A drawer of umlauts
一抽屜的變音
His love affair had begun as a schoolboy, with an Underwood Five. It lay uncovered on a teacher’s desk, curved and sleek, the typebars modestly contained but the chrome lever gleaming. He took it gently apart, as far as he could fillet 3,200 pieces with his pocket tool, and each time attempted to get further. A repair man gave him lessons, until he was in demand all across New York. When he met his wife Pearl later, it was over typewriters. She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage. Pearl made another doctorly and expert presence in the shop, hovering behind the overflowing shelves where the convalescents slept in plastic shrouds.
泰特爾對打字機的愛戀始于學生時代。當是是一臺Underwood Five打字機，就放在講臺上，線條優美，明凈油亮，打印桿平靜自然，鉻鋼桿閃閃發光。他用手頭的工具溫柔地把它拆開，有3,200個零件，每拆一個他都有再進一步的企望。一位修理人員給他上了多次課，后來整個紐約都需要他。泰特爾與妻子Pearl的相遇也是緣自打字機。Pearl想為辦公室配一臺 Royal 打字機，他說服她配了一臺Remington,之后他們結婚了。Pearl是泰特爾的得力助手，成為店鋪里另一名能工巧匠，經年累月的在堆滿打字機的架子后工作。這些裝在塑料帶子里的打字機需要修理，由于數量太多，架子幾乎不堪重負。

Mr Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.
泰特爾能用各種方式改裝打字機。他能為火車站和因戰爭致殘的人改裝打字機，每次收費10美分。只用一把好用的焊槍和一個小型的鐫板機床，泰特爾就能讓一臺美式打字機說145種不同的語言，從俄語到希臘語。他在堅尼街花45美分買了一個惰輪，用來改裝打字機，讓其能從右向左寫阿拉伯和希伯來文。泰特爾成功為艾森豪威爾夫人進行設計，用打字機打出象形文字、樂譜和草書體，因為她煩于手寫白宮請柬。

When his shop closed in 2001, after 65 years of business, it held a stock of 2m pieces of type. Tilde “n”s alone took up a whole shelf. The writer Ian Frazier, visiting once to have his Olympia cured of a flagging “e”, was taken into a dark nest of metal cabinets by torchlight. There he was proudly shown a drawer of umlauts.
泰特爾的店鋪2001年關張，共營業65年，存有200萬個類型的打字機。單是Tilde 的”n”系列就占了整整一個貨架。作家伊恩•弗雷澤曾造訪過一次，修理他的Olympia打字機，因為打字機不能打出字母”e”。點著火把，伊恩•弗雷澤被帶進一間裝滿金屬陳列柜的黑屋子里。在那里，主人驕傲地向他展示一抽屜的元音變音符號。

Mr Tytell felt that he owed to typewriters not only his love and his earnings, but his life. In the second world war his knowledge of them had saved him from deploying with the marines. Instead he spent his war turning Siamese keyboards into 17 other Asian languages, or customising typewriters for future battlegrounds. His work sometimes incidentally informed him of military planning; but he kept quiet, and was rewarded in 1945 with a medal done up on a black, familiar ribbon.
泰特爾覺得，打字機不僅給予他愛戀與收入，還給了他生命。二戰期間，因為他了解打字機，所以他不用參加海軍的作戰，而是把打字機的暹羅語鍵盤改裝成其他17種亞洲語言的鍵盤，或者改裝打字機供后續戰爭使用。有時由于工作他能獲悉一些軍事方案，但他保持沉默，在1945年被授予一個由其熟知的黑色色帶所懸掛的勛章。

Each typewriter was, to him, an individual. Its soul, he reminded Mr Frazier, did not come through a cable in the wall, but lay within. It also had distinguishing marks-that dimple on the platen, that sluggishness in the typebars, that particular wear on the “G”, or the “t”-that would be left, like a fingerprint, on paper. Much of Mr Tytell’s work over the years was to examine typewritten documents for the FBI and the police. Once shown a letter, he could find the culprit machine.
對泰特爾來說，每臺打字機都是獨特的個體。他對弗雷澤說，打字機的靈魂不是來自墻上的電線，而是來自其內部。他們個性鮮明，有的是壓紙卷筒笑靨如花，有的是打印桿懶散懈怠。這些印跡就像手印一樣，能顯示在所打出的字母上，比如”G”或”t”，因此而留在紙上。多年以來，泰特爾的工作是為FBI和警察局檢查打印的文件。只要讓他看一個字母，他就能找出哪臺打字機是罪魁禍首。

It was therefore ironic that his most famous achievement was to build a typewriter at the request of the defence lawyers for Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union. His lawyers wanted to prove that typewriters could be made exactly alike, in order to frame someone. Mr Tytell spent two years on the job, replicating, down to the merest spot and flaw, the Hiss Woodstock N230099. In effect, he made a perfect clone of it. But it was no help to Hiss’s appeal; for Mr Tytell still could not account for his typewriter’s politics, or its dreams.
因此，極具諷刺意味的是，泰特爾最著名的成就是應Alger Hiss的辯護律師的請求制造一臺打字機。1948年，Alger Hiss被指控是蘇聯的間諜，他的律師想證明打字機能夠被制造的非常相像，用以誹謗某人。泰特爾花了兩年時間，在考慮了各個細節后復制了Hiss Woodstock N230099。他的復制非常成功。但是這對Hiss的上訴沒什么幫助。因為泰特爾依然不能描述其打字機的夢想或政治意愿。