逝者：马塞尔•马索，默剧大师和他的小丑毕普

Bip

毕普：是默剧大师马塞尔·马索所创造的最著名的小丑形象，“毕普”已经是马塞尔·马索的标志。本文全文都是以毕普这个舞台形象来诠释马塞尔·马索的一生。

Sep 27th 2007

From The Economist print edition

Bip, the world's quietest clown, died on September 22nd, older than he seemed

世界上最安静的小丑毕普，于九月二十二日辞世，远比人们印象中的他要长寿。(Bip或译“毕毕”)

WHEN the spotlight faded on Bip last week, leaving not even a hand or a flower illuminated, it caused only a sigh of surprise. Bip had tried many times to put an end to himself. He would cut his wrists with a blade, nicking and wincing away from it, in case his copious blood gushed over his pure white sailor's trousers. He would shake out into his palm a handful of pills from a bottle, open his wide red mouth, and fail to swallow them. Stepping on a chair that wobbled under him, he would knot a noose round his scrawny neck, test it, yank it, gyrate his neck like a pigeon and step out into the void. Nothing worked. He went on living.

上周，毕普身上的聚光灯褪去了五彩，甚至哪怕是一只手或者一朵装饰的花儿都没能留下来，这只能让人们发出一声惊讶的叹息。 毕普曾尝试过好多次了断自己。他常用刀片割破手腕，边割边把身体向另一旁抽缩，以防汹涌而出的鲜血溅在纯白色的水兵裤子上。他会从瓶子中抖出一把药丸，然后张开血红的大嘴巴准备吃掉它们，但是却未能吞咽下去。他会跳上一把摇摇晃晃的椅子，在瘦骨嶙峋的脖子上打上一个绳套，先试一下，然后猛地一拉，把脖子扭得象一只鸽子，接着跳下椅子悬在半空中。所有这些都不奏效，他仍然活得好好的。

That he should wish to die was also not surprising. Often he was kept, crouching or standing, in a small cage on the stage. One by one he ran his hands along the bars until, with all his strength, he pushed two apart and jumped nimbly out; but then, right ahead of him, behind him, all round him, he found his palms flattening against a wall of glass. Each cage was contained in another. His hands often became birds, flickering and fluttering out of his sleeves, and he made them fly swiftly from their prisons, laughing as they flew. But the bars soon closed again round him.

他想死并不奇怪。他总是或蹲或站地被关在舞台上的一个小笼子里。他竭尽全力地用双手逐一推栅栏，一直到把两根栅栏间推开一条缝然后敏捷地从笼子中跳出来；但是紧接着，他发现前面、后面，四面八方到处都是挤压他手掌的玻璃墙。每个笼子之外都套有笼子。他的双手常常好象变成了飞鸟，扑动着翅膀在衣袖中振翅欲飞，接着他让它们迅速地飞离束缚，伴随着的是一声大笑。但是不久，栅栏就又把他困住了。

Like all human beings, he dreamed; but his dreams were rarely successful. He hunted butterflies with a darting net, only to break their wings. He plucked flowers, then picked their petals out, and was surprised they died. When he tried to tame lions, they ate him, scorning the thin hoop he flourished in their direction. He walked against wind and made no progress. His black-ringed eyes and black-lined eyebrows registered sadness, wonder, perplexity and terror. But he did not know what malevolence was. He was, said the man who knew him best, a romantic, a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and “alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty”.

他同其他人一样有梦想；但是却罕有实现。他用投射网捕抓蝴蝶，却撕破了它们的翅膀。他把鲜花拔下来，摘掉花瓣，却惊奇地发现它们枯萎了。他尝试驯狮，狮子却反过来要吃他，轻蔑地瞧着他朝它们挥舞薄铁环。他迎风而行却寸步难行。他黑眼圈内的眼睛和一字型的黑色眉毛流露着忧伤、惊讶、迷惘和恐怖。但是他却不知道什么是恶毒。最了解他的人说他是个浪漫的、刺向风车的当代唐·吉诃德，“孤独地行进在一个充满着不公正和美丽的脆弱世界里”。

To the naked eye Bip had only the clothes he stood up in: trousers, jacket, soft ballet shoes, striped jersey, and a crumpled opera-hat topped with a red flower. His lean limbs and white face were his only language. The spotlight played on him, and nothing else. Yet the silence around him was filled with chairs, tables, animals, trunks and escalators. It swarmed with lounging waiters, officious policemen, dog-walkers pulled to right and left of the path, old ladies knitting. Railway trains roared through, and Bip, bouncing and swaying in his seat, struggled to keep his suitcase from falling out of the rack. The sea flooded in, bringing a ship that could take Bip on his constant travels to America, to Japan and to Australia, and he staggered manfully up and down the pitching deck.

