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本帖最后由 eastx 于 2009-12-1 19:13 编辑
Obituary
逝者
Alan Peters
阿伦·彼得斯
Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Alan Peters, furniture-maker, died on October 11th, aged 76
木匠阿伦·彼得斯于10月11日逝世，享年76岁
REACHING blearily, in the morning, for a pair of socks, few people give a thought to the smooth running of a drawer. But to Alan Peters, who for many years was probably Britain’s best furniture-maker, a properly fitted and functioning drawer was the acme of his craft. A perfect drawer, he would say, had to slide in on a cushion of air, and when pulled out had to cause the other drawers to retract, very slightly, into the almost airtight case. It must show no hint of “slop” from top to bottom or side to side. The front must fit into the opening like a plug, with no light or gaps visible.
早上，当人们眯着惺忪的睡眼，拉开抽屉找袜子时，少有人会去留意推拉抽屉的过程中那种灵活自如顺畅无碍的感觉。但对木匠阿伦·彼得斯来说，一只大小合适、进退自如的抽屉却标志着自己的木工水准。在这位顶级木匠（有很长一段时间可以说是英国最好的木匠，几乎没有其他人可以望其项背）的眼里，完美的抽屉该是这样：抽屉进入匣体好似乘坐气垫；拉开之时，由于匣腔的密闭性好，其它的抽屉顺势略微回收。上下左右，处处都不能有“漏气”的迹象；抽屉进出匣口犹如活塞的抽拉，找不到缝隙处，一丝光线都钻不过来。
All very well to say; but Mr Peters, true to the Arts and Crafts Movement in which he had been trained, was working with “timber rather than walking sticks”, in William Morris’s phrase. Solid wood moved: it faded in sunlight, swelled in humidity, dried out in central heating, in constant sympathy with its surroundings. In Mr Peters’s hands it adjusted to the user, too: to sit in one of his chairs was to feel the back give a little, graciously, as if “it wants you to”. Wood moved slowly, but not equally, with its mixture of springwood and summerwood, straight and wavy grain, knots, rings and imperfections. And it would always go the way it was naturally inclined.
说起来容易做起来难；阿伦摆弄的可是“厚重的建筑用木，而不是拐杖一样轻飘飘的木条”（引号里是威廉·莫里斯说过的话，而我们的主人公也确实受到了“美术工艺运动”[起源于英国19世纪下半叶的一场设计运动，其起因是针对家具、室内产品、建筑的工业批量生产所造成的设计水准下降的局面，推动者之一正是威廉·莫里斯。——译者]的熏染，并且成了其倡导精神的忠实信徒）。实木的特点是它的“善变”：光照久了会褪色，湿气重了会膨胀，太干燥了会开裂，总是随着环境的变化而变化。而经阿伦之手打造后的实木遇到了人亦会变：当你坐进他制作的椅子时，会感觉椅背顺势略微后仰，没有抵抗，从容自然，好像“它很乐意为你服务”。木头的变化速度虽然不快，但是各部分的变化步调是不一致的——木头其实是一个包含各种元素的混合体：既有早材，又有晚材；既有直纹，又有波纹；还有木节、年轮和疵点。并且木头总是依自己的自然属性去变化。
For drawer-sides, therefore, Mr Peters liked reclaimed Victorian timber, which was “as stable as it was ever going to be”. Honduras mahogany was the best, or quartersawn oak, brought into his workshop to climatise and then fitted when the weather was dry. Fitting was a matter of continuous checking and swift, soft planing; only one stroke of a plane, he would say, separated a perfect drawer from a sloppy one. Backs were fitted to sides, and sides to fronts, with immaculate dovetail joints—another Arts and Crafts trademark—that were hardly glued, but tapped in with a hammer. The drawer-bottom was solid cedar of Lebanon, for the smell. His last little touch, as he planed the top edge of the front, was to bevel it slightly, front to back, so that the inward taper perfected the fit. At that point, “so close to where I want to be”, he found himself proceeding more and more slowly, almost with reverence.
所以，阿伦喜欢回收维多利亚时代的废木料来制作抽屉的四个侧面，因为那时的木材是“最稳定的”。其中稳定性最佳的是洪都拉斯桃花心木和直纹橡木，阿伦通常会让这些木料在自己的工作坊先待一段时间以适应环境，等气候干燥时再进行制作装配。装配时需要不断地比量和刨削。刨削时，动作要快，劲儿要轻；一只完美的抽屉或是一只松垮的抽屉通常只是一刀决定的。前后左右四个面是严密的燕尾接合（这是“美术工艺运动”的又一个标志），接合处基本不用胶水，只需锤子敲牢即可。抽屉底用的是黎巴嫩杉木，是为了取其气味。最后的工序——一道很小的工序——是打削抽屉前端的上沿，把外沿的直角削成斜面，这样一来，一切就都完美了。最后这一时刻，“越发接近自己想要的结果时”，他越会将动作慢下来，小心谨慎，几乎带着一种敬畏感。
Mahogany into ash
桃花心木配白蜡木
Smoothness was essential. He could not understand people who made drawers, or any other piece of furniture, with sharp edges. They had to be planed, rubbed with fine sandpaper, polished with paste wax, to a soft and glowing evenness. He himself could not keep his hands off wood. Reading a book, he would stroke the table beside it. Looking at a chair, his hands would be all over the rails and the struts. Picking up some stray offcut, he would begin to smile. Wood, like a warm and living thing, had to be respected and loved.
