经济学人下载:木雕艺术家大卫·埃斯特利(1)

Master and apprentice
大师与学徒

David Esterly, wood-carver, died on June 15th, aged 75
木雕艺术家大卫·埃斯特利于6月15日去世，享年75岁

It might happen at any time of day. David Esterly would be at his workbench, gouge in hand, when he felt the breath on his shoulder. The voice would say: "I wouldn't do it like that," or "I've made a leaf curl that way before. Why are you bothering?" He did not need to ask who it was. The man's portraits at three different stages of his life, the last plump, bewigged and comfortable, hung round his workshop in a converted barn at Barneveld, in upstate New York.
这可能发生在一天中的任何时间。大卫·埃斯特利在感觉到肩膀上的气息的时候，会手拿圆凿，站在自己的工作台上。那个声音会说：“我不会那样做的，”或者是“我以前用这种方式制作过一个卷叶。你在担心什么呢？”他不需要问它是谁。他的工作室位于纽约州北部巴内菲尔德，由谷仓改建而成。工作室里面挂着他人生的三个不同阶段的肖像画，最后一个阶段丰满，戴着假发，很舒服。

Grinling Gibbons, England's 17th-century genius of wood carving, was the god of the place. For ten years his admirer had been labouring to emulate his astonishingly meticulous chains and cascades of foliage, fruit, flowers, feathers and shells in the same white lime or linden wood. The tradition of such carving was long-lost. Mr Esterly, whose studies as a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge had been in Yeats and the philosopher Plotinus, hoped he had found a way to combine intellectual, moral and sensory experience into what Yeats called "unity of being".
格林林·吉本斯是英国17世纪的木雕天才，他是当地的神。十年来，他的崇拜者一直在努力模仿他制作的一系列用同样的白石灰或椴木做成的树叶、水果、花朵、羽毛和贝壳。这种雕刻的传统已经很久没见了。埃斯特利在剑桥大学做访问学者时研究过叶芝，还有哲学家普罗提诺，他希望能找到一种方式将智力、道德和感觉体验结合起来。他把这个称为“存在的统一”。

There were many satisfactions in working as Gibbons had done. Standing at his workbench—not sitting, for carving involved the whole body—he would take up, with a quick flip of the hand, one of the dozens of tools spread before him. He could have done it blindfolded, knowing just where each one was. The multiplicity of blades reflected the fecundity of nature, which he would strive to reproduce with ever-more-delicate gouging.
像吉本斯那样工作有许多令人满意的地方。他站在工作台上，而不是坐着，因为雕刻涉及到整个身体。他会迅速地甩一下手，拿起摆在面前的几十件工具中的一件。他可以蒙着眼睛拿起工具，因为他知道它们都在哪里。叶片的多样性反映了大自然的繁殖力，他会努力用更加精细的刨削来重现大自然的繁殖力。

He began each piece by stabbing down the outline on a sawn board a few inches thick, then wasting away the wood around it and modelling the form. The rearward hand, and that half of his body, propelled the tool; the forward hand, on the wood, resisted. This opposition gave him exquisite control over the blade edge. It reminded him of the empowering contrast between Dionysian impulse and Apollonian restraint; and of Hamlet, too, torn between action and thought, whose tension drove through the play.
每一件作品开始时，他先把轮廓插在一块几英寸厚的锯过的木板上，然后把木板周围的木头削掉，做成模型。那只向后的手和他身体的那一半推动着工具；那只放在木头上的手抵挡着。这种对立给了他对刀刃的绝妙控制。这使他想起酒神的冲动和梦神的克制之间的强烈对比；也想到哈姆雷特在行动和思想之间的左右为难，他的紧张情绪贯穿了整部戏。