大学英语（第六册）复习（原文及全文翻译）

This essay on a famous man, whose name is not revealed until almost the end of the piece, is a study of monstrous conceit. Filled with biographical details that keep the reader guessing to the last moment, the essay concludes with a challenging view on the nature of genius: If a genius was so prolific, "is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man?"

THE MONSTER

Deems Taylor

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body -- a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had seclusions of grandeur.

He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.

He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.

It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books … thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them -- usually at somebody else's expense -- but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.

He wrote operas, and no sooner did he have the synopsis of a story, but he would invite -- or rather summon -- a crowed of his friends to his house, and read it aloud to them. Not for criticism. For applause. When the complete poem was written, the friends had to come again, and hear that read aloud. Then he would publish the poem, sometimes years before the music that went with it was written. He played the piano like a composer, in the worst sense of what that implies, and he would sit down at the piano before parties that included some of the finest pianists of his time, and play for them, by the hour, his own music, needless to say. He had a composer's voice. And he would invite eminent vocalists to his house and sing them his operas, taking all the parts.

He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.

He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan -- men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at other loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.

What money he could lay his hands on he spent like an Indian rajah. The mere prospect of a performance of one of his operas was enough to set him to running up bills amounting to ten times the amount of his prospective royalties. No one will ever know -- certainly he never knew -- how much money he owed. We do know that his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000 to pay the most pressing of his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for debt.

He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of women marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a friend to inquire whether he could suggest some wealthy woman -- any wealthy woman -- whom he could marry for her money.

He was completely selfish in his other personal relationships. His liking for his friends was measured solely by the completeness of their devotion to him, or by their usefulness to him, whether financial or artistic. The minute they failed him -- even by so much as refusing dinner invitation -- or began to lessen in usefulness, he cast them off without a second thought. At the end of his life he had exactly one friend left whom he had known even in middle age.

The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record -- in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn't matter in the least.

Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world's greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.

When you consider what he wrote -- thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world's great music-dramatic masterpieces -- when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don't seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars' worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.

What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives? He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn't burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man?

这篇关于一位名人的文章探讨了骇人听闻的自负，但几乎直到结尾才道出他的姓名。文中写满关于此人的生平细节，让读者一直猜到最后一刻。文章在结尾提出了关于天才本质的具有挑战性的观点：如果一位天才如此多产，"时间不允许他像常人一样生活，这有什么好奇怪的呢？"

怪杰

迪姆斯·泰勒

他五短身材，头倒挺大，与他的身躯极不相称——是个一副病态的矮子。他神经脆弱，患有皮肤病。贴身穿戴若比丝绸稍稍粗糙一点，便会使他痛苦不堪。他还有夸大妄想的毛病。

他是个十分自负的怪物。他从来不屑对世界或世人瞧上一眼，除非事情与己有关。他不但自以为是天下头号重要人物，而且在他眼里唯有他一人生活在世间。他确信自己是世上最伟大的戏剧家之一，最伟大的思想家之一，最伟大的作曲家之一。听他侃侃而谈，他便是莎士比亚、贝多芬、柏拉图，集三人于一身。听他谈话其实并无难处，他是世上论事不厌其详的健谈者之一。同他度过一个夜晚，就是听他独自滔滔不绝讲一个夜晚。有时他妙语连珠，有时却令人厌烦不已，但不管是妙趣横生，还是枯燥乏味，他只有一个话题：他自己。总是讲自己想些什么，干些什么。

他一味坚信自己总是正确的。任何人，在最无足轻重的问题上，哪怕露出一丝异议，也会惹得他大发议论。他也许会说上好几小时，鼓起如簧之舌，千方百计证明自己正确无讹。听的人弄得不知所措，到头来为了图个太平，也就同意他的说法了。他压根儿没有想到，与他有过交往的人，并不感到他这个人和他做的事最富有情趣，为之倾倒。他几乎对世间一切问题都有自己的见解，包括素食主义、戏剧、政治以及音乐。为了证实自己的观点，他写了小册子、书信、书……连篇累牍，好几百页。他不仅写了这些东西，拿去出版——所需费用往往是别人支付——而且常常接连好几小时坐着读给朋友和家人听。

他写歌剧，往往刚有了个故事梗概，就邀请——或者更确切些说召集——群友人到他家来，把梗概念给他们听。不是请人批评指正，而是要人拍手叫好。整出戏的歌词写完后，朋友们得再来听他朗诵全剧。然后他就送去发表。有时歌词发表后好几年，配词的乐曲才创作出来。像一般作曲家那样，他也弹钢琴，可弹得糟透了。然而，尽管如此，他却常常坐在钢琴旁，面对包括他那个时代一些最杰出的钢琴家在内的一群人，一小时接一小时地为他们演奏个不停。不消说，弹的都是他自己创作的音乐作品。他有一副作曲家的歌喉。他还常常把著名的声乐家请到家里，亲自演唱他的歌剧给他们听，并且包揽所有角色。

