Why the literati love Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali stands over Sonny Liston during their fight in 1965 © Neil Leifer/Getty Images Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on twitter (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on facebook (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on linkedin (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on whatsapp (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on twitter (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on facebook (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on linkedin (opens in a new window) Why the literati love Muhammad Ali on whatsapp (opens in a new window) Janan Ganesh

1965 年战斗中，穆罕默德·阿里站在桑尼·利斯顿 (Sonny Liston) 旁边 © Neil Leifer/Getty Images 为何文人喜爱 Twitter 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (在新窗口中打开) 为什么文人喜爱 Facebook 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (在新窗口中打开) 为什么文人喜爱 linkedin 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (在新窗口中打开) 为什么文人喜爱 Whatsapp 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (在新窗口中打开) 为什么文人喜爱 Whatsapp 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (在新窗口中打开)推特上的穆罕默德·阿里 (opens in a new window) 为什么文人喜爱 Facebook 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (opens in a new window) 为什么文人喜爱 linkedin 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (opens in a new window) 为什么文人喜爱 Whatsapp 上的穆罕默德·阿里 (opens in a new window) Janan Ganesh

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我们每天早上都会向您发送一封 myFT Daily Digest 电子邮件，汇总最新的生活与艺术新闻。

Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Malory, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, bel canto opera, French classical music, the myth of Sisyphus.

赫尔曼·梅尔维尔、格特鲁德·斯坦、爱德华·吉本、托马斯·马洛里、托马斯·曼、阿尔伯特·加缪、美声歌剧、法国古典音乐、西西弗斯神话。

To survive the first five paragraphs of “Ahab and Nemesis” , AJ Liebling’s most acclaimed essay, a reader needs a passing acquaintance with all of these.

为了读懂 AJ Liebling 最受欢迎的文章《亚哈与涅墨西斯》的前五段，读者需要对所有这些内容有一个短暂的了解。

The wonder is not Liebling’s erudition.

奇迹并不在于利布林的博学。

Star turns at the mid-20th century New Yorker, especially those reared among the eastern seaboard’s cognoscenti, were meant to know such things.

二十世纪中叶的《纽约客》，尤其是那些在东海岸的行家中长大的明星，注定要了解这些事情。

The wonder is the subject to which all this learning was put.

奇迹是所有这些学习的主题。

“Ahab” is Archie Moore, a skilled but fading boxer up against Rocky Marciano, his unbeaten nemesis, for a world heavyweight title in 1955.

“亚哈”是阿奇·摩尔 (Archie Moore)，一位技术精湛但日渐衰落的拳击手，在 1955 年与他的不败对手洛基·马西亚诺 (Rocky Marciano) 争夺世界重量级冠军。

Liebling was a gourmand and a war reporter decorated by the French state for his coverage of resistance and liberation.

利布林是一名美食家和一名战地记者，因其报道抵抗和解放而受到法国政府的嘉奖。

He had one of those squat, bulbous bodies that seem to serve as padding for the higher faculties of mind and palate.

他有着矮胖、球根状的身体，似乎是高级心智和味觉能力的垫子。

At this point, it is customary to write something like: “It takes some feat to find a less probable devotee of the sweet science” but, really, it is no feat at all.

在这一点上，通常会这样写：“找到一个不太可能的甜蜜科学的奉献者需要一些壮举”，但实际上，这根本不是壮举。

Liebling was drawn to boxing, but so were Joyce Carol Oates and William Hazlitt, neither of whom is easily pictured doing high-speed pad work amid buckets of bloodied spit in a basement gym.

利布林被拳击所吸引，乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨和威廉·哈兹利特也被拳击所吸引，人们很难想象他们在地下室健身房里的一桶桶血腥唾液中进行高速拳击训练。

George Bernard Shaw wrote a novel about the sport ( Cashel Byron’s Profession , 1882).

萧伯纳写了一本关于这项运动的小说（卡舍尔·拜伦的职业，1882）。

James Baldwin covered Floyd Patterson’s 1962 fight with Sonny Liston.

詹姆斯·鲍德温 (James Baldwin) 报道了 1962 年弗洛伊德·帕特森 (Floyd Patterson) 与桑尼·利斯顿 (Sonny Liston) 的比赛。

Current New Yorker editor David Remnick published a book about Muhammad Ali ( King of the World , 1999) in between lighter subjects such as Barack Obama and Russia.

现任《纽约客》编辑大卫·雷姆尼克在巴拉克·奥巴马和俄罗斯等较轻松的主题之间出版了一本有关穆罕默德·阿里（《世界之王》，1999）的书。

All but one or two of Norman Mailer’s novels cringe with inadequacy next to The Fight , his account of Ali’s 1974 showdown with George Foreman in Zaire.

