深深地刺痛 | 经济学人讣告（翻译组进了一位高中生）

2023-03-18 00:03

写在前面

导图作者：

Cece，消防人+经济学人粉丝

02 与君共勉

上周一位高三学生（准北外）加入了翻译组，其实一开始我是比较抗拒的，因为高中生嘛，阅历总归是不够的，但是转念一想，年轻就是资本而且这么好学，应该给他一个机会，于是给他发了试译稿，等他回传译文之后，发到翻译组内，小伙伴们看过之后，发现翻译整体挺流畅，很多地方也可圈可点，最终让他加入了翻译组！

当然今天小编想说的是:关注公众号的小伙伴中大多数都是英专生，有些人考了一次catti就有了畏难情绪，但是看看这位小伙伴，才高中就过了二笔，作为英專生是不是应该更加努力一丢丢，一切只是为了自己，至少为之努力过，而不是得过且过，您说，对吗？

《亲爱的安德烈》里有一段话：

“孩子，我要求你读书用功，不是因为我要你跟别人比成绩，而是因为，我希望你将来会拥有选择的权利，选择有意义、有时间的工作，而不是被迫谋生。当你的工作在你心中有意义，你就有成就感。当你的工作给你时间，不剥夺你的生活，你就有尊严。成就感和尊严，会给你快乐。”

努力总不会出错，哪怕是为了将来能有谈判的资本！加油！

ps：本段落无意制造焦虑，旨在激励大家，当然每个人都有自己活法，过好自己的人生，如果您觉得现在的生活状态挺好，那就继续即可！

精读|翻译|词组

Justin Schmidt

贾斯汀·施密特

英文部分选自经济学人20230311期讣告

Justin Schmidt

贾斯汀·施密特

The King of Sting

刺痛之王

Justin Schmidt, entomologist, died on February 18th, aged 75

昆虫学家贾斯汀·施密特于2023年2月18日去世，享年75岁

To be stung by a wasp, an ant or a bee raises—beyond the “Ow!”—immediate questions. How can a creature so tiny inflict such remarkable pain? And why, when all you have done is to make a jam sandwich or dare to eat a peach, does it launch such a vicious and unprovoked attack?

人们被黄蜂、蚂蚁或蜜蜂蜇伤后，除了发出一声“哎哟”，也难免顿生一阵疑惑：小小昆虫怎能叫人如此痛苦？还有，明明只是做了个果酱三明治或浅尝了口桃子，怎就会平白遭此毒手？

注释：

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Prufrock asks, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Eating a peach is a symbol of taking a carefree, spontaneous approach to life. This is exactly what J. Alfred Prufrock has never dared to do, given the indecisions that plague him throughout the poem.

Justin Schmidt wondered too, and spent his life trying to find out. Hence his nickname, “The King of Sting”. To further human knowledge he thrust his bare arms into hives of honey bees, dug up in Brazil a boiling swarm of bullet ants (which reduced him to a shaking wreck, held together by ice and beer), teetered in trees to cut down hornets’ nests, and filled his home-cum-lab west of Tucson with tanks of irritated wasps. He harvested the venom of hundreds of ants to compare it with the venom of other ants, at 200 ants for one-thousandth of a teaspoon. Over 35 years 150 different species of insect jabbed him but, to his regret, his pain threshold never rose. If they would not voluntarily perform (most were eager) he gritted his teeth, placed them on his arm and enticed them, in the name of science. Then, after cursing just a little, he took out his notebook and stopwatch and wrote it up.

贾斯汀·施密特也想知其所以然，于是他穷其一生，追寻答案，并因此得名“刺痛之王”。为了探索人类知识的边界，他将裸露的手臂伸进蜂巢，在巴西挖出乌泱泱的一群子弹蚁（不过后果是他被叮得浑身发颤，元气大伤，最后靠着冰块和啤酒才得以撑过去），在树上摇摇晃晃地砍下马蜂巢，还把恼怒的黄蜂装进罐子，排满他位于图森市以西兼做实验室的家中。他从一种蚁类的数百只蚂蚁身上采集毒液（200只蚂蚁才能采集出千分之一茶匙的量），并与其他种蚂蚁的毒液进行比较。在过去35年中，他被150种不同的昆虫蛰过，但遗憾的是，他的耐痛阈值从未因此提高。如果昆虫不想主动咬他（不过大多都急不可耐），他就会咬紧牙关，把它们放在自己的手臂上，以科学之名“引诱”它们下嘴。被叮以后，他往往骂上几句就马上拿出笔记本和秒表记录数据。

