For 75 years Jiro has been doing the same highly repetitive manual work.
       75年来，二郎(Jiro)几乎一成不变地干着同样的手艺活。
       Since he was about 10, this 85-year-old man has spent most of his waking hours arranging little pieces of raw fish on to compressed balls of sticky rice. You might think hed have got tired of it by now.
       二郎现年85岁，从10岁起，他便将大部分日常时间用来将生鱼片点缀在压紧的黏性饭团上。你可能会觉得他已经厌倦了。
       But no: Jiro loves his job more than anything else in the world.
       错了。二郎对这份工作的热忱无与伦比。
       In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, David Gelbs admiring documentary, we see the chef stare straight at the camera and say, with grim earnestness:
       在大卫贾柏(David Gelb)向二郎致敬的纪录片《寿司之神》(Jiro Dreams of Sush)中，这位大厨站在摄像机前，满脸认真地说道：
       I feel ecstatic every day. When I make sushi I feel victorious.
       每天我都着迷不已。做寿司让我有胜利感。
       The film, with its lascivious shots of raw fish, is all about the purity of work. We are meant to think that Jiro is weird but wonderful. He obsesses over every scrap of fish.
       影片用极致的镜头描写生鱼片，焦点集中于刻画工作的纯粹性。我们不禁觉得，二郎虽然古怪，但着实了不起。他对每片生鱼片都很着迷。
       He hates holidays and is only absent for funerals and emergencies. His sushi restaurant in a grotty subway in Tokyo that seats only 10 along a thin counter is perhaps the finest in the world and has won three Michelin stars.
       他讨厌假期，只有遇到丧事或急事时才休工。他的寿司店坐落在东京一座破旧的地铁站里，区区10个座位沿着狭窄的柜台排开，但这里可能是世界上最好的寿司店，还赢得了米其林(Michelin)三星级的评分。
       Jiro is not interested in expanding: he cares only about perfection. Ill continue to climb until I reach the top, but no one knows where the top is, he says.
       二郎无意把生意做大，他在乎的只有尽善尽美。我会继续攀登直到顶峰，但没人知道顶峰在哪里，他说。
       To see someone strive so hard at something should be uplifting. But the more I watched, the more revolted I became.
       看到一个人如此为一件事而努力，本应令人鼓舞。但我越看下去，心里就越是抵触。
       At one point he inspects a bucket of octopus and explains how he used to get his assistants to massage the tentacles for 30 minutes, but then found that if they did it for 20 minutes longer, the taste was better in some subtle way that I didnt quite get. Watching this, I flipped. Such striving is completely mad.
       在一个片段中，他一边检查着一桶章鱼一边解释道，他过去曾经让助手将触角揉按30分钟，但后来发现如果多揉20分钟，就能略微改善口味，但那种微弱程度是我无法领略的。看到这里，我顿时无法忍受了。这种追求完全是疯了。
       Jiro or anyone else batty enough to aim for perfection in their work isnt a force for good. Such obsession comes with a dark underside. In Jiros case this is not hard to find: his childhood was of an extreme hard-knocks variety. The son of a bankrupt drunk, he was kicked out of home at the age of nine to make his own way in the world.
       不管是二郎，还是任何疯狂到在工作中追求极致完美的人，都不是善的力量。这种执着伴随的是不为人知的黑暗一面。我们不难在二郎的身上发现黑暗面：他的童年历尽种种打击。他是一个破产醉汉的儿子，九岁就被赶出家门，独自在世间闯荡。
       In turn, Jiro has forced his two sons to spend five decades in fish, setting them up for failure in a fight to compete with their sushi-mad dad. There is nothing I can do to top him, one says in a resigned sort of way, all fight knocked out of him.
       二郎又进一步强迫自己的两个儿子做了五十年的鱼片，而与执迷于寿司的父亲斗，二人注定会失败。我没法超过他，一个儿子有些逆来顺受地说道他身上一点斗志也没有了。
       Jiro himself is unbending. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill, he says, eyes unblinking through round, rimless glasses.
