好英语网哀悼女王，而不是她的帝国
“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted.
在人们评价伊丽莎白二世女王创纪录的统治历史时，“一个时代的终结”将成为一个反复使用的词语。她像所有君主一样，既是个人，又代表着制度。她的两个角色有不同的生日——她真实的生日在4月，而官方生日则在6月。并且，作为君主，虽然她自己的名字得以保留，但她在不同的领域有不同的头衔。她在公众面前不能表达个人意见和情感，就连她随时携带的手袋也被揣测为装着钱包、钥匙和手机这样的日常物件。除了她对马和狗的喜爱之外，我们对她的内心生活知之甚少，因而醉心于海伦·米伦、奥利维亚·科尔曼和克莱尔·福伊的那些入微演绎。
The queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties — her final public act was to appoint her 15th prime minister — and for her unflagging performance of them, she will be rightly mourned. She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world. But we should not romanticize her era. For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.
女王对她的职责有着深刻而由衷的责任感——她的最后一项公开活动是任命她的第15任首相——她在这些工作中的不懈表现注定将会被人们缅怀。她一直是稳定中不可或缺的部分，在已然动荡不安的时代，她的去世将在世界各地掀起悲伤的涟漪。但我们不应该把她的时代浪漫化。因为女王还是一个形象：她是一个国家的面孔，在统治期间，她见证了几乎整个大英帝国解体成为大约50个独立国家，并且全球影响力显著降低。由于制度，加上她异乎寻常的长寿，作为英国及其前殖民地的联盟英联邦的元首，她给数十年的暴力动荡披上了一层无动于衷的传统主义外衣。因此，女王帮助掩盖了一段血腥的去殖民化历史，其规模和尚未得到充分承认。
Elizabeth became queen of a postwar Britain where sugar was still rationed and rubble from bomb damage still being cleared away. Journalists and commentators promptly cast the 25-year-old as a phoenix rising into a new Elizabethan age. An inevitable analogy, perhaps, and a pointed one. The first Elizabethan Age, in the second half of the 16th century, marked England’s emergence from a second-tier European state to an ambitious overseas power. Elizabeth I expanded the navy, encouraged privateering and granted charters to trading companies that laid the foundations for a transcontinental empire.
伊丽莎白在战后即位之时，糖仍然是定量配给的，人们仍在清理轰炸造成的残砖碎瓦。记者和评论员迅速将这位25岁的年轻人形容为浴火重生的凤凰，将带来一个崭新的伊丽莎白时代。这样的类比也许无可避免，用意也十分明确。16世纪下半叶的第一个伊丽莎白时代标志着英国从二流欧洲国家崛起为雄心勃勃的世界强国。伊丽莎白一世扩大了海军，鼓励私掠，并授予贸易公司特许权，为横贯大陆的帝国奠定了基础。
Elizabeth II grew up in a royal family whose significance in the British Empire had swollen even as its political authority shrank at home. The monarchy ruled an ever-lengthening list of Crown colonies, including Hong Kong (1842), India (1858) and Jamaica (1866). Queen Victoria, proclaimed empress of India in 1876, presided over flamboyant celebrations of imperial patriotism; her birthday was enshrined from 1902 as Empire Day. Members of the royal family made lavish ceremonial tours of the colonies, bestowing upon Indigenous Asian and African rulers an alphabet soup of orders and decorations.
伊丽莎白二世成长之时的英国王室尽管在国内的政治权威已经萎缩，但其在大英帝国的重要性却在膨胀。英国君主直辖殖民地越来越多，包括香港（1842年）、印度（1858年）和牙买加（1866年）。维多利亚女王于1876年宣布成为印度女皇，对帝国的热爱在她治下得到大肆发扬；她的生日从1902年起被定为帝国日。王室成员在殖民地进行了奢华的仪式之旅，赐予亚洲和非洲土著统治者一大批勋章。
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday on a royal tour in South Africa, delivering a much-quoted speech in which she promised that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” She was on another royal tour, in Kenya, when she learned of her father’s death.