Most famously, in 1983, he compiled the Schmidt Index, ranking the stings of 78 insects from one to four according to their pain. Most he had endured himself—felt he had to endure, because of his list—though colleagues chipped in. The honey bee was his anchoring value, since most people knew what a bee sting felt like, and was rated a two. He also provided a line or so, trembling on the edge of poetry, to describe each pain precisely. Thus the sweat bee sting (1), was “light and ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” The honey wasp’s (2) was “Spicy, blistering. A cotton swab dipped in habanero sauce has been pushed up your nose.” The unstable paper wasp’s (2) was “like a dinner guest who stays much too long.” As for the red-headed paper wasp’s (3), this was “irrationally intense... the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”

他最广为人知的事迹是于1983年发明了施密特指数，把78种昆虫蜇伤的刺痛分成了1到4级。虽然同事也有参与，但考虑到自己对制定指数表责无旁贷，施密特承受了几乎所有蜇伤。由于大多数人都清楚被蜜蜂蜇的感觉，他把这一刺痛程度设成了基准值，归为2级。尽管被蛰得直发抖，但他还是用近乎诗意的一两句文字精准描述了每种疼痛的感觉：汗蜂的叮咬（1级）“轻若微尘，稍纵即逝，几近挑逗，宛如臂上火星燎了汗毛”；被黄蜂一蛰（2级）“火辣辣地疼，仿佛鼻子被蘸着哈瓦那辣椒酱的棉棒捅了一下”；纸黄蜂脾气变幻莫测，蜇人之疼（2级）“就如宴会宾客逗留过久招人嫌”；至于红头纸黄蜂，其威力（3级）则被描述为“痛感之强烈致人崩溃......犹如不断逼近腾空烈焰，直至洞见火舌之靛。”

注释：

哈瓦那辣椒来自于亚马逊河流域，之后扩展至墨西哥地区。1994年，吉尼斯世界纪录认定哈瓦那辣椒是地球上最辣的辣椒。直至2007年2月，其最辣辣椒的地位被印度断魂椒取代。

This sounded like pure masochism, from a man who relished pain and had been stung so often by honey bees that he found it boring. (“Like a burning matchhead that lands on your skin.”) The sting of the club-horned wasp (0.5) was actually rated “disappointing”. But he strongly denied that he was either a masochist, or crazy. His list was a tool to explore why inflicting pain was more necessary for some insects than others.

一个人如此享受刺痛，被蜜蜂蛰得体无完肤，甚至对此有些麻木，这听起来完全就是在自讨苦吃。“如同燃烧的火柴头落在你的皮肤上。”棒头蜂蜇人的疼痛程度是0.5级，施密特甚至认为这点“令人失望”。然而，他坚称自己不是受虐狂，也没有精神失常。这张指数表，可以用于探究为何某些昆虫比其他同类更需要施加刺痛。

Solitary insects, he found, tended to have a much milder sting than those organised into complex colonies. From this he deduced that stings allowed insects to get more food, hence build social structures, hence need to defend the nest, the workers, the immobile larvae and the whole teeming enterprise. The greater the danger, the higher the venom’s potency—even, in the case of a colony of paper wasps he was annoying once, blinding him when it was sprayed in microdroplets through the air. All that defending, incidentally, was left to the females; male insects did not sting, but hid, or fled. When he wanted to appal people he would pick up a male of a hyper-stinging species, like his favourite tarantula hawk wasp (pictured), and put on a brave grin.

施密特发现，独居昆虫蜇人的刺痛感往往比组成复杂的群居昆虫轻微得多。由此他推断，强烈的蛰痛能使昆虫获得更多食物，而后建立社会结构，因此需要保护巢穴、劳工、无法行动的幼虫和整个庞大的族群。它们面临的危险越大，分泌的毒液威力就越强——有一次，施密特惹恼了一大群纸黄蜂，它们喷到空气中的毒液飞沫令他出现短暂失明。顺带一提，只有雌蜂才会作出这一切防御行为，雄蜂不蜇人，只会躲起来或者逃开。每当施密特想吓唬别人，他就会拿起一只“超级刺痛类”的雄蜂，比如他最喜欢的沙漠蛛蜂（tarantula hawk wasp）（如图），然后强装欢笑。

Most stings were highly effective. Buzzing, bright colours and a hard shell helped; but predators thousands of times larger remembered stings keenly, and kept their distance. Only bears, skunks and honey badgers thought the pain worth the reward. He himself had never forgotten his first encounter with a bumble bee, which stung him on the neck when he was five and running wild in the woods of Appalachian Pennsylvania. That did not put him off, though. He was well adapted for entomology, a small, skinny kid with tiny fingers and a delicate way of picking honey bees off clover flowers. Insects enchanted him, especially flashy yellowjackets and tiger swallowtail butterflies; he fell in a swamp once, filthy and smelly, as he tried to catch a green darner dragonfly. As a teenager, he had his own beehives. In his early 20s, after an unsatisfying flirtation with chemistry (which did not creep and crawl enough), he was on the road in a car crammed with buckets and shovels to dig up and study harvester ants in Georgia. Their stings were curiously lasting. That curiosity shaped his life.

