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成为沃伦·巴菲特其人
本期导读
巴菲特被誉为华尔街的“股神”，他的一举一动影响着全球市场的走势。人们往往只津津乐道于“股神”的成功，殊不知“股神”并不擅长社交，拙于处理私人情感问题，童年时期也经历过家庭的“情伤”。
正文
本文选自纽约客
译者：杨婧娴
校对：李煦
笔记&策划：王瑞
Currency
'Becoming Warren Buffett,' the Man, Not the Investor
成为沃伦·巴菲特其人，而非投资者巴菲特
January 31, 2017
“Becoming WarrenBuffett,” a new HBO documentary, examines its subject’s complicatedrelationships with the people he loved most. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HBO
一档HBO新推出的纪录片《成为沃伦·巴菲特》，审视了主人公和最爱之人彼此间的复杂感情
Over the endcredits of the new HBO documentary “Becoming Warren Buffett,” we hear the incongruous sound of Buffett singing “Somewhere Over theRainbow,” in a cracking voice. It’s a nod to a moment, earlier in the film,when Buffett’s daughter, Susie, says that she has a sweet spot for the songbecause her father used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. And,while it might seem like an odd way to end a film about the world’s most famousinvestor, it’s actually surprisingly fitting. The documentary, which was madewith the co?peration of Buffett and his family, deals with Buffett the businessman and investor, but it’s Buffett the man and his complicated, and often difficult, relationships with the people he loved most that are thefilm’s real subject.
随着HBO的新纪录片《成为沃伦·巴菲特》正片结束，演职员表开始滚动，巴菲特用与平时不一样的沙哑嗓音唱起了“飞越彩虹”。与此遥相呼应的是之前在影片中，巴菲特的女儿苏茜曾说道这首歌令她感到幸福，因为儿时父亲常常唱这首歌给她听。对于这部有关世界最具盛名的投资者的电影而言，这样的结局看似古怪，实际上却是恰如其分。这部关于商人兼投资者巴菲特的纪录片，得到了巴菲特及其家庭成员的配合，但这部影片真正的主题，却是巴菲特其人，和他与最爱之人彼此间复杂而又棘手的感情。
We are stilltreated to the greatest hits of Buffett’s business career. We hear about hisearly entrepreneurial endeavors—selling soda and gum door to door, deliveringfive hundred papers a day—as well as about his love of numbers and hisinterest, from a very young age, in the stock market. Buffett describes hisdiscovery of Ben Graham, one of the fathers of value investing, from whom helearned the idea of buying “cigar butts”—companies that are on their last legsbut are nonetheless so undervalued by the stock market that you can still makemoney off them (as you can get one last puff from a discarded cigar butt). Andwe get a picture of his partnership with Charlie Munger, who was instrumentalin moving Buffett from buying bad businesses at cheap prices to buying greatbusinesses—most famously, Coca-Cola—for reasonable prices, a move that was thefoundation of his immense fortune.
观众仍有幸看到巴菲特投资事业的巅峰时刻。他早年打拼的血汗故事家喻户晓——挨家挨户上门推销苏打水和口香糖，一天之内派送五百份报纸——以及他对数字的喜爱，和自幼对股票市场的兴趣。巴菲特讲述自己如何发掘价值投资之父之一的本·格雷厄姆，从后者身上他学到了买“烟蒂”的点子——“烟蒂”，是苟延残喘，然而却被股票市场严重低估，仍有利可图的公司（就像被丢弃的烟蒂还可以抽一口一样）, 我们也看到了他和查理·孟格的合作，后者在推动巴菲特从购买“烟蒂”转变成投资优秀公司方面发挥了巨大作用-最为人所知的是可口可乐公司这一案例，此举为巨鳄起家奠定了基础。
But what makes“Becoming Warren Buffett” far more interesting than a simple hagiography is theexploration of Buffett’s personal life, and, in particular, his relationshipwith his first wife, Susan, who died in 2004. Personal relationships were notsomething that Buffett navigated naturally. At one point in the movie, he says,“I don’t have a mind that relates to the physical universe very well,” and thesame seems to have been true of the emotional universe. Buffett, by his owndescription, was socially awkward as a kid (he attributes much of his latersuccess to taking a Dale Carnegie public-speaking course as a young man), andthe film is a portrait of a person for whom financial questions “are easy,” asBuffett says. “It’s the human problems that are the tough ones.”
