晚上十点吃饭，西班牙人的节奏

晚上十点吃饭，西班牙人的节奏

MADRID — Dipping into a bucket filled with Mahou beers, Jorge Rodríguez and his friends hunkered down on a recent Wednesday night to watch soccer at Mesón Viña, a local bar. At a nearby table a couple were cuddling, oblivious to others, as a waitress brought out potato omelets and other dinner orders. Then the game began. At 10 p.m.

马德里——近日的一个周三晚上，豪尔赫·罗德里格斯(Jorge Rodríguez)和朋友在当地酒吧葡萄园小馆(Mesón Viña)一边享用着一桶马奥(Mahou)啤酒，一边认真地观看足球比赛。旁边的桌位上，一对情侣旁若无人依偎在一起，这时服务员拿来了土豆卷和他们点的其他晚餐食品。然后球赛便开始了。时间是晚上10点。

Which is not unusual. Even as people in some countries are preparing for bed, the Spanish evening is usually beginning at 10, with dinner often being served and prime-time television shows starting (and not ending until after 1 a.m.). Surveys show that nearly a quarter of Spain’s population is watching television between midnight and 1 a.m.

这并不奇怪。虽然晚上10点的时候，有些国家的人已经准备上床睡觉了，但西班牙的夜间生活却往往在此时开始，人们会在这时享用晚餐，黄金时段的电视节目也才刚刚开始(而且一般直到夜里1点之后才结束)。调查表明，将近四分之一的西班牙人都会在午夜时分到1点的时候看电视。

“It is the Spanish identity, to eat in another time, to sleep in another time,” said Mr. Rodríguez, 36, who had to get up the next morning for his bank job.

“这是西班牙人的特点，吃饭睡觉的时间都与众不同，”36岁的罗德里格斯说。他次日早上还要起床去银行上班。

Spain still operates on its own clock and rhythms. But now that it is trying to recover from a devastating economic crisis — in the absence of easy solutions — a pro-efficiency movement contends that the country can become more productive, more in sync with the rest of Europe, if it adopts a more regular schedule.

西班牙仍然在按自己的时间安排和节奏行事。但是现在，它正试图从一场破坏性极大的经济危机中恢复过来——简单的解决方案并不存在——一个倡导提高效率的运动认为，如果西班牙能采用更正常的作息安排，它的生产力就会提高，也会与欧洲其他地方更加同步。

Yet what might sound logical to many non-Spaniards would represent a fundamental change to Spanish life. For decades, many Spaniards have taken a long midday siesta break for lunch and a nap. Under a new schedule, that would be truncated to an hour or less. Television programs would be scheduled an hour earlier. And the elastic Spanish working day would be replaced by something closer to a 9-to-5 timetable.

然而，或许在许多非西班牙人听起来比较合乎情理的事情，将意味着对西班牙生活的彻底改变。数十年来，许多西班牙人中午都会花很长的时间来吃午餐和睡午觉。根据新的日程安排，他们的午休时间将会被缩短到一个小时或者更少。电视节目的播放时间也将提前一小时。而且有弹性的西班牙工作日也将被近似于朝九晚五的日程安排所代替。

Underpinning the proposed changes is a recommendation to change time itself by turning back the clocks an hour, which would move Spain out of the time zone that includes France, Germany and Italy. Instead, Spain would join its natural geographical slot with Portugal and Britain in Coordinated Universal Time, the modern successor to Greenwich Mean Time.

有一条建议是此次提出的改变的基石，那就是把钟表的指针往回拨一个小时，改变西班牙的时间。这样一来，西班牙就将不再与法国、德国和意大利处于同一时区，而是加入它的自然时区，与葡萄牙和英国共处于协调世界时(UTC)，即继承了格林威治标准时间(GMT)的现代时间标准。

“We want to see a more efficient culture,” said Ignacio Buqueras, the most outspoken advocate of changing the Spanish schedule. “Spain has to break the bad habits it has accumulated over the past 40 or 50 years.”

“我们希望看到一个更有效率的文化，”对于改变西班牙作息最大胆敢言的倡议者伊纳西奥·布凯拉斯(Ignacio Buqueras)说。“西班牙必须改变它在过去四五十年间积累的坏习惯。”

For the moment, Spain’s government is treating the campaign seriously. In September, a parliamentary commission recommended that the government turn back the clocks an hour and introduce a regular eight-hour workday. As yet, the government has not taken any action.

