双语原著：马斯克传记——第一章：一窝子冒险家

2023-10-14 07:10

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Chapter 1 Adventurers 第 1 章冒险者

Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman
约书亚和温妮弗雷德·哈尔德曼

Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions who was raised on a farm on the barren plains of central Canada. He studied chiropractic techniques in Iowa, then returned to his hometown near Moose Jaw, where he broke in horses and gave chiropractic adjustments in exchange for food and lodging.
埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）喜欢冒险是家族遗传。在这方面，他继承了外祖父约书亚·霍尔德曼（Joshua Haldeman）的风格，霍尔德曼是一位敢于冒险的冒险家，在加拿大中部贫瘠的平原上的一个农场长大，具有强烈的主见。他在爱荷华州学习整脊技术，然后回到家乡穆斯焦附近，在那里驯马并提供整脊服务，以换取食物和住宿。

He was eventually able to buy his own farm, but he lost it during the depression of the 1930s. For the next few years, he worked as a cowboy, rodeo performer, and construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure. He married and divorced, traveled as a hobo on freight trains, and was a stowaway on an oceangoing ship.
他最终买下了自己的农场，但在 20 世纪 30 年代的大萧条中失去了农场。在接下来的几年里，他做过牛仔、牛仔竞技表演者和建筑工人。他唯一不变的是对冒险的热爱。他结过婚，离过婚，当过货运列车上的流浪汉，还曾在一艘远洋轮船上偷渡。

The loss of his farm instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.
失去农场给他灌输了一种民粹主义，他开始积极投身于一场名为社会信用党的运动，该党主张向公民提供免费的信用纸币，他们可以像货币一样使用。该运动带有保守的原教旨主义色彩，并带有反犹太主义色彩。该党在加拿大的首任领导人谴责 "文化理想的变态"，因为 "过多的犹太人占据了控制职位"。霍尔德曼升任该党全国委员会主席。

He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.
他还参加了一场名为 "技术民主"（Technocracy）的运动，该运动认为政府应由技术官僚而非政客管理。由于反对加拿大参加第二次世界大战，该运动在加拿大被暂时取缔。霍尔德曼不顾禁令，在报纸上刊登了支持该运动的广告。

At one point he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, which is how he met Winnifred Fletcher, whose adventurous streak was equal to his. As a sixteen-year-old, she got a job at the Moose Jaw Times Herald, but she dreamed of being a dancer and actress. So she lit out by train to Chicago and then New York City. Upon her return, she opened a dance school in Moose Jaw, which is where Haldeman showed up for lessons. When he asked her to dinner, she replied, “I don’t date my clients.” So he quit the class and asked her out again. A few months later, he asked, “When will you marry me?” She responded, “Tomorrow.”
他曾一度想学习交际舞，并因此结识了温妮弗雷德·弗莱彻（Winnifred Fletcher），后者的冒险精神与他不相上下。16 岁时，她在《穆斯焦时代先驱报》找到了一份工作，但她梦想成为一名舞蹈家和演员。于是，她乘火车去了芝加哥，然后又去了纽约。回国后，她在穆斯焦开办了一家舞蹈学校，霍尔德曼就是在那里上课的。当他邀请她共进晚餐时，她回答说："我不和客户约会。"于是他退了课，再次约她出去。几个月后，他问 "你什么时候嫁给我？"她回答说 "明天"

They had four children, including twin girls, Maye and Kaye, born in 1948. One day on a trip he spotted a For Sale sign on a single-engine Luscombe airplane sitting in a farmer’s field. He had no cash, but he convinced the farmer to take his car in exchange. It was rather impetuous, since Haldeman did not know how to fly. He hired someone to fly him home and teach him how to pilot the plane.
他们有四个孩子，包括 1948 年出生的双胞胎女儿 Maye 和 Kaye。有一天，他在一次旅行中发现一架单引擎的 Luscombe 飞机上挂着出售的牌子，这架飞机就停在一个农民的田里。他没有现金，但他说服农民用他的汽车作为交换。由于霍尔德曼不会驾驶飞机，所以他的举动显得有些冒失。他雇人送他回家，并教他如何驾驶飞机。

The family came to be known as The Flying Haldemans, and he was described by a chiropractic trade journal as “perhaps the most remarkable figure in the history of flying chiropractors,” a rather narrow, albeit accurate, accolade. They bought a larger single-engine plane, a Bellanca, when Maye and Kaye were three months old, and the toddlers became known as “the flying twins.”
他们一家后来被称为 "会飞的哈尔德曼"，而他也被一家脊骨神经科行业杂志形容为 "也许是飞行脊骨神经科医生历史上最杰出的人物"。在梅和凯伊三个月大的时候，他们买了一架更大的单引擎飞机--贝兰卡飞机，于是这对蹒跚学步的孩子被称为 "飞行双胞胎"。