但是让《成为沃伦·巴菲特》比简简单单一部伟人传记更有意思的是它深入巴菲特的个人生活，尤其是他和2004年去世的首任妻子苏珊的感情。巴菲特并不擅长处理私人情感。在影片中，他说，“我的精神世界和周围环境格格不入”，对感情亦如是。巴菲特自言有如孩童般拙于社交（他将自己后期的练达大部分归功于年轻时所上的戴尔·卡耐基公共演讲课程），对于这部影片描绘的巴菲特而言，金融问题“不在话下”，他说“真正的难题是与人相处”。
In some ways,Buffett was the archetypal absent-minded professor, so locked inside his ownhead that he wasn’t always aware of what was going on around him. (He says hedoesn’t recall the color of the walls of his bedroom or his living room.) Thiscould be hard on the people around him. “Physical proximity with Warren doesn’talways mean he’s there with you,” Susan says, in an old “Charlie Rose”interview. His children reiterate this sentiment. His son, Howard, says thatit’s difficult to connect with Buffett on an emotional level, “because that’snot his basic mode of operation.” Susie, his daughter, says that you had tospeak to him in sound bites, because if you went on for too long you would“lose him to whatever giant thought he has in his head at the time.”
某种程度而言，巴菲特属于典型的“心不在焉”，沉溺自我，无心周身人事（他说不记得卧室或客厅墙体的颜色）。这让身边人很头疼。“和沃伦靠的再近，他也可能是心不在焉”，苏珊过去在一档访谈节目《查理·罗斯》上说道。他的子女也翻开这本旧账。他的儿子，霍华德说，很难走进巴菲特的心门，“因为温情本就不是他运行的基本设定”。他的女儿，苏茜说，同他讲话必须简明扼要，因为一旦开始长篇大论，“他就会游离到他脑海中正构建的的什么宏伟蓝图中去”。
To some degree,Buffett’s cerebral, inward nature seems to have been there from the start. Butthe film also suggests, gently, that it may have been amplified by his familylife when he was a boy. Buffett’s father—whose portrait still hangs on the wallof his son’s office at Berkshire Hathaway—was, by his account, a great dad,affectionate and inspirational. “The best gift I was ever given was to have thefather I had when I was born,” Buffett says. But his mother, who was brilliantand ambitious, was another story. She was plagued with chronic headaches, and,Buffett says, “You didn’t want to be around her when she was having theheadaches. She would lash out.” Buffett’s sister Doris is more blunt, sayingthat she remembers “being terrified” of her mother. “When I’d wake up in themorning, I’d listen to hear her voice. I could tell by her voice if it wasgoing to be a terrible day or not.” It hardly seems like a stretch to speculatethat Buffett’s emotional reserve might have been, in part, a reaction to theturmoil at home.
从某方面而言，巴菲特理智而又内向的的天性似乎是与生俱来的，但是这部影片也隐晦地暗示出家庭生活在其少年时代推波助澜的作用。巴菲特父亲的肖像至今仍悬挂在他伯克希尔哈撒韦公司的墙上，他说自己有位伟大的慈父，对他循循善诱。“我收到过最好的礼物，就是此生能有他这样一位父亲，”巴菲特说。但他才华横溢却又野心勃勃的母亲却截然不同。她有慢性头痛缠身，巴菲特说“她头痛起来，你都不会想在她左右，她会迁怒于你。”巴菲特的妹妹多丽丝则更加直接，说她记得自己曾被母亲“吓坏了”。“我早上起床时，都会侧耳寻声，这一天或好或糟，听她声音就知道。”巴菲特出于对糟心家事的应对，才在情感上有所保留，这种推测也不算牵强。
But Buffett has,over the years, pushed back against that reserve, and the movie examines him asa man trying, haltingly but successfully, to open himself up to the world andlet more of it in. Buffett attributes this effort almost entirely to his firstwife: “I was a lopsided person. She put me together.” Susan moved away fromOmaha (where Buffett has lived for more than sixty years) in 1977, but the twoof them remained close (and never divorced), and she helped to orchestrate hisrelationship with Astrid Menks, whom he married after she died. Susan—who is in some senses the real star of the documentary—seems tohave been the driving force behind Buffett’s evolution as a person. She’s theone who got him interested in civil rights and feminism, who pushed him tobecome more of a public figure and to give more of his money away before duringhis lifetime. (Buffett, with his love of compound interest, wanted to pile itup and then donate it after he died.) The paradox of the movie’s title is that,in order to become “Warren Buffett,” the avuncular, modest figure who’s theanti-Trump, Buffett needed in many ways to stop being himself, or at least tostop being the self that came most naturally.
