雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第9章:退隱山林(79)
WAlking up to the city centre from the Victoria University, there was a point where Oxford Road became Oxford Street, just under the railway bridge.
There were a couple of cinemas, an amusement arcade, a pub—the Union Tavern—and a very early example of the milk bar.
這裏有幾家電影院，一家娛樂商場，一家酒吧"聯合客棧"，還有一家牛奶吧。This stretch between the urinal and the cinema was where the male hoMosexual eye was focussed—perhaps the same block as trodden by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1908, such unofficial institutions lasting as long as the respectable kind. Here straggled a motley convoy of souls, and amidst them the odd independent sailing, like Alan Turing.
這是男性同性戀的樂園，也許維特根斯坦1908年就在這一片活動過。這個地下樂園存在了很長時間，各樣的靈魂，在這裏結隊穿梭，也有一些獨自飄過，比如圖靈。
Here merged many kinds of desire—for physical excitement, for attention, for a life outside family and factory confines, or for money. These were not sharp divisions.
這裏瀰漫着不同的慾望——身體的快感，旁人的注視、家庭或工廠之外的刺激，還有金錢，這些慾望之間，並沒有明確的界線。Money, if involved, was little but the clink of 'tipping' that was heard in any encounter between different social classes;
錢不多，但不同階級的人相遇，總會響起"小費"的叮噹聲。This was how it was done in the ordinary England of 1950, outside privileged circles such as those of Cambridge or Oxford. For the young, in particular, without means or private space, homosexual desire meant street life.
在劍橋或牛津這樣的特權圈子之外，這就是1950年的英國年輕人的普通生活。特別是對於年輕人來說，他們沒有私人空間，同性戀就意味着這種街道生活。Desert island sex, this was not for the respectable man. But Alan was above respectability.
孤島性愛不是正經人能做的，但圖靈早就已經超脫了世俗評判。But what was his 'programme for the immediate future'?
不過，書歸正傳，圖靈搬到這裏之後，他接下來的打算是什麼呢？The past two years had offered flashbacks to the successes of his earlier life.
過去的兩年，幾乎就是他早年生活的倒敘，The usual academic course would be to build upon those successes, extracting as much as possible from them. But this was not his path; he had to find something new in order to continue.
他可以基於這些經歷，從中儘可能地榨取精華。但這不是圖靈的套路，他必須找到一些新鮮的東西，以支持他繼續走下去。And he now began to draw upon something that had, in fact, been there all the time, but which only now began to emerge into light.
他開始注意到一樣東西，實際上一直都存在，但現在纔開始浮現出來的東西。It was as though a long sub-routine, that had begun with Christopher Morcom, passing through Eddington and von Neumann, Hilbert and Godel, Computable Numbers, his war machines and mechanical processes, the relays and the electronics and the ACE, the programming of computers and the groping towards intelligent machinery—all that stream of enquiry had tapered off, and left him free to continue from where schooling had interrupted him.
它就像一個很長的子程序，從克里斯朵夫·默卡開始，穿過愛丁頓和馮·諾伊曼，希爾伯特和哥德爾，可計算數，戰爭機器，機械程序，延遲繼電器，電子，ACE，計算機程序，朝着對智能機器的探索——這條溪流逐漸變細了，給圖靈留下了一份自由，使他得以去探索，那個曾因上學而被迫離開的世界。
