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导读
“太空行走第一人”前苏联宇航员阿列克谢·列昂诺夫去世
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听力|精读|翻译|词组
The blue of Earth
地球之蓝
Obituary: Alexei Leonov
讣告：阿列克谢·列昂诺夫
The blue of Earth
地球之蓝
Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space and create art there, died on October 11th, aged 85
阿列克谢·列昂诺夫，太空行走并进行艺术创作的先锋，于2019年10月11日去世，享年85岁
.Climbing from the open airlock of Voskhod-2, Alexei Leonov felt quite calm. He was cool-headed, focused. This often disappointed people. “What!” they would exclaim. “The door into the universe had been opened, and you felt nothing?” They forgot that he had been through all that training at the Star City cosmonaut school, jumping into deep water, acrobatics, and the rest. They forgot that his head was full of data and instructions. All the same, as he released one hand, then one foot, then the whole of him, until only a 5.5-metre rope held him to the world of men, he could feel a smile starting on his face and spreading. He was calm mostly because he was enthralled. He spread his bulky suited arms, kicked his legs and floated, free. In the silence he could hear only his heartbeat and his heavy breathing. Stars were all around him against a coal-black sky. They did not blink.
爬出“上升2号”的隔离室时，阿列克谢·列昂诺夫显得格外平静。他头脑冷静，注意力集中。这一点常使人们失望叹息。他们十分不解，大叫道：“什么鬼！通往宇宙的大门已经向你敞开，你竟然一点感觉都没有？”人们忘记了他在星城宇航员学校接受的那些培训：跳入深水、特技飞行等等。人们也忘记了，此刻他头脑里满是各种数据和指令。尽管如此，当他松开一只手，迈出一只脚，然后整个身体都离开气密舱，只剩一根5.5米长的绳子将他和人类世界连接在一起时，他能感觉自己脸上浮起一丝微笑，笑容在他脸上绽放开来。他如此平静，或者说是神魂颠倒。穿着笨重宇航服的他，伸伸胳膊，踢踢腿，然后就在太空中自由地漂浮起来。四周一片寂静，他只能听到自己的心跳和重重的呼吸。周围漆黑的天空里，满是星星，但是它们并不眨眼。
Below him, 500km below, lay the Black Sea. He knew it well, not only as a Russian patriot, but because he had visited its shores dozens of times. Now, on March 18th 1965, he saw it whole, gun-metal grey, with a tiny dot of a ship on it that seemed caught from all sides in a flow of light. He too was a dot, a grain of sand in the near-blinding dazzle of the unobscured sun. It came through his visor like a welder’s torch. He saw the Earth revolve, the only moving thing apart from himself. What struck him most forcibly was how round it was, how beautiful, and how blue.
在他下方500公里远的地方是黑海。黑海，他再熟悉不过了，不仅是出于一名俄国人的爱国热情，而且因为他已数十次造访黑海海岸。此时此刻，1965年3月18日，他从太空俯瞰整个黑海——黑海呈铁灰色，上面漂浮着光点大小的一艘船，在四面八方流淌的光亮里显露无遗。在浩瀚的太空中，他自己也是一个小点，一粒毫无遮挡地暴露在耀眼的太阳底下的沙子。刺眼的阳光透过他的面罩，如同焊工手中的氧乙炔炬。他看见地球在转动，那是除了他自己之外唯一运动着的物体。最震人心魄的是，地球是那么的圆，那么的美，那么的蓝！
His reverie ended in near-disaster. In the vacuum of space his space suit expanded, until he could not get back into the craft without bleeding it of oxygen. Moreover, in minutes, the craft’s orbit would take it into total darkness. Training kicked in; he kept his nerve and at last, drenched in sweat, tumbled head-first back through the airlock. Then the craft’s re-entry went wrong. The guidance system failed and they had to steer manually, bumping down in a snowy forest 1,600km from the landing site. They waited two nights to be rescued, wondering whether bears or wolves would get them first. Yet the elation did not leave him. Partly this was because the mishaps were officially hushed up, leaving only his triumph. And there were other reasons.
