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Towards the end of the twentieth century, a celebrated Romanian-French philosopher was invited to speak in Zurich.
20世纪末，一位著名的罗马尼亚法国哲学家应邀在苏黎世演讲。
He was introduced with rhetorical pomp and flattering comparisons to the likes of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.
人们在介绍他的时候，用华丽的辞藻将他与克尔凯郭尔和叔本华这样的人物相比较。
The speaker smiled, and immediately confounded his German interpreter by beginning his presentation with the words 'Mais je ne suis qu'un deconneur'- 'But I'm just a joker'.
演讲者笑了笑，立即用“但我只是个小丑”开始他的演讲，把他的德语翻译弄糊涂了。
A few of his critics might agree, but they would be wrong.
一些批评他的人可能会同意，但他们错了。
For Emil Cioran is very much worthy of inclusion in the line of the great French and European moral philosophers and writers of maxims stretching back to Montaigne, Chamfort, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld.
因为埃米尔·乔兰非常值得被纳入法国和欧洲伟大的道德哲学家和格言作家的行列，这些哲学家和格言作家可以追溯到蒙田、钱福特、帕斯卡和拉罗什福科。
Cioran was born in Rasinari, Romania, in April 1911. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest. Both facts were to be key in his later work.
乔兰于1911年4月出生在罗马尼亚的拉西纳里，他的父亲是希腊东正教牧师，这两个事实都是他后来工作的关键。
The writer's Romanian origins are often taken as the source of a brooding, Romantic, fatalistic temperament while his father's ecclesiastical calling finds echoes in his son's unswerving preoccupation with themes of religion, sainthood and the dangers and joys of atheism.
这位作家的罗马尼亚血统常常被视为沉思、浪漫、宿命论气质的来源，而来自其父亲教会的召唤则与儿子坚定不移地专注于宗教、圣人和无神论的危险与欢乐的主题相呼应。
In 1934, at the age of only 23, he published his first book in Romanian, On the Heights of Despair.
1934年，年仅23岁的他用罗马尼亚语出版了第一本书《在绝望之巅》。
The book contains in embryo much of the lucidly bleak, nihilistic thinking that he'd develop throughout his life.
这本书包含了他一生中发展出来的许多清晰、凄凉、虚无主义的思想。
He explained that writing had been an alternative to shooting himself.
他解释说写作是自杀的另一种选择。
This is an author to read at moments of despair and melancholy. He doesn't depress us, merely makes us feel less alone with our sorrows.
他是个在绝望和忧郁时刻阅读的人，他并没有使我们沮丧，只是让我们在悲伤中不再感到孤独。
Here is a peak inside his work 'It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.'
其作品中有一句话是这样说的：“不值得去自杀，因为自杀总是太迟了。”
'Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists.
只有乐观主义者才会自杀，那些不再能成为乐观主义者的乐观主义者。
The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?'
其他人没有生活的理由，为什么他们要去寻死？”
'Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.'
“只有当你要在书中说出永远不敢透露给任何人的东西时，你才会写书。”
And 'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.' 1937 proved a pivotal year for Cioran. He moved to Paris and soon became a French citizen.
“你从早到晚都做什么？”“我忍住了。”1937年对乔兰来说是关键的一年，他搬到巴黎，很快就成了法国公民。
He never returned to the country of his birth. It was a move that provided him with another reason to be melancholic exile.
他再也没有返回故国，这给了他另一个在忧郁中流亡的理由。
And yet he asserted that anyone who doesn't feel themselves to be an exile has no imagination.
然而他断言，任何一个不觉得自己是流亡者的人都没有想象力。
'Only the village idiot thinks they belong,' he noted. Cioran sat out the Second World War in Paris.
他说，只有村里的白痴才有归属感。乔兰在巴黎参加了第二次世界大战。
In its aftermath, he approached the famous publishing house, Gallimard, with his first work in French, A Short History of Decay, published in 1949.
之后，他找到了著名的伽里玛出版社，他的第一部法语作品《衰亡短史》发表于1949年。
Writing in French was he said, 'like writing a love letter with a dictionary'.
他用法语撰书，他说“就像用字典在写情书。
The book became a bestseller, the first in a series of devastatingly wicked and dark texts composed mainly of aphorisms and tart short essays.
这本书极为畅销，这是他撰写的以格言和尖刻短文为主的邪恶阴郁文字系列中的第一本。
Each title comes as a provocation or a punch Syllogisms of Bitterness, The Temptation to Exist and his masterpiece The Trouble with Being Born.
