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标题: 史蒂文斯:作为字母C的喜剧演员 [打印本页]

作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
标题: 史蒂文斯:作为字母C的喜剧演员
作为字母C的喜剧演员


没有想象力的世界

1   笔记:人是他的粪土的智力,是
2   至高无上的幽灵。依此而论,也是
3   蜗牛的苏格拉底,梨子的音乐家,原理
4   和法律。然而得问一问,诸物的
5   知识分子,这愚蠢的学究,同样也是
6   大海的导师么?在大海上,在他自己的
7   日子里,克里斯宾创造出一种怀疑的气质。
8   一只眼睛,更加敏捷,于明胶与女裙中,
9   于村野的浆果中,一只理头匠的眼睛,
10  一只属于陆地的眼睛,也属于简单的色拉夹心,
11  属于诚实的被子,这是克里斯宾的眼睛,
12  注视着海豚而不是杏树,是那些
13  惯于沉默的海豚,他们的拱嘴
14  在波浪中掘进,那波浪有如蓬松胡髭,
15  一个神秘莫测的世界中神秘莫测的毛发。

16  某人吃着一份辣肉酱,甚至还和着盐,他说。
17  那不大会是那迷失的陆生人,不大会是
18  那暖冬,它来自大海与盐,来自那个
19  包含于单单一股气息中的风的世纪。
20  值得注意的是自我的神话学,这自我
21  染有污点却超越了一尘不染。克里斯宾,
22  跳蚤的琵琶弹奏者,流氓,领主,
23  饰有缎带的手杖,咆哮吼叫的马裤,
24  中国斗篷,西班牙帽子,专横的
25  咕咕囔囔者,盘根问底的植物学家,
26  缄默无声且如少女般腼腆的新手们的
27  首席词典编纂者,如今把自己视作
28  一个瘦骨嶙峋的水手,在海水玻璃中凝视。
29  音节在群集的声调下面喀哒作响、狂吼咆哮,
30  而在这些音节中分裂的哪个词语,是给那
31  位于一切激荡之中的短腿家伙的命名?
32  克里斯宾被宏大荡涤、冲走。
33  仍然残留在他之中的生命的整体
34  缩为一个声音,在他耳朵里胡乱地奏响,
35  无所不在的震荡,又是拍掌又是叹息,
36  是超越了他的指挥棒的复调音乐。

37  克里斯宾能否抵抗大海中的啰嗦繁冗,
38  能否阻止溶解于蓝与绿的多变的透明度中的
39  特里顿,这位水淋淋的现实主义者的
40  老年期?一个多嘴多舌的、水淋淋的年纪,
41  对着太阳的同情窃窃私语,夜夜召集
42  海上星辰的聚会,并且五体投地地
43  躺倒在月光之剪裁碎料的人行道上。
44  特里顿对那些使之成为特里顿的一切
45  进行简化,没有任何属于他的东西留下,
46  除了在那些黯淡的、记忆中的手势里,
47  那手势,有如波浪中的肩与臂——
48  在这儿,是仿佛致幻的号角一般的风
49  之上升与降落中的某物;还有这儿,
50  像是一种沉没的嗓音,在交替变换的
51  语调中,既关乎记忆又关乎遗忘。
52  正如这样,一位古老的克里斯宾溶解了。
53  暴风雨中的贴身男仆被废止了。
54  从波尔多到尤卡坦,接着是哈瓦那,
55  然后是卡罗莱纳。一次普通的远足。
56  克里斯宾,大门内最细微的小写字体,
57  一任他的情绪沮丧至骚动混乱。
58  盐萦绕于他的精神,有如一场寒霜,
59  死去的盐水像冬天的一滴露水般
60  融化于他,直到没有任何他自己的东西
61  留下,除了某个更生硬、更赤裸的自我,
62  在一个更生硬、更赤裸的世界,
63  在这里太阳不是那太阳,因为它从未
64  以温和的殷勤照耀于苍白的阳伞,
65  也从未垂落于小教堂内简朴的花束。
66  冲着他那破壳而出的声音,有只喇叭在天上
67  发出喧嚣的、嘲讽的号叫。克里斯宾,
68  成了一位朝向内心的航海者。