目前，西班牙政府对待这场运动的态度较为严肃。9月，一个议会委员会建议政府把时钟回拨一小时，并采用普通的八小时工作制。但是，政府至今尚未采取任何行动。

A workday abbreviated by siestas is a Spanish cliché, yet it is not necessarily rooted in reality. Instead, many urban Spaniards complain of a never-ending workday that begins in the morning but is interrupted by a traditional late-morning break and then interrupted again by the midday lunch. If workers return to their desks at 4 p.m. (lunch starts at 2), many people say, they end up working well into the evening, especially if the boss takes a long break and then works late.

通过午休来缩短工作时间已是有关西班牙人的老套说法，但是它并不一定真的就是现实。事实上，许多城市里的西班牙人都对漫长的工作日心怀不满。他们的工作日通常开始于上午，但按照习惯，上午晚些时候会稍事休息，然后又到了午餐时间。如果工作者于下午4点回到办公桌前(午餐2点开始)，许多人都说他们就需要工作到晚上，特别是在老板中午休息很久，然后工作到很晚的情况下。

“These working hours are not good for families,” said Paula Del Pino, 37, a lawyer and the mother of two children, who said an 8-to-5 workday would ease the pressure. “Spanish society is still old-fashioned. The ones who rule are old-fashioned, and here, they like it like it is.”

“这种工作时间对家庭来说并不好，”37岁的葆拉·德尔皮诺(Paula Del Pino)说。作为律师和两个孩子的母亲，她说，朝八晚五的工作日有助于缓解压力。“西班牙社会仍然很因循守旧。这个社会的管理者都是老古董，他们希望能维持原状。”

The national schedule can be traced to World War II, when the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco moved the clocks forward to align with Nazi Germany, as also happened in neighboring Portugal. After the defeat of Hitler, Portugal returned to Greenwich Mean Time, but Spain did not.

这种全国时刻表可以追溯到第二次世界大战，当时西班牙独裁者弗朗西斯科·佛朗哥(Francisco Franco)为了和纳粹德国保持一致，对时间做了改动，邻国葡萄牙也是如此。在希特勒垮台后，葡萄牙恢复了格林威治标准时间，但西班牙没有。

At the time, Spain was a largely agrarian nation, and many farmers set their schedules by the sun, not by clocks. Farmers ate lunch and dinner as before, even if the clocks declared it was an hour later. But as Spain industrialized and urbanized, the schedule gradually pushed the country away from the European norm.

当时的西班牙主要是个农业国家，很多农民是根据太阳而不是时钟来安排时间的。农民按一向的习惯吃午饭和晚饭，尽管时钟上显示已经晚了一个小时。但是随着西班牙的工业化和城市化，这种时间安排令该国从欧洲常态中渐渐脱离出来。

“People got stuck in that time,” said Javier Díaz-Giménez, an economist. “Eventually, the clocks took over.”

“人们被困在了那个时间里，”经济学家哈维尔·迪亚兹-席门内兹(Javier Díaz-Giménez)说。“最终被时钟接管。”

In the early decades of his rule, Franco ordered radio stations to broadcast reports of news and propaganda twice a day to coincide with mealtimes at about 2:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Television arrived in the 1950s and followed the same mandate, with daily programming on the lone government channel ending at midnight with the national anthem and a portrait of Franco.

在佛朗哥掌权的头几十年里，他下令要电台每天播出两次新闻和政治宣传节目，时间分别是下午2:30和晚上10点这两个吃饭时间。上世纪50年代出现的电视也执行了这个命令，在唯一的政府频道上每天播出，到午夜以国歌和一张佛朗哥的肖像为结束。

“Then everyone would go to bed and procreate,” said Ricardo Vaca, chief executive of Barlovento Communications, a media consultancy in Madrid.

“然后所有人上床繁殖后代，”马德里媒体顾问公司巴罗文托传播(Barlovento Communications)的首席执行官里卡多·巴卡(Ricardo Vaca)说。

By the 1990s, with Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy underway, television also began evolving. Mr. Vaca said new private networks, eager for profits on popular shows, made programs longer and pushed prime time into the early morning hours. Now, he added, surveys show that 12 million people are still watching television at 1 a.m. in Spain.

