罕见的畅销文学评论家哈罗德·布鲁姆逝世，享年89岁

Harold Bloom, A Rare Best-Selling Literary Critic, Dies At 89

罕见的畅销文学评论家哈罗德·布鲁姆逝世，享年89岁

Harold Bloom was a rarity: a best-selling and widely known literary critic. Affectionately dubbed the "King Kong" of criticism, Bloom died Monday at the age of 89, at a hospital in New Haven, Conn., according to his wife.

哈罗德·布鲁姆是罕见的:他是一位畅销书作家和广为人知的文学评论家。布鲁姆被亲切地称为批评界的“金刚”。据他的妻子说，布鲁姆周一在康涅狄格州纽黑文的一家医院去世，享年89岁。

Over a redoubtable career, Bloom wrote scores of books, edited hundreds more and irritated innumerable intellectuals by arguing, for example, for the superiority of Western literary traditions.

在其令人敬畏的职业生涯中，布鲁姆写了几十本书，编辑了数百本书，并因争辩西方文学传统的优越性而激怒了无数知识分子。

Bloom was born in the Bronx, N.Y., to a Yiddish-speaking family that had emigrated from Eastern Europe. His father was a garment worker, and Bloom did not hear English spoken until the age of 6.

布鲁姆出生在纽约州的布朗克斯，他们是一个说依地语的家庭，这个家庭是从东欧移民过来的。他的父亲是一名服装工人，布鲁姆直到6岁才听到有人说英语。

Educated first at Cornell University and then at Yale University — which at the time still maintained an informal Jewish quota — Bloom quickly established himself as a brilliant student. Yale would become Bloom's intellectual home for more than five decades.

布鲁姆先后在康奈尔大学和耶鲁大学接受教育——当时耶鲁大学仍保留着非正式的犹太人配额——他很快成为一名出色的学生。50多年来，耶鲁一直是布鲁姆的学术中心。

He taught classes there up until the week before his death, and his lectures on William Shakespeare drew throngs of enthusiastic undergraduates and a not-insubstantial following online.

直到去世前一周，他都在那里授课。他关于威廉·莎士比亚的讲座吸引了大批热情的本科生，网上也有不少追随者。

Bloom had a photographic memory, and claimed he could recite all of Shakespeare, all of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and copious swaths of British Romantic poetry.

布鲁姆有过目不忘的能力，他声称自己能背诵莎士比亚全集、弥尔顿的《失乐园》全集以及大量英国浪漫主义诗歌。

"To a rather considerable extent," Bloom told The Atlantic magazine in 2003, "literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies."

布鲁姆在2003年接受《大西洋月刊》采访时说:“在相当大的程度上，文学研究已经被一种叫文化研究的荒谬绝伦的东西所取代。就我所知，这种东西既不是文化，也不是研究。”

But Bloom also championed various minority and female scholars, authors and theater directors. He once proclaimed Ursula K. Le Guin a greater writer than J.R.R. Tolkien and suggested, in his 1990 bestseller, The Book of J, that much of the Hebrew Bible may have been written by a woman.

但布鲁姆也支持各种少数族裔和女性学者、作家和戏剧导演。他曾宣称厄休拉·k·勒奎恩是一位比J.R.R.托尔金更伟大的作家，并在其1990年的畅销书《J书》中指出，《希伯来圣》的大部分内容可能是由一个女人写的。

In 2004, writer Naomi Wolf accused Bloom of putting his hand on her thigh when she was a student of his. He vigorously denied her accusation.

2004年，作家娜奥米·沃尔夫指责布鲁姆在她还是他学生时把手放在她的大腿上。他极力否认她的指控。

In spite of a lifetime of laurels and unusually lucrative book contracts for an academic, Bloom seemed resigned to his reputation as past his prime.

尽管一生都享有荣誉，并与一位学者签下了异常丰厚的出书合同，但布鲁姆似乎对自己已过盛年的名声无可非议。