好英语网经历过西班牙流感、犹太人大屠杀和大萧条，她们活了下来
For most of us, it is almost impossible to comprehend the ferocity and regularity with which life was upended during the first half of the 20th century. Plague and conflict emerged on an epic scale, again and again. Loss and restriction were routine; disaster was its own season.
对于我们大多数人来说，20世纪上半叶生活动荡的剧烈与频繁，几乎是无从想象的。瘟疫和冲突一次又一次地以史诗般的规模出现。伤亡和限制是家常便饭；灾难连年发生。
At 101, Naomi Replansky, a poet and labor activist, has endured all of it. Born in her family’s apartment on East 179th Street in the Bronx in May 1918, her arrival in the world coincided with the outset of the Spanish flu.
101岁的诗人和劳工活动人士娜奥米·雷普兰斯基(Naomi Replansky)经受了这一切。1918年5月，她出生于她家在布朗克斯东179街的寓所里，她出世时恰逢西班牙流感暴发。
小儿麻痹症曾在几十年里一直构成威胁。图中一名病患得到了人称“铁肺”的艾默生呼吸器的辅助。
The Spanish flu, which claimed tens of millions of lives, many of them children under the age of 5, was hardly an isolated public health emergency. Polio had been designated an epidemic in New York in June of 1916. That year 2,000 people died of the disease in the city. Of those who lived, many would have had all too vivid memories of the typhoid eruption that gripped the city nine years earlier.
瘟疫导致数千万人丧生，其中许多是5岁以下的儿童，这并不是孤立的突发公共卫生事件。1916年6月在纽约，小儿麻痹症被定性为流行病。那一年，该市有2000人死于这一疾病。而那些活下来的人中，许多人还清晰地记得九年前席卷这座城市的伤寒暴发。
Until a polio vaccine came into use in the 1950s, outbreaks occurred somewhere in the country nearly every spring. Public gatherings were regularly canceled; wealthy people in big cities left for the country. By the early 1920s, Naomi’s baby sister was stricken, leaving one of her legs permanently paralyzed.
在1950年代脊髓灰质炎疫苗投入使用之前，美国几乎每年都有某个地方暴发疫情。公众聚会经常取消；大城市的富人搬去乡下。到1920年代初，娜奥米年幼的妹妹染病，一条腿永久瘫痪。
Their mother had pinned hope on the aqua therapies deployed by Franklin Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Ga., but that hope came in vain.
他们的母亲对富兰克林·罗斯福(Franklin Roosevelt)在佐治亚州沃姆斯普林斯(Warm Springs)部署的水疗法寄予了希望，但以失望告终。
“It was a morale booster, a jolly place,’’ Naomi told me recently, “but not curative.”
“那是个鼓舞士气、欢乐的地方，”娜奥米最近告诉我，“但治不了病。”
Later, when she was 12, her 15-year-old brother developed mastoiditis. In the absence of antibiotics to treat it, he died quickly of what is essentially an ear infection.
后来，在她12岁那年，她15岁的哥哥患上了乳突炎。在没有抗生素治疗的情况下，他很快死于耳部感染。
Last weekend, as New Yorkers were absorbing the enormity of the current crisis, Naomi and her 95-year-old wife, Eva Kollisch, were at home in their one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, listening to Marian Anderson on vinyl. The album was “Spirituals,’’ and they were tended to by one of their regular aides.
上周末，正当纽约人开始认识到当前危机的严重影响时，娜奥米和她95岁的妻子伊娃·克里斯彻(Eva Kollisch)正在上西区的一居室公寓家中，听着玛丽安·安德森(Marian Anderson)的黑胶唱片。专辑名为《灵》(Spirituals)。她们的其中一位专职助手负责照顾她们的生活。
They were not unsettled. “Confinement doesn’t bother me,” Naomi wrote me in an email. “My shaky frame can handle more confinement.”