但多年来，他从未向这种情感保留屈服，这部影片表现了他踌躇着，成功敞开心胸，悦纳世界。巴菲特说这几乎完全是第一任妻子的功劳：“我是一个失衡的人，她让我完整。”1977年，苏珊从巴菲特住了60多年的奥马哈搬走，但是他俩一直很亲密，并未离婚。巴菲特和阿斯特里德·孟克斯就是由她牵线的，两人在她去世后结为眷侣。某种意义上，苏珊才是这部纪录片里真正的明星——她让巴菲特成为一个完整的人。是她让巴菲特对民权和妇女运动产生兴趣，在她的鞭策下，巴菲特更像是一位公众人物，在有生之年捐赠家财。（巴菲特之意在于复利，他原打算自己百年后再捐出积蓄的财产。）影片名字的一大悖论在于，要想成为反特朗普、慈爱又谦逊的巴菲特，他需要在很多方面不再做自己，或至少是要摒弃与生俱来的自我。
There’s anotherparadox the film hints at, too: the qualities that made it challenging forBuffett to deal with people are the very qualities that made him such abrilliant investor. This is more subtle than just the fact that Buffett lovednumbers so much. In fact, his true genius isn’t just his ability to identifyundervalued companies; it’s his ability to buy and hold onto those companiesthrough the inevitable fluctuations that all markets experience. That’s notjust about insight. It’s also about an ability to divorce yourself fromemotion, to be rational at a time when other people are acting irrationally,and to be calm when others are fearful.
影片暗示的另一悖论在于：问鼎投资，成也性格；难于相处，败也性格。这比巴菲特对数字的痴迷更加微妙。实际上，他真正的天分不在于慧眼识得价值被低估的公司，而是能在所有市场不可避免地浮浮沉沉时，买进和持有那些公司。那不仅是一种洞察，而且也是一种抽离情绪的能力，在别人被不理智支配时保持冷静，别人望而却步时保持清醒。
On the walls of theBerskhire offices, framed front pages from days of market panic, like the 1929financial crash, serve as a reminder not to succumb to the passions of themoment. That’s something that all investors know they’re supposed to do. Butactually being able to do it, being able to buy when everyone else isscreaming, “Sell,” and not to buy when everyone is telling you to do so, is avery hard thing for most of us. For Buffett, it seems to have been as naturalas breathing. But it’s not difficult to see how that hyperrationality, thatability to divorce yourself from what’s going on around you, might also make itdifficult truly to connect with the events of everyday life, which happen,after all, in the moment. Buffett was born to be great at investing. He had towork really hard to be good at living.
在伯克希尔公司的墙上，1929年金融危机那样市场恐慌时期的头版被装裱起，以示勿向一时狂热折腰。所有投资者都知道自己要这么做，但能在所有人疯狂喊“卖”时买，在所有人让你买时逆其道行之，对我们绝大多数人来说确实很难。对于巴菲特而言，这就和呼吸一样自然。然而，这样的高度理性，超然事外的能力，可能会让人难于真正触及当下的每日生活。巴菲特生来擅长投资，却需要花一番功夫才能擅长生活。
外媒简介
《纽约客》（The New Yorker），也译作《纽约人》，是一份美国知识、文艺类的综合杂志，内容覆盖新闻报道、文艺评论、散文、漫画、诗歌、小说，以及纽约文化生活动向等。《纽约客》现由康得纳斯出版公司出版。《纽约客》不是完全的新闻杂志，然而它对美国和国际政治、社会重大事件的深度报道是其特色之一。他一方面保持了轻松幽默的主题风格，另一方面它也很快成为严肃新闻报道和文学创作的一处显要出版窗口。
学习笔记
① incongruous
adj. strange, and not suitable in a particular situation 不合适的，不相称的
eg: Such traditional methods seem incongruous in our technical age.
此类传统方法似乎同我们今天的科技时代格格不入。
② puff
n. an act of breathing in sth such as smoke from a cigarette, or drugs 吸，抽（把气体经口和鼻引到体内的动作）
eg: He had a few puffs at the cigar.
他吸了几口雪茄。
③ hagiography
n. a book about the life of a person that praises them too much 吹捧性的传记
eg: He writes a hagiography for himself.
他为自己写了一本吹捧性的传记。
④ archetypal
adj. having all the important qualities that make sb/sth a typical example of a particular kind of person or thing 典型的
eg: The Beatles were the archetypal pop group.
披头士乐队是典型的流行音乐乐队。
⑤ reiterate
v. to repeat sth that you have already said, especialy to emphasize it 重申
eg: Let me reiterate that we are fully committed to this policy.
我再说一遍，我们完全拥护这项政策。
⑥ lash out
v. to criticize sb in an angry way 怒斥，严厉斥责
eg: In a bitter artical he lashed out at his critics.
他写了一篇尖刻的文章，猛烈抨击批评他的人。
⑦ lopsided
adj. unequal or uneven, especially in an unfair way 不平等的，不公正的
eg: a lopsided 8-0 victory
8比0一边倒的胜利
⑧ avuncular
adj. behaving in a kind and nice way to someone who is younger, rather like an uncle 叔伯般地；慈爱的
eg: an avuncular pat on the shoulder
慈爱的拍拍肩膀
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