With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime. They took apart the Bellanca, crated it, and boarded a freighter for Cape Town. Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”
霍尔德曼持有古怪的保守民粹主义观点，他认为加拿大政府对个人生活的控制过多，国家变得软弱无力。因此，1950 年，他决定移居南非，当时南非仍由白人种族隔离政权统治。他们拆开贝兰卡，装箱后登上了前往开普敦的货轮。霍尔德曼决定住在内陆，于是他们向约翰内斯堡方向飞去，那里的大多数白人市民都说英语，而不是南非荷兰语。但当他们飞越附近的比勒陀利亚时，薰衣草槐花盛开，霍尔德曼宣布："这就是我们要住的地方。"

When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says. Once in Africa, the Haldemans made a monthlong trek into the Kalahari every year to search for this legendary city. They hunted for their own food and slept with their guns so they could fend off lions.
约书亚和温妮弗雷德年轻的时候，一个名叫威廉·亨特（William Hunt）的江湖骗子来到穆斯焦（Moose Jaw），说他在穿越南非卡拉哈里沙漠时看到了一座 "失落的古城"。"马斯克说："这个骗子给我祖父看了一些明显是假的照片，但他信以为真，并决定把重新发现它作为自己的使命。到了非洲之后，哈尔德曼夫妇每年都要在卡拉哈里沙漠跋涉一个月，寻找这座传说中的城市。他们自己捕猎食物，带着枪睡觉，以便抵御狮子。

The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.” They embarked on long-distance flights to places such as Norway, tied for first place in the twelve-thousand-mile Cape Town–to-Algiers motor rally, and became the first to fly a single-engine plane from Africa to Australia. “They had to remove the back seats to put in gas tanks,” Maye later recalled.
这个家庭的座右铭是："危险地生活，小心地生活"。他们开始长途飞行，飞往挪威等地，在从开普敦到阿尔及尔的 12000 英里汽车拉力赛中并列第一，并成为第一个驾驶单引擎飞机从非洲飞往澳大利亚的人。"梅伊后来回忆说："他们不得不拆掉后座来安装油箱。

Joshua Haldeman’s risk-taking eventually caught up with him. He was killed when a person he was teaching to fly hit a power line, causing the plane to flip and crash. His grandson Elon was three at the time. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” he says. “Risk energized him.”
约书亚-霍尔德曼的冒险行为最终让他锒铛入狱。他教人飞行时撞上了电线，导致飞机翻转坠毁，他因此丧生。当时他的孙子埃隆才三岁。"他知道，真正的冒险是有风险的，"他说。"风险让他充满活力。

Haldeman imprinted that spirit onto one of his twin girls, Elon’s mother, Maye. “I know that I can take a risk as long as I’m prepared,” she says. As a young student, she did well in science and math. She was also strikingly good-looking. Tall and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and sculpted chin, she began working at age fifteen as a model, doing department store runway shows on Saturday mornings.
霍尔德曼将这种精神深深地烙印在他的双胞胎女儿之一，也就是伊隆的母亲梅伊身上。"她说："我知道，只要做好准备，我就能冒险。年轻时，她的科学和数学成绩很好。她长得也很出众。她个子高挑、蓝眼睛、颧骨高耸、下巴精致，15岁时开始做模特，在周六上午参加百货公司的时装表演。

Around that time, she met a boy in her neighborhood who was also strikingly good-looking, albeit in a smooth and caddish way.
大约在那个时候，她在邻居家认识了一个男孩，这个男孩长得也很出众，不过为人圆滑、腼腆。

Errol Musk 埃洛尔·马斯克

Errol Musk was an adventurer and wheeler-dealer, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. His mother, Cora, was from England, where she finished school at fourteen, worked at a factory making skins for fighter-bombers, then took a refugee ship to South Africa. There she met Walter Musk, a cryptographer and military intelligence officer who worked in Egypt on schemes to fool the Germans by deploying fake weapons and searchlights. After the war, he did little other than sit silently in an armchair, drink, and use his cryptology skills on crossword puzzles. So Cora left him, went back to England with their two sons, bought a Buick, and then returned to Pretoria. “She was the strongest person I ever met,” Errol says.
埃罗尔·马斯克是一个冒险家和商人，总是在寻找下一个机会。他的母亲科拉来自英国，14 岁就完成了学业，在一家为战斗轰炸机制造蒙皮的工厂工作，然后搭乘难民船来到南非。在那里，她遇到了沃尔特·马斯克（Walter Musk），他是一名密码学家和军事情报官员，曾在埃及从事通过部署假武器和探照灯来欺骗德国人的计划。战后，他除了静静地坐在扶手椅上喝酒，把他的密码学技能用在填字游戏上之外，几乎无所事事。于是，科拉离开了他，带着两个儿子回到英国，买了一辆别克车，然后回到了比勒陀利亚。"埃罗尔说："她是我见过的最坚强的人。

