INTO THE WILD
Jon Krakauer
走入荒野
乔恩。克拉库尔
云天译
AUTHOR’SNOTE
作者序跋
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska
and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his
decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
1992年四月，一个出身东岸富裕家庭的年轻人，一路搭便车来到阿拉斯加，只身走入麦金利山北面的荒野。 四个月之后，一伙猎鹿人发现了他已腐烂的尸体。
Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside
magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy's death. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He'd grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he'd excelled academically and had been an elite athlete.
尸体发现后不久，《户外》杂志的编辑请我报道这桩离奇的死亡事件。年轻人名叫克里斯托弗。强森。麦坎得利斯。我得知，他在华府边上的一个富裕郊区长大，不仅学业优异，还是体育健将。
Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of
1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.
1990年夏天，麦坎得利斯以优异成绩从埃默里大学毕业，随后就无影无踪。他改名换姓，把银行存款 $24000 全部捐给了慈善机构，抛弃车子和大部分财物，钱包里的现金也一烧而光。他然后为自己设计了新生活，开始栖身于社会的残破边缘，浪迹北美，找寻原始的超验生活。他的家人对他的行踪和遭遇一无所知，直到他的尸体出现在阿拉斯加。
Working
on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran
in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with
McCandless remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on
the newsstands by more current journalistic fare. I was haunted by
the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling
parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling
to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the
convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing
down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on
obsession. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to
reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on
the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for
young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond
that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering
inquiry is the book now before you.
为了赶截稿期，我写了篇9000
字的文章，刊登在1993年1月的《户外》杂志上。报摊上的新杂志取而代之后很久，我仍无法忘怀麦坎得利斯。这个男孩如何饿死的细节，以及我与他生命中某些令人纠结的相似处，都盘桓于心挥之不去。我不甘心就此作罢，投入一年多的时间，追踪这条终结于阿拉斯加丛林的曲折之路，几乎着魔般寻找他旅程中的种种细节。为了试图了解麦坎得利斯，也必然会思考其他更宏大的主题：诸如荒野对美国梦幻的吸引力，高风险活动对有某种特定心态年轻人的诱惑力，以及父子之间错综复杂而高度紧张的关系。这些颇费周折的调查结果就是呈现在你面前的这本书。
I
won't claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless's strange tale
struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the
tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried—and
largely succeeded, I think—to minimize my authorial presence. But
let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless's story with
fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope
that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of
Chris McCandless.
我不敢标榜自己是个不偏不倚的传记作家。麦坎得利斯的离奇故事触动了我自己的心弦，想要毫无感情地述说这桩悲剧是不可能的。这本书的绝大部分，我试图让我这个作者隐身，我想我基本上做到了。不过还是要先提醒读者：在麦坎德利斯的故事中，我穿插了自己年轻时的记忆片段。这样做，只是希望我的经历能够给克里斯。麦坎得利斯之谜提供些间接线索。
He
was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn
idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence. Long
captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly
admired how the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and
privilege to wander among the destitute. In college McCandless began
emulating Tolstoy's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that first
astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to him. When the
boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that
he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and
Tol-stoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that
is what he found, in abundance.
麦坎得利斯是个神经紧绷的年轻人，他固执的理想主义与现实格格不入。他一直迷恋列夫。托尔斯泰的著作，大文豪抛弃财富特权而混迹于赤贫的特立独行，更让他崇拜仰慕。读大学时，他就开始效仿托尔斯泰的禁欲主义和严谨道德，以致与他相近的人，先是吃惊，继而惶恐。
这个男孩前往阿拉斯加丛林时，并未幻想步入一片丰盛的奶蜜之地；
危险，灾难，以及托尔斯泰式的自我克制，这些正是他所寻求的，也是他所面对的，应接不暇。
For
most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than
held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly
insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in
August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April.
Instead, his innocent mistakes turned out to be pivotal and
irreversible, his name became the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his
bewildered family was left clutching the shards of a fierce and
painful love.
尽管如此，麦坎得利斯在十六周的艰难困境里，大部分时间都能够游刃有余地应付。事实上，若不是因为一两个看似无所谓的严重失误，他在1992年8月就悄无声息地走出丛林了，正如他4月走人丛林时无人知晓。但事与愿违，他无知的过错造成了生命攸关无可挽回的后果，他的名字上了娱乐小报的头条，他的家人握着残忍而哀伤的爱的碎片，不知所措。
A
surprising number of people have been affected by the story of Chris
McCandless's life and death. In the weeks and months following the
publication of the article in Outside, it generated more mail than
any other article in the magazines history. This correspondence, as
one might expect, reflected sharply divergent points of view: Some
readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals;
others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist
who perished out of arrogance and stupidity and was undeserving of
the considerable media attention he received. My convictions should
be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form
his or her own opinion of Chris McCandless.
麦坎得利斯的生死故事打动了那么多人，实为意外。我的文章在《户外》杂志刊登后，接下来的数周数月，读者来信之多，创了杂志社历史之最。不出所料，这些信的观点大相径庭：一些读者非常钦佩他的勇气和崇高理想；另一些人则严词谴责，说他是鲁莽的傻瓜，古怪的疯子，被傲慢和无知害死的自恋狂，不值得媒体的大量关注。至于我的观点，稍后就会在书中表明，每个读者对麦坎得利斯亦会各有论断。
jon
krakauer
seattle
april1995
乔恩。克拉考尔
1995年4月于西雅图
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