雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第9章:退隱山林(94)

Alan was rather amused by this and wrote to Don Bayley (who had sent his congratulations) that they could not really have made him an FRS when he was twenty-four.

圖靈對此很開心，他在信中對唐·貝利說，皇家學會只是無法在他24歲時選他當院士。

The sponsors were Max Newman and Bertrand Russell.

他的提名者是紐曼和羅素。

Newman had lost all interest in computers and was only grateful that Alan had regenerated his pulse with the morphogenetic theory.

紐曼現在對計算機也沒有興趣了，他很高興圖靈重拾了形態形成學研究。

Jefferson, himself a Fellow since 1947, also sent a letter of congratulation,52 saying 'I am so glad; and I sincerely trust that all your valves are glowing with satisfaction, and signalling messages that seem to you to mean pleasure and pride!

傑弗遜是1947年當選的院士，他給圖靈寫祝賀信，說"我非常高興，我誠摯地相信，你的電子管正洋溢着喜悅的光芒，向你發送榮耀的信息！

He managed to confuse the logical and the physical levels of description even within one sentence.

"恐怕也只有他，能在一個句子之內，把邏輯和物理層面的不同描述搞得一團糟。

Alan would refer to Jefferson as an 'old bumbler' because he never grasped the machine model of the mind, but Jefferson certainly found an apt description of Alan,53 as 'a sort of scientific Shelley'.

圖靈把傑弗遜稱爲"老呆子"，因爲他始終無法理解思維的機械模型，但傑弗遜卻給圖靈起了一個很恰當的綽號——科學界的雪萊。

Apart from the more obvious similarities, Shelley also lived in a mess,54 'chaos on chaos heaped of chemical apparatus, books, electrical machines, unfinished manuscripts, and furniture worn into holes by acids,' and Shelley's voice too was 'excruciating; it was intolerably shrill, harsh and discordant.'

除了成就方面的相似之處，雪萊的生活也非常混亂，到處都堆滿了化學儀器、書本、機器、未完成的手稿，傢俱被侵蝕得滿是瘡痍。而且雪萊的嗓音也很折磨人，那是一種不堪入耳的尖銳的噪聲。

Alike they were at the centre of life; alike at the margins of respectable society.

他們一樣，活在生命的中心，也都一樣，活在社會的邊緣。

But Shelley stormed out, while Alan continued to push his way through the treacly banality of middle-class Britain, his Shelley-like qualities muted by the grin-and-bear-it English sense of humour, and filtered through the prosaic conventions of institutional science.

雪萊被風暴帶走了，而圖靈則要繼續面對英國中產階級的庸俗，他那雪萊般的品質，在隱忍的英國文化中，在迂腐的學術界的陳規中，慢慢地消磨着。

Mrs Turing was very proud of the Fellowship, a title which raised Alan to the eminence of George Johnstone Stoney, and laid on a party at Guildford where her friends could meet him—hardly the function to appeal to Alan, who once walked wordlessly out of a sherry party to which his brother had invited him, after a bare ten minutes.

圖靈夫人對他當選院士感到非常自豪，她在格爾福特舉辦了一場聚會，她的朋友們前來祝賀圖靈。但圖靈對這種聚會毫無興趣，曾經有一次，他哥哥邀請他參加聚會，他僅僅坐了十分鐘，就一言不發地走了。

His mother found it hard to overcome her amazement that important personages could speak well of her Alan, but in this respect she was making progress, and had come a long way since the 1920s.

他的母親很難相信，有那麼多名人在稱讚圖靈，現在她逐漸適應了。自從20年代之後，他們都已經走過了漫長的路。

Although Alan complained to his friends of her patronising fussiness and religiosity, there remained the fact that she was one of the few people who took an interest in his doings.

雖然圖靈總跟朋友抱怨她的脾氣和宗教觀，但不可否認，她是僅有的幾個在乎圖靈的人之一。