平滑柔和是很重要的。他对于那些把抽屉或是其他家具的边角做得跟刀子一样的木匠很不理解。棱角处一定要先削，然后用细砂纸磨，最后再适度地打蜡上光，达到一种既闪亮又不刺眼的柔和感。他总是“手不离木”——看书时会轻抚旁边的桌子；打量椅子时，手会在扶手和椅子腿上摸个不停；在边角废料中发现有用之材时，嘴角会浮起微笑。对他来说，木头不是死的，而是性情温和的活物，需要爱和尊重。
His teacher, Edward Barnsley, had eschewed power tools. At the Froxfield workshops in Hampshire, where Mr Peters was apprenticed at 16, eagerly sweeping every last wood-curl from the floor, there were treadle saws, and only natural daylight illuminated the aproned young men bent solemnly over their work benches. As Arts and Crafts dictated, everything was done by hand. Mr Peters, steeped in that ethic but open to things new, found power tools useful in his own workshops in Surrey and in Devon. A portable drill or an electric chainsaw could save labour, and make light of roughing out big boards. Once that was done, he set to the real work: with hand drills, handsaws (their teeth rubbed, to run more smoothly, with a candle end), his bevelled-edge chisel and his wide, heavy, trusty Number 7 plane, which he used for everything.
他的老师爱德华·巴恩斯利对于电动工具一直很排斥。在汉普郡的弗洛斯菲尔德工作坊里，看到的是一只只由脚踏板驱动的锯，屋内没有灯，唯一的光源是日光。在屋内的亮处，一个个年轻人，围着围裙，坐在工作凳上，弯腰埋头，一丝不苟地工作着。阿伦16岁就在那里做学徒，扫落在地上的刨花；那种积极认真劲儿——落在地上的每一片刨花他都不会放过。“美术工艺运动”讲究一切工作都要靠手来完成，阿伦虽然深受这种精神的影响，却并不排斥新事物；当他发现电动工具好用时，就引进到他在萨里郡和德文郡的工作坊。移动式钻床或电锯都能节省劳动力，切大块板子就变得轻松多了。这些一旦完成，就开始真正的木工活了：用的是手钻、手锯（为了拉起来顺手，锯齿是用蜡烛头磨过的），还有他的斜刃凿，还有又宽又沉的7号刨子，这个他用起来得心应手，做什么活时都用的到。
His exquisite work made him the leader of the craft furniture revival of the 1970s and 1980s, and brought honours in both Britain and America. But how it had begun, this love-affair, was mysterious. As a boy he made a workshop in his parents’ cellar, mapping out dovetails with dividers while other boys played football, and he courted his future wife with the history of tables, chairs and cupboards. He was hooked young, and stayed there.
1970和1980年代出现了手工家具的复兴潮，他凭借制作精良的作品成了当时的领军人物，并在英美两国享有盛誉。追根溯源，他是怎么喜欢上木工的，没人知道。我们只知道，当他还只是一个小男孩时，就在家里的地下室兼并出了自己的工作室，别的小孩踢足球时，他在用圆规设计燕尾榫草图。谈恋爱时，他追求未来妻子的办法是跟她讲桌子、椅子和碗柜的历史。可以说，他对木工的痴迷始于幼年，此后一直未曾改变。
His motivation, he always said, was not to produce art. Many of his pieces were extraordinarily beautiful: a semicircular table with the wood adzed perfectly like an opening fan, a scalloped bowl in a block of solid wood, a rosewood cabinet panelled with pale sycamore. (His influences were eastern as well as English, strongly shaped by a trip to Japan in 1975 in which he had watched woodworkers, crouched on the floor, cutting cedar “soft as cheese” into pieces of elemental simplicity.) Each humble drawer, too, was beautiful, with sides and front in deliberately contrasting woods linked by dovetails: light oak into rosewood, mahogany into ash. But much of that quality, he would have said, came from the wood itself, in the swirl, curl and quilting of Devon walnut, perhaps his favourite, or the dark, coloured stripes of Macassar ebony, so hard to work.
他常说，艺术并不是自己的工作动力。尽管他许多作品都异常的美丽：那个扇状的半圆形桌子，那只用整块实木削成的碗口带着一圈圆齿的木碗，那个用白色梧桐木点缀的紫檀柜。（除了英国本土风格，他的作品还带有一种东方感，这很大程度源于1975年的日本之行，在那里，他见识到了当地的木匠做工，他们蹲在地上，像“切奶酪一样”把杉木切成组装用的基本配件。）每一只不起眼的抽屉也是美丽的；前后左右四个面用燕尾榫依次连接，前面和两侧分别使用差别明显的木料，以造成对比的效果：浅色橡木可以配紫檀木，桃花心木可以配白蜡木。但这些在阿伦看来应该并不是真正的美之所在，他会认为木家具的美主要在于木头本身，在德文郡胡桃木（可能是他的最爱）的每一条漩状或线状花纹上，在孟加锡黑檀木（极难加工）的每一道黑色或深色的粗条上。
What mattered most to him was that a piece was simple and honest, that it worked, and that it was good enough to put his name to. If people called it art, all well and good; but his was the ethic of the craftsman. As Barnsley, his teacher, once put it, a rural artisan simply had to do his best. “If the wheel axle pin squeaked, if the beam had sapwood in it, if the haystack leant”, everyone in the village would know who had done it. Or, for that matter, if a drawer jammed.
他最看重的是家具的简单朴实，用起来不出问题就可以了，并且可以问心无愧地对别人说“这是我做的”。如果人们把他做的家具称作艺术品，那当然是好事；但是他更在意的是作为一个工匠的职业操守。他的老师巴恩斯利曾经说过，作为农村的工匠，一定要尽全力把手中的活儿做好。若是车轮的轴销嘎吱作响，或是横梁里掺了边材，或是干草堆斜歪了，村里的所有人都会知道这是谁干的活儿。或是本文一开头提到的抽屉，若是拉的时候卡住了...... |
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发表于 2009-11-9 17:53
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