69  这里是真正的在其自身中的事物,最终,
70  克里斯宾遭遇了它,一种可被发音的事物,
71  却要伴随着一番言辞,从灰白的阴影中喷出,
72  这阴影完全不像是他的可见的那种,
73  他排除了微不足道的特里顿,也摆脱了
74  他自己的、那躺在他身旁别处的
75  无可回避的影子。隔离是明确无疑的。
76  罗曼司的最终变形抛弃了
77  这不知餍足的自我主义者。大海
78 不仅隔离开陆地,也隔离开自我。
79  这里,在现实面前,没有任何援助。
80  克里斯宾凝视,克里斯宾被更新了。
81  在这里,在李子树的诗歌中,
82  想象无法逃避一个宏大的、压倒性的
83  最终的音调中的严厉与严峻。
84  陈腐生活的渗透不再半途坍台。
85  这华而不实、高调空弹的盛装是什么?
86  从何种即刻来临的毁灭中,它突然跃出?
87  那是头脑与云的华服,那是
88  惯于在被巨大之物粉碎的诡计中
89  制造整体的某种事物。



关于尤卡坦的雷暴

90  在尤卡坦,属于加勒比式圆形剧场的
91  玛雅商籁体诗人,不管鹰隼与猎鹰,
92  不理睬绿色的巨嘴鸟和碎嘴鸦,
93  依然向夜间出没的鸟奉上他们的恳请,
94  似乎棕榈丛里,高居橙色空气中的
95  紫红色的唐纳雀还显得野蛮粗俗。
96  然而克里斯宾过于匮乏,以至于在
97  任何平常之物中都寻不到要找的援助。
98  他是一个被大海变得生动鲜明的人,
99  一个产生于明亮璀璨之穿越的人,
100 被过多地大吹法螺,变得无可救药的清晰,
101 新鲜于对潮汐般的天空之发现,
102 对他来说,神谕的震动从未止歇。
103 他往前走,进入一片荒野的色彩。

104 在他的领土上他长得多么巨大,
105 这昆虫的旁听者!他看见,
106 一座公园里,正在消逝的秋天
107 以文雅得体的忧郁之姿态阔步前行;
108 他为春天写出一年一度的双行诗,
109 作为以深沉的欣喜为专题的论文;
110 在旅行中,他泊于一处蛇的土地,
111 发现兴衰变迁的际遇已极大地
112 扩展了他的理解力,使他复杂于
113 喜怒无常的群氓,难于也疏于
114 所有的欲望,那些他之贫乏的标志。
115 他在这里面,犹如其他那些自由民
116 居于内中咔哒作响的宏亮的坚果壳。
117 他的狂暴,是为了扩展与增大,
118 而不是为了恍惚与麻木,有如音乐
119 如此这般作用于半醒的睡者。他感觉到
120 那种清凉,因为他的热力来得突然,
121 并且仅仅在他用自己的羽毛笔,蘸着它
122 自带的露水涂鸦而成的寓言中,这些寓言
123 说的是一个美学意义上的恶棍,多变,难驯,
124 令故作正经的女人难以置信,泥污的铸造所,
125 颠覆了范例的绿色的野蛮鄙俗。
126 克里斯宾预见了一次好奇的漫步,或者,
127 说得高贵些,感觉到一种元素的命运,
128 还有元素的潜力与剧痛,还有
129 漂亮的赤裸,似乎以前从未见过,
130 这一切,构成了棕榈之野性,
131 浓重的、死灰色的丝兰花上之月光
132 以及黑豹之步态的绝大部分。
133 这寓言般的并且是其固有的诗行
134 之降临犹如两个精灵,装饰着
135 来自大西洋拐角的光辉,为克里斯宾
136 和他那盘问不休的鹅毛笔连本带利下注。
137 然而他们前来,押上这样一片土壤
138 ——这土壤因其边缘和砍下的参差绿枝
139 而如此厚重;与盘绕在紫红色灌木
140 与猩红色树冠深处,并于其避难所中
141 将气味充溢丛林的蛇族如此纠缠扭结;
142 密布如此之多的条纹,来自鸟喙、蓓蕾
143 和果实片状块状表皮的黄、蓝、绿、红
144 ——这片土壤,犹如一个盛大的节日,
145 其间种子们你推我挤,肥硕而丰饶多汁,
146 正伸展于黄金那充满母性的温暖中。
147 对那来说这太多了。这深情款款的移民
148 在鹦鹉刺耳的叫声中发现了一种新的现实。
149 喏,且让那小事过去罢。现在,当这个
150 古怪的发现者步行穿过港口的街道,
151 检阅着市政厅或镇公所,大教堂的
152 正面,一边做着笔记,他听到
153 一种轰隆隆的声响,来自墨西哥之西,
154 越来越近仿佛鼓声的自吹自擂。
155 白色的市政厅变暗了,建筑正面
156 像天空一样阴沉,被淹没在
157 来势迅猛的连续的悲哀的阴影中。
158 那轰隆声降临时变得更加宽阔。那风
159 是暴风雨的号角,带着沉重的呼啸,
160 坦率地发动着轰隆隆的雷鸣袭来,
161 比巴松管上之音乐的复仇更加可怕。
162 闪电手势汹汹,神秘,苍白而迅速地
163 来回挥动。在这儿,克里斯宾逃跑了。
164 一位注释者也有他的疑虑。
165 在大教堂中他与其他人一同跪下,
166 这位精通元素命运的行家,
167 意识到了微妙的思想。这场风暴
168 是为数众多的这类宣言中的一个,
169 它宣告了某种东西,比他从听到
170 布告板在寒夜里呜咽和看到
171 他的窗格玻璃上仲夏的炎热伎俩中
172 所学到的更为严厉无情。这是力量的
173 跨度,是事实的精髓,是一位贴身男仆
174 努力想要拥有的伏尔甘的笔记,
175 是那种让他在词句中表示嫉妒的东西。

