2019年经济学人 木雕艺术家大卫·埃斯特利(3)（在线收听）

And it had begun in a moment: that moment in 1974 when his girlfriend Marietta, later his wife, took him to see the Gibbons carvings behind the altar in St James's Church, Piccadilly. He was thun-derstruck, and his reaction was physical: hairs rising on his neck, his skin tingling, and his tongue seeming to move over ivory's coolness and smoothness. ("The thinking of the body", Yeats would have called it.) His first, academic, thought was to write abook about Gibbons; his second was just to pick up tools and teach himself to carve.

它是在一个时刻开始的：那是在1974年，他的女朋友玛丽埃塔，后来成为他妻子，带他去了皮卡迪利大街圣詹姆斯教堂圣坛后面的长臂猿雕像。他被雷击了，他的反应是身体上的：他脖子上的汗毛都竖起来了，他的皮肤刺痛，他的舌头似乎在象牙的凉爽和光滑之上移动。（济慈称此为身体的思考。）他首先的学术上的想法是想描写长臂猿，他的第二个想法是拿起工具教自己雕刻。

The minute his chisel struck the wood, he was inthrall. Ensconced in a cottage in Sussex for eight years, then at Barneveld, he became a ghost's apprentice. But no, that put it too lightly: by the end of a decade, he was a slave. Enslaved not only to his carvings, which about halfway through would start to impose their own ideas on him, but also to the long-dead master he so revered, beside whose work he could only despair about his own. There was a way out.

他的凿子刚触到木头，他就被奴役了。他在苏塞克斯郡的一间小屋里住了八年，然后在巴内维尔德当了一名幽灵学徒。但不，这话说得太轻了：十年后，他成了一名奴隶。不仅被他的雕刻奴役，雕刻在刻到一半时就开始把它们的观点强加给他，但是也被他崇敬的去世已久的大师奴役，与他的工作相比，他只能对自己的工作感到绝望。有一条出路。

That, too, was completely unexpected. In 1986 he was asked to replace a seven-foot Gibbons drop at Hampton Court Palace, south-west of London, which had been destroyed by fire. He hesitated over it. Exact reproduction, which he had never done, was surely the most slavish tutelage of all. Yet the closer he got to Gibbons—first touching a single stem, then whole pieces, scrutinising his technique, following the movements of his gouges and his thought—the more his own workbench seemed transported to 1698, and the more he saw the larval forms of the half-modelled wood with Gibbons's eyes. When after a year the drop was made, with its exhausting ropes of crocuses and trefoil, he was no longer a slave, but a colleague. The spell was broken.

那也是完全出乎意料的。1986年，他被邀请替换掉伦敦西南部的汉普顿皇宫的七尺长臂猿，该长臂猿被火烧毁。他在这件事上犹豫了。他从没做过一模一样的复制品，这肯定是最奴性的监护。但是他离长臂猿更近-先接触一颗茎，然后是整根，仔细检查他的技术，跟着他的凿子的动作和他的想法-他就越感到自己的工作台穿到了1698年，他越是用长臂猿的眼睛来观察这些半模塑的木材的幼虫形态。一年后，长臂猿雕像做成时，带着让人筋疲力尽的番红花和三叶草，他不再是一个奴隶，而是一个同僚。咒语被解除了。