里约需要一场振奋人心的开幕式 | 纽约时报
Summer Olympics Begin With Uplifting Spectacle in Gritty Rio
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里约奥运会演绎美轮美奂巴西风
RIO DE JANEIRO — If there was a nation in need of an uplifting spectacle at this moment, even in the form of a public relations exercise, it was Brazil.
里约热内卢。如果说哪个国家此时亟待一场盛会来振奋人心，不惜以公关手段的方式，那么这个国家就是巴西。
The first South American country to host the Olympics is reeling from an astonishing combination of political upheaval and economic unret. Its efforts to stage the world’s biggest sporting event met trouble at every turn,from the Zika virus to polluted waters to budget cuts so deep that basic operations became strained.
第一个举办奥运会的南美国家正因令人瞠目的政治剧变和经济动荡而步履蹒跚。努力承办世界上最盛大的体育赛事动辄遇阻——寨卡病毒，水质污染，预算大幅削减以至基本运转都捉襟见肘。
译评：黑别人家奥运是西方的长项，可这次巴西着实有太多槽点，总统都是“代”的，也难怪多国政要缺席，偏右翼的特梅尔政府是否仍然有利于开放的巴西尚待观察，阿根廷、巴拉圭南美小伙伴国家的元首都以拒绝出席抵制特梅尔，更难谈大国首脑了。
So the opening ceremony of the Summer Games arrived Friday nightas a salve, disguising the wounds for a few hours and letting Brazilianscelebrate everything from the waves of immigrants still putting down stakeshere to Alberto Santos Dumont, the aristocratic bon vivant whom Brazilianscredit with inventing the airplane.
于是周五上演的夏季奥运会开幕式不啻为一种安慰，在短短几小时内掩盖了伤口，让巴西人举国欢庆，内容包括一切，从至今仍影响巴西的历次移民潮到亚伯托•桑托斯•杜蒙——巴西人认为这位锦衣玉食的贵族发明了飞机。
译评：巴西人认为飞机的发明者并非莱特兄弟，而是巴西人杜蒙，这里美国人酸酸地揶揄，杜蒙是个锦衣玉食的贵族，暗示巴西人的高科技仍然是白人文化。
Over the past several Olympic cycles, the gigantic cost of hosting the Games has drawn as much attention as the athletic performances. Host countries like China and Russia have used the Olympics as a show of force. The vibe, and the budget, are different here. These are a no-frills,budget-conscious Olympics — even if the opening ceremony dazzled.
在过去几轮奥运会上，举办奥运会的巨大成本与运动成绩同样引人注目。中国和俄罗斯等主办国将奥运会视作一场实力秀。里约的氛围和预算则大不相同，这里没有华而不实的花哨玩意，相反厉行节约，即便开幕式堪称令人炫目。
The organizers of the ceremony even chose a word in Portuguese, gambiarra, to describe their own efforts to put on a show amid Rio’s pared-down Olympic ambitions. Translating the word, which is pronounced GAHM-beeah-hah,offers its own challenges, so they offered a few options: jerry-rig, quick fix,do a MacGyver.
开幕式组织者甚至选择了葡萄牙词语“gambiarra”，用来形容里约的奥运雄心被削减后上演开幕式所作出的努力。这个词如何翻译带来了挑战，他们提供了几个选项：替代、权宜、凑合事儿。（译者注：中国解说翻译为“事半功倍”）
The Games have even been marred by scandal emanating from half a world away: nearly third of Russia’s Olympic delegation was barred from the Rio Olympics after revelations emerged of a state-sponsored doping program.Russia’s delegation on Friday night was severely depleted.
本届奥运会甚至因发源于半个世界之外的丑闻而蒙尘：近三分之一的俄罗斯奥林匹克代表团因国家资助的兴奋剂项目曝光被禁止参加里约奥运会，周五晚上亮相的俄罗斯代表团大幅缩减。
Extolling achievements like Rio’s pioneering replanting of itsurban forests and the tolerance, however fragile, that characterizes much of Brazilian society, a message emanated from the opening ceremony: Some order andprogress, the words optimistically emblazoned on the country’s flag, might justemerge from the creative chaos that persists here.