176 并且,当暴雨的洪流还在屋顶嗡嗡作响,
177 他感觉到安第斯山的呼吸。他的头脑自由,
178 而且不仅仅是自由,兴奋,急切,深沉,
179 专注于一个主宰了他的自我,在他从那儿
180 起航的那个僵硬顽固的城市里,这个自我
181 还不在他里面。超越于他之外,向西边,
182 绵延着峰峦起伏的山脊,紫红色的栏杆,
183 在那儿,响雷在它的霹雳声中滑落,
184 放下它的嗓音中的巨大震颤,
185 让克里斯宾再度大声叫喊。



原诗573行(另有小标题6行),已经基本译出,后四章尚在修订中
作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
原文及注释



THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C

I
The World without Imagination

1 Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
2 The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
3 Of snails, musician of pears, principium
4 And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
5 Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
6 Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
7 Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
8 An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
9 Berries of villages, a barber\'s eye,
10 An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
11 Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
12 On porpoises, instead of apricots,
13 And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
14 Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
15 Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.

16 One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.
17 It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
18 The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
19 That century of wind in a single puff.
20 What counted was mythology of self,
21 Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,
22 The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,
23 The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak
24 Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw
25 Of hum, inquisitorial botanist,
26 And general lexicographer of mute
27 And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,
28 A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.
29 What word split up in clickering syllables
30 And storming under multitudinous tones
31 Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?
32 Crispin was washed away by magnitude.
33 The whole of life that still remained in him
34 Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,
35 Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,
36 Polyphony beyond his baton\'s thrust.

37 Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
38 The old age of a watery realist,
39 Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
40 Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
41 That whispered to the sun\'s compassion, made
42 A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
43 And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon
44 Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that
45 Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
46 Except in faint, memorial gesturings,
47 That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
48 Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
49 That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
50 A sunken voice, both of remembering
51 And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
52 Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.
53 The valet in the tempest was annulled.
54 Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
55 And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.
56 Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates,
57 Dejected his manner to the turbulence.
58 The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
59 The dead brine melted in him like a dew
60 Of winter, until nothing of himself
61 Remained, except some starker, barer self
62 In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
63 Was not the sun because it never shone
64 With bland complaisance on pale parasols,
65 Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.
66 Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried
67 Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin
68 Became an introspective voyager.

69 Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,
70 Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,
71 But with a speech belched out of hoary darks
72 Noway resembling his, a visible thing,
73 And excepting negligible Triton, free
74 From the unavoidable shadow of himself
75 That lay elsewhere around him. Severance
76 Was clear. The last distortion of romance
77 Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea
78 Severs not only lands but also selves.
79 Here was no help before reality.
80 Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.
81 The imagination, here, could not evade,
82 In poems of plums, the strict austerity
83 Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.
84 The drenching of stale lives no more fell down.
85 What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?
86 Out of what swift destruction did it spring?
87 It was caparison of mind and cloud
88 And something given to make whole among
89 The ruses that were shattered by the large.


