，文学节永远推销新书，千言万字都是满纸胡言。

他憧憬着建立一个富有创造力的城镇，居民们凭借双手，光荣劳动。他们能够吃上周围青山脚下农民们提供的大小颜色不一的鸡蛋和家庭自制培根，不用担心不必要的规则约束。他们是否读书，是否识字，都不重要，重要的是官僚主义最终被打倒，被20本《印第安狗》打倒。

注：

1. mumbo-jumbo： language or a ceremony that seems complicated and important but is actually without real sense or meaning; nonsense 繁琐严肃但无意义的语言（或仪式）；胡言乱语；繁文缛节

2. Murdochite：Murdoch+ite，ite为后缀意为：某某式的，此处为：默多克式的；类似表达有：Thatcherite译为：撒切尔式；

背后的故事梗概：默多克是继布斯后在海伊的大人物，宣扬旅游经济。布斯与其理念不合。

翻译组：

Alex，不务正业的理工男

Lucia，英语专业学生，经济学人爱好者

Rachel Zhang，学理工科，爱跳芭蕾，热爱文艺的非典型翻译

校对组：

Mona，悦读悦译，以译会友

Lee，爱骑行的妇女之友+Timberland粉

Dave，实力校对，肌肉男大学教师，文学翻译+CATTI一笔二口