开幕式称赞里约探索再造城市森林的成就，赞美她的宽容精神，尽管后者仍显脆弱，却代表了巴西社会的主要特征。开幕式也传递了这一信息：某种秩序和进步——两个被乐观地纹在国旗上的词汇——可能正源自这里一直以来具有创造力的混乱。
Pointing to the ceremony’s honoring of Brazil’s achievements as a racially diverse nation and its call for action to combat global warming,Fernando Meirelles, the director of “City of God” — about Rio’s favelas, the gritty urban areas that largely formed as squatter settlements(棚户区) — and one of the event’s creative directors, proudly proclaimed that it would rankle conservative figures at home and abroad.
《上帝之城》的导演费尔南多•梅里尔斯是开幕式的创意导演之一，《上帝之城》是一部描写里约贫民窟的影片，那里主要由棚户区构成的城市区域。他指出开幕式赞扬了巴西作为一个种族多样化的国家取得的成就，并呼吁采取行动抗击全球变暖，他骄傲地宣称这会让国内外那些保守主义人物咬牙切齿。
译评：巴西和秩序似乎有点距离，里约更难逃脏乱差的印象，但巴西在经济政治困境中，并没有选择狭隘的民族主义，对移民和难民张开怀抱，甚至让不少欧洲国家赧颜，《纽约时报》则一如既往地在任何话题的文章中，都不忘黑一把特朗普。
Political leaders certainly hope that the Olympics will be a turning point in the fortunes of Brazil and Rio, whose quest to host the Olympics began in the early 1990s — a time when the city was wallowing in crisis, enduring a long decline after authorities built Brasília, the new capital, from scratch deep in the country’s interior and transferred much of the federal bureaucracy there in the 1960s.
政治领导人当然希望奥运会成为巴西和里约运气的转折点，巴西从九十年代初就寻求主办奥运会，当时城市深陷危机，原因是当局在六十年代迁都内陆的巴西利亚，平地建城，把多数联邦机构迁到新首都，此后里约一路衰落。
Still, the International Olympic Committee frequently frustrated Rio’s ambitions. It was only in 2009, when Brazil’s star was on the rise as the economy prospered from a commodities boom, that Rio was finally awarded the Games. Elated crowds celebrated on the sands of Copacabana.
国际奥委会多次阻挠里约申奥的雄心，直到2009年，商品经济繁荣让巴西腾飞，里约终于获选主办奥运会，当时欢乐的群众在科帕卡巴纳海岸庆祝。
“I’ve never felt more pride in Brazil,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,the country’s president at the time, said when Rio got the Games.“Now, we are going to show the world we can be a great country.”
时任巴西总统卢拉在里约赢下奥运会主办权时说：“在巴西，我从未如此骄傲，现在我们准备向世界表明，我们是个伟大的国家。”
But much has changed since that exuberant day. Brazil’s economy is mired in its worst recession in decades. Rio is grappling with resurgent violent crime. And colossal corruption scandals are casting a pall er the nation’s political establishment.
繁荣之后，一切都变了。巴西经济深陷几十年来最严重的衰退，里约勉力对付复兴的暴力犯罪，庞大的腐败丑闻给国家的政界投上阴影。
The city’s preparations for the Olympics were marked by a long string of fiascos, including the recent collapse of an oceanfront bicycle path that killed two men. Mr. da Silva, universally known as Lula, did not even attend the opening ceremony — he is instead preparing for a trial on charges that he tried to obstruct an inquiry into a massive bribery scheme at Petrobras, the national oil company.
里约筹备奥运会过程中出现一连串的失败，包括最近海边的自行车道坍塌，导致两人死亡。卢拉甚至没有参加开幕式，他正准备出庭受审，被控阻碍对巴西石油公司的大规模贿赂事件进行调查。
Mr. da Silva’s protégée and successor, Dilma Rousseff, who was suspended as president to face an impeachment trial, also skipped the show. Instead, it was the interim president, Michel Temer — who had emerged victorious in a power struggle in May — who was in attendance.
