好英语网折纸的艺术
“I would say the biggest rule is no cutting,” said Wendy Zeichner, the president and chief executive of OrigamiUSA. It’s “one piece of paper and no glue.”
“我会说，最大的规则是不要裁剪，”折纸美国(OrigamiUSA)的会长兼首席执行官温迪·蔡克纳(Wendy Zeichner)说。就是“一张纸，不用胶水”。
OrigamiUSA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about the art form. The group traces its roots to the 1950s, when Lillian Oppenheimer, one of its eventual founders, began to communicate with paper folders around the world, including Akira Yoshizawa in Japan, who is often credited as the father of modern origami — they would send each other diagrams explaining how to fold different shapes from a single square sheet of paper. Decades later, OrigamiUSA has around 1700 paying members, and it keeps track of nearly 90 community origami groups in the United States.
折纸美国是一个致力于向公众传授这种艺术形式的非盈利组织，其历史可以追溯到1950年代，当时它的最终创始人之一莉莉安·奥本海默(Lillian Oppenheimer)开始和世界各地的折纸人联络，包括常被誉为现代折纸之父的日本人吉泽章(Akira Yoshizawa)——后来他们互相发送图示，解释自己如何将一张正方形的纸折叠成种种不同的样子。数十年后，折纸美国已拥有约1700名付费会员，并且与美国近90个社区折纸团体保持联系。
纽约人折纸鹤捐赠给2011年日本地震和海啸的幸存者。艺术治疗师小林利子随后在福岛地区创建了一个工作室，把这些纸鹤变成了花朵。
Origami as an art reaches back thousands of years. “Origami is really almost as old as paper,” Ms. Zeichner explained — it means “to fold paper” in Japanese — and paper in sheet form is thought to have been invented in China around 105 A.D. To start making shapes like cranes and frogs, it boils down to two basic techniques: mountain folds and valley folds, which are different ways to make the edges meet. After that, you can get creative.
作为一种艺术的折纸可以追溯到几千年前。“折纸的历史和纸张本身同样古老，”蔡克纳解释说，纸片形式的纸张被认为是公元105年左右在中国发明的。要想折出鹤和青蛙等作品，可以归结为两个基本技术：凹折和凸折，它们是不同的对折方法。掌握了这两个技术，你就可以随心所欲地创作。
Crimps, pleats and petal folds are just some of the ways to create different shapes. There are also sculptural techniques such as wet-folding, a process in which part of the paper is dampened, which weakens the paper fibers and makes it easier to shape. When it dries, the paper stiffens. For more advanced 3-D projects, folders will use something like Origamizer, a software that generates crease patterns.
曲折、打褶和花瓣折只是创造不同形状的一些方法。还会用上雕塑技巧，比如湿折，在这种技术中，纸的一部分是湿的，这样可以弄软纸纤维，使它更容易成型。纸干后就变硬了。还有更高级的3D设计，折纸者需要使用Origamizer之类生成折痕图的软件。
A few years ago, NASA engineers were able to create foldable telescopes and a flower-shaped shade to block out light from distant stars by using paper-folding techniques. “If you want to send something in a rocket, it has to be packed small,” Ms. Zeichner said. “The same algorithms you would use in origami would be used in this.” The same goes for folding an airbag into a car, or creating pop-up homeless shelters.
几年前，NASA工程师们利用折纸技术制造出了可折叠的望远镜和一个花朵形状的遮光罩，以便阻挡来自遥远恒星的光。“如果你想用火箭运送东西，就得打包成很小的体积，”蔡克纳说。“这会用到折纸中使用的算法。同样的道理也适用于将安全气囊折叠到汽车上，或者为无家可归者创建临时的庇护所。”
Precision is key, whether someone is folding a humble crane or a complex modular structure with interlocking parts. So is enthusiasm. “The majority of people are either enthusiasts on the simple end or on the complex end,” said Jason Ku, a lecturer at M.I.T. and a faculty adviser to the origami club there, along with Erik Demaine, the youngest professor to be hired at M.I.T. Dr. Demaine teaches classes dedicated to geometric folding; in 2001, at the age of 20, he wrote his doctoral thesis on folding in different dimensions.