II
Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

90 In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
91 Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,
92 In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan
93 And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,
94 As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
95 High up in orange air, were barbarous.
96 But Crispin was too destitute to find
97 In any commonplace the sought-for aid.
98 He was a man made vivid by the sea,
99 A man come out of luminous traversing,
100 Much trumpeted, made desperately clear,
101 Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies,
102 To whom oracular rockings gave no rest.
103 Into a savage color he went on.

104 How greatly had he grown in his demesne,
105 This auditor of insects! He that saw
106 The stride of vanishing autumn in a park
107 By way of decorous melancholy; he
108 That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,
109 As dissertation of profound delight,
110 Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,
111 Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged
112 His apprehension, made him intricate
113 In moody rucks, and difficult and strange
114 In all desires, his destitution\'s mark.
115 He was in this as other freemen are,
116 Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
117 His violence was for aggrandizement
118 And not for stupor, such as music makes
119 For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived
120 That coolness for his heat came suddenly,
121 And only, in the fables that he scrawled
122 With his own quill, in its indigenous dew,
123 Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,
124 Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,
125 Green barbarism turning paradigm.
126 Crispin foresaw a curious promenade
127 Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,
128 And elemental potencies and pangs,
129 And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,
130 Making the most of savagery of palms,
131 Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom
132 That yuccas breed, and of the panther\'s tread.
133 The fabulous and its intrinsic verse
134 Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned
135 In radiance from the Atlantic coign,
136 For Crispin and his quill to catechize.
137 But they came parlaying of such an earth,
138 So thick with sides and jagged lops of green,
139 So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled
140 Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,
141 Scenting the jungle in their refuges,
142 So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red
143 In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,
144 That earth was like a jostling festival
145 Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,
146 Expanding in the gold\'s maternal warmth.
147 So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found
148 A new reality in parrot-squawks.
149 Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd
150 Discoverer walked through the harbor streets
151 Inspecting the cabildo, the fa?ade
152 Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard
153 A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,
154 Approaching like a gasconade of drums.
155 The white cabildo darkened, the fa?ade,
156 As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up
157 In swift, successive shadows, dolefully.
158 The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,
159 Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
160 Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
161 Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
162 Gesticulating lightning, mystical,
163 Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.
164 An annotator has his scruples, too.
165 He knelt in the cathedral with the rest,
166 This connoisseur of elemental fate,
167 Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one
168 Of many proclamations of the kind,
169 Proclaiming something harsher than he learned
170 From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights
171 Or seeing the midsummer artifice
172 Of heat upon his pane. This was the span
173 Of force, the quintessential fact, the note
174 Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,
175 The thing that makes him envious in phrase.

176 And while the torrent on the roof still droned
177 He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free
178 And more than free, elate, intent, profound
179 And studious of a self possessing him,
180 That was not in him in the crusty town
181 From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay
182 The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,
183 In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,
184 Let down gigantic quavers of its voice,
185 For Crispin to vociferate again.


III
Approaching Carolina

186 The book of moonlight is not written yet
187 Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
188 For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,
189 Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
190 Through sweating changes, never could forget
191 That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
192 In which the sulky strophes willingly
193 Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.
194 Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book
195 For the legendary moonlight that once burned
196 In Crispin\'s mind above a continent.
197 America was always north to him,
198 A northern west or western north, but north,
199 And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled
200 And lank, rising and slumping from a sea
201 Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread
202 In endless ledges, glittering, submerged
203 And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.
204 The spring came there in clinking pannicles
205 Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
206 If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
207 Before the winter\'s vacancy returned.
208 The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
209 Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
210 The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
211 Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
212 Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

213 How many poems he denied himself
214 In his observant progress, lesser things
215 Than the relentless contact he desired;
216 How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
217 He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
218 Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
219 And what descants, he sent to banishment!
220 Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
221 The liaison, the blissful liaison,
222 Between himself and his environment,
223 Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
224 For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
225 Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
226 Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
227 To him that postulated as his theme
228 The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,
229 A passionately niggling nightingale.
230 Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
231 A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

232 Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
233 An up and down between two elements,
234 A fluctuating between sun and moon,
235 A sally into gold and crimson forms,
236 As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
237 And then retirement like a turning back
238 And sinking down to the indulgences
239 That in the moonlight have their habitude.
240 But let these backward lapses, if they would,
241 Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew
242 It was a flourishing tropic he required
243 For his refreshment, an abundant zone,
244 Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious
245 Yet with a harmony not rarefied
246 Nor fined for the inhibited instruments
247 Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed
248 Between a Carolina of old time,
249 A little juvenile, an ancient whim,
250 And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn
251 From what he saw across his vessel\'s prow.