她们没有感到不安。“我不介意关禁闭，”娜奥米在发给我的邮件中写道。“我的一把老骨头还能应付更多禁闭。”
Naomi and Eva were introduced by Grace Paley at a reading of her work in the 1980s. They were well past middle-age, long after the tragedies and social disruptions of the previous decades had touched them each with such intimacy. When catastrophe is sequential, it eventually trains its survivors to greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened.
娜奥米和伊娃是由格雷斯·佩利(Grace Paley)在1980年代介绍认识的，当时是在佩利的作品朗读会上。她们都已过中年，都亲临了过去几十年的悲剧和社会动荡，深深地被触动。当灾难接连发生时，最后幸存下来的人学会了用从中领悟到的平静去面对恐怖。
Both Eva and Naomi experienced anti-Semitism at a young age. Eva, who was raised in a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals outside Vienna, recalls being beaten by a group of children for being a “dirty Jew’’ when she was 6. During her childhood in the Bronx, Naomi was privy to the fascist radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, which were always emanating from the open windows of East Tremont during the summer. Her grandparents had escaped the pogroms in Russia, coming to America at the turn of the century when the habits of immigrants — considered filthy and ignorant — were continually blamed for the spread of disease.
伊娃和娜奥米都在年轻时经历了反犹主义。伊娃在维也纳郊外的一个富有的犹太知识分子家庭长大，她回忆起自己6岁时因为是“肮脏的犹太人”被一群孩子殴打。童年时，她住在布朗克斯区，在东特里蒙特的夏天，总会有柯夫林神父(Father Coughlin)的法西斯主义广播从敞开的窗户传出。她的祖父母逃脱了俄罗斯的大屠杀，在世纪之交来到美国时，人们一直认为移民的习俗——被认为是肮脏和无知的——是疾病传播的罪魁祸首。
The first of Eva’s own upheavals came with war. A year after the Nazi annexation of Austria, in 1939, she fled via the Kindertransport, a series of rescue efforts that placed Jewish children in British homes. Eva, then 13, traveled with her siblings first by train to the Netherlands and then by ship to England.
伊娃经历的第一次动荡是战争带来的。1939年，纳粹吞并奥地利一年后，她通过难民儿童运动(Kindertransport)逃亡，也就是一系列将犹太儿童安置在英国人的住所中的救援运动。时年13岁的伊娃与兄弟姐妹一起乘火车前往荷兰，然后乘船前往英国。
“The minute we got to Holland it seemed so wonderful that there were kind people there on the station platform,’’ Eva once told an interviewer for a feminist oral history project. “They gave you orange juice and smiled at you.”
“我们到达荷兰的那一刻，站台上有很多善良的人，一切看起来太棒了，”伊娃在一个女权主义口述历史项目的采访中说。“他们给你橙汁，对你微笑。”
At first she had thought of it all as an adventure. “And then, when we were in England,’’ she said, “I very soon realized that I was extremely lonely.” Eva and her brothers were dispersed to different homes while their parents stayed behind. In 1940, the family escaped the Holocaust and reunited in America, landing in Staten Island.
起初，她认为一切都是一场冒险。“后来，当我们在英国的时候，”她说，“我很快就意识到我非常孤独。”伊娃和兄弟们被分散到不同的家庭，父母则留了下来。1940年，一家人逃离犹太大屠杀，到美国重聚，在斯塔滕岛安顿下来。
By then Eva’s parents had lost everything, and so her mother worked teaching English to refugees for 25 cents an hour in order to earn the money to become a masseuse. Her father, who had been a prominent architect in Austria, sold vacuum cleaners.
到那时，伊娃的父母已经失去了一切，她的母亲为了攒钱当按摩师，以每小时25美分的价格向难民们教授英语。她的父亲曾是奥地利著名的建筑师，现在只得去卖吸尘器。
Throughout their lives, Naomi and Eva have exhibited a kind of fearlessness ably nurtured by misfortune. After she graduated from high school in New York, Eva went to Detroit to work in an auto factory.
