PBS高端访谈:日本广岛原子弹爆炸事件揭露

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yesterday marked 75 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The attack shocked the world, but it would be another year before Americans would get firsthand accounts from people who lived through it, thanks to trailblazing reporting by New Yorker writer John Hersey. Author Lesley Blume has a new book about Hersey and how his reporting exposed the bomb's lasting¹ damage, which the U.S. government tried initially² to downplay. And she spoke³ with Jeffrey Brown as part of our continuing coverage⁴ of this solemn anniversary. This is also part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

朱迪·伍德乐夫：昨天是日本广岛原子弹爆炸75周年纪念日，该次爆炸震惊了全世界。而由于《纽约客》作家约翰·赫西的开创性报道，美国人要再过一年才能从经历过该袭击的幸存者那里获得一手资料。此外，作家莱斯利·布鲁姆写了一本关于赫西的新书，书中讲述了赫西的报道对该爆炸造成的持久性破坏的揭露，而美国政府从一开始就试图淡化这一点。莱斯利·布鲁姆接受了杰弗里·布朗的采访，采访内容将归于PBS新闻一小时对该庄严的周年纪念日进行系列报道的一部分，同时也归于PBS新闻一小时艺术和文化系列Canvas的一部分。

JEFFREY BROWN: August 6, 1945, the future of warfare⁵ and humanity itself would change, when the U.S. detonated a single atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. But while everyone saw the mushroom cloud, it would be a year before the world fully⁶ understood what had happened on the ground that day, a story told in the pages of The New Yorker magazine by journalist John Hersey.

杰弗里·布朗：1945年8月6日，当美国在日本广岛引爆原子弹时，战争和人类命运就此改变。记者约翰·赫西在《纽约客》杂志上讲述了一则故事：当人们看到(原子弹爆炸)蘑菇云时，世界要过一年才能完全熟知那一天地面上究竟发生了什么。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME, Author, Fallout: We know what the aftermath of nuclear warfare looks like because John Hersey showed us.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆，《辐射》作者：我们清楚核战争的后果是什么，因为约翰·赫西向我们展示了该后果。

JEFFREY BROWN: In her new book, Fallout, author Lesley Blume explores how Hersey came to write a profoundly influential⁷ work. She calls it one of the most important works of journalism⁸ ever created that has shaped generations since.

杰弗里·布朗：在她的新书《辐射》中，作者莱斯利·布鲁姆探讨了赫西是如何写出该部影响深远的作品的。她称该著作是自那之后塑造了几代人的最重要的新闻作品之一。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: Even if people, his eventual⁹ readers, could not understand the physics that went into the nuclear bomb, they could certainly relate to the stories of six regular people.

莱斯利·布鲁姆：即使人们(他的读者)无法理解原子弹的物理原理，他们也肯定会对六个普通人的故事产生共鸣。

JEFFREY BROWN: The bomb in Hiroshima, followed days later by one destroying Nagasaki, led to Japan's surrender and ecstatic celebrations of a hard-earned American victory. The U.S. government justified¹⁰ use of these experimental weapons as necessary to end the war, but, Blume writes, covered up the bombs' horrifying¹¹ impact on humans, including the after-effects of radiation.

杰弗里·布朗：先是一枚原子弹在广岛爆炸，几天后又有一枚原子弹炸毁了长崎，致使日本最终投降，美国为来之不易的胜利欢欣鼓舞。美国政府认为使用这些实验武器是结束战争的必要手段，但是，布卢姆写道：美国政府掩盖了原子弹对人类的可怕影响，包括辐射带来的后遗症。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: On the one hand, they wanted to showcase the might of their weapon, because they now had a weapon that nobody else did. But, on the other hand, they didn't want to reveal the true devastation¹² of the bomb, and also reveal the fact that it was a weapon that went on killing¹³ long after detonation¹⁴ in a really gruesome way.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：一方面，美国想要展示自身武器的威力，因为他现在拥有一种别人没有的武器。然而，另一方面，美国并不想揭露原子弹带来的真正破坏，它不想揭露这样一个事实，即原子弹在爆炸之后还会以一种可怕的方式继续杀人。

JEFFREY BROWN: Hersey was just 31, but already a veteran war correspondent.