每个标题都是一个挑衅或是重击，《苦涩三段论》，《存在的诱惑》以及他的杰作《出生的烦恼》。
Each book deals relentlessly with themes of illness, death and suicide.
每本书都以不屈不挠的精神应对疾病、死亡和自杀的主题。
It was a rather touching irony that the author lived to the ripe old age of 84.
埃米尔·乔兰活到84岁高龄，这真是一种讽刺。
By the time Cioran died in 1995, he had become a cult in France, attracting the sort of faddish attention he witheringly denounced in his work.
1995年乔兰去世时，他已经成为法国民众的崇拜者，吸引了他作品中痛斥的那种赶时髦者的关注。
Every life, he maintained, is utterly peculiar – and wholly unimportant.
他坚持认为，每一种生活都是完全奇特的，而且完全不重要。
In the age of Walt Disney, this kind of darkness matters. Cioran's writing belongs in the line of those great aloof European miserabilists, including La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Leopardi, Nietzsche and Beckett.
在华特·迪士尼的时代，这种阴郁感很重要。乔兰的作品属于那些孤傲的伟大欧洲悲剧家行列，包括拉罗什福科、钱福特、利奥帕迪、尼采和贝克特。
Like them, he saw civilization as an absurd distraction from the ultimate meaninglessness of existence.
和他们一样，他把文明看作是一种荒谬的东西，从存在的终极意义上分散人们的注意力。
'Only an idiot could think there is a point to any of this,' he insisted.
“只有白痴才会认为这一切都有意义，”他坚持说。
But he always kept his wit and good cheer. One of his greatest sources of sorrow was that he couldn't sleep very well–and was often up at 3am.
但他总是保持机智和愉悦的心态。他最大的悲哀之一就是睡眠不好，常常凌晨3点就起床。
He'd walk around the streets of Paris until dawn.
他会在巴黎的大街上走到天亮。
He noted sardonically in The Trouble with Being Born, 'What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac suffers?'
他在《出生的烦恼》中讽刺地指出，“与失眠症患者每天遭受的痛苦相比，一次受难算什么？”
Cioran was obsessed by suicide. But better to live, he wrote, and yet think and act as though one were already dead.
乔兰痴迷于自杀。但他写道，活着更好，而思考和行动却好像一个人已经死了。
After all, he said why deprive oneself of the consoling idea of no longer being around?
毕竟，他说，为什么要剥夺自己不存在的这种能给人以安慰的想法？
'Continuing to Live is possible only because of the deficiencies of our imagination and our memories.'
“只有在缺乏想象力和记忆力的情况下，才能继续活下去。”
he wrote. 'I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?'
他写道，“我的存在只是个意外。为什么把这一切都看得那么认真？”
But suicide was a constant relief as an idea 'We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.'
但自杀是一种持续性解脱，因为自杀是一种观念，“只有当我们不确定自己是否能在想自杀时能这么做，我们才会害怕未来。”
'Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.'
“我一直生活在害怕被最坏的情境吓到的恐惧中，我在任何情况下都试图抢先一步，早在不幸发生之前就让自己陷入困境。”
Our age is notably optimistic and it makes us suffer hugely from being so.
我们的时代充满乐观，这让我们非常痛苦。
We are all, in private, a lot sadder than we are allowed to admit.
我们私下都比被允许承认感受到的悲伤更难过。
Writers like Cioran provide an occasion for the sadness inside all of us to be communally expressed and thereby a little, but only a little, diminished and softened.
像乔兰这样的作家为我们所有人内心的悲伤提供了共同表达的机会，从而使悲伤有所减轻，
In his beautiful book, The Trouble with Being Born, Cioran wrote 'I can be friends with people only when they are at their lowest point and have neither the desire nor the strength to restore their habitual sentimental illusions.'
在他那本精妙的书《出生的烦恼》中，乔兰写道：“只有当人们处于最低谷，既没有欲望也没有力量恢复习惯性的情感幻觉时，我才能与他们为友。”
It's precisely in that kind of mood – into which all thoughtful people must sink on a fairly regular basis – that we can be blessed to find the dark and consoling works of Emil Cioran waiting for us.
正是在这种心情下——所有深思熟虑者都必须沉入其中——我们才能幸运地发现埃米尔·乔兰那阴郁，又令人慰藉的作品在等着我们。
We love bringing you these films, if you want to help us to keep bringing you thoughtful content,
如果你们想帮助我们制作这些视频，可以不断为我们提供有深度的内容。
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