他的梦幻之旅差点演变成一场灾难。在太空的真空环境中，他的宇航服开始膨胀，不得不放掉部分氧气才能返回气密舱。更糟糕的是，几分钟之后，绕轨道飞行的宇宙飞船将进入完全黑暗的区域。关键时刻，平时的训练发挥了作用；他保持镇定，终于满头大汗地挤过气密舱，一头栽进太空舱。祸不单行，宇宙飞船的返回系统也接着出了故障。 制导系统失灵，他们只能手动操作，最终宇宙飞船偏离着陆点1,600公里，撞入一片大雪覆盖的森林。在获救之前，他们在冰天雪地里呆了两个夜晚，担心熊和狼会在救援队伍之前找到他们。然而，他一直沉浸在兴奋之中。一方面是因为官方掩盖了这些事故，只留下他成功的消息。当然，还有其他原因。
First, he had survived. Astonishingly, he always did when danger felt his collar. His car flipped over on a frozen lake, and he didn’t drown. In 1969 he got caught in a hail of bullets when he was riding in a motorcade behind Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet leader; four passed through his coat, but not through him. In 1971 he was bumped from the Soyuz 11 flight to the Salyut 1 space station, and was furious, but the craft opened prematurely on re-entry, and the crew died. The space-walk was another brush with annihilation from which he emerged, just about, in one piece.
无论如何，他幸免于难。更令人为之惊奇的是，每次危险降临，他总能死里逃生。曾经他的车翻入一片冰湖，但他竟然没淹死。1969年，作为时任苏联领导人列昂尼德·勃列日涅夫的车列队的一员，枪林弹雨当中，四发子弹穿透了他的大衣，但一发都没打中他。1971年，参选“联盟11号”飞船与“礼炮1号”太空站对接任务的宇航员，他没有入选，这令他生气不已，然而，由于飞船在返回时过早打开舱门，全组成员都牺牲了。太空行走则是再一次与死神擦肩而过，差一点死无全尸。
It had also affected him in a particular way. He had gone on this mission not just as a cosmonaut, but as an artist, self-taught from childhood, when he had painted pictures on the white stoves of his neighbours in the remote Siberian village where his parents farmed. A passion to be a fighter pilot, then a cosmonaut, diverted him from that, but he preserved his insatiable love of looking at things. Whether it was odd alleyways in a town, or random birds and mushrooms on a hunting trip, he was always lagging behind, appreciating them. One of his pilot-training photos showed him, in full uniform, lying in a clover field to gaze tenderly at a stem of flowering grass. Now he had seen the colours of space.
这种幸运也以一种特殊的方式影响了他。他执行任务时不仅是一名宇航员，也是一名自学成才的艺术家。小时候他住在遥远的西伯利亚农村，父母都是农民，他就在左邻右舍的白炉子上画画。他曾经梦想当一名战斗机飞行员，之后想成为一名宇航员，这梦想改变了他的人生轨迹，但他自始至终地对观察事物保持着浓重的的好奇心。不论是城镇里奇特的小巷，还是打猎途中偶然看到的鸟儿和蘑菇，他都会驻足欣赏。在一张飞行员训练照中，他身穿制服，躺在三叶草田中，温柔地凝视着一株开花的三叶草。而如今，他看到了色彩缤纷的太空。
He had prepared for it, he thought, taking a sketch pad and crayons onto Voskhod-2. Yet nothing could have prepared him. There were so many more colours than on Earth, and so much brighter. Onboard he sketched the sunrise, with its astonishing sharp luminescence of red, green and yellow against the black and the blue. When Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and his best friend from cosmonaut training, the short handsome foil to his tall, fair, bland-faced self, came on the radio during the walk to ask how “Artist” was, he simply said: “I can see so very much.”