卢拉的女门徒和继承人罗塞夫被停职，并面临弹劾审判，她也没有出席开幕式，代总统米歇尔•特梅尔代而出席，他在五月的权斗中胜出。
“We Brazilians can say with pride that we are one of the most mixed-race countries of the world,” Mr. Temer said in an essay published on Friday. Still, he left unsaid how he named a cabinet without any Afro-Brazilians or women, making him a target of scorn in much of the country.
周五特梅尔发文表示：“我们巴西人可以骄傲地说，我们是世界上种族最多样的国家之一。”他却没有提到，他提名的内阁中没有一名非裔巴西人，没有一名女性，这让他成为国家许多人轻蔑的对象。
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里约绿色五环精彩绽放
Without delving explicitly into politics, the ceremony explored Brazil’s complex history, including its settling by indigenous peoples, its colonization by Portuguese explorers and the tragic scope of the country’s slave trade.
开幕式没有直接指涉政治，而是回溯了巴西复杂的历史，包括原住民定居、葡萄牙探险家殖民和该国奴隶贸易的巨大悲剧。
About 51 percent of the population define themselves as black or mixed race, according to the 2010 census. The scale of Brazil’s slave trade is hard to fathom. The country received about 4.9 million slaves through the Atlantic trade, compared with mainland North America’s importation of 389,000, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
2010年调查显示，约51%的巴西人口认为自己是黑人或混血。巴西奴隶贸易的规模很难测算，跨大西洋奴隶贸易数据库显示，通过跨大西洋贸易，该国接收了约490万奴隶，而北美大陆的人口进口只有38.9万。
Rio, a city without a major slavery museum, is still grappling with how to discuss the ways the slave trade affected its development — even though it received more than 1.8 million African slaves, more than any other city in the Americas.
里约还没有一座大型的奴隶博物馆，城市仍在纠结于奴隶贸易如何对发展产生影响，尽管里约接受了超过180万非洲奴隶，比美洲任何其他城市都多。
In an interview, the rapper Karol Conka said that she had directed her performance at Mr. Temer, the broadly unpopular interim president, and Jair Bolsonaro, an ultraconservative congressman with rising political clout who talks with revulsion about Haitian immigrants to Brazil and defends the torture of drug traffickers.
饶舌歌手Karol Conka接受采访时说，她的表演针对不受大众欢迎的代总统特梅尔和得势的极端保守议员Jair Bolsonaro，后者强烈反感来自海地的移民，为对贩毒者施以酷刑进行辩护。
“They need to understand what empathy is,” said Ms. Conka, 29, who is from the southern city of Curitiba. “The current political moment in Brazil is just unpleasant. Slavery might not exist anymore but blacks in our society are still undervalued and attacked on social media. The only way to help the new generation is with education.”
29岁的Conka来自南部城市库里蒂巴。她说：“他们应该明白什么叫同情心，巴西当下的政治是令人不快的。奴隶制可能不复存在了，但我们社会中的黑人仍然受到歧视，在社交媒体上遭到攻击。帮助新一代人的唯一办法就是教育。”
Reflecting, perhaps, the resilience of freedom of expression in Brazil’s unruly democracy, some observers voiced displeasure over the lavish ceremony.
有些观察者还对铺张的开幕式表示不满，这可能反映出巴西这个不太讲究规则的民主国家对自由言论的宽容。
Letícia Bahia, a psychologist and feminist commentator,questioned the prominence given to Gisele Bundchen, the Brazilian supermodel who catwalked to the sounds of the song “Girl from Ipanema.”
心理学家和女性主义评论员Leticia Bahia质疑巴西超模吉赛尔•邦辰的出场，她在《来自依帕内玛的女孩》音乐中踏猫步高调亮相。
巴西超模吉赛尔•邦辰踏猫步高调亮相
“What does it say about a mixed-race country, boasting about its pride over miscegenation, to choose a supermodel who is white, ultra skinny, blonde and blue-eyed to represent the women of Brazil?” Ms. Bahia said.
