Kristalina Georgieva starts to sing, in Bulgarian, right there at the table — quietly, but firmly, the way you might sing to a child on absolutely her last lullaby of the evening. It is a song she wrote as a teenager in the late 1960s, in her grandparents’ village in the mountains in communist-era Bulgaria, when she ran out of shelves in the local library and started reading philosophy. She finishes a couplet, then translates.
克里斯塔丽娜•格奥尔基耶娃(Kristalina Georgieva)坐在桌子前，开始用保加利亚语唱起歌来——声音很轻，但很稳，就像你对一个孩子唱她今晚最后一首摇篮曲。那是一首她在少女时期——也就是1960年代末——写的歌，当时她生活在共产党统治下的保加利亚，在祖父母栖居的山村小住。她看完了当地图书馆的所有书，开始阅读哲学书籍。她唱完了两句，然后开始翻译。
But what is the value of Kant and Spinoza
但康德(Kant)和斯宾诺莎（Spinoza，巴鲁赫•斯宾诺莎，17世纪哲学家——译者注）的价值何在
If somebody else writes predictions for me?
假如别人会为我写好预言？
The translation itself has a metre, and she looks at me as she stresses the first syllable of each dactyl. The song, with its playful plea for self-determination, was “almost political”, she says. “Of course, I would sing it and I would go home and say, ‘My God what have I done?’ ”
这两句的英文译文就有韵律，她望着我，每到扬抑抑格的第一个音节处就会重读。这首歌用打趣的方式请求自决，她说，它“差不多是一首政治歌曲”。“当然，我会唱它，然后回到家说，‘我的天，我刚才做了什么？’”
On the day we have lunch, Georgieva, 67, is celebrating her first anniversary as managing director of the International Monetary Fund. The position itself comes with enormous responsibility — to save the world during a financial crisis. But it has very little formal power. The IMF can’t do too much lending without the consent of its most powerful members; so whoever runs the fund has only the right to persuade presidents and prime ministers to act. Georgieva’s job is perfectly, maddeningly, political.
我们共进午餐的那一天，67岁的格奥尔基耶娃正在庆祝她担任国际货币基金组织(IMF)总裁的一周年纪念日。这个职位本身意味着巨大的责任——在金融危机期间拯救世界。但它没有多少正式权力。没有其最强大成员国的同意，IMF无法贷太多款；所以，不论是谁掌管IMF，其仅有权利说服总统们和首相们采取行动。格奥尔基耶娃的工作完全是政治性的——这令她发狂。
And right now it’s especially important. In the coming week, the IMF will update its forecasts for global growth. When it last did this, in June, the fund’s economists anticipated drops in 2020 of 8 per cent in the developed world, and 3 per cent in emerging economies, referring to “synchronised, deep downturns”. The fund said on Tuesday that the outlook was “less dire than expected”, but has also warned that if the global recession turns into a global financial crisis, things could get worse.
当下，这份工作尤其重要。上周，IMF更新了其全球增长预测。该组织上次作出预测是在今年6月，其经济学家们预测，2020年发达经济体将下跌8%，新兴经济体将下跌3%，并提到“同步、深度的低迷”。IMF上周二表示，其展望“没有预想的那么糟糕”，但也警告称，如果全球衰退转变为全球金融危机，情况会变得更糟糕。
In her first year, Georgieva is already facing the most horrific version of every IMF chief’s basic challenge: how do you persuade rich countries to help out poor ones? And if you can do that, how do you attach the right strings to make sure the help sticks? And if you can do that, how do you make sure the poor countries trust that help from the IMF is sincere, when in the past it has caused further destruction? She will have to do all this with informal power, as the kind of person who will write you a song.
在任期的第一年里，格奥尔基耶娃已面临历任IMF总裁基本挑战之中最可怕的版本：你如何说服富国帮助穷国？如果你能做到，那你如何附带合适的条件，以保证这些帮助能够持久？如果你能做到，那你如何保证穷国相信IMF的帮助是真诚的，考虑到过去这种帮助造成了进一步破坏？她将不得不运用非正式权力做到这一切——作为那种会为你写歌的人。
In high school she had amused classmates by composing gently counter-revolutionary marches for when they had to drill with broken rifles in the summer. She sang me her song about Spinoza to illustrate a point. As a child and then a young professor in Sofia, she had more power than she thought at the time. “People like me were very useful,” she says. “We created the impression that there was more freedom than we actually had.”
在高中时期，她曾谱写含蓄反对革命的进行曲，供同学们在暑期不得不端着破步枪军训时消遣。她对我唱了她那首关于斯宾诺莎的歌，是为了说明一个要点。格奥尔基耶娃在索非亚(Sofia)度过了童年，青年时期在这个保加利亚首都担任教授，她当时拥有的权力比她当时认为的更多。“像我这样的人那时很有用处，”她说，“我们造成一种印象，即我们拥有的自由比实际更多。”
She has invited me to Tonic at Quigley’s, a bar in an old drugstore tucked away in the urban campus of George Washington University, a short walk from the IMF’s headquarters in Washington. There’s a place like Tonic near every American college; students can stop by for an appropriate lunch when their parents are in town, then return for pitchers when their parents are safely back at the hotel.
她邀请我去Tonic at Quigley's，这是一家开在老药店里的酒吧，藏在乔治•华盛顿大学(George Washington University)的城区校园里，从IMF位于华盛顿的总部步行一小段路即可抵达。每所美国大学附近都有个像Tonic一样的地方；学生们可以在父母来看他们时到此吃一顿像样的午餐，等确定父母返回酒店后再回来喝啤酒。