252 He came. The poetic hero without palms
253 Or jugglery, without regalia.
254 And as he came he saw that it was spring,
255 A time abhorrent to the nihilist
256 Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
257 The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
258 Although contending featly in its veils,
259 Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
260 Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
261 A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
262 The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
263 He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
264 Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
265 From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
266 Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
267 That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
268 He savored rankness like a sensualist.
269 He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
270 The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
271 Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore.
272 It purified. It made him see how much
273 Of what he saw he never saw at all.
274 He gripped more closely the essential prose
275 As being, in a world so falsified,
276 The one integrity for him, the one
277 Discovery still possible to make,
278 To which all poems were incident, unless
279 That prose should wear a poem\'s guise at last.


IV
The Idea of a Colony

280 Nota: his soil is man\'s intelligence.
281 That\'s better. That\'s worth crossing seas to find.
282 Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
283 His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
284 Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
285 Rex and principium, exit the whole
286 Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
287 More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
288 A still new continent in which to dwell.
289 What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
290 Whatever shape it took in Crispin\'s mind,
291 If not, when all is said, to drive away
292 The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
293 And, from their stale intelligence released,
294 To make a new intelligence prevail?
295 Hence the reverberations in the words
296 Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
297 Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
298 Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
299 The more invidious, the more desired.
300 The florist asking aid from cabbages,
301 The rich man going bare, the paladin
302 Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
303 The appointed power unwielded from disdain.
304 His western voyage ended and began.
305 The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,
306 Another, still more bellicose, came on.
307 He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
308 And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
309 Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
310 He made a singular collation. Thus:
311 The natives of the rain are rainy men.
312 Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
313 And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
314 Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
315 And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.
316 And in their music showering sounds intone.
317 On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,
318 What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,
319 What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
320 That streaking gold should speak in him
321 Or bask within his images and words?
322 If these rude instances impeach themselves
323 By force of rudeness, let the principle
324 Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
325 Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
326 As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

327 Upon these premises propounding, he
328 Projected a colony that should extend
329 To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.
330 A comprehensive island hemisphere.
331 The man in Georgia waking among pines
332 Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,
333 Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
334 Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,
335 But on the banjo\'s categorical gut,
336 Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.
337 Sepulchral se?ors, bibbing pale mescal,
338 Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
339 Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
340 And dark Brazilians in their cafés,
341 Musing immaculate, pampean dits,
342 Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,
343 To be their latest, lucent paramour.
344 These are the broadest instances. Crispin,
345 Progenitor of such extensive scope,
346 Was not indifferent to smart detail.
347 The melon should have apposite ritual,
348 Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,
349 When its black branches came to bud, belle day,
350 Should have an incantation. And again,
351 When piled on salvers its aroma steeped
352 The summer, it should have a sacrament
353 And celebration. Shrewd novitiates
354 Should be the clerks of our experience.

355 These bland excursions into time to come,
356 Related in romance to backward flights,
357 However prodigal, however proud,
358 Contained in their afflatus the reproach
359 That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
360 He could not be content with counterfeit,
361 With masquerade of thought, with hapless words
362 That must belie the racking masquerade,
363 With fictive flourishes that preordained
364 His passion\'s permit, hang of coat, degree
365 Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
366 Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
367 It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,
368 Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
369 Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
370 A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
371 There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
372 That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
373 Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
374 The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
375 The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed
376 Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.
377 All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
378 But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

379 Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
380 With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
381 No, no: veracious page on page, exact.


V
A Nice Shady Home

382 Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,
383 Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent
384 Had kept him still the pricking realist,
385 Choosing his element from droll confect
386 Of was and is and shall or ought to be,
387 Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far
388 Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come
389 To colonize his polar planterdom
390 And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.
391 But his emprize to that idea soon sped.
392 Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there
393 Slid from his continent by slow recess
394 To things within his actual eye, alert
395 To the difficulty of rebellious thought
396 When the sky is blue. The blue infected will.
397 It may be that the yarrow in his fields
398 Sealed pensive purple under its concern.
399 But day by day, now this thing and now that
400 Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned,
401 Little by little, as if the suzerain soil
402 Abashed him by carouse to humble yet
403 Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement.
404 He first, as realist, admitted that
405 Whoever hunts a matinal continent
406 May, after all, stop short before a plum
407 And be content and still be realist.
408 The words of things entangle and confuse.
409 The plum survives its poems. It may hang
410 In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
411 Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
412 Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved
413 In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
414 Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.
415 So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,
416 For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

