Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far from here, lived a peaceful star, which moved peacefully in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of peaceful planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon¹ isn’t working.

很久以前，在离这里相当遥远的宇宙里某个地方，住着一颗平静的星星，在浩瀚的天空静静地行走着。这颗星星被一群我们叫不出名的行星包围着。它很大，也很热，还非常重：这给记者的报道工作开始造成了麻烦。我们用“遥远，”“很大，”“很热，”“难以计算，”形容过下面的事物：澳大利亚很遥远，大象很大，房子更大，今天早晨我冲了个很热的热水澡，喜马拉雅山庞大无比。显然我们使用的词典里的词语远远满足不了我们想形容的事物。

If this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, of impoverishing² the narrative³. For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate⁴ and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow⁵ with a feather. It’s a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and as long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it’s human. It doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us. Until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite⁶; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. The sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. Not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting “very” numerous objects, and, with little imagination, “million” was coined. A while later, with even less imagination, “billion” was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.

如果必须要写这篇故事，我们必须要有勇气剔除易于激发我们想入非非的所有形容词：这些词会使叙述贫瘠无力，起到相反的效果。因为我们人类的语言不适合论述星辰，否则会显得可笑，就如同某些人想用羽毛去犁地一样。语言和我们与生俱来的，适合描述和我们人类一般大小和持久存在的物体；它拥有我们的四维，它有人性。它没有逾越我们感知的事物告知我们事情。就在两三百年前，小指的是疥疮上的螨虫；没有更小的东西了，结果呢，也就没有形容词来形容小了。大海和天空都很大，事实上，它们同样大小；火是热的。到了十九世纪，人们才感到有必要将 “很”这一词引进到日常语言中来，以便计算无数的物体，时机一到，“百万”这一词便没费吹灰之力，应运而生了。不久，也没费多大的劲，“十亿”一词也被造了出来，也没有介意这个词的精确含义，因为这个词今天在不同的国家里有着不同的价值取向。

Not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times as high as a high tower is a very high tower? Nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like “immense,” “colossal,” “extraordinary”: to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is “many” times as big and heavy as our Earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. There is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten, but then this would not be a story in the sense in which it wants to be a story; that is, a fable⁷ that awakens⁸ echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.

对于形容词最高级形式，人们也没有走得太远：多高的塔算非常高的塔呢？像“巨大的，”“庞大的，”“非凡的，”这些形容词，我们也不能希望从伪装的最高级性用词那里得到帮助：叙述我们想在这里叙述的事情，这些形容词很不适宜，我们不抱有希望，因为星星从开天辟地起就比太阳大十倍，而太阳比我们居住的地球大并且重“许多”倍，其体积远远超出了地球，致使我们想破了脑袋也描述不出它的体积到底有多大。诚然，有许多娴雅和优美的语言，远比十个字母表的力量要大得多，但在某种意义上说这不是人们想要讲述的故事；就是说，寓言可以产生共鸣，我们每个人在读寓言的时候都能够隐约看到他自己的和人类的影子。

This tranquil⁹ star wasn’t supposed to be so tranquil. Maybe it was too big: in the far-off original act in which everything was created, it had received an inheritance too demanding. Or maybe it contained in its heart an imbalance or an infection, as happens to some of us. It’s customary among the stars to quietly burn the hydrogen they are made of, generously giving energy to the void, until they are reduced to a dignified¹⁰ thinness and end their career as modest white dwarfs¹¹. The star in question, however, when some billions of years had passed since its birth, and its companions began to rarefy, was not satisfied with its destiny and became restless—to such a point that its restlessness became visible even to those of us who are “very” distant and circumscribed¹² by a “very” brief life.

