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Early ballooning
早期的熱氣球
Shifting perspectives
轉變的觀點
Two rich tales about men, machines
兩個有關男人、機械的精彩故事
Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air.By Richard Holmes.
《向上降落》：我們是如何升空的
England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines.By David Edgerton
《英格蘭和飛機》：軍國主義，現代性和機械制造
RICHARD HOLMES, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, renowned for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, “The Age of Wonder”, which came out in 2008, he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, “Falling Upwards”, he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists.
理查德霍爾姆斯是英國的一位作家兼大學老師，生性有點兒浪漫，以為波比雪萊和塞繆爾泰勒柯爾律治作傳而出名。在他上一本書《奇跡年代》中，他寫了有關科學、浪漫以及它們值得探索的共同點。在新書“向上降落”中，他將二者再度結合，講述了歐洲早期熱氣球飛行者的故事。
Mr Holmes's love of balloons was kindled at a village fete and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the euphoric tone that features in many first-hand ballooning narratives, and it is hard not to discern something similarly joyous in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled bubbles, fuelled by cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind “for what it really is”.
霍爾姆斯先生迷上熱氣球始于一次鄉村節日，他的狂熱是本書眾多有意思的地方之一。書中他參考了在許多一手的熱氣球敘事中偏愛運用的歡樂的口吻，所以在他這篇二手的文章中也不難看出類似的歡樂。在他的描述中，男人和女人醉心于穿著皮毛大衣窩在充滿氫氣的泡泡中，靠生冷的雞肉和香檳來補充能量，藐看著地球上的人類，看看“他們究竟是什么”。
The pioneers included John Money, who took off from Norwich one day in 1785, came down 20 miles from land and was rescued after five hours in the sea; and Sophie Blanchard, darling of the French revolutionary balloonists, whose “basket” was a decorative silver gondola shaped like a child's cradle and who was appointed Aeronaute des Fêtes Officielles by an impressed Napoleon.
熱氣球飛行事業的先驅中有約翰曼尼，他在1785年的一天從諾維奇起飛，下降到距地面20英里的位置，五小時以后在海中得以被救；還有法國革命性熱氣球駕駛員的愛人蘇菲布蘭卡德，她的“熱氣球下的籃子”是裝飾性的銀色貢多拉，形狀似孩童的搖籃。她還被了不起的拿破侖任命為法國官方節日的熱氣球駕駛員.
Mr Holmes makes much of the esoteric side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in tethered balloons to scope out enemy movements. And during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870-71, balloonists managed to fly out of (if not back into) the city to communicate with the French government in exile in Tours. But the most thrilling tale belongs to Sweden, and Salomon Andree's doomed attempt to fly a balloon from Spitsbergen to the North Pole in 1896. Andree's craft came down on the ice, and he and his companions were unable to walk out of the wilderness. Diaries and film, found with the men's bodies over 30 years later, fill in the poignant details.
霍爾姆斯先生在書中介紹了很多熱氣球的偏門功用，但書中最大的亮點卻出現在描述它更正統應用的地方。舉個例子，在美國南北戰爭時期，南北雙方均讓自己的觀察員在系留氣球上觀測敵方的動向。再有就是在1870到1871，普魯士圍攻巴黎期間，熱氣球駕駛員設法飛出城市去和法國流亡政府溝通。但是最刺激的故事發生在瑞典。1896年，所羅門安德蕾進行了命中注定的一次嘗試：從斯匹次卑爾根島乘熱氣球飛到北極。他的船身落到了冰上，他和同伴無力從荒野中走出來。30年后，他的日記和膠卷連同他的尸體才被人發現，日記和膠卷中記錄的滿是辛酸的細節。
“Falling Upwards” contains much of the historian's apparatus, such as footnotes and bibliography, but its epilogue refers modestly to what has gone before as “a cluster of true balloon stories”. It does feel a touch light on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work.
“向上降落”中包含許多歷史學家的寫作特質，像腳注和參考文獻，但其后記卻適度提起了“一系列真實的熱氣球故事”之前所發生的事情。感覺像是更多探討了熱氣球科技層面的東西，而對于公認的熱氣球發明者法國的蒙戈菲爾兄弟卻幾乎沒提。在這本令人鼓舞的作品中，算是些許美中不足吧。
Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the aeroplane. As David Edgerton's sure-footed essay makes clear, flying in this next age was a rather more serious affair. Aeroplanes, he notes, were—and to a considerable extent still are—primarily weapons of war, created to serve “national purposes”.
霍爾姆斯先生的故事結束于20世紀期初，當時正值飛行事業向飛艇和飛機轉型。大衛艾哲頓在其確鑿的論文中明確說，飛行在下一個時代會是更加嚴肅的一件大事。他解釋說，飛機曾經是，且以后在很大程度上也仍然是戰爭中最主要的武器，造飛機的主要目的在于“服務國家”。
By examining Britain through the lens of its aviation industry, Mr Edgerton suggests that the country's recent history is both more militant and more technical than many historians claim. British emphasis on the bomber, rather than the fighter plane, he argues, “represented a technological way of warfare” that accepted the killing of the enemy by machines. It was certainly brutal: in the second world war 60,000 Britons were killed by bombing; 118,000 Germans died in Hamburg alone.
通過觀察鏡頭中英國的航空工業，埃哲頓先生表明，英國近代歷史要比很多歷史學家聲稱的更加好戰且科技更發達。相比于戰斗機，英國人更多使用轟炸機，他還說，“呈現科技手段的戰爭”接受機器殲敵這一事實。這確實很殘酷：二戰期間，有60,000英國人被轟炸致死；而德國僅漢堡一個城市就有118,000人死亡。
Like Mr Holmes's balloonists, Mr Edgerton sees Britain from an unusual perspective. He digs into research and development spending and the activities of long-gone government ministries in an effort to challenge versions of history that have become fixated on Britain's decline. In the 22 years since his book's first edition Mr Edgerton says such “declinism” has waned—something he ascribes particularly to New Labour and the birth of a cooler Britannia. He himself can also take some credit; his arguments provide sound backing for the idea that modern Britain is as much a warfare state as a welfare one.
和霍爾莫斯先生的熱氣球飛行者的故事一樣，艾哲頓先生也從一個不同角度來窺見英國。他深入挖掘已經沒落的政府部門的研發開支和各種活動，以此向英國衰落歷史的既定版本質疑。自從這本書的首版面市以來的22年里，艾哲頓先生表示，持這種“衰落論”觀點的人已經越來越少——他把一些原因特別歸于新工黨的出現和一個更冷靜的大不列顛的誕生。他自己的努力也可以算作一份功勞；他的論點聲援了一個觀點，那就是現代英國戰火雖尤平，但鮮有硝煙，人民過上了還算幸福的生活。
