惠特曼的三大爱好：吃肉、留胡子、节制房事

Walt Whitman’s lost advice to America’s men: meat, beards and not too much sex

A simple meat diet, no sweets, fried food or even vegetables, a brisk leap out of bed in the mornings and not exhausting oneself “continually among women”. 

只吃肉，不吃甜品、油炸食品甚至蔬菜，一大早就从床上跳下来，不要在“裙钗间”耗损身体。

A 150-year-old self-help guide written by one of the United States’ most revered poets, Walt Whitman, , offering some unique advice to 19th-century American man on how to obtain a more “noble physique” – and some of it wouldn’t seem so out of place today.

美国最受推崇的诗人之一惠特曼，他150年前的养生指南被发现，书中给19世纪的美国男人如何获得“高尚的体格”提出独一无二的建议，其中一些迄今仍不算过时。

Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” is a 47,000-word treatise on how to be a real man, a work that had been long forgotten since it appeared in 13 weekly instalments in a long defunct New York newspaper over the autumn of 1858. In long and sometimes rambling prose, the poet extols the virtues of fresh air, of good footwear, of naked sunbathing and even of facial hair. 

惠特曼的《男子健康与训练》是一篇47000字的论文，传授怎样做一个真正的男人，文章1858年在一个早已倒闭的纽约报纸上连载13周后就被以往。诗人拉拉杂杂地讴歌了新鲜空气、穿一双好鞋、裸晒太阳浴甚至留胡子的功效。

A beard, said Whitman, is preferable in a man as “a great sanitary protection to the throat”. Too much “mere repetition” of sex, however, is to be avoided as that will produce only sickly, weedy children.

惠特曼说，男人最好留胡子，可以作为”对喉咙的卫生保护“。但要避免房事太“频繁”，否则生的小孩是秧鸡仔。

Dubbed “America’s poet”, Whitman was born in Long Island in 1819, and left school at 11 to start work as an office boy in a newspaper. He went on to become a prolific poet, essayist and journalist.

被誉为“美国诗人”的惠特曼1819年出生于长岛，11岁辍学在一家报社工作。他后来成为多产的诗人、散文家和记者。

It was while looking through the work Whitman had produced under his journalistic pen names that University of Houston doctorate student Zachary Turpin found a single reference to “Manly Health” by Mose Velsor, and ordered the microfilm of the newspaper, the New York Atlas, from his library. 

休斯顿大学博士生Zachary Turpin通过惠特曼当记者时的笔名搜索他的作品时，发现了索引署名为Mose Velsor的《男子健康》，并从图书馆索取了New York Atlas报纸的微缩影像。

By the time it turned up Turpin had forgotten all about it but managed to find an old microfilm player and was astonished to find the huge series, which adds greatly to the cache of Whitman’s known work, much of which has been lost down the years, buried in old newspapers thought too parochial to be digitised. 

Turpin把这事给忘了，但设法找到一台微缩影片播放器时，吃惊地发现如此大量的连载，极大丰富了惠特曼的已知作品，多年来，惠特曼的大部分作品都已遗失，埋藏在被认为太地域性而不值得数字化的报纸中。

Here he found Whitman, who was a middle-aged man at the time, urging the reader: “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up! … Out in the morning!

他发现惠特曼在中年时劝告读者：“你，坐办公室的、码字儿的、久坐不动的、有钱的、无所事事的，给你们一个建议。起床！早早起床！”

“America has mentality enough, but needs a far nobler physique.” And “there is no doubt, as things now are, among the young men of modern civilised life, in cities, that a healthy manly virility seems to be almost lost – seems to have given place to a morbid, almost insane, pursuit of women, especially of the lowest ranges of them, for the mere repetition of the sensual pleasure.

“美国人的思考够多了，可需要更高尚的体格。”“毫无疑问，现在看来，现代文明社会中的年轻男子，把健康阳刚的男子气概都丢了，恹恹不振、脑子不沉迷女性尤其是最贱的女人，只沉溺于反复的感官愉悦中。”

“A man that exhausts himself continually among women is not fit to be, and cannot be, the father of sound and manly children,” he states. “They will be puny and scrofulous – a torment to themselves and to those who have the charge of them.”

“一个在裙钗间耗尽身体的男人不适合，也不能够成为健康强壮孩子的父亲。孩子们会羸弱、病态，对自己是个折磨，对监护他们的人也一样。”

Whitman, who found a surprising cult status as a  series Breaking Bad, was gay, his poetry often suffused with homoerotic imagery. 

大获成功的美剧《绝命毒师》中，惠特曼成为推动情节的偶像，他的形象是同性恋，诗歌常常充满了耽美的意象。

This series, said Whitman expert Ed Folsom, a University of Iowa English professor and editor of the , was written when the poet was struggling to make ends meet after his book Leaves of Grass was failing to sell and at a period where little is known about his life. 

爱荷华大学英语教授、《惠特曼季刊》的编辑Ed Folsom说这一连载作品写作时，作者的《草叶集》卖不出去，自己也一文不名，他正想法子弥补家用。

“I see it as kind of a hymn to the male body – a love song to the male body,” Folsom told the Houston Chronicle.

Folsom对《休斯顿记事报》说：“我认为这是对男性身体的赞歌，对男性身体的礼赞。”

Perhaps the view that might jar most with modern health and environmental concerns is Whitman’s view on diet – although not completely as he does advocate excluding pies and sugar.

可能惠特曼对饮食的观点与现代健康和环境关切不符，尽管也并非完全抵牾，毕竟他主张不吃派和糖。

“In our view, if nine-tenths of all the various culinary preparations and combinations, vegetables, pastry, soups, stews, sweets, baked dishes, salads, things fried in grease, and all the vast array of confections, creams, pies, jellies, &c, were utterly swept aside from the habitual eating of the people, and a simple meat diet substituted in their place – we will be candid about it, and say in plain words, an almost exclusive meat diet – the result would be greatly, very greatly, in favour of that noble-bodied, pure-blooded and superior race we have had a leaning toward, in these articles of ours.”

“在我看来，如果把各种烹饪食材和制品、蔬菜、面糕、汤、炖品、甜品、烤制品、沙拉、油炸食品以及各种蜜饯、奶油、派、果冻等等，全都从人们的食谱中扫除，只吃肉，说白了吧，全肉宴，结果将大大地有利于培育我们期待的那种健康、纯血和高等的种族。”

The University of Iowa-based Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has  online – together with an introductory essay by Turpin.

爱荷华的《惠特曼季刊》在线刊登了这13篇文章，附有Turpin的导读。

Whitman often expressed anxiety about his work vanishing. 

惠特曼经常忧虑他的作品不复存在。

“Some day I’ll die,” he told a friend, Horace Traubel. “Maybe surprise you all by a sudden disappearance: then where’ll my book be? That’s the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dread – the dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lost – lost forever.”

他和朋友Horace Traubel说：“有一天我死了，可能会突然消失，让你们大吃一惊：那时我的书怎么办？这件事让我焦虑：多数作者都害怕，害怕他们写的东西被推到一边，甚至永远都丢失了。”

Happily for Whitman, this is one work which has been restored.

惠特曼应该感到高兴，这部作品被再次发现了。