这颗恬静的星星不应该如此沉静。也许它太大了：每样东西都是在遥远的原始状态下创造出来的，它已收到了一份相当苛刻的遗传物。或许在它的内部包含有失调或感染疾病，就像我们身上得的疾病那样。在星星之间不知不觉中燃尽它们赖以组成的氧气，慷慨地将能量给予空旷的太空，直到减缩到得体的苗条形状，变成端庄白色的矮星，已是习以为常的事了。然而，我们提到的这个星星自从它诞生以来已经经历了数十亿年代的沧桑巨变，它的一些伙伴开始稀少，不满足于它们的宿命，变得烦躁不安了——它的烦躁不安对我们这些距离它“非常”遥远的并且受到“非常”短暂的生命制约的人来讲，就不言而喻了。

Of this restlessness Arab and Chinese astronomers¹³ were aware. The Europeans, no: the Europeans of that time, which was a time of struggle, were so convinced that the heaven of the stars was immutable¹⁴, was in fact the paradigm¹⁵ and kingdom of immutability¹⁶, that they considered it pointless and blasphemous¹⁷ to notice changes. There could be none—by definition there were none. But a diligent¹⁸ Arab observer, equipped only with good eyes, patience, humility¹⁹, and the love of knowing the works of his God, had realized that this star, to which he was very attached, was not immutable. He had watched the star for thirty years, and had noticed that it oscillated between the fourth and the sixth of the six magnitudes that had been described many centuries earlier by a Greek, who was as diligent as he, and who, like him, thought that observing the stars was a route that would take one far. The Arab felt a little as if it were his star: he wanted to place his mark on it, and in his notes he called it al-Ludra, which in his dialect means “the capricious one.” Al-Ludra oscillated, but not regularly: not like a pendulum²⁰; rather, like someone who is at a loss between two choices. It completed its cycle sometimes in one year, sometimes in two, sometimes in five, and it didn’t always stop in its dimming at the sixth magnitude, which is the last visible to the naked eye: at times it disappeared completely. The patient Arab counted seven cycles before he died: his life had been long, but the life of a man is always pitifully brief compared with that of a star, even if the star behaves in such a way as to arouse suspicions about its eternity²¹.

阿拉伯和中国的天文学家了解这一烦躁不安的缘由。欧洲的天文学家们却不得而知：那个时代的欧洲人，是个与时代进行抗争的时候，确信星星的王国是不可改变的，事实上是不可改变的典范和领域，他们认为留意那些变化是毫无意义且亵渎天庭的行为。可能没有一个人——根据这一定义，没有一个人相信星星居住的太空会改变。但是，有一个勤奋的阿拉伯观察家，仅仅通过良好的视力、耐心、谦逊以及对上帝造物了解之笃诚，明白他所深深迷恋的这颗星星，不是不可改变的。他花了三十年的光阴观察这颗星星，他注意到这颗星星在六个等级中第四和第六颗星星之间来回摆动，这一现象早在许多世纪前就被一个希腊人描述过，这个希腊人很勤奋，知道观测星星是一条漫长的征程。这个阿拉伯人感觉那颗星星有点像是他自己的星星似的：他想在那上面做上他的标记，在他的笔记本里他将它称为艾尔-路得拉（音译——译注），用阿拉伯话说叫做“反复无常的星星。”艾尔-路德拉来回摆动，但却没有规律：它不像钟摆那样摆动;却像个人，处于两种选择之间不知所措。有时它完成一个周期的循环需要一年的时间，有时需要两年，有时需要五年，而且在它处于第六等级昏暗的时候也不总是停下行进的步伐，竟至到了肉眼看不见的程度：有时它完全消失不见了。那个耐心的阿拉伯人在去世前数过七次周期：他在世上活的时间很长，但一个人的生命与那颗星星的寿命相比总是短暂的，令人感到可怜，即便这个星星以这样方式存在于宇宙之间，也还是引起人类对其永恒性产生了质疑。

After the death of the Arab, al-Ludra, although provided with a name, did not attract much interest, because the variable stars are so many, and also because, starting in 1750, it was reduced to a speck²², barely visible with the best telescopes of the time. But in 1950 (and the message has only now reached us) the illness that must have been gnawing²³ at it from within reached a crisis, and here, for the second time, our story, too, enters a crisis: now it is no longer the adjectives that fail but the facts themselves. We still don’t know much about the convulsive death-resurrection of stars: we know that, fairly often, something flares²⁴ up in the atomic mechanism结构 of a star’s nucleus核心 and then the star explodes, on a scale not of millions or billions of years but of hours and minutes.We know that these events are among the most cataclysmic that the sky holds; but we understand only—and approximately—the how, not the why. We’ll be satisfied with the how.