绝大多数的蛰刺都非常奏效。嗡嗡的蜂鸣声、鲜艳的警戒色和坚硬的外壳均能起到保护作用，但对于比这类昆虫体型大几千倍的那些捕食者来说，其蛰咬的刺痛感尤为刻骨铭心，因此它们会对这类昆虫敬而远之。只有熊、臭鼬和蜜獾会抱着“不入虎穴，焉得虎子”的心态负伤取蜜。施密特自己也从未忘记第一次遇到大黄蜂的情景。那年他五岁，在宾夕法尼亚州阿巴拉契亚的森林里狂奔乱跑时被大黄蜂蜇了脖子，不过他并没有就此退缩。他瘦瘦小小，手指纤细，能巧妙地把蜜蜂从苜蓿花上捉下来，很适合从事昆虫学研究；昆虫令他深深着迷，尤其是光彩夺目的黄蜂和虎纹燕尾蝶。有一回，他为了捉一只绿胸晏蜓（darner dragonfly），一头跌进了沼泽，弄得又脏又臭。他十几岁时有了自己的蜂箱；二十出头时，他一时兴起研究了一段时间化学，但最终意兴阑珊（化学不如昆虫的蠕动爬行那般让他有兴致），随后他便带着一车水桶和铲子上路了，前往乔治亚州挖掘研究收获蚁（harvester ant）。这种蚂蚁叮咬带来的刺痛感会持续很长时间，令施密特十分好奇，而也正是这种好奇造就了他的一生。

In general, he thought insects got a raw deal. Government research funding went to bigger creatures; no one seemed to care about wasps, or even ants. So although he held a senior post for 25 years at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Centre in Tucson, part of the federal Department of Agriculture, he worked on his own self-funded projects much of the time. They included looking for insects whose stings he might not have experienced yet.

总体来说，他认为昆虫遭到了冷遇。政府研究经费都花在了大型动物上，似乎没有人会关心黄蜂甚至是蚂蚁。因此，尽管25年来他一直在联邦农业部下属的图森卡尔海登蜜蜂研究中心（Carl Hayden Bee Research Centre）任高级研究员，但大部分时间他都是自费进行研究，比如寻找那些还没叮过他的昆虫。

For him, stings were not only interesting chemically and socially. They were also philosophically intriguing. The purpose of pain was to tell the body that damage was occurring, or about to occur. Many stings on his list, including those of the tarantula hawk, packed a punch but did no harm beyond a prick and a welt. By contrast, others, including the sting of the honey bee, seemed milder but were much more toxic; they could close down the body and, if delivered en masse, stop the heart. Stings seemed to be a sharp statement of truth, insect to human. But pain was often a lie. Only toxicity counted. It was all part of an awkward web of miscommunication and non-understanding which he hoped to unravel, given patience and time.

对施密特来说，刺痛不仅在化学和社会层面上妙趣横生，其哲学意蕴也令其着迷。疼痛的感觉意在表明，身体正在或即将产生损伤。指数表中所载的许多蛰咬（如沙漠蛛蜂的叮咬）虽然痛劲十足，但除了带来一阵刺痛和一块红肿，并不会产生什么损伤。相比之下，别的刺痛看似轻微（如蜜蜂的叮咬），但毒性其实强得多，可能会使身体休克；而要是整窝蜜蜂一齐出击，其毒液量之大可能会导致心脏停跳。蛰咬似乎传达着昆虫界对人类真相的深刻洞见——刺痛时常只是个幌子，毒副作用才应引起重视。人们对昆虫的误解与不解交织成了一张大网，施密特希望用坚韧和时间解开这张棘手之网，而刺痛是其中必须要解决的部分。

Meanwhile he had installed himself in south-eastern Arizona, on the edge of the Sonoran desert. He had already found Maricopa harvester ants there, the most savage variety. (“After eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill is wedged in the toe.”) For the worst stingers, though, he would have to go farther south, as he often had, to the tropical and semi-tropical Americas. There he would encounter again the bullet ant (4+) with its “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail in your heel.” Or, possibly, another 4, the warrior wasp: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?”

