Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with words by James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans, is a book about seeing deeply into things as they are. It stands as a universal record of a singular place and time, a fundamentally unclassifiable book with a weight and shape of its own that exists in my mind as thing itself, more artifact than book. It shimmers with the profound presence of summer night, of heat and humidity, of human toil and exhaustion, of slow time, and, above anything else, of Agee’s deep experience of the beauty of it all. Famous Men, nominally about tenant farming in the Depression-era South, is an American classic. An accurate description of the book would require almost as many pages as the 450 of the 1941 original. It is part documentary and part anti-documentary. (Agee believed his readers had been desensitized to the plight of the poor by the near-fetishization of them by documentary filmmakers of the day, Margaret Bourke-White in particular.) It could be described prosaically as a pictorial and textual meditation on the abusive conditions endured by those cotton tenants, and equally accurately as a formalist poetic experiment. According to the author and editor Hugh Davis, Famous Men is also part jeremiad, and part anti-journalistic, eloquent screed; he should know, for he has spent the last dozen years of his life rendering the words, details and circumstances of this book and, most distinctly and importantly, the true voice of its author, James Agee. I have read Famous Men several times, most recently this past year in the cottage that was my summer home at a writers’ colony on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau in Sewanee (where, incidentally, Agee attended St. Andrew’s School as a boy). I read the book aloud, alone in the close velvet dark of thick Tennessee summer nights. Agee’s gorgeous, cadenced

中文翻译：

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眼前的世界

让我们现在赞美名人，詹姆斯·艾吉的文字和沃克·埃文斯的照片，是一本关于深入了解事物的书。它代表着一个单一地点和时间的普遍记录，一本根本无法分类的书，具有自己的重量和形状，作为事物本身存在于我的脑海中，比书更像是人工制品。它闪耀着夏夜、炎热和潮湿、人类的辛劳和疲惫、缓慢的时间的深刻存在，以及最重要的是，艾吉对这一切之美的深刻体验。名人，名义上是关于大萧条时期南方的佃农，是美国的经典之作。对这本书的准确描述需要的页数几乎与 1941 年原版的 450 页一样多。它既是纪录片又是反纪录片。（阿吉认为，当时的纪录片制片人，尤其是玛格丽特·伯克-怀特（Margaret Bourke-White）近乎迷恋穷人，他的读者对穷人的困境已经麻木了。那些棉花租户所忍受的条件，同样准确地作为一种形式主义的诗意实验。根据作者和编辑休·戴维斯的说法，《名人录》也有部分是耶利米，部分是反新闻的，雄辩的。他应该知道，因为他在生命的最后几十年里一直在渲染这本书的文字、细节和环境，最明显和最重要的是，它的作者詹姆斯·艾吉的真实声音。名人名言我读过好几遍，去年最近的一次是在我位于塞瓦尼坎伯兰高原边缘作家聚居地的小屋里（顺便说一下，阿吉小时候就读于圣安德鲁学校）。我独自在田纳西州浓密的夏夜的天鹅绒般的黑暗中大声朗读这本书。Agee的华丽，节奏