1947年，伊丽莎白公主在南非的一次王室之旅中庆祝她的21岁生日，并发表了一篇被广泛引用的演讲，她在演讲中承诺：“我的一生，无论漫长还是短暂，都将致力于您和我们同在的伟大王室。”得知父亲去世的消息时，她正在肯尼亚进行另一次王室之旅。
On Coronation Day in 1953, The Times of London proudly broke the news of the first successful summiting of Mount Everest by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, calling it a “happy and vigorous augury for another Elizabethan era.” The imperialistic tenor of the news notwithstanding, Queen Elizabeth II would never be an empress in name — the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 stripped away that title — but she inherited and sustained an imperial monarchy by assuming the title of head of the Commonwealth.
1953年的加冕日，《泰晤士报》自豪地报道了夏尔巴人丹增·诺盖和新西兰人埃德蒙·希拉里首次成功登顶珠穆朗玛峰的消息，称其为“这个伊丽莎白时代活力四射的预兆”。尽管新闻充满帝国主义基调，伊丽莎白二世女王永远不会成为名义上的女皇——1947年印度和巴基斯坦的独立剥夺了这一头衔——但她通过担任英联邦元首继承并维持了一个帝国君主制。
“The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past,” she insisted in her Christmas Day message of 1953. Its history suggested otherwise. Initially imagined as a consortium of the “white” settler colonies (championed by the South African prime minister Jan Smuts), the Commonwealth had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule as a form of tutelage, educating colonies in the mature responsibilities of self-government. Reconfigured in 1949 to accommodate newly independent Asian republics, the Commonwealth was the empire’s sequel, and a vehicle for preserving Britain’s international influence.
“英联邦与过去的帝国完全不同，”她在1953年的圣诞节致辞中坚持说。从英联邦的历史来看并非如此。英联邦最初被想象为“白人”定居者殖民地的联盟（由南非总理扬·斯穆茨倡导），起源于种族主义和家长式的英国统治概念，作为一种监护形式，教育殖民地承担成熟的自治责任。英联邦在1949年重组以容纳新独立的亚洲共和国，它是帝国的续章，也是保持英国国际影响力的工具。
In photographs from Commonwealth leaders’ conferences, the white queen sits front and center among dozens of mostly nonwhite premiers, like a matriarch flanked by her offspring. She took her role very seriously, sometimes even clashing with her ministers to support Commonwealth interests over narrower political imperatives, as when she advocated multifaith Commonwealth Day services in the 1960s and encouraged a tougher line on apartheid South Africa.
在英联邦领导人会议的照片中，白人女王坐在数十名大多为非白人的总理的中央，就像一位女族长被她的子孙后代簇拥着。她非常认真地对待自己的角色，有时为了英联邦的利益甚至在一些局部政治事务上与她的大臣发生冲突，例如她在1960年代倡导在英联邦纪念日举行多宗教仪式，并鼓励对种族隔离的南非采取更强硬的立场。
What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.
你永远不会从这些照片中知道的——这也是它们的部分意义所在——是隐藏在背后的暴力。1948年，马来亚殖民地总督为打击共产党游击队宣布进入紧急状态，英国军队使用了后来被美国人在越南效仿的平叛战术。1952年，肯尼亚总督宣布进入紧急状态，镇压被称为“茅茅起义”的反殖民运动，在此期间，英国人将数以千计的肯尼亚人围捕到拘留营，对他们实施残暴的、有组织的酷刑。1955年在塞浦路斯，1963年在也门的亚丁，英国总督再次宣布进入紧急状态，以应对反殖民主义的袭击；他们再次折磨平民。与此同时，在爱尔兰，北爱尔兰问题给联合王国带来了实施紧急状态的动力。1979年，爱尔兰共和军暗杀了女王的亲戚路易斯·蒙巴顿勋爵，成为一桩因果报应的事件。蒙巴顿是最后一任印度总督（伊丽莎白与他的侄子菲利普亲王的婚姻也是他促成的）。
We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011. Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.
