New Publishing Imprint Tests Limits of Literacy for Young Readers
新書 測試年幼讀者閱讀極限
By Alexandra Alter

Alice Hemmer’s favorite part of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” doesn’t involve the drug-addled cross-country road trips, encounters with prostitutes in Mexico or wild parties in Manhattan. Alice, who is 5 and lives in a Chicago suburb, likes the part when Sal Paradise eats ice cream and apple pie whenever he feels hungry.
對於傑克．凱魯亞克的小說「旅途上」，愛麗絲．海默最喜歡的部分與嗑藥放蕩的橫越美國公路旅行，在墨西哥碰到妓女，或是曼哈坦的狂野派對都無關。5歲、住在芝加哥郊區的愛麗絲喜愛的，是薩爾．派瑞戴斯肚子一餓就吃冰淇淋和蘋果派的部分。

She hasn’t actually read Kerouac’s 320-page, amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness classic. (Alice is a precocious reader, but not that precocious.) Instead, her father read her a heavily abridged and sanitized illustrated version of “On the Road” designed for 6- to 12-year-old children.
她其實並沒有讀凱魯亞克這部320頁、有安非他命助興的意識流經典小說。（愛麗絲是早熟的讀者，但還沒那麼早熟。）她的父親為她讀的是經過大幅刪節和凈化的「旅途上」繪本，專為6到12歲的兒童而設計。

“She didn’t love it,” said her father, Kurt Hemmer, an English professor at Harper College and scholar of the Beat Generation, who noted that even some college students failed to appreciate the novel’s subtle spiritual message. “To really grasp it, you need to be a bit more mature.”
她的父親柯特．海默說：「她不喜歡這本小說。」這位哈珀學院的英文教授，研究「垮掉的一代」的學者指出，連一些大學生也無法欣賞這本小說微妙的形而上訊息。「你需要更成熟一點，才能真正領會。」

“On the Road,” with its recurring references to sex, drugs and domestic violence, might not seem like an ideal bedtime story for a child. But that’s the point of KinderGuides, a new series of books that aims to make challenging adult literary classics accessible to very young readers.
「路途上」不斷提到性、毒品和家庭暴力，也許不像是在床邊讀給孩子聽的理想讀物。但這正是「兒童導讀」新系列書籍的著眼點，要讓年紀很小的讀者也能接觸具有挑戰性的成人文學經典作品。

Along with “On the Road,” KinderGuides recently published picture book versions of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Truman Capote’s melancholy novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” (It skipped over the awkward question of whether Holly Golightly is a prostitute.) In one of its most ambitious and bizarre efforts, it released a cheerful take on Arthur C. Clarke’s opaque, mind-bending science fiction novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” an allegory about the evolution of human consciousness that many adult readers find impenetrable.
除了「路途上」，「兒童導讀」最近還出版了厄尼斯特．海明威的「老人與海」，以及楚門．柯波帝的憂鬱中篇小說「第凡內早餐」的繪本。（後者跳過荷莉．葛萊特利是不是妓女的尷尬問題。）這個系列最具企圖心和奇特的做法之一，是出版亞瑟．克拉克晦澀、難懂的科幻小說「2001太空漫遊」的歡樂版本，這是有關人類意識進化的寓言故事，許多成年讀者也覺得無法理解。

With their bright illustrations and breezy language － “Sal is ready for an adventure!” pretty much typifies the tone of “On the Road” － the books almost seem like parodies, or the perfect gag gift for the hipster parent who has everything. But the creators of the series, graphic designer Melissa Medina and her husband, writer Fredrik Colting, insist they aren’t joking. They’re already working on the next four titles in the series － versions of Paulo Coelho’s best-selling novel “The Alchemist,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (minus the rape charges, Ku Klux Klan rallies and racial slurs).
配上色彩亮麗的插畫和輕鬆愉快的語言－「薩爾準備去探險！」大致已為「路途上」定調－這些書近乎詼諧的模仿之作，或是送給什麼都不缺的潮人文青父母的理想幽默禮物。不過，這一系列書的創作者，平面設計師梅莉莎．麥迪納和她的丈夫、作家佛列德瑞克．寇汀堅稱，他們不是在開玩笑。他們已著手進行此系列接下來的四本繪本－保羅．科爾賀的暢銷小說「牧羊少年奇幻之旅」、珍．奧斯汀的「傲慢與偏見」、沙林傑的「麥田捕手」和哈波．李的「梅岡城故事」（刪除強暴指控、三k黨集會和種族歧視的髒話）。

“The goal of all of this is to get them really psyched about these books now, so that they’ll want to read the originals later,” Medina said.
麥迪納說：「做這些的目的是讓他們現在對這些書真正感到興奮，以後會想讀原著。」

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/business/media/forget-pat-the-bunny-my-child-is-reading-hemingway.html