他的感情犹如六岁孩童一般，极易波动，他一不高兴，动辄捶胸顿足，破口大骂，要不就情绪一落千丈，泄气地说什么要去东方削发为僧，了此残生。十分钟后，倘若有什么事使他高兴了，他会冲出门去，在庭院里东奔西跑，要不就在沙发上又蹦又跳或者来个拿大顶。他会因爱犬死了而悲痛欲绝，也会冷酷无情到令古罗马皇帝也不寒而栗。

他几乎没有丝毫责任感。他不仅似乎无力养活自己，而且从未想到过有什么养活自己的责任。他确信世人应该供养他。基于这一信念，他向一切拿得出钱的人借款——不分男女，不分朋友或是素不相识的人。乞讨信他一写就是二十来封。有时低声下气，不知天下有羞耻事；有时趾高气扬地把资助他的殊荣恩赐给他看中的捐助人，要是领受人谢绝这一荣誉，他会气得半死。我没有发现任何记录，表明他曾把钱付给或归还任何不采取法律手段讨钱的借款人。

凡是能弄到手的钱，他花起来像位印度王公。他的某出歌剧可能要上演了，仅凭这么一点指望，他一下子就欠下了十倍于预期版税的账单。没有人搞得清楚——肯定他自己也弄不清——他欠过多少钱。可我们确实知道，一位为他出钱最多的捐助人曾给他六千元，帮助偿还他在某市被催得最紧的债款。一年后，又得给他一万六千元，使他在另一城市安顿下来，并免遭因无力偿还债务而锒铛人狱之灾。

他在其他方面同样无所顾忌。他一生中曾与之发生过关系的女人有长长一串。他的发妻与他度过了二十个年头，对他用情不专一再忍受，一再原谅。他第二个太太原是对他最敬慕的、最忠实的友人之妻，他从挚友之手夺走了她。甚至在他劝说这位太太离开她第一个丈夫之际，他已在给朋友写信，询问能否介绍位阔妇人——有财产就行——为了她的金钱他愿娶她作妻子。

他在别的私人交往中也极端自私。他对朋友有无好感完全要看他们对他是否绝对忠诚，或者要看他们在经济上或艺术上对他是否有用。一旦他们有什么地方让他失望——连谢绝赴宴之类区区小事也不例外——或者不如以前有用了，他便不假思索地同他们断绝来往。他在迟暮之年，只剩下一个朋友，就连这个朋友也是在中年时才认识的。

这位怪杰的大名叫理查德·瓦格纳。我所谈到的关于他的一切情况都记录在案——可资查考的有报纸、警方报告、认识他的人的证言，他自己的信函以及他自传中字里行间透露的情况。可是，这种记录令人奇怪之处，在于它竟无损此公一根毫毛。

这是因为，这位身材瘦小、一副病态、脾气乖戾、具有魔力的矮子在任何时候都无可非议。玩笑是跟我们开的。他是全世界最伟大的剧作家之一，他是一位伟大的思想家，他是迄今全世界最了不起的音乐天才之一。世人确实应该供养他。当你掂量一下他的作品时——十三部歌剧和音乐剧，其中十一部仍然占领舞台，八部无疑可当之无愧地进入世界音乐剧名作之列——当你聆听他的作品时，他欠债不还也好，伤透人心也罢，这些代价似乎不好算大。想一想命运至少曾一度赐给拿破仑，那个毁灭法国、洗劫欧洲的人的那种奢华吧。这样一比，你也许会同意，用几千元的债买来《指环》三部曲并不太贵。

即使他不忠于朋友们和妻子们，又有什么要紧呢？他有一位至死对其忠贞不渝的情侣：音乐。他没有一刻肯放弃过自己的信念，抛弃过自己的理想。他的作品中没有一行乐谱是平庸浅薄之辈构想得出的。纵然他有单调乏味抑或极其拙劣之作，但于单调中仍可见光彩。他最糟的败举中还有伟大的地方。人们聆听他的乐曲时，并不去宽恕他也许曾做过或不曾做过什么。这不是宽恕不宽恕的问题。这是件令人难以置信的事。他体内充满创造力的魔鬼不停地挣扎，挥舞魔爪又抓又挖，试图冲出体外，魔鬼一边撕扯，一边尖声狂叫，要他谱写藏于体内的乐曲。他遭受这般折腾，可是他那可怜的脑袋瓜和身躯却没有被压垮。令人叹为观止的是，即便他是伟大的天才，在短短七十年间要做那么多事也是难以想像的，而他居然完成了。时间不允许他像常人一样生活，这有什么好奇怪的呢？

参考资料：

1. 大学英语精读第六册 Unit 06_大学教材听力 - 可可英语

2. 大学英语精读(第三版) 第六册: Unit5A The Monster(1)_大学教材听力 - 可可英语