诺曼·梅勒的小说除了一两本外，其余的都因描写阿里 1974 年在扎伊尔与乔治·福尔曼对决的《战斗》而感到不足。

Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson: all thrived at the intersection of professionalised violence and literary journalism.

盖伊·塔莱斯、乔治·普林普顿、亨特·汤普森：他们都在职业化暴力和文学新闻的交叉点上蓬勃发展。

The first rule of fight club is that you write about fight club, a lot.

搏击俱乐部的第一条规则是你要写很多关于搏击俱乐部的文章。

No sport has been chronicled in greater depth or quality than boxing.

没有哪一项运动比拳击更具有深度和质量。

There is some famous baseball prose by Don DeLillo, among others.

唐·德里罗等人写了一些著名的棒球散文。

Cricket yielded a great book (CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary , 1963) and tennis a great essay (David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience”, 2006).

板球产生了一本伟大的书（CLR James 的《超越边界》，1963 年），网球产生了一篇伟大的文章（大卫·福斯特·华莱士的《费德勒作为宗教体验》，2006 年）。

Football has amassed something of a canon over the past 20 years but nothing commensurate with the game’s imperial presence in the world.

过去 20 年来，足球已经积累了一定程度的经典，但与这项运动在世界上的帝国地位并不相称。

Boxing does not vie for the attention of writers with other sports, but is on another plane with war and romance.

拳击并不与其他运动项目争夺作家的关注，而是与战争和浪漫处于另一个层面。

It is clear that just one exponent of ringcraft — Ali, nowadays forced by Parkinson’s disease to let others tell his story — has inspired a more distinguished bibliography than entire human pursuits.

显然，只有一位环艺倡导者——阿里，如今因帕金森病而被迫让别人讲述他的故事——激发了一本比整个人类追求更杰出的参考书目。

The waterfall of words continues to cascade: Davis Miller, whose previous works include The Tao of Muhammad Ali (1996), has chronicled his friendship with the afflicted icon in Approaching Ali , published next month, which is also when the author’s co-curated Ali exhibition, I Am The Greatest , opens at The O2 in London.

文字的瀑布继续倾泻而下：戴维斯·米勒（Davis Miller）之前的作品包括《穆罕默德·阿里之道》（1996），他在下个月出版的《走近阿里》中记录了他与这位饱受折磨的偶像的友谊，这也是作者共同策划的阿里展览《我是最伟大的》在伦敦 O2 开幕的时间。

Less clear is exactly why, over every other pugilist, Ali remains the focus of so much literary talent.

不太清楚的是，为什么阿里比其他拳击手仍然是众多文学天才的焦点。

His claim as the greatest does not command unanimity within the sport.

他声称自己是最伟大的球员，但并没有在这项运动中获得一致认可。

Sugar Ray Robinson tends to be the aficionado’s pick.

舒格·雷·罗宾逊（Sugar Ray Robinson）往往是狂热爱好者的选择。

Prewar fighters Joe Louis and Willie Pep (such a virtuoso of feints and lateral movement that he reputedly once won a round without attempting a punch) are in the conversation.

战前拳击手乔·路易斯和威利·佩普（威利·佩普是佯攻和横向移动的大师，据说他曾经在不尝试出拳的情况下赢得了一轮比赛）也在谈话中。

True, Ali’s élan inside the ring lent itself to descriptive prose: it was a reminder, if outsiders needed it, that boxing is more technique than brawn, less about hitting than not getting hit.

确实，阿里在拳击场上的活力使其成为描述性散文：如果外人需要的话，它提醒人们，拳击更多的是技术而不是肌肉，而不是击中而不是被击中。

But Sugar Ray Leonard, Pernell Whitaker and the best of our time, Floyd Mayweather, were also luminous stylists.

但舒格·雷·伦纳德、佩内尔·惠特克和我们这个时代最优秀的弗洛伊德·梅威瑟也是才华横溢的造型师。

In some passages it is hard to tell whether Ali has come to Zaire to fight Foreman or impress Norman Mailer

在某些段落中，很难判断阿里来到扎伊尔是为了与福尔曼战斗还是为了给诺曼·梅勒留下深刻印象

It is not even clear that Ali lived the most dramatic life in boxing history.

甚至不清楚阿里是否经历了拳击史上最戏剧性的一生。

Digressions in the Remnick book reveal Liston (“who’d never gotten a favor out of life and never given one out”) to have the more horrifyingly irresistible story, one that weighs a few years of glory against many more of humiliation in a country that hated the fact it could produce someone so broken and so capable of breaking others.

