【英译汉必译题】
Strolling beside Amsterdam’s oldest canals, where buildings carry dates like 1541 and 1603, it is easy to imagine the city’s prosperity in the 17th century. Replace today’s bicycles and cars with horse-drawn carts, add more barges on the waterways, and this is essentially how Amsterdam must have looked to Rembrandt as he did his rounds of wealthy merchants.
Such musings are not, of course, unprompted. This year, Amsterdam is celebrating the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, and it is hard to escape his shadow. His birthplace in Leiden, 20 miles south, has naturally organized its own festivities. But Amsterdam has two advantages: it boasts the world’s largest Rembrandt collection — and tourists like to come here anyway.
True, anniversaries can be pretty corny, but what city resists them？ This year, Amsterdam is competing with Salzburg, where Mozart was born 250 years ago, and Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne died a century ago. A sign in Amsterdam’s tourist office by the Central Station hints at one motive for such occasions: “Buy your Rembrandt products here.”
Still, if you start off by liking Rembrandt, as I do, there is much to discover. For instance, when in Amsterdam I always make a point of paying homage to the Rembrandt masterpieces in the Rijksmuseum, yet until now I had never bothered to visit Rembrandt House, where the painter lived from 1639 until driven out by bankruptcy in 1658. In brief, I had never much connected his art to his person.
Now, at least, I have made a stab at doing so because, for this anniversary (he was born on July 15, 1606), Amsterdam has organized a host of events that offer insights into Rembrandt’s world. They highlight not only what is known about his life, but also the people he painted and the city he lived in from the age of 25 until his death at 63 in 1669.
Although the Rijksmuseum is undergoing a massive renovation through 2009, the museum is not snubbing its favorite son. Throughout the year, in part of the building to be renovated last, it is presenting some 400 paintings and other 17th-century objects representing the Golden Age in which Rembrandt prospered. These include works by Jan Steen, Vermeer and Frans Hals as well as by Rembrandt and his pupils. And they climax with Rembrandt’s largest and best known oil, “The Night Watch,” itself the focus of “Nightwatching,” a light and sound installation by the British movie director and Amsterdam resident, Peter Greenaway.