尽管那个星星被那个阿拉伯人在生前起了艾尔-路德拉的名字，却没有引起人们极大的兴趣，因为变幻莫测的星星如此之多，也由于自从1750年开始，它变成了一颗小斑点，用那个时代最精确的望远镜几乎都难以看见。但在1950年（我们刚刚才收到这条信息）这一来自其内在的危机的病态一定一直在啮噬着它，在此，我们讲述的故事也再次进入一种危机：现在并非是形容词不再发挥其作用，而是事实本身。对于起决定性作用的星星的死亡和再生的规律我们仍然知之甚少：我们知道，星星核心的原子结构里频频骤然发出火焰，接着这颗星星便爆炸了，其规模不是数百万或数十亿年，而是数小时和数分钟。我们知道这些偶发事件是在天空拥有的最大的灾难；但我们仅仅——大概了解——只知其然，却不知其所以然。我们将会满足于只知其然的水平上。

An observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of 1950, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the silent planets of al-Ludra would have seen, “before his very eyes,” as they say, his gentle sun swell²⁷, not a little but “a lot,” and would not have been present at the spectacle for long. Within a quarter of an hour he would have been forced to seek useless shelter against the intolerable heat—and this we can affirm independently of any hypothesis concerning the size and shape of this observer, provided that he was constructed, like us, of molecules²⁸ and atoms—and in half an hour his testimony²⁹, and that of all his fellow-beings, would end. Therefore, to conclude this account we must base it on other testimony, that of our earthly instruments, for which the event, in its intrinsic horror, happened in a “very” diluted³⁰ form and, besides, was slowed down by the long journey through the realm of light that brought us the news. After an hour, the seas and ice (if there were any) of the no longer silent planet boiled up; after three, its rocks melted and its mountains crumbled³¹ into valleys in the form of lava³². After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor³³, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor³⁴ of chance and necessity偶然性和必然性, through innumerable trials and errors试验, had perhaps created there, and along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined that sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.

1950年10月19日10点钟，一位星象观测家不无遗憾地发现自己本来会看到艾尔-路得拉上寂静的一颗行星，他们说他观测的那颗温和的太阳“就在他眼前”增大起来，增大的既不少也不“多”，而且这一奇观也不会长时间呈现。在一刻钟内他不得不被迫去寻找无用的掩体以抵御那叫人难以忍受的酷热——这一点我们可以断言有关这个星象观测家观测到的那颗行星的大小和形状不以任何一项假说为依据，假设他像我们一样构想出分子和原子的话——在半个小时之内，他以及他的诸位同人的证据都将结束。因此，总结这一现象，我们必须根据这一现象并在其它的证据基础上进行总结归纳，通过使用我们尘世的仪器，其相互作用以其本身固有的恐惧，在非常无力的形式下产生的，此外，这一进程通过光的领域（给我们带了这个消息）的长期行程而得以放缓。一小时之后，这颗不再沉寂的星星上的海洋和冰块便沸腾起来：三个消失之后，岩石开始融化，山脉以火山岩的形式崩溃，变成座座峡谷。十小时之后，整个行星变为蒸汽，以及所有因偶然性和必然性结合的劳作的、并经过无数次试验发明的那些精美的工程，还有，所有诗人和明智之士也许观测过天空，想知道那么多小小的亮点到底有什么价值，可是他们都没有找到答案。没有答案也是种答案。

After one of our days, the surface of the star had reached the orbit of its most distant planets, invading their sky and, together with the remains³⁵ of its tranquillity³⁶, spreading in all directions—a billowing wave of energy bearing the modulated³⁷ news of the catastrophe³⁸.