Errol earned a degree in engineering and worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories. On the side, he liked restoring old cars and planes. He also dabbled in politics, defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party to become one of the few English-speaking members of the Pretoria City Council. The Pretoria News for March 9, 1972, reported the election under the headline “Reaction against the Establishment.”
埃罗尔获得了工程学学位，从事过酒店、购物中心和工厂的建设工作。此外，他还喜欢修复老式汽车和飞机。他还涉足政界，击败了支持种族隔离的民族党的一名阿非里卡人成员，成为比勒陀利亚市议会为数不多的讲英语的议员之一。1972 年 3 月 9 日的《比勒陀利亚新闻》以 "对当权者的反动 "为题报道了这次选举。

Like the Haldemans, he loved flying. He bought a twin-engine Cessna Golden Eagle, which he used to ferry television crews to a lodge he had built in the bush. On one trip in 1986, when he was looking to sell the plane, he landed at an airstrip in Zambia where a Panamanian-Italian entrepreneur offered to buy it. They agreed on a price, and instead of taking a payment in cash, Errol was given a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia.
和霍尔德曼夫妇一样，他也热爱飞行。他买了一架双引擎塞斯纳金鹰飞机，用来把电视摄制组送到他在丛林中建造的小屋。1986 年的一次旅行中，当他打算出售这架飞机时，他在赞比亚的一个简易机场降落，一位巴拿马-意大利企业家表示愿意购买这架飞机。他们商定了一个价格，埃罗尔没有接受现金支付，而是得到了这位企业家在赞比亚拥有的三个小矿场出产的部分祖母绿。

Zambia then had a postcolonial Black government, but there was no functioning bureaucracy, so the mine was not registered. “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you,” Errol says. He criticizes Maye’s family for being racist, which he insists he is not. “I don’t have anything against the Blacks, but they are just different from what I am,” he says in a rambling phone discourse.
赞比亚当时有一个后殖民时代的黑人政府，但没有正常运作的官僚机构，所以矿场没有注册。"埃罗尔说："如果你注册了，你就会一无所有，因为黑人会夺走你的一切。他批评梅伊的家人是种族主义者，但他坚称自己不是。"他在电话中喋喋不休地说："我并不反对黑人，只是他们与我不同。

Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg. “Many people came to me with stolen parcels,” he says. “On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal.” After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings.
埃罗尔从未拥有过矿山的所有权，他通过进口祖母绿原石并在约翰内斯堡进行切割来扩大自己的贸易。"许多人带着偷来的包裹来找我，"他说。"在海外旅行时，我会向珠宝商出售祖母绿。这是一件隐秘的事情，因为这一切都不合法。在获得大约 21 万美元的利润后，他的祖母绿生意在 20 世纪 80 年代因俄罗斯人在实验室里制造出人造祖母绿而倒闭。他失去了所有的翡翠收入。

Their marriage 他们的婚姻

Errol Musk and Maye Haldeman began dating when they were young teenagers. From the start, their relationship was filled with drama. He repeatedly proposed to her, but she didn’t trust him. When she discovered he was cheating on her, she became so upset that she cried for a week and couldn’t eat. “Because of grief, I dropped ten pounds,” she recalls; it helped her win a local beauty contest. She got $150 in cash plus ten tickets to a bowling alley and became a finalist in the Miss South Africa contest.
埃罗尔-马斯克和梅伊-霍尔德曼在年轻时就开始约会。从一开始，他们的关系就充满了戏剧性。他多次向她求婚，但她不相信他。当她发现他对她不忠时，她难过得哭了一个星期，吃不下饭。她回忆说："因为悲伤，我体重下降了十磅，"这帮助她赢得了当地的选美比赛。她得到了 150 美元现金和十张保龄球馆的门票，并进入了南非小姐决赛。

When Maye graduated from college, she moved to Cape Town to give talks about nutrition. Errol came to visit, brought an engagement ring, and proposed. He promised he would change his ways and be faithful once they were married. Maye had just broken off a relationship with another unfaithful boyfriend, gained a lot of weight, and begun to fear that she would never get married, so she agreed.
梅伊大学毕业后，来到开普敦举办营养学讲座。埃洛尔来看她，带来了订婚戒指，并向她求婚。他承诺一旦结婚，就会改邪归正，忠贞不渝。梅伊刚刚与另一个不忠男友分手，体重增加了很多，开始担心自己永远不会结婚，于是她同意了。

The night of the wedding, Errol and Maye took an inexpensive flight to Europe for their honeymoon. In France, he bought copies of Playboy, which was banned in South Africa, and lay on the small hotel bed looking at them, much to Maye’s annoyance. Their fights turned bitter. When they got back to Pretoria, she thought of trying to get out of the marriage. But she soon became nauseated from morning sickness. She had become pregnant on the second night of their honeymoon, in the town of Nice. “It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”
新婚之夜，埃洛尔和梅伊乘坐廉价航班前往欧洲度蜜月。在法国，他买了南非禁售的《花花公子》，躺在酒店的小床上翻看，这让梅伊非常恼火。他们的争吵越来越激烈。他们回到比勒陀利亚后，她曾想过离婚。但她很快就孕吐不止。他们在尼斯度蜜月的第二个晚上，她就怀孕了。"嫁给他显然是个错误，"她回忆道，"但现在已经无法挽回了。"