杰弗里·布朗：赫西只有31岁，但他已经是一位资深的战地记者。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: He had seen the worst of human nature. And he felt that, at the end of what remains¹⁵ the deadliest conflict in human history, the only way that human civilization had a chance of surviving is if we began to see the humanity in each other again.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：他见过人性最丑恶的一面。他认为，在这场人类历史上最致命的冲突结束之时，人类文明得以幸存的唯一途径就是重新审视人性。

JEFFREY BROWN: He was also a writer. His 1944 novel, A Bell for Adano, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Working with legendary¹⁶ New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, Hersey proposed a novelistic approach, tell the intersecting stories of six individuals who'd crossed paths that day.

杰弗里·布朗：他也是一名作家，他1944年的小说《阿达诺的钟声》获得了普利策小说奖。赫西与《纽约客》的传奇编辑哈罗德·罗斯、威廉·肖恩合作，提出用一种小说化的方式来讲述那天那六个相遇的人发生的交叉性故事。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: A lot of the reporting that had been done on the major devastation caused by the bombs, it was rendered in a very eye-of-God kind of way. This is the end of days, and you were just seeing massive, roiling¹⁷ mushroom clouds. And so what Hersey decided¹⁸ to do was to dial it back from sort of a point-of-view-of-God narrative¹⁹ to the point of view of six regular folks on the ground.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：很多关于“原子弹爆炸造成的重大破坏”的报道都是以上帝的视角展现出来的：这就是世界末日，你看到的只是巨大的、翻滚的蘑菇云。而赫西决定将这种上帝的视角转变成普通人的视角。

JEFFREY BROWN: The subjects included two doctors, two clergy²⁰, a widow caring for three children, and a young clerk. The humanizing style is there from the famous first line: At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Ms. Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office, and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

杰弗里·布朗：主人公包括两名医生、两名神职人员、一名照顾三个孩子的寡妇以及一名年轻的职员。我们从其著名的第一句话当中便能看到其人性化的写作风格：日本时间1945年8月6日上午8点15分，当原子弹在广岛上空闪过时，东亚锡公司人事部的一名职员佐佐木敏子女士正坐在工厂办公室里的座位上侧着头和旁边的女孩说话。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: And instead of being incinerated on the spot, she was almost crushed by falling bookshelves and was covered in books. And when Hersey met her and heard her story, he found himself thinking that it was incredibly ironic²¹ that this life was nearly taken by books in the first moments of the atomic age. And even when he was still in Hiroshima, he knew that he was going to write about that in his own article.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：她没有被当场烧死，而是被掉下来的书架差点砸死，她的身上堆满了书。当赫西见到她、听到她的故事时，他发现自己在想：真是太讽刺了，在原子弹爆炸的那一刻生活却被书所占据，甚至当他还在广岛的时候他就知道自己会撰写相关文章。

JEFFREY BROWN: That article would take up the entire issue of The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, and would itself become a bombshell, capturing headlines around the world. In book form, it has sold more than three million copies to date. There is much more to the tale Blume tells, including the surprising role of General Leslie Groves²², one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, who tried to suppress information about the bomb, but then saw benefits to Hersey's reporting. And years later, a bizarre appearance by one of Hersey's subjects, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, on an episode of This Is Your Life.

杰弗里·布朗：1946年8月31日，该文章占据了整期《纽约客》，它本身也成为了一枚重磅炸弹，占据了世界各地的头条。到目前为止，这本书已经卖出了300多万册。布卢姆还讲述了很多其它的故事，包括莱斯利格罗夫斯将军这个令人惊讶的角色，他是曼哈顿计划的领导人之一，曾试图隐瞒原子弹爆炸的相关信息，直到后来看到赫西的报道带来的好处。几年后，赫西的主人公之一Tanimoto Kiyoshi以一种怪异的方式出现在《这就是你的生活》的一集里。