精确是关键，无论是折出一个简陋的纸鹤，还是用环环相扣的部件组成一个复杂的模块化结构。热情也很重要。“大部分人要么只喜欢最简单的折法，要么就迷上最复杂的东西，”麻省理工学院讲师、该校折纸俱乐部的教员顾问杰森·顾（Jason Ku，音）说；麻省理工学院聘请的最年轻教授、传授几何折叠课程的埃里克·德梅尼(Erik Demaine)也有同感，2001年，20岁的德梅尼写了关于不同维度折叠的博士论文。
The goal is to arrive at the most efficient and elegant means of achieving a particular effect. “I want the result to be complex, but I want to simplify the process it takes to get there,” Dr. Ku said. “It reminds me of the quote in ‘Amadeus’: ‘There are simply too many notes.’”
目标是通过最有效、最优雅的手段达到特定效果。“我希望结果是复杂的，但我想简化实现目标的过程，”顾说。“这让我想起了《莫扎特传》(Amadeus)里的一句台词：‘音符实在太多了。’”
As in math, it’s important to show your work. Sometimes this happens at origami gatherings, such as OrigaMIT’s annual convention, where paper folders from around the country come to spend a day at the school’s campus learning about new techniques. It can also happen online, in simple YouTube videos such as “How To Make a Paper Crane,” which has over 4 million views. “Showing your technique is one of the biggest aspects of origami,” said Taro Yaguchi, the founder of Taro’s Origami Studio in Brooklyn.
和数学一样，展示你的成果也很重要。有时这种展示会是在折纸聚会上，比如OrigaMIT年会，届时全国各地的折纸爱好者齐聚麻省理工校园，花一天时间学习各种新技术。展示也可以是在网上，YouTube上“怎样折纸鹤”这样的简单视频拥有超过400万的浏览量。“展示技术是折纸艺术里最重要的方面之一，”布鲁克林的太郎折纸工作室(Taro’s Origami Studio)创始人矢口太郎(Taro Yaguchi)说。
Before the 1950s, certain origami objects were more difficult to create, partly because diagrams weren’t standardized. Some guide books simply presented the results, without the necessary steps to get there. Yoshizawa, in Japan, and Samuel Randlett, in the United States, helped develop a set of international diagram conventions that is now referred to as the Yoshizawa-Randlett system.
在1950年代之前，某些物品更难被折出来，部分原因是图示没有标准化。一些指南只是简单介绍结果，没有必要的步骤。日本的吉泽章和美国的萨缪尔·兰德列特(Samuel Randlett)合作创制了一套国际图例，现在被称为吉泽-兰德列特体系。
“Before it got codified, it could be very confusing,” said Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Mosely is known for large-scale projects such as an origami Menger sponge, a series of cubes adding up to a giant cube, made out of business cards. At the time, the fact that she didn’t use square paper caused ripples throughout the origami community. “There were people who didn’t want anything to do with my work because I started with rectangles,” she said.
“在规范化之前，情况非常混乱，”马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的软件工程师珍妮·莫斯利(Jeannine Mosely)说，她以大型项目闻名，比如用一系列名片折出的立方体构成大型折纸海绵宝宝等作品。当时，她因为没有使用正方形纸张，在整个折纸界引发了争议。“有些人不想和我的作品沾边，因为我是用矩形纸折的，”她说。
Which leads to another point: A big part of origami is the medium. “I feel my works are collaborations between paper and me,” Koshiro Hatori, a master folder in Japan, wrote in an email.
