纽约时报 曾红极一时的詹姆斯·鲍德温(2)（在线收听）

    Baldwin first ascended into the ranks of America's great literary figures鲍德温首先跻身美国伟大文学人物的行列，

    while raising, particularly in his searing essays, unsettling questions about the nation's past and present, all rendered with a cutting, double-edged honesty:

    同时提出了有关美国过去和现在的令人不安的问题，尤其是，他极具批判性的文章将所有这些问题都以一种尖锐且双刃剑式的诚实呈现出来：

    He was unsparing but also generous, lyrical, edifying as a conscience.

    他不留情面，但同时内容丰富，感情丰满，像良知一样启迪人心。

    More than a decade and a half before Chase arrived for the "20/20" interview,在接受《20/20》节目记者蔡斯采访的15年前，in the early 1960s, Baldwin would appear on the cover of Time magazine ("The Negro's Push for Equality"),也就是上世纪60年代早期，鲍德温曾登上《时代周刊》的封面（当期主题为“黑人争取平等”），travel for television appearances and lectures and, famously, debate the conservative writer William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965.

    并做客多档电视节目并进行演讲，其中最著名的是1965年与保守派作家威廉·巴克利在剑桥大学进行的辩论。

    As the 1970s closed, though, and the gains of the civil rights movement quelled mainstream fascination, Baldwin no longer roused attention in quite the same way.

    然而，随着上世纪70年代的结束，民权运动的成就压制了主流魅力，鲍德温不再以同样的方式唤起人们的注意。

    In 1979, something convinced ABC that the "20/20" interview wasn't enough. The segment was scrapped.

    1979年，美国广播公司确信《20/20》节目的采访不太合适。因此这段采访的播出计划被取消。

    According to Lovett, the reaction at the show was, roughly, "Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?"据洛维特说，人们对这个节目的反应大致是，“谁会想听过气黑人同性恋的采访？”

    It's not unusual for thinkers' reputations to fade or swell according to society's use for them.

    思想家的声誉会随着社会对他们的消耗而衰退或膨胀，这种情况并不罕见。

    Our use for Baldwin, who died in 1987, has clearly returned to a great high.

    鲍德温于1987年去世，而我们对他的消耗显然已回到极高的水平。

    Over the last decade, writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates have taken him as an explicit model in their works;过去十年里，塔内希斯·科茨等作家在他们的作品中将鲍德温作为明确的典范；an Oscar-nominated documentary, "I Am Not Your Negro," was built from an unfinished Baldwin manuscript,获得奥斯卡提名的纪录片《我不是你的黑鬼》根据鲍德温未完成的手稿改编而成，and an Oscar-nominated film from his novel "If Beale Street Could Talk."另一部获得奥斯卡提名的电影则由鲍德温的小说《假若比尔街能够讲话》改编而成。

    Last year, one of The New Yorker's most-read stories was an essay he wrote for the magazine in 1962.

    去年，《纽约客》杂志最受欢迎的故事之一是鲍德温在1962年为该杂志撰写的文章。

    Among earlier critics, though, Baldwin could face a combination of dissent and humiliation.

    不过，在早期批评者中，鲍德温可能同时面临异议和羞辱。

    By the late 1960s, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a 1992 essay, "Baldwin-bashing was almost a rite of initiation" for a new generation of Black intellectuals;上世纪60年代末，正如小亨利·路易斯·盖茨在1992年的一篇文章中所写，对新一代黑人知识分子来说，“抨击鲍德温几乎是一种启蒙仪式”；he was dismissed with homophobic epithets, or had his erudition interpreted as a capitulation to white intellectuals.

    他被贬斥为仇视同性恋者，或被解读为向白人知识分子低头的人。

    ("Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver's memoir, was laced with homophobic rebukes of Baldwin（埃尔德里奇·克里弗的回忆录《冰上灵魂》中夹杂了对鲍德温的恐同指责，and described "Negro homosexuals" as "frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man";并称“黑人同性恋者”“非常受挫，因为他们生病时不能由白人男子生孩子”；Amiri Baraka criticized Baldwin for "playing the distressed aesthete in Europe.")阿米里·巴拉卡指责鲍德温“在欧洲扮演痛苦的唯美主义者。”）Martin Luther King Jr., in a private conversation recorded and summarized by the F.B.I., claimed to be put off by Baldwin's "poetic exaggeration."马丁·路德·金在被联邦调查局录音整理的私人谈话中声称，鲍德温的“诗意夸张”让他感到不快。

    Even that Time magazine profile noted that Baldwin was "not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Negro leader,"就连《时代》周刊的简介也指出，鲍德温“在任何想象中都不是黑人领袖”，described him as "nervous, slight, almost fragile" and "effeminate in manner," and said he "often loses his audience with overblown arguments."称他“容易紧张、瘦弱、几乎可以说是虚弱”而且“举止娘娘腔”，并说他“经常因言过其实的言论而失去听众”。