就外表看，毕普仅仅穿着他的丑角行头：一条长裤，一个外套，一双柔软的芭蕾舞鞋，一件条纹运动衫以及一顶顶上缀着朵红花的皱巴巴的男式礼帽。削瘦的四肢和白色的脸孔是他仅有的语言。聚光灯照在他的身上，除此之外再没别的东西了。然而围绕着他的寂静却充满了椅子、桌子、动物、旅行箱和电梯。懒散的侍者、无事生非的警察、横冲直撞的溜狗人、织毛衣的老太太等等，熙熙攘攘地拥挤在一起。火车呼啸而过，毕普坐在上下颠簸的座位上，勉强保护着手提箱没有从车架上掉下来。海水涨潮，漂来一条海船，它可以带着毕普不断地旅行，先到美国再到日本然后到澳大利亚，他顽强地在颠簸的甲板上蹒跚而行。

He was born, some said, in the Paris acting school in 1947, bred by Jean-Louis Barrault in “Les Enfants du Paradis” and raised at the tiny Théatre de Poche in Montparnasse. Others made him far older, dating from the Athenian drama and the Japanese noh plays, via the commedia dell'arte and Charlie Chaplin. Parts of all this went into the making of him, as well as the imaginings of the young Marcel Marceau, in Strasbourg in the 1930s, trying on his father's long trousers and contorting his body to make his friends laugh. His name, Bip, came loosely from Dickens's “Great Expectations”. His hat, flower and sailor-costume solidified over time.

有人说毕普1947年诞生于巴黎署理学校，让-路易斯·巴伦特在电影《天堂的孩子》中塑造了他的形象，并把他搬上了蒙帕那斯的tiny Théatre de Poche 。还有人认为毕普来源于更早的雅典戏剧和日本奥马尔戏，并借鉴了即兴喜剧和查理·卓别林的。所有这些零散的内容，连同1930年代斯特拉斯堡的年轻人马塞尔·马索的想象力，被一起融入进了对毕普的创造之中。那时侯，马塞尔·马索常穿上他父亲的长裤子并扭曲身体，试着给朋友们逗乐。他的名字“毕普”是从狄更斯的《远大前程》中随意挑出来的。他的帽子、花儿以及水手装束随时间的推移已经变得不可分割。

Becoming the tempest骤成风暴

He never spoke. Mr Marceau's father died in 1944 in Auschwitz, and Bip's silence was a tribute to all those who had been silenced in the camps. It was a recollection, too, of the necessary muteness of resistance fighters caught by the Nazis, or quietly leading children across the Swiss border to safety, as Mr Marceau had done. In one of his acts, “Bip Remembers”, the sad-faced clown relived in mime the horrors of the war and stressed the necessity of love. In another, his hands became good and evil: evil clenched and jerky, good flowing and emollient, with good just winning.

他从不说话。马索的父亲1944年死于奥斯威辛集中营，因而毕普的沉默是向那些在集中营中被压制的人们致敬。它是对那些被纳粹捕抓的抵抗斗士们宁死不屈精神的追忆，还是对那些象马索一样悄悄地带领儿童穿越瑞士边界的人们的回忆。他有一场叫做《毕普的回忆》的表演，剧中这个忧伤的小丑再次体验了模拟的战争恐怖，并强调了爱的需要。在另一场表演中，他的双手是善良与邪恶的代表：邪恶的手紧握拳头，干瘪而丑陋，善良的手舒畅地伸展着，柔软而美丽，最终善良战胜了邪恶。

His alter ego, who promoted him as Everyman all over the world, sometimes spoke for him. “Bip”, said Mr Marceau, “is a hero of our time. His gaze is turned not only towards heaven, but into the hearts of men.” Mr Marceau compiled his biography and painted his portrait, colouring him blue, rose and mauve as he walked through the city streets and sailed among the stars. He wrote a poem for him:

A silent, fragile hand has drawn in space a white flower emptied of its blood.

Soon it will open, blossom out.

Soon, though faded, bloom again.

毕普有个时常代他说话的知己，这个知己把毕普提升到了具有普世意义的高度。马索说：“毕普是我们时代的英雄。他的目光不仅转视天堂，还深入人们的内心。”马索编撰毕普的传记，为毕普画肖像，当毕普徒步穿越城市的街道时，当毕普航行于无边星际时，马索给他的肖像着上不同的颜色：忧郁的蓝色、奔放的玫瑰红以及淡紫色。他为他写过一首诗：

一只静默脆弱的手从流尽鲜血的苍白的花朵间抽出，

不久它就会舒展开，然后开花。

不久，它再次开花，虽然五彩褪尽。

Mr Marceau was garrulous and gregarious where Bip was not. He ran his own mime company for almost 60 years, staging mimodrames when they were completely out of fashion, and started an international school in Paris to teach his skills to others. No mime artist could touch him. Hollywood loved him. Mr Marceau gave interviews frequently, sometimes in Bip's clothes, explaining him to the crowd: “If I do this, I feel that I am a bird. If I do this, I am a fish. And I feel that, if I do this, it's like a song...To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. Mime expresses...the soul's most secret aspiration.”

马索不扮演毕普的时候活泼健谈。他经营自己的默剧公司将近60年，在默剧彻底过时的时候却登台表演默剧，并在巴黎开办了国际性的学校向他人传授自己的技艺。没有默剧演员可以望其项背。好莱坞喜欢他。马索频繁地接受采访，有时候穿着毕普的装束，向人群解释说：“当我表演的时候，我感觉我是只鸟儿。当我表演的时候，我是条鱼儿。我感受到，表演就象是一首歌….模仿风时，人就成了风暴。默剧表达….灵魂中最秘密的渴望。”

Bip simply moved on the stage, bird, fish, song, wind, tempestuously without a word, until he too became invisible.

毕普洒脱地走上舞台，先是(模仿)鸟儿，接着是鱼，然后是歌，再后来是风，如同暴风骤雨却不说一个字，一直到他自己也消失于无形。