Bahia说：“说自己是混血国家，吹嘘自己为跨种族婚姻感到骄傲，却选择一个巨瘦、金发蓝眼的白人超模代表巴西女人？”
Alvaro Siviero, a Brazilian classical pianist and music critic, compared the ceremony to Russia’s in 2014 for the Winter Olympics in Sochi,where literary giants like Gogol, Tolstoy and Nabokov were celebrated.
巴西古典钢琴家和音乐批评家Alvaro Siviero将开幕式与2014年俄罗斯索契冬季奥运会进行比较，索契奥运会向果戈里、托尔斯泰和纳博科夫等文学巨匠致敬。
Why not shine a light on Heitor Villa-Lobos, the prolific Brazilian composer of the 20th century, Mr. Sivieiro asked. Or Machado de Assis, arguably the greatest writer of Brazilian literature.
Siviero问，为什么不去荣耀多产的巴西二十世纪作曲家海托尔•维拉-洛伯斯，或是马查多•德•阿西斯，后者被视作巴西文坛最伟大的作家。
Various stunning musical performances marked the extravaganza, with a new generation of performers like MC Soffia, a 12-year-old rapper from São Paulo’s hardscrabble periphery.
华丽的表演中有各类曼妙的音乐演出，其中包括新生代演员MC•索菲亚，这位12岁的饶舌歌手来自圣保罗贫困的周边地区。
In one of the ceremony’s more thrilling moments, dancers representing the Bate-Bolas, a raucous Carnival tradition in Rio, enacted a clash with others representing Maracatu, another Carnival tradition from Pernambuco in northeast Brazil drawing on African and indigenous influences.
里约传统狂欢节上喧嚷的、代表Bate-Bola的舞者与另一方来自受非洲和土著影响的巴西东北部伯南布哥地区、代表Maracatu的狂欢节舞者之间的对垒，这是开幕式最惊心动魄的时刻之一。
On a more cerebral note, the actors Fernanda Montenegro and Judi Dench read from “Nausea and the Flower,” a 1945 poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in which the poet complained about an array of problems: “It’s still a time of feces, bad poems, hallucinations, and waiting.” And yet, the poet manages to find hope in a flower sprouting through the asphalt.
在一段更为烧脑的发言中，演员佛兰达•蒙特勒罗和朱迪•丹奇朗读了诗人卡洛斯•德鲁蒙德•德•安德拉德1945年的诗歌《恶心与花》，诗人抱怨了一系列问题：“这仍是渣滓的时代，烂诗歌的时代，幻觉的时代和等待的时代。” 但诗人试图在冲破沥青绽放的一朵花中寻找希望。
Building on that thought, the ceremony issued a call to action to combat global warming, putting forward the strategy of reforestation to capture carbon. Curiously absent from all of this was any mention of Petrobras, the national oil company that ranks among the world’s largest petroleum concerns.
在这种思考之上，开幕式发出抗击全球变暖的号召，提出再森林化以捕获碳排放的战略。令人好奇地是，这一切都未提及巴西石油公司，这家国家石油公司是世界上因石油引发的最大担忧之一。
译评：这是记者常用的“不地道”勾连法。所有的恶都是人类造的，甚至发达国家造的更多些，可说既然作恶就无法言善，这就难免霸道——伦敦奥运会难道提及2010年英国石油公司在墨西哥湾的石油泄漏污染事件吗？
Its huge oil discoveries turbocharged Brazil’s economy, enabling the country to project clout when it was awarded the Olympics. Now Petrobras, a major emitter of greenhouse gases, is mired in scandal following revelations that Brazil’s leaders used the energy behemoth to fund their political campaign.
石油大发现加速了巴西经济的腾飞，这为其获选举办奥运会发挥了影响力。巴西领导人被曝借助这家能源巨头资助选举后，作为温室气体排放大户的巴西石油公司深陷丑闻之中。
8月6号，运动会正式开始，究竟是运动员吸引了聚光灯，还是主办国难以摆脱的问题占了上风？世界在观察。