‘We Hillbillies Have Got to Wake the Hell Up’: Review of Hillbilly Elegy
“我们这些山巴佬该醒醒了”——《山乡挽歌》书评
A family chronicle of the crackup of poor working-class white Americans.
一份贫穷糟糕美国白人工薪阶层的家庭编年史
【编注：hillbilly和redneck、yankee、cracker一样，都是对美国某个有着鲜明文化特征的地方群体的蔑称，本文译作『山巴佬』】
Read this remarkable book: It is by turns tender and funny, bleak and depressing, and thanks to Mamaw, always wildly, wildly profane. An elegy is a lament for the dead, and with Hillbilly Elegy Vance mourns the demise of the mostly Scots-Irish working class from which he springs. I teared up more than once as I read this beautiful and painful memoir of his hillbilly family and their struggles to cope with the modern world.
阅读这本非凡之作的感受时而温柔有趣，时而沮丧压抑，而且，亏了他的祖母，还往往十分狂野，狂野地对神不敬。挽歌是对死人的悼念。Vance用《山乡挽歌》缅怀了苏格兰-爱尔兰裔工人阶级的衰亡，他自己便出身于此阶级。这本书描写了他的乡下家庭及其在现代社会中的挣扎，在阅读这本美丽而痛苦的回忆录时，我几度流泪。
Vance grew up poor with a semi-employed, drug-addicted mother who lived with a string of five or six husbands/boyfriends in the fading Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio. The only constants in his chaotic life were his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw. Vance nearly failed out of high school but eventually graduated from Yale Law School. That personal journey is in the book, but Vance’s main story is about the ongoing collapse of hillbilly culture as seen through the lens of his own family’s disordered experiences.
Vance在贫穷的环境中长大，他母亲半失业且吸毒成瘾，同她的五六个丈夫/男友生活在地处铁锈带、正在凋零中的俄亥俄州米德尔敦。他混乱糟糕的生活中唯一不变的是他的祖父母。Vance差点从高中退学，但最终还是从耶鲁法学院毕业。这段个人生活也被写进了书中，但书的主要情节是透过作者自己家庭颠沛流离的经历来描绘乡村文化的不断衰败。
Before going on, I should make a disclosure: Like Vance, I grew up as a hillbilly. Neither of my grandfathers could read nor write. My paternal grandparents, Mom and Daddy Bailey, left the Appalachian coal country of McDowell County, West Virginia, around 1950 and bought a dairy farm 80 miles away in Washington County, Virginia. I grew up on that farm.
在继续往下写之前，我要坦白：同Vance一样，我也是个山巴佬。我的爷爷外公都不会读写。我的爷爷、妈妈和爸爸Bailey在1950年左右离开了西弗吉尼亚州阿巴拉契亚山麓的煤城麦克道尔，在离弗吉尼亚州的华盛顿县80英里的地方买了处奶牛场。我便在那农场长大。
For most of my childhood, all six of my grandparents’ adult children lived within 10 miles of the home place, as did my dozens of cousins. Every Sunday, a massive family midday “dinner”—somewhere around 40 to 50 people—convened at my grandparents’ house. I left the farm at age 16, when my parents got divorced. I will spare you further details, but let’s just say that the Baileys did not model their family life on the Waltons. Before I made my escape to the University of Virginia, I lived for a while with my mother and one of my sisters in a rented trailer.
在我童年的大部分时间，我祖父母的六个成年孩子都生活在离家10英里的范围内，我的表兄妹们自然也是如此。每个星期天中午，超级家宴——大约40到50个人——就会在我祖父母的家里上演。我16岁时离开那个农场，当时我父母离婚了。多的我就不讲了，我只告诉你，我们Bailey家后来在沃尔顿并没有继续那种家庭生活。在我逃到弗吉尼亚大学之前，我、妈妈和我的一个妹妹在一个租来的拖车里生活了一段时间。
HarperCollinsThough he mostly grew up in the Rust Belt, Vance identifies as a hillbilly—his family’s roots are in the hollers of Breathitt County, Kentucky. Vance’s Papaw and Mamaw, like tens of thousands of other mountain folk, left coal country in 1947 to find work and their shot at the American Dream in the booming steelworks 200 miles north. As a kid, Vance would accompany his grandparents as they traveled back nearly every weekend to visit with family in Kentucky. Middletown was Vance’s “address,” but the town of Jackson in Breathitt County where his great-grandmother Mamaw Blanton lived is his “home.”
尽管Vance基本在铁锈带长大，但他自认为是个“山巴佬”——他家庭的根在肯塔基州布莱斯郡的溪谷中。Vance的爷爷奶奶，像成千上万其他山民一样，在1947年离开煤城到200英里以北的新兴钢铁企业寻找工作和实现美国梦的机会。小时候，每当他祖父母周末回到肯塔基，Vance总是陪伴他们左右。米德尔顿是Vance的“住址”，但他祖父母生活过的布莱斯郡的杰克逊才是他的“家”。
Today hillbilly culture is scarred by spectacular rates of joblessness, single motherhood, drug addiction, crime, and incarceration. Vance places most of the blame for this on the hillbillies’ own shoulders. Globalization and automation decimated the manufacturing jobs that many low-skilled workers leveraged into a middle-class lives in the mid-20th century, he argues, but that’s no excuse for fatalistic victimhood now.
