Tale of the Lusitania, Retold as a Thriller
驚悚暢銷書重述客輪擊沈事件
By Alexandra Alter

On a clear afternoon about 100 years ago, a British passenger ship started sinking off the coast of Ireland, listing violently as it was sucked down into the ocean.
大約一百年前的一個晴朗下午，一艘英國客輪在愛爾蘭海岸外開始下沉，船身劇烈傾斜，被吸入大海中。

“Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks,” one horrified eyewitness wrote, adding: “It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. It was impossible for me to give any help.”
一名驚懼的目擊者寫道：「不顧一切逃生的人們無助地在甲板上上下下狂奔。」接著寫道：「這是我這輩子看到的最恐怖景象。我不可能去幫忙。」

The distressed witness was Walther Schwieger, a German submarine captain who just minutes before had fired a torpedo into the ship, the Lusitania, killing 1,198 of its 1,959 passengers, in one of the most devastating maritime disasters in history.
這名沮喪的目擊者是幾分鐘前才向這艘「路西塔尼亞號」客輪發射一枚魚雷的德國潛艇艇長華特．史威格，這是史上死傷最慘重的海難之一，船上1959人中有1198人遇害。

Some 95 years later, Erik Larson, the author of best-selling historical narratives like “The Devil in the White City” and “In the Garden of Beasts,” came across Schwieger’s journal and other dramatic testimonials at the Stanford University in California. Schwieger’s complexity fascinated Mr. Larson, and helped persuade him that he had found the subject of his next book.
大約95年後，「白城魔鬼」和「野獸花園」等暢銷口述歷史的作者艾瑞克．拉森，在加州史丹福大學偶然間看到史威格的日誌和其他戲劇性的佐證史料。史威格的複雜性令拉森著迷，有助於讓他相信找到了下一本書的主題。

Five years and eight drafts later, “Dead Wake,” is shaping up to be one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the year. Mr. Larson turns the destruction of the Lusitania into a sort of geopolitical thriller.
經過5年和8次草稿後，「死亡船跡」（暫譯）成為今年最受矚目的非小說類書籍。拉森把「路西塔尼亞號」被摧毀事件，變得有如地緣政治驚悚小說。

“Dead Wake” jumped to the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s best-seller list several days before its release.
在「死亡船跡」問世的幾天前，這本書竄升到亞馬遜暢銷書榜榜首。

Though the Lusitania seems like the ideal story for Mr. Larson, he was reluctant to tackle the subject at first. But when he started reading through the archives at Stanford, he realized he didn’t know much about the ship’s sinking.
雖然「路西塔尼亞號」事件似乎是拉森的理想故事，但他起初並不願意碰這個主題。不過，他在史丹福開始讀這些檔案時，他才明白他過去對這艘船的沉沒所知不多。

He spent the next two years sifting through source material in Thorsminde, Denmark; London; Liverpool; and Cambridge, England. He studied intercepted war telegrams, code books used by the British military, love letters, diaries, autopsy reports, morgue photos, depositions from survivors taken during a trial after the disaster, and an insurance claim from a survivor who lost rare manuscripts and drawings by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray.
他接下來花兩年時間在丹麥的索爾斯明德、倫敦、利物浦和英格蘭的劍橋整理資料。他研究被攔截的戰時電報、英國軍方使用的密碼書、情書、日記、驗屍報告、停屍間照片、船難後法庭審理期間生還者的證詞，以及一名喪失查爾斯．狄更斯和威廉．薩克萊珍貴手稿和圖畫的生還者的保險理賠要求。

“It’s like being involved in a detective story, looking for that thing that nobody else has found,” Mr. Larson said.
拉森說：「這好像寫偵探小說，尋找其他人沒有發現的東西。」

Not everyone thinks he succeeded. In The New York Times Book Review, the historian and author Hampton Sides noted that “from the standpoint of scholarship or human drama, there’s not much fresh ground here.”
不是每個人都認為他成功了。在紐約時報書評中，歷史學家兼作家漢普頓．賽茲指出，「從學術或世態人情面觀之，沒有太多新東西」。

Others argue that Mr. Larson’s book will counter widespread misconceptions about the attack, such as the view that the sinking drew the United States directly into the war, said Mike Poirier, a Lusitania enthusiast and co-author of a book on World War I naval disasters.
麥克．波伊瑞爾是個「路西塔尼亞號」迷，也是一本一次大戰海難書籍的共同作者，他說，另有些人認為拉森的書反擊對這次攻擊事件的普遍誤解，包括沉船事件把美國直接拖入戰爭的觀點。

Mr. Larson’s publisher hopes to broaden the author’s sizable fan base by capitalizing on the centennial of the ship’s sinking, on May 7, 1915. In a clever and somewhat macabre bit of marketing, Crown is partnering with Travel + Leisure magazine, the recipe website TasteBook and Cunard Line, the cruise company that operated the Lusitania, on a Lusitania-themed sweepstakes. The winner will receive a signed copy of the book and two tickets on Cunard’s Queen Victoria for a weeklong anniversary cruise around England and Ireland.
拉森的出版商希望利用1915年5月7日這艘船沉沒的一百周年，擴大作者原已十分龐大的書迷群。在一項聰明且有點令人發毛的促銷手法中，皇冠出版社與「旅遊+休閒」雜誌、食譜網站TasteBook和經營「路西塔尼亞號」的冠達遊輪公司結為夥伴，推出以「路西塔尼亞號」為主題的贏者全拿活動。贏家將獲得一本作者簽名書和兩張冠達「維多利亞女王號」遊輪票，繞英格蘭和愛爾蘭遊覽一周。

It doesn’t take much to entice Mr. Larson’s fans. His six previous books have collectively sold 5.5 million copies. “He’s the master of making us forget the history we think we already know,” said Amanda Cook, Mr. Larson’s editor at Crown.
誘惑拉森的書迷不需太費力。他之前六本書共賣出550萬本。皇冠出版社拉森作品編輯阿曼達．庫克說：「他是讓我們忘卻自以為知道的歷史的大師。」

Mr. Larson steeps himself in facts, but he seems to model his narrative arcs and prose style on fiction. He lists the crime writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as influences.
拉森沉浸在事實中，但他似乎以小說當成他的敘事弧線和散文風格的模型。他把犯罪故事小說家雷蒙．錢德勒和達許．漢密特列為影響他的人。

He’s written four novels, which he intend to keep unpublished. For now, he seems content to exhume stories from history, assembling facts in a way that no novelist could pull off without inviting disbelief.
他已寫了四本小說，刻意不出版。現階段，他似乎很滿意於從歷史挖掘故事，用一種沒有小說家可以完成，而不令人質疑的方式把事實拼湊起來。

Toward the end of “Dead Wake,” Mr. Larson drops in the chilling detail that four months after Captain Schwieger sank the Lusitania, he torpedoed another passenger liner, killing 32 people. The ship carried the corpse of a Lusitania victim, Frances Stephens, whose body was being returned to Canada for burial.
在「死亡船跡」快結尾時，拉森拋出讓人不寒而慄的細節，在史威格艦長擊沉「路西塔尼亞號」的四個月後，他用魚雷擊沉另一艘客輪，殺害了32人。這艘船上載著「路西塔尼亞號」受難者法蘭西斯．史戴芬斯的遺體，正送回加拿大安葬。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/books/erik-larson-author-of-dead-wake-seizes-historical-mysteries.html

2015-03-24聯合報/G5版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 田思怡譯 原文參見紐時週報十二版右