雷姆尼克书中的题外话揭示了利斯顿（“他从来没有从生活中得到过恩惠，也从来没有给予过人”）有一个更可怕的、不可抗拒的故事，这个故事权衡了几年的荣耀与更多的耻辱，这个国家讨厌这个国家可能会产生如此破碎的人，却又如此有能力击垮他人。

Ali has “lived the life of one hundred men”, as he keeps telling Miller.

正如阿里不断告诉米勒的那样，他“过着一百个人的生活”。

But Jack Johnson, Roberto Durán and Mike Tyson also charted the extremes of human experience.

但杰克·约翰逊、罗伯托·杜兰和迈克·泰森也描绘了人类经历的极端情况。

Easy to forget, too, that boxing was already receding in American life by the time Ali arrived.

人们也很容易忘记，当阿里到来时，拳击已经在美国人的生活中逐渐消失。

It was before the second world war and immediately after it that the sport was truly central.

第二次世界大战之前和之后不久，这项运动才真正成为中心。

As early as the 1950s, there was a wistful pang in Liebling’s writing as he gazed at ringside seats that would have been filled with dignitaries a decade or two earlier.

早在 20 世纪 50 年代，当利布林凝视着一两年前本该坐满了贵宾的场边座位时，他的笔下就充满了一种渴望的痛苦。

Still, Ali might be known to more people in the world than anyone of the past half-century and, whether as a symbol of black emancipation or sporting mastery or rock ’n’ roll charisma, he is a straightforward hero to many of them.

尽管如此，阿里在世界上的知名度可能比过去半个世纪中的任何人都要多，无论是作为黑人解放的象征，还是体育大师或摇滚魅力的象征，他对许多人来说都是直截了当的英雄。

However, a close reading of the prose devoted to him suggests that writers are drawn to something different: not his heroism but nearly the opposite of that, his moral ambiguity.

然而，仔细阅读有关他的散文表明，作家们被一些不同的东西所吸引：不是他的英雄主义，而是几乎相反的，他的道德模糊性。

There has always been a difference between Ali as perceived by the multitudes and Ali as rendered by embedded scribes.

大众眼中的阿里和嵌入文士眼中的阿里之间始终存在着差异。

They pick up on a cruel streak that spurred him to hound Liston as someone less than human and Frazier, a product of pre-civil rights South Carolina, as an “Uncle Tom”.

他们发现了他的残酷倾向，促使他将利斯顿视为非人类，并将弗雷泽（南卡罗来纳州民权运动前的产物）视为“汤姆叔叔”。

Frazier’s ordeal at the hands of people who took their cue from Ali included death threats and the necessity of police protection for his family.

弗雷泽在那些听从阿里暗示的人手中遭受了磨难，其中包括死亡威胁以及警察保护他的家人的必要性。

It is tougher to read about than the most heinous slugfest inside a ring.

这比拳击场内最令人发指的混战更难读。

In the work of Hugh McIlvanney, Britain’s greatest living boxing writer, Ali is acknowledged as the “Alpha and Omega” (his aunt Coretta Clay’s phrase) but real affection is reserved for others, Frazier and the anti-sectarian Irishman Barry McGuigan among them.

在英国现存最伟大的拳击作家休·麦克尔万尼的作品中，阿里被认为是“阿尔法和欧米伽”（他的姨妈科雷塔·克莱的说法），但真正的感情是留给其他人的，其中包括弗雷泽和反宗派的爱尔兰人巴里·麦奎根。

Mailer, happily wading into another race’s internal politics with all the restraint of a man who once made a gonzo bid for the New York mayoralty, goes even further in The Fight .

梅勒带着一个曾经疯狂竞选纽约市长职位的人的克制，愉快地介入了另一个种族的内部政治，在《斗争》中走得更远。

Foreman emerges as gloweringly taciturn but honourable.

福尔曼显得怒目而视，沉默寡言，但却很值得尊敬。

Ali, by contrast, fails to dazzle Mailer with wit (“It is difficult to decide how much of the language is his own”) or authenticity (“Foreman could be mistaken for African long before Ali”).

相比之下，阿里未能用智慧（“很难确定有多少语言是他自己的”）或真实性（“福尔曼早在阿里之前就可能被误认为是非洲人”）让梅勒眼花缭乱。

There are passages where it is hard to tell whether Ali has come to Zaire to fight Foreman or to impress Mailer.