我们可能永远不会知道，女王对那些以她的名义犯下的罪行知道什么、不知道什么。（君主与首相每周会晤的内容仍是不列颠政权中央的一个黑箱子。）她的臣民也不见得了解事情的全貌。殖民地官员销毁了许多记录——根据殖民地事务大臣的一份报告，这些记录“可能会让女王陛下的政府感到难堪”——并故意将其他记录隐藏在一个秘密档案中，该档案的存在直到2011年才被披露。尽管工党议员芭芭拉·卡塞尔等一些活动人士公开谴责英国的暴行，但未能获得广泛的公众关注。
And there were always more royal tours for the press to cover. Nearly every year until the 2000s, the queen toured Commonwealth nations — a good bet for cheering crowds and flattering footage, her miles clocked and countries visited totted up as if they’d been heroically attained on foot rather than by royal yacht and Rolls-Royce: 44,000 miles and 13 territories to mark her coronation; 56,000 miles and 14 countries for the Silver Jubilee in 1977; an additional 40,000 miles traversing Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand and Canada for the Gold. The British Empire largely decolonized, but the monarchy did not.
而且，总有更多的王室出访活动给媒体报道。直到21世纪，女王几乎每年都会巡访英联邦国家——这是一个好机会，可以吸引欢呼的人群和谄媚的镜头，她的出行里程数和出访国家的总数就好像是靠步行完成的英勇壮举，而不是乘坐皇家游艇和劳斯莱斯做到的：庆祝加冕，行程44000英里，出访13个领地；1977年银禧庆典，56000英里，14个国家；金禧庆典，再加40000英里，出访牙买加、澳大利亚、新西兰和加拿大。大英帝国在很大程度上实现了非殖民化，但君主制却没有。
During the last decades of her reign, the queen watched Britain — and the royal family — struggle to come to terms with its postimperial position. Tony Blair championed multiculturalism and brought devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but he also revived Victorian imperial rhetoric in joining the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Social and regional inequality widened, and London became a haven for superrich oligarchs. Though the queen’s personal popularity rebounded from its low point after the death of Princess Diana, the royal family split over Harry and Meghan’s accusations of racism. In 1997 the queen famously shed a tear when the taxpayer-funded Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned, a few months after escorting the last British governor from Hong Kong. Boris Johnson floated the idea of building a new one.
在女王统治的最后几十年里，她目睹了英国——以及王室——努力适应其后帝国地位。托尼·布莱尔倡导多元文化主义，将权力下放到威尔士、苏格兰和北爱尔兰，但他又参加了美国领导的对阿富汗和伊拉克的入侵，从而恢复了维多利亚时代的帝国主义论调。社会和地区的不平等扩大了，伦敦成为超级富豪寡头的天堂。尽管女王的个人声望在戴安娜王妃去世后从最低点反弹，但王室因哈里和梅根的种族主义指控而分裂。1997年，在护送最后一位英国总督离开香港几个月后，由纳税人出资的皇家游艇“大不列颠号”退役，女王的落泪成了著名的瞬间。鲍里斯·约翰逊提出了建造一艘新游艇的想法。
In recent years, public pressure has been building on the British state and institutions to acknowledge and make amends for the legacies of empire, slavery and colonial violence. In 2013, in response to a lawsuit brought by victims of torture in colonial Kenya, the British government agreed to pay nearly 20 million pounds in damages to survivors; another payout was made in 2019 to survivors in Cyprus. Efforts are underway to reform school curriculums, to remove public monuments that glorify empire and to alter the presentation of historic sites linked to imperialism.
近年来，公众对英国政权和体制的压力越来越大，要求他们承认帝国、奴隶制和殖民暴力的遗留问题，并且做出补偿。2013年，作为对肯尼亚殖民地酷刑受害者提起的诉讼的回应，英国政府同意向幸存者支付近2000万英镑的赔偿金；2019年，又向塞浦路斯的幸存者支付了一笔赔偿金。改革学校课程、移除美化帝国主义的公共纪念碑、改变帝国主义相关历史遗迹呈现方式的工作也正在进行中。
Yet xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with Liz Truss, now the prime minister, as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of “Global Britain” steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.