到了上世纪90年代，后佛朗哥时代的西班牙正在向一个民主国家过渡，电视也开始发展。巴卡说，新成立的私营电视网盼望着靠热播节目挣钱，因此延长了播出时间，把黄金时段推到了凌晨。他还说，调查表明现在西班牙有1200万人在凌晨1点还在看电视。

Changing the prime-time schedule is one of the recommendations bundled together by Mr. Buqueras, president of the Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Working Hours. At his office in Madrid, Mr. Buqueras burst into a conference room and immediately checked his watch.

在西班牙工作时间合理化改革协会(Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Working Hours)会长布凯拉斯提出的一揽子建议中，改变黄金时段也是其中一项。在马德里的协会办公室里，布凯拉斯急匆匆走进一间会议室，第一时间看了看手表。

“Thank you for being on time!” he declared.

“感谢你能准时到!”他表示。

Mr. Buqueras argues that changing the Spanish schedule would be a boon to working mothers, allow families more free time together and help Spain’s economic recovery. “If Spain had a rational timetable, the country would be more productive,” he said.

布凯拉斯指出，改变西班牙的时刻表对在上班的母亲是有好处的，这样家人就有更多闲暇时间在一起，有助于西班牙的经济复苏。他说，“如果有一个合理的时间表，这个国家就可以有更高的生产力。”

Whether an earlier, more regimented schedule will translate into higher productivity is a matter of dispute. Mr. Buqueras’s group says Spanish workers are on the job longer than German workers but complete only 59 percent of their daily tasks. Measuring productivity is an imprecise science, and while many experts say Spanish productivity is too low, Spain actually outperforms many European countries in some calculations, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency.

一个提早的、更严谨的时刻表是否能转化为更高的生产效率，目前是有争议的。布凯拉斯所在的一方认为，西班牙工人每天的在岗时间比德国工人长，但完成的工作只有后者的59%。生产效率的衡量并不是一门精确的科学，虽然许多专家说西班牙的生产效率太低，但根据欧盟统计机构Eurostat的数据，在某些方面西班牙的表现其实是比欧洲许多国家好的。

“These three-hour siestas don’t exist,” said Carlos Angulo Martín, who oversees social analysis at the National Statistics Institute in Madrid. Nor are habits uniform across the country, he said, noting that in the Catalonia region, mealtimes and work schedules are aligned more with those of other European countries.

“这些三小时的午睡是不存在的，”马德里国家统计研究所(National Statistics Institute)分管社会分析的卡洛斯·安古洛·马丁(Carlos Angulo Martín)说。而且这些习惯也并非全国统一的，他提到加泰罗尼亚地区的进餐和工作时间安排跟其他欧洲国家要更一致一些。

At the Mesón Viña bar, Mr. Rodríguez and his friends contemplated the Spanish clock. One friend, Miguel Carbayo, 26, was appalled at the notion of a nap-free lunch. He had worked as an intern in the Netherlands, where his co-workers arrived at 8 and left at 5, with a half-hour to munch on a sandwich for lunch, a regimen he found shocking.

在“葡萄园小馆”，罗德里格兹和他的朋友对西班牙时间进行了深入思考。其中一位朋友，26岁的米凯尔·卡拉巴约(Miguel Carbayo)对没有打盹时间的午餐感到厌恶。他在荷兰做过一份实习工作，那里的同事早上8点上班，下午5点下班，中间半个小时午餐，一个三明治三两口下肚了事，如此的安排让他觉得不可思议。

“Reduce lunchtime?” he said. “No, I’m completely against that. It is one thing to eat. It is another thing to nourish oneself. Our culture and customs are our way of living.”

“减少午餐时间?”他说，“不行，我完全反对。吃饭是一回事，让自己获得养分是另一回事。我们的文化和风俗就是我们的生活方式。”

But, he admitted, a shorter nap might be acceptable. “They say 20 minutes is enough to boost productivity,” he said.

但是他承认，缩短的午睡还是可以接受的。“他们说睡个20分钟足够促进工作效率了，”他说。