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: They trotted²³ out not only people from his life, but they even trotted out one of the bombers²⁴ from the Enola Gay, who had bombed Hiroshima, and forced a meeting between the two, the two gentlemen. And it's some pretty skin-crawling stuff, for sure.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：他们不仅翻出了他生活里的一些人，甚至还翻出了曾经轰炸过广岛的其中一架艾诺拉·盖号轰炸机。此外还迫使这两位绅士见面，都是一些比较肉麻的情节。

JEFFREY BROWN: John Hersey donated part of the proceeds from his work to the American Red Cross. He didn't return to Japan for 40 years, wrote many more books, and died in 1993. It's been argued that that article and then the book afterwards played an important role in the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since. Do you believe that?

杰弗里·布朗：约翰·赫西将他工作所得的部分收入捐给美国红十字会，并在40年年里从未回到过日本。他写了更多的书，后来于1993年去世。有人认为那篇文章及之后的那本书是导致核武器从此再也未被使用的主要原因。你怎么看？

LESLEY M.M. BLUME: Well, John Hersey definitely believed that. I know a lot of people don't realize how perilous²⁵ the nuclear landscape is right now. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has its famous doomsday clock, has now set it closer to midnight, i.e., nuclear apocalypse, than it has ever been since its advent²⁶ in the late 1940s. One of the things that John Hersey was especially worried about by the time the Cold War accelerated again in the 1980s was that the memory of Hiroshima was fading. And if you didn't have the memory as a deterrent²⁷ anymore, was it going to be as potent²⁸ a deterrent? And I think that remains a really crucial question today.

莱斯利M.M.布鲁姆：约翰·赫西肯定是这么认为的。我知道有很多人没有意识到现在的核环境有多危险。《原子科学家公报》里有一个著名的末日钟，而现在它指向的时间已经接近午夜(即核灾难)，这是自20世纪40年代末以来最接近的一次。约翰·赫西极其担忧的一点是，到20世纪80年代冷战再次加速时人们对广岛的记忆已经开始消退，如果说记忆不再是一种威慑，那么它还能起到同样强大的威慑作用吗？我觉得直至今日这仍是一个十分关键的问题。

JEFFREY BROWN: For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown.

杰弗里·布朗：这里是PBS新闻一小时，我是杰弗里·布朗。

1 lasting   

adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持

参考例句：

• The lasting war debased the value of the dollar.持久的战争使美元贬值。
• We hope for a lasting settlement of all these troubles.我们希望这些纠纷能获得永久的解决。

2 initially   

adv.最初，开始

参考例句：

• The ban was initially opposed by the US.这一禁令首先遭到美国的反对。
• Feathers initially developed from insect scales.羽毛最初由昆虫的翅瓣演化而来。

3 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

4 coverage   

n.报导，保险范围，保险额，范围，覆盖

参考例句：

• There's little coverage of foreign news in the newspaper.报纸上几乎没有国外新闻报道。
• This is an insurance policy with extensive coverage.这是一项承保范围广泛的保险。

5 warfare   

n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突

参考例句：

• He addressed the audience on the subject of atomic warfare.他向听众演讲有关原子战争的问题。
• Their struggle consists mainly in peasant guerrilla warfare.他们的斗争主要是农民游击战。

6 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

7 influential   

adj.有影响的，有权势的

参考例句：

• He always tries to get in with the most influential people.他总是试图巴结最有影响的人物。
• He is a very influential man in the government.他在政府中是个很有影响的人物。

8 journalism   

n.新闻工作，报业

参考例句：

• He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师，可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
• He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。

9 eventual   

adj.最后的，结局的，最终的

参考例句：

• Several schools face eventual closure.几所学校面临最终关闭。
• Both parties expressed optimism about an eventual solution.双方对问题的最终解决都表示乐观。

10 justified   

a.正当的，有理的

参考例句：

• She felt fully justified in asking for her money back. 她认为有充分的理由要求退款。
• The prisoner has certainly justified his claims by his actions. 那个囚犯确实已用自己的行动表明他的要求是正当的。