然而，在英国脱欧的有毒政治推动下，仇外心理和种族主义一直在抬头。以英国主导的英联邦替代欧洲一体化这个欧洲怀疑论者（左翼和右翼都有）经营多年的想法被约翰逊政府（现任首相丽兹·特拉斯曾是他的外交大臣）利用了起来，开始拥抱一个沉浸在片面之辞和帝国怀旧中的“全球不列颠”愿景。
The queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age to persist. She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that Britain alone saved the world from fascism. She had a personal relationship with Winston Churchill, the first of her 15 prime ministers, whom Mr. Johnson pugnaciously defended against well-founded criticism of his retrograde imperialism. And she was, of course, a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation: From perhaps one person of color in 200 Britons at her accession, the 2011 census counted one in seven.
女王的长寿使得第二个伊丽莎白时代的过时幻想得以延续。她代表着人们与第二次世界大战的鲜活联系，以及英国单枪匹马将世界从法西斯主义手中拯救出来的爱国神话。她与温斯顿·丘吉尔有私人关系——他是她治下经历的15位首相中的第一位——而关于丘吉尔向帝国主义倒退的那些有凭有据的批评曾引起约翰逊的激烈驳斥。在这个迅速多元化的国家，她是所有流通的硬币、纸币和邮票上的白人面孔：在她登基时，每200个英国人中大概有一个是有色人种，而2011年的人口普查显示，每七个英国人当中就有一个是有色人种。
Now that she is gone, the imperial monarchy must end too. It’s well past time, for instance, to act on calls to rename the Order of the British Empire, a distinction that the queen has bestowed on hundreds of Britons every year for community service and contributions to public life. The queen served as head of state in more than a dozen Commonwealth realms, more of which may now follow the example of Barbados, which decided “to fully leave our colonial past behind” and become a republic in 2021. The queen’s death could also aid a fresh campaign for Scottish independence, which she was understood to oppose. Though Commonwealth leaders decided in 2018 to fulfill the queen’s “sincere wish” and recognize Prince Charles as the next head of the Commonwealth, the organization emphasizes that the role is not hereditary.
既然她不在了，帝国主义君主制也必须终结。例如，早该采取行动，重新为大英帝国勋章命名，女王每年都会将这一荣誉授予数百名为社区服务和公共生活作出贡献的英国人。女王曾经担任过十几个英联邦国家的元首，现在更多的国家可能会效仿巴巴多斯，后者决定“完全抛弃我们的殖民历史”，在2021年成为共和国。女王的去世也可能有助于新一轮的苏格兰独立运动，据悉，她反对苏格兰独立。尽管英联邦领导人在2018年决定实现女王的“真诚愿望”，承认查尔斯王子为下一任英联邦元首，但该组织强调，这个角色不是世袭的。
Those who heralded a second Elizabethan age hoped Elizabeth II would sustain British greatness; instead, it was the era of the empire’s implosion. She will be remembered for her tireless dedication to her job, whose future she attempted to secure by stripping the disgraced Prince Andrew of his roles and resolving the question of Queen Camilla’s title. Yet it was a position so closely linked to the British Empire that even as the world transformed around her, myths of imperial benevolence persisted. The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like those of Scandinavia. That would be an end to celebrate.
曾经预言第二个伊丽莎白时代到来的人希望伊丽莎白二世能保持英国的伟大；然而，这成了一个帝国崩溃的时代。人们会记住她对工作孜孜不倦的奉献，她剥夺名誉扫地的安德鲁王子的职务，并解决了卡米拉王后的头衔问题，试图以此保住君主本身的未来。然而，这个职位与大英帝国的联系如此紧密，即使她周围的世界发生了变化，皇恩浩荡的神话依然存在。新国王现在有机会节制王室的豪奢，更新英国的君主制，使其更像斯堪的纳维亚半岛的君主制，从而产生真正的历史影响。那将是一个值得庆祝的结局。