有些段落很难判断阿里来到扎伊尔是为了与福尔曼战斗还是为了给梅勒留下深刻印象。

Long-form writers deal in nuance, the teasing out of contradictions over thousands of words.

长篇作家处理细微差别，在数千字中梳理矛盾。

Ali was the ideal muse.

阿里是理想的缪斯。

Other fighters were too monstrous (Liston, Tyson) or too vanilla (Patterson, Marciano), at least outwardly.

其他拳手要么太可怕（利斯顿、泰森），要么太普通（帕特森、马西亚诺），至少在外表上是这样。

Ali’s blend of the chivalric and the malevolent, charm and braggadocio, made for rich copy.

阿里将侠义与恶毒、魅力与吹牛融为一体，为丰富的文案而生。

For outsiders to the sport, his racial and religious consciousness, right down to the change of name from Cassius Clay after the first Liston fight, is what makes him interesting.

对于这项运动的局外人来说，他的种族和宗教意识，甚至在第一次利斯顿比赛后卡西乌斯·克莱的名字的改变，都是让他变得有趣的原因。

But it is poorly understood.

但人们对其了解甚少。

Writers find him magnetic precisely because he was never a saint.

作家们发现他很有魅力，正是因为他从来都不是圣人。

The contrast with some of his heirs is telling.

与他的一些继承人的对比很能说明问题。

There is a Lennox Lewis-sized hole in boxing literature but it is a wholly explicable one once you understand what turns writers on.

拳击文学中存在一个伦诺克斯·刘易斯大小的漏洞，但一旦你了解了是什么让作家兴奋，它就完全可以解释了。

Lewis was perhaps the purest technician in the heavyweight division since Ali’s era.

刘易斯也许是自阿里时代以来重量级最纯粹的技术人员。

He won world titles and retired with a healthy body, mind and cash pile.

他赢得了世界冠军，并以健康的身体、精神和现金退休。

Something about this purring machine riled writers, though, who only addressed him as a subject to bemoan his lack of thunder.

然而，这台咕噜咕噜的机器的某些东西激怒了作家，他们只是将他视为一个哀叹他缺乏雷霆的主题。

The kind interpretation is that boxing’s literati — people who could be writing about world affairs, art treasures, metaphysics — have high standards when it comes to valour in the ring and charisma outside it.

善意的解释是，拳击界的文人——那些可以撰写有关世界事务、艺术珍品、形而上学的文章的人——在赛场上的英勇和赛场外的魅力方面有着很高的标准。

The darker possibility is that they are privileged voyeurs.

更黑暗的可能性是他们是享有特权的偷窥者。

They flock to the sport for the same reason that a certain kind of foreign correspondent asks for the trickiest banana republic postings: it gives them access to poor, wild, dysfunctional humanity at minimal risk to themselves.

他们涌入这项运动的原因与某些外国记者要求发布最棘手的香蕉共和国帖子的原因相同：它让他们能够以最小的风险接触贫穷、狂野、功能失调的人性。

The clinical serenity of a Lewis must be a terrible disappointment to them.

刘易斯的冷静冷静一定让他们非常失望。

In a book that was decades in the construction, the journalist Christopher Booker argued that all stories in all literature conform to at least one of Seven Basic Plots.

记者克里斯托弗·布克（Christopher Booker）在一本花费数十年时间编写的书中指出，所有文学作品中的所有故事至少都符合七个基本情节中的一个。

Ali’s life conforms to them all: Overcoming the Monster (Liston, Foreman), Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return (Zaire and then Manila, where he fought Frazier), Comedy (“I hospitalised a brick/I’m so mean I make medicine sick”), Tragedy (the withdrawal of his boxing licence during his peak years for resisting the Vietnam draft, his imprisonment by Parkinson’s) and Rebirth (his defeat of Foreman at the age of 32).

阿里的一生符合这些：克服怪物（利斯顿、福尔曼）、白手起家、探索、远航和回归（扎伊尔，然后是马尼拉，在那里他与弗雷泽战斗）、喜剧（“我住院了/我太刻薄了，我让药物生病了”）、悲剧（在他巅峰时期因抗拒越南征兵而吊销了他的拳击执照，他因帕金森病入狱）和重生（他击败了福尔曼） 32岁）。

Just as you wonder what Miller could possibly add to the Everest of prose, his new book gives you an intimate glimpse of Tragic Ali: a man of once-uncontainable animation now locked behind facial features that do not move “one-tenth of an inch”.

正如你想知道米勒可能会为散文的珠穆朗玛峰增添什么一样，他的新书让你近距离地一睹悲剧阿里：一个曾经无法控制的动画人物，现在被锁在无法移动“十分之一英寸”的面部特征后面。

It has become pat to say writers turn to Ali because his story offers the possibilities that only usually exist in fiction.