11 horrifying   

a.令人震惊的，使人毛骨悚然的

参考例句：

• He went to great pains to show how horrifying the war was. 他极力指出战争是多么的恐怖。
• The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate. 战争的可能性太可怕了，真不堪细想。

12 devastation   

n.毁坏；荒废；极度震惊或悲伤

参考例句：

• The bomb caused widespread devastation. 炸弹造成大面积破坏。
• There was devastation on every side. 到处都是破坏的创伤。 来自《简明英汉词典》

13 killing   

n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财

参考例句：

• Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
• Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。

14 detonation   

n.爆炸；巨响

参考例句：

• A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade.街垒传来一阵骇人的爆炸声。
• Within a few hundreds of microseconds,detonation is complete.在几百微秒之内，爆炸便完成了。

15 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

16 legendary   

adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学）

参考例句：

• Legendary stories are passed down from parents to children.传奇故事是由父母传给孩子们的。
• Odysseus was a legendary Greek hero.奥狄修斯是传说中的希腊英雄。

17 roiling   

v.搅混（液体）( roil的现在分词 )；使烦恼；使不安；使生气

参考例句：

• Now, all that could be seen was the roiling, lead--coloured sea, with its thunderously heaving waves. 狂风挟着暴雨如同弥漫大雾，排挞呼号，在海上恣意奔驶。 来自汉英文学 - 现代散文
• Rather, it is a roiling, seething cauldron of evanescent particles. 相反，它是一个不断翻滚、剧烈沸腾的大锅，内有逐渐消失的粒子。 来自互联网

18 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

19 narrative   

n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的

参考例句：

• He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
• Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

20 clergy   

n.[总称]牧师，神职人员

参考例句：

• I could heartily wish that more of our country clergy would follow this example.我衷心希望，我国有更多的牧师效法这个榜样。
• All the local clergy attended the ceremony.当地所有的牧师出席了仪式。

21 ironic   

adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的

参考例句：

• That is a summary and ironic end.那是一个具有概括性和讽刺意味的结局。
• People used to call me Mr Popularity at high school,but they were being ironic.人们中学时常把我称作“万人迷先生”，但他们是在挖苦我。

22 groves   

树丛，小树林( grove的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields. 朝阳宁静地照耀着已经发黄的树丛和还是一片绿色的田地。
• The trees grew more and more in groves and dotted with old yews. 那里的树木越来越多地长成了一簇簇的小丛林，还点缀着几棵老紫杉树。

23 trotted   

小跑，急走( trot的过去分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走

参考例句：

• She trotted her pony around the field. 她骑着小马绕场慢跑。
• Anne trotted obediently beside her mother. 安妮听话地跟在妈妈身边走。

24 bombers   

n.轰炸机( bomber的名词复数 )；投弹手；安非他明胶囊；大麻叶香烟

参考例句：

• Enemy bombers carried out a blitz on the city. 敌军轰炸机对这座城市进行了突袭。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The Royal Airforce sill remained dangerously short of bombers. 英国皇家空军仍未脱离极为缺乏轰炸机的危境。 来自《简明英汉词典》

25 perilous   

adj.危险的，冒险的

参考例句：

• The journey through the jungle was perilous.穿过丛林的旅行充满了危险。
• We have been carried in safety through a perilous crisis.历经一连串危机，我们如今已安然无恙。

26 advent   

n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临

参考例句：

• Swallows come by groups at the advent of spring. 春天来临时燕子成群飞来。
• The advent of the Euro will redefine Europe.欧元的出现将重新定义欧洲。

27 deterrent   

n.阻碍物，制止物；adj.威慑的，遏制的

参考例句：

• Large fines act as a deterrent to motorists.高额罚款是对开车的人的制约。
• I put a net over my strawberries as a deterrent to the birds.我在草莓上罩了网，免得鸟歇上去。

28 potent   

adj.强有力的，有权势的；有效力的

参考例句：

• The medicine had a potent effect on your disease.这药物对你的病疗效很大。
• We must account of his potent influence.我们必须考虑他的强有力的影响。