       二郎本人则是不屈不挠。你必须花费毕生来精通你的技能，他戴着无框的圆形镜片，说话时眼睛眨都不眨。
       I draw the opposite conclusion. You must under no account dedicate your entire life to mastering a skill particularly if the end result is a mere mouthful of rice and fish. There are too many other interesting or pleasurable or worthwhile things to be doing instead.
       我却得出相反的结论。你绝不能花费毕生来精通一项技能倘若成果不过是一口鱼片包饭的话，那就更不能了。有趣、快乐、值得做的事情多了去了。
       I felt the same sense of repulsion and waste reading about Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton. Thanks to her recent venting in The Sunday Times we now know that becoming the fastest woman cyclist in the world had a very dark side indeed. She describes herself as a skinny 15-year-old trying to keep up with her cyclist father, tormenting herself with the thought: he doesnt love me. Her response to success when it came was darker still, to cut herself with a Swiss army knife.
       读到奥运金牌得主维多利亚彭德尔顿(Victoria Pendleton)的故事时，我也是心怀反感、感到不值。看到她最近在《星期日泰晤士报》(The Sunday Times)上大倒苦水后，我们终于知道成为世界上最快的女自行车手也的的确确有着黑暗的一面。她描述自己当年是位瘦削的15岁少女，努力追赶着身为自行车手的父亲，心里痛苦地想着他不爱我。当成功来临时，她的反应更加阴暗：用瑞士军刀划伤自己。
       Both in sushi and in cycling and in almost every other area we celebrate freakish success. We hand out gold medals and Michelin stars, but blind ourselves to the madness that goes with such striving. A hunger for perfection in most things is grotesque, distorted and unbalanced.
       不管是寿司、自行车，还是其他几乎各个领域，我们都为疯狂的成功欢欣雀跃。我们看到的是金牌和米其林星级，却对这类拼命之举背后的疯狂视而不见。在大多数情况下，对完美的渴望是怪异、扭曲、失衡的。
       Last week I was cycling through London rather slowly, as it happens with one of my own daughters in tow and we went past a building that said Goodenough College in large writing across the door. It turns out to be a residential hall for postgraduate students, named after a long-ago chairman of Barclays Bank. At first I thought what an unfortunate name this was for an academic institution, but then, calling up the image of Jiro and Pendleton, I thought again. Goodenough College isnt a bad name. Its a good one. To be good enough is, well, good enough.
       上周，我带着女儿在伦敦缓缓骑行，路过一座建筑，门上用大大的字体写着古迪纳夫学院（Goodenough College，good enough意为够好译者注）。我们发现这是一幢研究生宿舍，以巴克莱银行(Barclays Bank)很久之前一位董事长的名字命名。我最初觉得，一座学府竟然起了这么不吉利的名字，但想到二郎和彭德尔顿的身影，我又转了念。够好学院这个名字并不赖，起得很好。够好就够好了。
       In most things, being good enough requires quite a lot of effort. More recently, CEOs of Barclayshavent been nearly good enough. Nor have most other bankers, or most other workers, or most products, or, come to that, most newspaper columnists. And most universities are nowhere near good enough either they are increasingly places where students emerge with a lot of debt, having suffered more wear and tear on their livers than on their brains.
       大多数情况下，成为够好也需要付出许多努力。最近，巴克莱的首席执行官就远远不够好。大多数银行家、劳动者、产品或是报纸专栏作家，都不够好。大多数大学也远远不够好它们越来越成为让学生负债累累的地方，智力考验不多，酒精考验不少。
       And as for sushi, at least in London, the day it becomes good enough really will be a day to celebrate. At Eat, my local sandwich chain, the sushi is quite revolting.
       说到寿司，至少在伦敦的话，如果它能变得够好，倒是值得庆祝一番。在我家当地的三明治连锁店Eat，寿司真的很倒胃口。
       译者:徐天辰