2017-02-12．聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 田思怡

說文解字看新聞 田思怡

本文提到凱魯亞克的小說「在路上」，這部小說是「垮掉的一代」（the Beat Generation）的代表作。凱魯亞克在1948年首度使用「垮掉的一代」來形容紐約的青年次文化，後來「垮掉的一代」泛指凱魯亞克等美國作家帶動的文學運動，作品集中在1950年代，描述叛逆青年追求自由解放的生活，他們不願意過被預設的人生、拒絕既有價值和物質主義、追尋形而上的生活、探索東方宗教、追求性解放、體驗毒品，這群人被稱為hipster（嬉皮士），是1960年代嬉皮（hippie）的先驅。

今天hipster在美國指的是追求非主流時尚、擁有進步政治觀點、偏好有機食物的中產階級或富有年輕人，可以譯成潮人或文青，例如文中提到的文青父母（hipster parent）。

「在路上」是凱魯亞克的自傳體小說，途述他穿越美國旅行時一路上新鮮刺激和瘋狂的經歷，是「公路小說」（road novel）的代表作，改編成電影「浪蕩世代」，這類電影稱為公路電影（road movie）。

Seeking a Fountain of Youth for Old Masters
為早期大師藝作 尋找青春之泉
By Scott Reyburn

Trying to make the old look young is one of the abiding fixations of our times. Not only have humans become disinclined to age gracefully － 60 has become the new 50 (or is it 40?) － but our material culture is continually being given a face-lift to remain relevant.
設法讓老東西顯得年輕是我們這個時代一個不變的執念。不僅人們變得不願意優雅老去，讓60歲重新變成50歲（或40歲？），我們的物質文化也不斷翻新門面以跟上時代腳步。

Take the Louvre in Lens, for example. This branch of the museum, which opened in 2012 in a former coal mining town in northern France, takes a radically different approach to the presentation of historic artifacts.
且以法國蘭斯羅浮宮為例。這是羅浮宮博物館的分館，2012年於法國北部一個昔日的採煤小城開幕，且以截然不同的方法呈現館內的歷史文物。

Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have created a vast silver-walled “Gallery of Time” in which visitors meander through a chronological display of free-standing objects and paintings from the Louvre’s collection, ranging from a fourth millennium B.C. Syrian terra cotta idol to Jean-Pierre Franque’s monumental 1810 painting, “Allegory of the State of France Before Napoleon’s Return From Egypt.”
日本建築師妹島和世以及西澤立衛創造了一座巨大，以銀色牆壁圍起的「時間廊」，讓遊客信步參觀按年代順序展示，來自羅浮宮館藏的獨立式物件和繪畫，從西元前第四個千年的敘利亞赤土陶俑到尚-皮耶．法蘭克繪於1810年的不朽畫作「拿破崙從埃及返回前法國狀態的寓言」。

“The display in a lighter, minimalist setting works fantastically well,” said Bob Haboldt, a dealer in old master pictures with premises in Paris, New York and Amsterdam, who visited the Louvre in Lens over the summer. “It’s not like the red or green velvet of an art fair where you walk into a cave to pay your respects to an old master.”
鮑伯．哈波特說：「在更輕省、極簡式的背景下進行展覽，效果奇佳。」哈波特是早期大師級繪畫作品的交易商，在巴黎、紐約和阿姆斯特丹都有經營場所，他去年夏天參觀了羅浮宮蘭斯分館。他說：「它不像那種藝術博覽會，讓你走進洞穴向早期大師致敬時，看到的是紅色或綠色的天鵝絨。」

Haboldt, 61, like many people at the traditional end of the art trade, is wondering whether a fresh approach to presentation can make old masters relevant to a new generation of buyers. Historic pictures were for centuries the market’s biggest earners, but over the last 10 years or so they have been progressively overshadowed by postwar and contemporary art.
61歲的哈波特和許多主要從事於傳統藝術買賣的人一樣，都在思考，如果他們將展示方式翻新，是否就能讓早期大師的作品和新世代買家搭上線。歷史悠久的畫作幾世紀來一直是市場上最賺錢的作品，但約莫這10年以來，它們的光彩卻日益被戰後和當代藝術品奪去。

In 2005, European old masters generated $655 million of auction sales, compared with $1.6 billion for contemporary works. In 2015, old master auctions had declined to $561 million, while equivalent sales of contemporary art stood at $6.8 billion, according to the 2016 Tefaf Art Market Report.
2005年，歐洲早期大師作品的拍賣銷售總額為6億5500萬美元，當代作品則為16億美元。根據2016年Tefaf藝術市場報告，2015年，早期大師作品的拍賣總額降至5億6100萬美元，反觀當代藝術的銷售額則高達68億美元。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/arts/design/seeking-a-fountain-of-youth-for-old-masters.html