与此同时，他还在亚利桑那州东南部的索诺拉沙漠边缘安了家，并在那里发现了最野蛮的蚂蚁品种——马里科帕收获蚁。（“持续不停钻了八个小时的脚趾嵌甲后，你猛然发现钻头都已钻到脚指里了”）为了找到蛰咬痛感最强的昆虫，一直在南下的施密特得继续向南前行，前往美洲热带和亚热带地区。他将在那里再次遇到子弹蚁（刺痛指数4+级），感受其“剧烈纯粹而劲爆至极的刺痛，如同脚踩三寸之钉行走于熊熊燃烧的木炭上。”或者碰着战士黄蜂（刺痛指数也是4级），体验“煎熬之疼，宛若陷于岩浆涌流之桎梏，仰天长啸：早知如此，我何必当初整这么个指数表？！”

翻译组：

Shulin，女，热咖啡+保温杯，慢慢来er

Benjiamin，MTIto be, 初学翻译的翻译小学生

Cassie，准MTI，一心想吃口译面，早日坐进小黑屋

校对组：

Alfredo，清纯男高体验卡仅剩几个月到期

Claire，进进退退，摇摇摆摆，探索世界ing

Francis，达人观之，生死一耳；何必生之为乐，死之为悲

观点|评论|思考

本次感想

Francis，达人观之，生死一耳；何必生之为乐，死之为悲

Octavia, 键盘手和古风爵士，逃离舒适圈，有只英短叫八爷

昆虫学的“蛛丝马迹”

贾斯汀·施密特以身试毒，从汗蜂，秃脸大黄蜂，到子弹蚁，不一而足；法国昆虫学家法布尔能花一天时间看昆虫偷食烂鼹鼠肉，观察毛毛虫慢悠悠爬行，同时，他也研究红蚂蚁，确定它们是否沿着标记的路径前进。

可很多人不禁发问，昆虫学对人类有什么实用价值？仿佛一门学科失去了实用性就没有存在的意义。我们且不去评判这种观点本身的狭隘与立足的实用主义立场背后缺少的人文精神与浪漫情怀，可实际上，昆虫学在犯罪侦查方面也有不可替代的价值，法医昆虫学（forensic entomology）也因此应运而生。因为昆虫具备一些人类所不具有的生物特性，例如灵敏的嗅觉，强大的视觉，甚至某些合成化学物质的能力，因此，人类可以在一些特定的场合利用昆虫的这些特性来解决所面临的难题，走出思维与证据的困局。

利用昆虫的特性解决刑侦问题的审案思路和侦查手段在人类历史上由来已久。被誉为“法医之祖”的南宋提点刑狱官宋慈在《洗冤集录》中就记载了一桩依靠苍蝇辨别凶手的案例。未洗干净的杀人凶器泛着人难以察觉的血腥味，但是苍蝇嗅觉灵敏，在七八十把镰刀中辨认出了真正的凶器。尽管这个案例没有那么严谨，因为镰刀上任何的血液的血腥味都能招揽苍蝇聚集，而招揽苍蝇聚集的味道也未必是血腥味，这样看来，这桩案例以此为证据协助检官指认真凶似乎有些运气成分，但这依然可以看成是古人利用昆虫的特性协助解决人们所面临的一些棘手问题的有着一定理据的尝试；19世纪，法国法医学协会曾报道了一桩案例，其中法医通过尸体上的螨虫确定了案发细节；美国也曾经出现过一起刑事案件，警方苦于无法给犯罪嫌疑人定罪，但峰回路转，昆虫学家在该肇事者的车辆上发现了趋光性昆虫的遗骸，与案发现场的生物遗迹匹配，从而推翻了嫌疑人的不在场证明。当代社会，我们面对海量的信息，也许很难注意到它们如何在当今的司法和侦查案例中大显身手，但是通过一些文艺作品，我们仍然可以知道，这并非是一个过时的技术。日剧《非自然死亡》中，法医三澄美琴（石原里美饰演）利用切叶蚁亚科蚂蚁没有蚁酸的特性为案件的侦破找到了突破口。

昆虫学并不只是观察、搜集、整理和归纳昆虫的自然习性和同生理结构相关的各种研究资料，它的研究成果同时也在人类社会中人们不易察觉的角落，扮演着常被人们忽视的重要角色。在刑侦学上，昆虫学的研究成果为案件侦破提供蛛丝马迹，为社会正义的存在与实施多铺设了一条科学带来的路径。普罗大众能做的，则是对昆虫学以及这些苦心孤诣的昆虫学研究者们多一些敬畏之心。