说作家求助于阿里已经很常见了，因为他的故事提供了通常只存在于小说中的可能性。

If anything, that undersells him and overrates fiction.

如果说有什么不同的话，那就是低估了他并高估了小说。

Novelists have total freedom, in theory, but their lived reality is more bounded than that.

理论上，小说家拥有完全的自由，但他们的生活现实比这更加有限。

They cannot concoct a protagonist who has something of the epic about him without exposing their work to slurs of middlebrow-ness.

他们不可能编造出一个具有史诗般气质的主角，而不会让他们的作品受到中庸之道的诽谤。

It is somehow unliterary.

这在某种程度上是非文学性的。

Fiction is the art of encoding universal themes into characters flawed and accessible enough for anyone to recognise in themselves.

小说是一门将普遍主题编码成有缺陷且易于理解的人物的艺术，任何人都可以认识到自己。

To conjure a spectacular individual doing sensational things is for hacks and hysterics.

想象一个出色的人做耸人听闻的事情是为了黑客和歇斯底里。

The Great American Novels dwell on small people.

伟大的美国小说描写的是小人物。

Augie March shambles picaresquely through Saul Bellow’s Chicago, stealing books for an education, being henpecked here and there.

奥吉·马奇（Augie March）在索尔·贝娄（Saul Bellow）的芝加哥里流浪，为了接受教育而偷书，到处都是怕老婆的人。

Philip Roth wrote about sexual neurotics and ostracised professors.

菲利普·罗斯（Philip Roth）写过有关性神经症和被排斥的教授的文章。

John Updike defined his work as “giving the mundane its beautiful due”.

约翰·厄普代克将他的作品定义为“赋予平凡以美丽”。

His Rabbit series is a study in provincial marginalia.

他的《兔子》系列是对省级旁注的研究。

He left New York for a small town to get a better handle on quotidian life.

他离开纽约前往一个小镇，以便更好地处理日常生活。

Even Melville’s Captain Ahab is just an ageing whaler with a peg leg.

就连梅尔维尔饰演的亚哈船长也只是一位装着假腿的上了年纪的捕鲸者。

As an aesthetic convention, this ban on superstar protagonists in fiction makes sense.

作为一种审美惯例，禁止小说中出现超级明星主角是有道理的。

Where is the skill in making a plainly dramatic individual seem dramatic?

让一个看似戏剧性的人显得戏剧性的技巧在哪里？

But it must also create a huge unfulfilled desire among writers to let loose.

但它也必定会在作家中产生一种尚未实现的巨大的释放欲望。

These are the people most equipped to capture individual greatness — to make it sing — but their profession’s tastes and sensibilities deter them from doing so, which is why they end up cramming so much improbable meaning into characters you would not look twice at if they came to life and walked into your train carriage.

这些人最有能力捕捉个人的伟大——让其歌唱——但他们的职业品味和情感阻止他们这样做，这就是为什么他们最终将如此多不可思议的意义塞进角色中，如果他们复活并走进你的火车车厢，你就不会多看一眼。

Ali is their escape.

阿里是他们的避难所。

He is epic but real, so they can write about him.

他是史诗般的人物，但却是真实的，所以他们可以写他。

If Mailer had penned a novel about a poor Kentucky boy whose athletic prowess and personal radiance made him as world-famous as the sun, as politically sensational as any guerrilla, he would have been laughed out of his publisher’s office.

如果梅勒写了一本关于一个贫穷的肯塔基男孩的小说，他的运动能力和个人光芒使他像太阳一样闻名世界，像任何游击队员一样在政治上引起轰动，那么他可能会被出版商嘲笑。

Ali was a gift to people who yearn to paint on the largest canvases.

阿里是送给那些渴望在最大的画布上作画的人们的一份礼物。

It is not that you could not make him up.

这并不是说你无法弥补他。

It is that nobody would let you.

就是没有人会让你。

‘Approaching Ali’ by Davis Miller (WW Norton) is published in the UK on March 1.

戴维斯·米勒 (WW Norton) 的《走近阿里》于 3 月 1 日在英国出版。

The exhibition I Am the Greatest’ opens at the O2 Arena on March 4

《我是最伟大的》展览3月4日在O2体育馆开幕

Photographs: Neil Leifer/Getty Images; John Shearer/The Life Picture Collection; Davis Miller; AP

照片：尼尔·莱弗/盖蒂图片社；约翰·希勒/生活图片集；戴维斯·米勒；美联社