今天的山巴佬文化被骇人的高失业率、单身母亲、毒品上瘾、犯罪和牢狱搞得遍体鳞伤。Vance认为责任主要在山巴佬自己。全球化和自动化削减了制造业的工作岗位，而20世纪中叶许多低技能的工人正是靠这些工作跻身中产阶级。但这并不能成为当下宿命论式的受害者情结的借口，Vance强调。
Throughout the book, Vance offers stories from family, friends, and neighbors that illustrate the growing cultural dysfunction among poor whites. For example, he takes a job at a floor tile warehouse for $13 an hour where one of his co-workers is a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. The warehouse owner gives the girlfriend a job as a receptionist. The 19-year-old and his girlfriend are warned about their increasingly frequent absences and tardiness, and eventually both were fired. The 19-year lashes out at the manager, saying, “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know that I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?”
通过这本书，Vance用自己家庭、朋友和邻居的故事向我们展示了贫穷白人中的文化失调。举个例子，他曾在一个地板瓷砖仓库工作，每小时13美元，他的一个同事是个19岁的小伙子，有个怀了孕的女友。仓库的主人给他同事的女友一份前台接待的工作。这个19岁的小伙子和他的女友因为越来越频繁的缺席和懈怠而被警告，并最终被解雇。小伙子对着经理大吼大叫，“你怎么能这样对我？你不知道我还有个怀孕的女友吗？”
At another point, Vance meets an old acquaintance in a Middletown bar who tells him he recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. Later, the same guy was complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life.
还有一次，Vance在米德尔敦的一个酒吧碰见一位老熟人，那人告诉Vance，自己因为厌倦了早起而辞掉了工作。之后这个家伙又在Facebook上抱怨“奥巴马的经济政策”如何影响了他的生活。
Hillbilly culture is suspicious of outsiders and enforces a violent code of honor. Vance recalls that boys who got good grades in school were considered “sissies” or “faggots,” an attitude that keeps people ill-educated and isolated. As their hopes for achieving the American Dream have faded, his hillbilly relatives, friends, and neighbors have come to see the institutions of society, government, and the economy as rigged against them. This has engendered a deep and debilitating pessimism among poor working-class whites. Hillbillies are killing themselves so effectively with drugs and alcohol that their life expectancies are actually falling.
山乡文化对外来者警惕怀疑并且极端强调荣誉。Vance回忆小时候在学校得了高分的男孩会被当成“娘炮”或“基佬”，这种态度让山巴佬无法受到良好教育并且被孤立。随着他们实现美国梦的机会逐渐消失，他的山巴佬亲戚、朋友和邻居逐渐认为社会体系、政府和经济都被操纵着跟他们作对。这在贫穷白人中催生了一股根深蒂固的、让人颓废的悲观情绪。山巴佬们用毒品和酒精毒害自己，他们的生活前景越发惨淡。
Does Vance offer any solutions for white working-class despondency and fatalism? “These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them,” he argues. “We hillbillies have got to wake the hell up.” He provides several examples of members of his extended family who have managed to leave poverty and family dysfunction behind. Tellingly, nearly all of them are women, got educations beyond high school, and married men who were not hillbillies.
Vance是否为白人工薪阶级的悲观情节和宿命论提供了任何解决方案呢？“这些问题不是由政府或企业或任何人搞出来的。我们自己搞出了这些问题，只有我们自己能搞定它们，”他认为，“我们山巴佬们该清醒了。”他从他的亲戚中举了几个成功摆脱贫穷和家庭分崩离析命运的例子。值得一提的是，几乎所有人都是女性，在高中后继续接受教育并嫁给了不是山巴佬的男人。
“People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to ‘solve’ the problems of my community,” Vance writes. “I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist.”
“人们有时会问我是否觉得我们可以做些什么来‘解决’我们社区的问题，”Vance写道，“我知道他们想要什么：一个神奇的公共政策或一个创新的政府项目。但解决这些家庭、信仰、文化的问题不像玩魔方，我不认为存在什么通常意义上的解决方案。”
Well, there is at least one “solution.” Vance observes that all of his successful friends from Middletown did one other thing: They got the hell out of Middletown. They moved to where the jobs are. Just as Vance’s hillbilly grandparents left the impoverished hollers of Kentucky to build middle-class lives in Middletown, today’s urban hillbillies could get on the highway to opportunities elsewhere. In the meantime, the government should stop paying poor people to languish in Appalachian and Rustbelt poverty traps.
好吧，至少还是有个“药方”。Vance发现他所有来自米德尔敦的成功朋友都做了一件事：滚出米德尔敦。他们搬到有工作的地方。就像Vance的山巴佬祖父离开肯塔基毫无生气的溪谷并在米德尔敦过上中产生活一样，今天的城市山巴佬可以开车驶向高速公路，去别的地方找到机会。同时，政府应该停止向阿巴拉契亚和铁锈带陷入贫穷陷阱中的穷人发钱。
Vance calls himself a “cultural emigrant.” By leaving his hillbilly culture behind, he has been able to create and enjoy a better life. I made much the same journey from Appalachian poverty to what has been a fascinating and fulfilling life. Vance clearly has some regrets about his cultural emigration; I have none.
Vance称自己为“文化移民”。离开了山乡文化，他懂得了创造并过上了更好的生活。我走过相同的路，从我阿巴拉契亚的穷人生活中走出并过上了精彩充实的生活。Vance显然对自己的文化叛逃有几分悔意，而我没有。
Despite all their failings, Vance fiercely identifies with and loves his people. He is also a natural storyteller who makes compellingly personal the statistics and news stories about the cultural and economic coming apart of America. It hits close to home.
尽管山民在许多方面的失败，Vance仍视自己为其中一员并对他们怀着深厚感情。他天生会讲故事。关于美国在文化和经济上的分裂【编注：此处双关，Coming Apart是政治学家Charles Murray的一部著作】，在别处你会读到平淡的统计数字和新闻故事，但他能让你感同身受。这就是我们的家乡。
翻译：Drunkplane(@Drunkplane-zny)
校对：babyface_claire
编辑：辉格@whigzhou