紐時賞析／土敘強震摧毀家園 災民重建決心堅定

Earthquakes Destroy. People Rebuild.

地震摧毀家園 災民重建決心堅定

She wanted to retrieve her medicine, and if memory serves all these years later, also a hairbrush and a photograph from her apartment.

她想拿回她的藥，若經過這麼多年沒記錯的話，還想拿回一把梳子跟她公寓裡的一張照片。

It was in 2009, a couple of days after an earthquake flattened L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, in central Italy. Authorities had closed the city to residents, but the woman and her sister had sneaked in. I found her leaning on a cane in a broken, empty plaza staring up at a midcentury building that the quake had somehow sheared horizontally so that it looked like a pot with its lid askew.

那是在2009年，義大利中部阿布魯佐大區首府拉奎拉遭地震夷成平地的幾天後。當局已禁止居民進入該城，但這位婦女跟她妹妹偷溜進去。我發現，她站在一個破敗、空曠的廣場上，拄著一根拐杖盯著一座上世紀中葉的建築物，地震不知以何種方式水平橫切該建築物，看起來就像一個蓋子歪掉的鍋子。

She asked for help.

她尋求援助。

From afar, we measure catastrophes like the calamity in Turkey and Syria by totaling the numbers of dead and buildings destroyed. Reports describe a spectacularly wide disaster zone, recovery efforts that are too slow, leaving untold hundreds and possibly thousands of victims still buried, alive and dead, under the rubble — and hundreds of thousands more in the cold without homes, food, drinking water or medical supplies.

從遠處看，我們透過罹難人數和建築物被摧毀總數，衡量像土耳其和敘利亞的災難。有報導描述一個驚人的廣大災區，復原工作過於緩慢，數百名甚至數千名受害者恐仍被埋在廢墟下，生死未卜，還有數十萬人在寒冷環境中生活，沒有房子、食物、飲用水或醫療用品。

It is too much to process, the loss of lives and history. The tiny Jewish community in Antakya, in central Turkey, dates back 2,500 years. The head of the community and his wife both died in the quake. The city’s synagogue is now gone.

生命和歷史的逝去讓人難以接受。土耳其中部安塔基亞的小猶太社區可追溯至2500年前。社區負責人和他的妻子都在地震中喪生。這座城市的猶太教堂現已不復存在。

The Habibi Neccar Mosque collapsed, too. The earthquake’s destruction was ecumenical. The mosque dates back to 638. It was a church and a mosque, depending on who ruled the city. Over the centuries, authority passed from the caliphs to the Byzantines, who succumbed to Seljuks, who were ousted by the Crusaders, who ceded to Mamluks, who were replaced by Ottomans, and eventually Antakya was annexed by Turkey. The quake erased whole swathes of history.

哈比卜內卡清真寺也倒塌了。地震造成廣泛破壞。這座清真寺的歷史可追溯至公元638年。它是一座教堂，也是座清真寺，取決於誰統治這座城市。數個世紀以來，權力從哈里發傳到屈服於塞爾柱人的拜占庭，十字軍驅逐塞爾柱人後將城市割讓給馬木留克人，馬木留克人則被鄂圖曼人取代，最終安塔基亞被土耳其併吞。地震則抹去了整個歷史。

The biblical city of Antioch, Antakya is also where the word “Christian” was supposedly first used. The Apostle Peter led the church there before establishing a church in Rome. Paul preached in Antioch. The quake collapsed the St. Paul Orthodox Church, as well.

安塔基亞是聖經中的安提阿城，據說也是「基督徒」一詞首次被使用的地方。使徒彼得建立羅馬教會以前，曾在當地帶領基督教。保羅也在安提阿傳道。地震也使得聖保羅東正教教堂倒塌。

L’Aquila, like Antakya, lies in a notorious earthquake zone. A quake in L’Aquila in 1349 killed 800 residents; another in 1703 killed more than 3,000, prompting Pope Clement XI to send priests and nuns freed of their celibacy to repopulate the city.

拉奎拉和安塔基亞一樣，位在惡名昭彰的地震帶上。拉奎拉1349年的一場地震，造成800個居民喪生，1703年的另一場地震導致3000多人死亡，促使教宗克勉十一世派遣不再守貞的神父和修女，提供這座城市新生命。

You may rightly ask about the logic of rebuilding time and again in these risky places. But logic is not the point.

你可能會問，在這些危險地方一次又一次重建的邏輯為何，但邏輯並不是重點。

Cities are only nominally bricks and mortar, after all. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a photograph — collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community.

城市畢竟只是表面上的實體建築。對居民來說，它們是一把梳子和一張照片的倉庫，一個社會結構的集體線索，將一個生活、一個家庭、一段歷史、一個鄰居和一個社區逐漸編織在一起。

The city was still a shambles. But it was home.

這座城市仍然一片狼藉，但它是家。

文／Michael Kimmelman　譯／陳韋廷

說文解字看新聞

【張佑生】

發生在土耳其及敘利亞邊境的強震造成慘重傷亡，紐約時報由專寫建築評論的齊默曼執筆。有別於一般的新聞報導，作者以第一人稱的抒情筆調寫景拉出歷史縱深，刻劃天災之無情與人類的韌性，從標題就可看出。

作者接連用passed, succumbed, ousted, ceded, replaced, annexed描述霸權的更迭興替，看似信筆捻來，其實字斟句酌。人間多少豐功偉業，一場強震過後，「豐碑是處成荒塚」。Swathe指一大片土地、人群或事物：The disease killed huge swathes of the population.

文章開頭提到的梳子與照片在文末再次出現，作者認為城鎮不僅是磚瓦建築，對居民更是集體記憶的寄託，用life, family, history, neighborhood, community來逐漸擴大範圍。

因此，執著在地震高風險地帶重建沒道理但無關宏旨，縱然一片狼藉(a shambles)，卻是眾人安身立命之所在。Shambles是單數名詞：Government corruption has left the economy in a shambles.或His desk is a shambles.