Ramón Escojido was thirty-four and had two charming children. With his wife he had a complex and tense relationship: he was Peruvian and she was of Austrian origin, he solitary³⁹, modest, and lazy, she ambitious and eager for social life. But what social life can you dream of if you live in an observatory天文台 at an altitude海拔高度 of twenty-nine hundred metres, an hour’s flight from the nearest city and four kilometres from an Indian village, dusty in summer and icy in winter? Judith loved and hated her husband, on alternate days, sometimes even in the same instant. She hated his wisdom and his collection of shells; she loved the father of her children, and the man who was under the covers in the morning.

过了几天后，这颗星星的平面到达了最遥远的行星的轨迹，入侵它们的天空，与这颗恬静的星星的残害一道朝四面八方散去——能量滚滚的浪涛传送出大灾难变了调的信息。拉蒙三十四岁，有两个可爱的孩子。他跟他太太的关系复杂而紧张：他是秘鲁人，她的祖籍是奥地利，他性格孤僻，谦逊待人，生性懒惰，而她性情豪放，渴望社交生活。但如果你住在海拔两万九千米的高度，乘坐飞机到最近的城市需要一个小时的时间，从印度的一个村落走也要四公里的路程，夏季尘土飞扬，冬季冰天雪地，那么你梦想的社交生活还有什么意义呢？朱迪丝时而爱她的丈夫，时而恨她的丈夫，有时爱恨交织在一起。她狠他的聪明和他收集贝壳的嗜好；她爱这个孩子的父亲，爱这个早晨头蒙大被爱睡懒觉的男人。

They reached a fragile accord on weekend outings. It was Friday evening, and they were getting ready with noisy delight for the next day’s excursion. Judith and the children were busy with the provisions; Ramón went up to the observatory⁴⁰ to prepare the photographic plate for the night. In the morning, he struggled to free himself from the children, who overwhelmed him with lighthearted questions: How far was the lake? Would it still be frozen? Had he remembered the rubber raft? He went into the darkroom to develop the plate; he dried it and placed it beside the plate that he had made seven days earlier. He examined both under the microscope: good, they were identical; he could leave in tranquillity. But then he had a scruple⁴¹ and looked more carefully, and realized that there was something new—not a big thing, a barely perceptible spot, but it wasn’t there on the old plate. When something like this shows up, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s a speck of dust (one can’t be too clean in the workplace) or a microscopic⁴² defect in the emulsion; but there is also the minuscule⁴³ probability that it’s a nova, and one has to make a report, subject to confirmation⁴⁴. Farewell, outing: he would have to retake the photograph on the following two nights. What would he tell Judith and the children?

关于周末交友他们达成了脆弱的一致意见。那是星期五的晚上，他们都为次日的出行乱哄哄地忙碌着。朱迪丝和孩子们忙着准备携带的物品；拉蒙去了天文台准备那天晚上的照相底片。到了早晨，他好不容易摆脱了孩子们，他们竞问些天真的问题搅扰他：那座湖有多远啊？它还上着冻吗？他记得那个橡皮伐子吗？他去暗示冲洗底片：他晾干了底片，放在他早在七天前就冲洗完毕的底片旁边。他在显微镜下仔细检查了两张底片：很好，一模一样；他可以平静地离开了。但这时他还是有点顾虑，于是又更仔细看了一眼，发现有样新的东西——不是很大的东西，而是几乎难以察觉到的斑点，但它不在那张旧的底片上了。但凡出现这种事，一百次里有九十九次会发现一粒灰尘（工作间里越清洁越好）或者感光乳剂中有一个极小的缺陷；但也有微小的可能性，因为那是颗新星，人们必须作出报告确认下来。再会吧，郊游：在接下来的两天夜里他将不得不再拍下那颗星星的照片。他将怎样告诉朱迪丝和孩子们呢？