娜奥米和伊娃毕生都表现出一种因不幸而养成的无畏精神。从纽约的高中毕业后，伊娃去了底特律的一家汽车厂工作。
“Lithe and nimble, her job was to leap onto the hoods of Jeeps rolling down the line and attach the windshield wipers,’’ her daughter-in-law, Mary-Elizabeth Gifford, told me recently. In the evenings, she was a labor organizer for a Trotskyite group. She hitchhiked across the country.
“她的工作是跳到流水线上的吉普车引擎盖上安装挡风玻璃雨刷，动作轻盈、敏捷，”她的儿媳玛丽-伊丽莎白·吉福德(Mary-Elizabeth Gifford)最近告诉我。晚上，伊娃是托洛茨基派团体的劳工组织者。她还搭便车周游全国。
Naomi graduated from high school at the height of the Depression, in 1934. For years she worked in offices, on assembly lines and as a lathe operator before she summoned the resources to go to U.C.L.A. She was an early computer programmer; her first collection of poetry, published in 1952, was nominated for a National Book Award. She maintained close friendships with Richard Wright and Bertolt Brecht, whose work she translated.
娜奥米在经济大萧条最严重的1934年从高中毕业。多年来，她在办公室里工作，也在流水线上工作，她做过车床操作员，直到攒够钱去加州大学洛杉矶分校读书。她曾担任早期的计算机程序员；她的第一本诗集于1952年出版，获得国家图书奖提名。她与理查德·赖特(Richard Wright)和贝托尔特·布莱希特(Bertolt Brecht)保持着密切的友谊。布莱希特的作品由她翻译。
Sexism and homophobia made their inevitable intrusions. Eva’s mother thought that she should run a hotel or a beauty parlor. But Eva was fiercely ambitious for a certain kind of urbane, cerebral life. Eventually she became a professor of comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence. She married two men; she had a son with one of them; she was a lover of Susan Sontag’s.
性别歧视和恐同不可避免地侵犯了她们。伊娃的母亲认为她应该去经营一家旅馆或美容院。但伊娃对某种文雅、理智的生活有着强烈的追求。最终她成为了莎拉·劳伦斯学院(Sarah Lawrence)的比较文学教授。她曾和两个男人结婚；和其中一人生了个儿子；她曾是苏珊·桑塔格(Susan Sontag)的情人。
Until the emergence of the coronavirus, Eva and Naomi were out often. On most days they took long walks. They were active in a Buddhist Sangha at meditation center. They shopped at the farmers’ market and ate vegetarian lunches at Effy’s on West 96th Street.
在冠状病毒出现之前，伊娃和娜奥米经常外出。在大多数日子里，她们长时间地散步。她们是冥想中心一个佛教僧伽组织的活跃成员。她们在农贸市集购物，在西96街的Effy's餐厅吃素食午餐。
They find themselves longing for what has been lost more than they dread whatever might come, and they worry more for their “generation,” as Naomi put it, than they do for themselves, even though Naomi had a bout with pneumonia six years ago.
她们发现自己更渴望失去的东西，而不是担心可能会发生什么；正如娜奥米所说，她们更担心自己的“同代人”，而不是她们自己，尽管娜奥米六年前患过肺炎。
As a poet, Naomi preferred the order of formalism. In the “Ring Song,’’ she uses light verse to convey the abruptly shifting rhythms of deprivation and contentment, the sense that happiness is ultimately a human reflex as much as it is an aspiration:
作为诗人，娜奥米更喜欢形式主义的秩序。在《铃歌》中，她用轻快的诗句传达了贫困与满足之间的节奏突变，最终，幸福既是一种渴望，也是一种人类的本能反应：
When I live from hand to hand
当我过着朝不保夕的生活
Nude in the marketplace I stand.
当我裸身立于集市。
When I stand and am not sold
当我站在那里未被卖出
I build a fire against the cold.
我生起火焰，抵御寒冷。
When the cold does not destroy
当这寒冷无法被摧毁
I leap from ambush on my joy. …
我怀着喜悦逃脱埋伏。