这就引出了另一个问题：在折纸中，媒材是很重要的一部分。“我觉得我的作品是纸张与我的合作，”日本折纸大家羽鸟宫士郎(Koshiro Hatori)在电子邮件中写道。
And diagrams and algorithms won’t be much help if you’re not using the right materials. “It’s a mistake a lot of beginner’s make: they go online and find the most beautiful kind of paper,” said Jewel Kawataki, a New York-based jewelry maker who creates different designs with chiyogami, a sleek fabric-like paper. “You can see their frustration in YouTube tutorials. They’ve used the wrong paper.”
如果材料不正确，图表和算法也不会有太大帮助。“很多新手都会犯这样的错误：他们到网上寻找最美的纸张，”纽约珠宝设计师朱尔·川泷（Jewel Kawataki，音）说，她使用千代纸创作自己的产品，这是一种光滑的、类似织物的纸。“你可以在YouTube教程中看出他们的沮丧。他们用错了纸。”
But even with quality paper, it can still be tricky to figure out how to get the right result. “One time, it took me about 10 hours to do a heart,” Ms. Kawataki said. “I couldn’t understand the diagram. You just have to be persistent.”
但是即使有了高质量的纸张，想要折出正确的结果仍然很困难。“有一次，我花了大约10个小时来制作一颗心，”川泷说。“我看不懂图示。你得坚持不懈才行。”
Paper folders are as diverse as their approaches to the art. “I love the fact that origami artists range from 5 to 100, and there’s no age limit on doing it. Although I suspect some people might get pushed out by arthritis,” Ms. Mosely said, laughing.
喜欢折纸的有各种各样的人，接触到这种艺术的方式也是各不相同。“折纸艺术家的年龄从5岁到100岁都有，折纸完全没有年龄限制，我喜欢这样。不过我怀疑有些人可能会因为关节炎而退出这一行，”莫斯利笑着说。
She began folding as a child in the 1950s and ’60s, but finding origami paper was difficult (and expensive). “I folded with the lined paper you do your homework on, or blank white typing paper,” she said. “Anytime a piece of paper came into my hands I would crease it and see what it did.”
莫斯利本人在上世纪五六十年代的孩提时期就开始折纸了，但在那时，要找到一张折纸用纸并不容易（而且价格昂贵）。“我就是用写作业的横格纸，或者空白的白色打字纸来折的，”她说。“只要有一张纸到了我手里，我就会把它折起来，看看效果怎么样。”
Toshiko Kobayashi, an art therapist in Manhattan who grew up folding as a child in Tokyo after World War II, believes in the art’s ability to heal. “Just after the war, there was nothing. Paper was one of the readily available toys for me,” she said.
二战后在东京长大的小林利子(Toshiko Kobayashi)从小就喜欢折纸，如今她是曼哈顿的一名艺术治疗师，她相信艺术的治愈能力。“战争刚结束的时候什么都没有。纸是我手头现成的玩具之一，”她说。
In New York, she has been busy introducing the art to different communities through the Origami Therapy Association in Manhattan, which she founded in 2002. She has a regular session on paper-folding techniques for visually impaired patrons at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library in Manhattan.
在纽约，她一直致力于通过曼哈顿的折纸疗法协会(Origami Therapy Association)向不同的社区介绍这种艺术，该协会是她于2002年创建的。她还在曼哈顿的安德鲁·海斯凯尔盲文和有声书图书馆(Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library)为视力受损的来宾举办关于折纸技术的常设讲座。
For many, the practice is embraced for its calming aspects. “It’s lessened my anxiety a lot,” Ms. Kawataki said.
对许多人来说，折纸可以让自己平静下来。“它大大减轻了我的焦虑，”川泷说。
Regardless of techniques, the community, whether in person or online, keeps people excited about the art form. “Origamists from around the world will meet and fold together,” Ms. Mosely said. “They might not be able to talk to each other, but they can fold.”
不管技术如何，无论是在线上还是在线下，折纸人团体都可以让人们更热爱这种艺术形式。“来自世界各地的折纸艺术家可以聚在一起折纸，”莫斯利说。“他们可能无法通过语言交谈，但他们可以动手去折。”