进入“上升2号”宇宙飞船前，列昂诺夫自认为已经做好准备，他带上素描本和蜡笔。然而什么准备都不够。太空中的颜色远比地球上的丰富得多、鲜亮得多。在舱内，他画的日出，太阳在黑色和蓝色的背景映衬之下，散发出红色、绿色和黄色糅合的锋锐耀眼光芒，令人叹为观止。他在太空行走时，好友尤里·加加林通过无线设备问这位“艺术家”感觉怎样时，他轻描淡写地说道：“我可以看到数不胜数的颜色。” 尤里·加加林是进入太空第一人，也是列昂诺夫在宇航员训练时期最好的朋友。尤里·加加林矮小帅气，而列昂诺夫高大，相貌平平，神态沉着，两人对比鲜明。
7.Undoubtedly he had to mention that blue if, as he hoped, he spoke to Earth as the first man standing on the Moon. He trained hard for that, mostly by using helicopters as mock lunar-landing craft, but the Soviet plans struck him as downright dangerous. In any case, in the space race that consumed the world’s two great powers for almost two decades, the Americans nosed past in 1969 with the Apollo 11 landing. He watched it, one of the few Russians allowed to, his heart pounding with anxiety for the crew. Six years later, during a brief thaw in the cold war, he found himself training in Houston with Americans, larking around in a Stetson like a cowboy. On the joint Soyuz-Apollo Test Project that followed he and Tom Stafford bear-hugged in the docking tunnel between their craft, the first international handshake in space. Later he and his new friends, whom he kept for life, drank each other’s health in borscht which he had led them to believe was vodka. Space was not a place where men should be anything but brothers.
毫无疑问，如果他如愿成为第一个在月球上与地球通话的人，他肯定要提到地球之蓝。他为了实现这个目标非常努力的训练着，大多时候是用直升飞机充当模拟登月飞船，但是苏联的计划让他感到太危险了。无论如何，在这场世界两大超级强国将近20年的太空竞赛中，美国人凭借1969年阿波罗11号的成功登月惊险获胜。作为少数几个获准观看阿波罗登月的俄罗斯人之一，他观看着，一颗心怦怦直跳，担心整组宇航员的安危。六年后，在冷战中那段短暂的释冰期，他在休斯顿和美国人一起接受训练，带着宽边牛仔帽嬉笑玩闹，像一个美国牛仔。在随后的“联盟号-阿波罗号”联合试验项目中，他和汤姆·斯坦福德在他们太空船之间的对接隧道里热情拥抱，那是太空里的第一次国际握手。后来他和他的新朋友们成为了一生挚友，用罗宋汤为彼此的健康祝酒，他一度让他们以为将要喝下去的会是伏特加。在太空，大家都只是兄弟手足，不做他想。
Whenever he had time, from his first training into his retirement, he painted at his easel. Two subjects in particular he kept returning to. One was the air crash in 1968 that killed Gagarin, which he later officially investigated. He had been among the first to get to that awful scene of wreckage and snow, with the tops of the birch trees torn off by the impact. He had had to identify his friend’s body. Death had never seemed closer, or so terrible.
从他第一次训练开始一直到他退休，只要他有时间他就在他的画板上作画。他反复画的有两个主题。一个是1968年让加加林罹难的那次飞机失事，他参与了随后的正式调查。他是第一批到达那个可怕现场的人，现场遍布飞机残骸和积雪，还有被飞机撞击削去顶端的白桦树。他不得不去确认自己朋友的遗体。死亡从未如此近，如此令人恐惧。
Yet so far as there could be comfort, it came from his other constant subject, his walk in space. Beside the lovingly rendered module he floated again, sometimes with his hands out like an explorer, sometimes simply swimming, with his tether slack around him. Beyond him the sun blazed, a spotlight with a star’s red aura round it; behind and below him lay Earth’s blue. It was straight-out-of-the-tube blue, improbably bright. But that was what he had seen—and seen directly, out in empty space.
不过，慰藉也还是有的，那就是他常画的另一个主题：他的太空漫步。画里，他把太空舱画得很可爱，在太空舱旁边，他又再次漂浮了起来，有时双手伸出，像个探险家一样，有时又像在游泳，旁边围绕着松弛的拴绳。远处，太阳在闪耀，像一个聚光灯周围绕着一圈红色光晕；他后下方是蓝色的地球。那是一种纯粹的纤尘不染的蓝色，鲜亮无比。但是，那就是他见到的样子，在那浩瀚无垠的宇宙之中亲眼所见。
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