417 Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
418 Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
419 Was he to company vastest things defunct
420 With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
421 Scrawl a tragedian\'s testament? Prolong
422 His active force in an inactive dirge,
423 Which, let the tall musicians call and call,
424 Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen
425 Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?
426 Because he built a cabin who once planned
427 Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?
428 Because he turned to salad-beds again?
429 Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?
430 Should he lay by the personal and make
431 Of his own fate an instance of all fate?
432 What is one man among so many men?
433 What are so many men in such a world?
434 Can one man think one thing and think it long?
435 Can one man be one thing and be it long?
436 The very man despising honest quilts
437 Lies quilted to his poll in his despite.
438 For realists, what is is what should be.
439 And so it came, his cabin shuffled up,
440 His trees were planted, his duenna brought
441 Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,
442 The curtains flittered and the door was closed.
443 Crispin, magister of a single room,
444 Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down
445 It was as if the solitude concealed
446 And covered him and his congenial sleep.
447 So deep a sound fell down it grew to be
448 A long soothsaying silence down and down.
449 The crickets beat their tambours in the wind,
450 Marching a motionless march, custodians.

451 In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,
452 Each day, still curious, but in a round
453 Less prickly and much more condign than that
454 He once thought necessary. Like Candide,
455 Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,
456 And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,
457 A blonde to tip the silver and to taste
458 The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be
459 Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!
460 Yet the quotidian saps philosophers
461 And men like Crispin like them in intent,
462 If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.
463 But the quotidian composed as his,
464 Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,
465 The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,
466 Although the rose was not the noble thorn
467 Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,
468 Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung
469 Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights
470 In which those frail custodians watched,
471 Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,
472 While he poured out upon the lips of her
473 That lay beside him, the quotidian
474 Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.
475 For all it takes it gives a humped return
476 Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.


VI
And Daughters with Curls

477 Portentous enunciation, syllable
478 To blessed syllable affined, and sound
479 Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
480 Prolific and tormenting tenderness
481 Of music, as it comes to unison,
482 Forgather and bell boldly Crispin\'s last
483 Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur
484 His grand pronunciamento and devise.

485 The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,
486 Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,
487 Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,
488 Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.
489 The return to social nature, once begun,
490 Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,
491 Involved him in midwifery so dense
492 His cabin counted as phylactery,
493 Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt
494 Of children nibbling at the sugared void,
495 Infants yet eminently old, then dome
496 And halidom for the unbraided femes,
497 Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,
498 Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,
499 True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.
500 All this with many mulctings of the man,
501 Effective colonizer sharply stopped
502 In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.
503 But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs
504 Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints
505 Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex
506 The stopper to indulgent fatalist
507 Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon
508 His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,
509 She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,
510 So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,
511 Attentive to a coronal of things
512 Secret and singular. Second, upon
513 A second similar counterpart, a maid
514 Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake
515 Excepting to the motherly footstep, but
516 Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.
517 Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,
518 A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,
519 Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,
520 All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.
521 A few years more and the vermeil capuchin
522 Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,
523 The dulcet omen fit for such a house.
524 The second sister dallying was shy
525 To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself
526 Out of her botches, hot embosomer.
527 The third one gaping at the orioles
528 Lettered herself demurely as became
529 A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.
530 The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.
531 Four daughters in a world too intricate
532 In the beginning, four blithe instruments
533 Of differing struts, four voices several
534 In couch, four more person?, intimate
535 As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue
536 That should be silver, four accustomed seeds
537 Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights
538 That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
539 Four questioners and four sure answerers.

540 Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.
541 The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,
542 Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out
543 Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,
544 And sown again by the stiffest realist,
545 Came reproduced in purple, family font,
546 The same insoluble lump. The fatalist
547 Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,
548 Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote
549 Invented for its pith, not doctrinal
550 In form though in design, as Crispin willed,
551 Disguised pronunciamento, summary,
552 Autumn\'s compendium, strident in itself
553 But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved
554 In those portentous accents, syllables,
555 And sounds of music coming to accord
556 Upon his law, like their inherent sphere,
557 Seraphic proclamations of the pure
558 Delivered with a deluging onwardness.
559 Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
560 Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
561 Philosopher, beginning with green brag,
562 Concluding fadedly, if as a man
563 Prone to distemper he abates in taste,
564 Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
565 Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,
566 Illuminating, from a fancy gorged
567 By apparition, plain and common things,
568 Sequestering the fluster from the year,
569 Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,
570 And so distorting, proving what he proves
571 Is nothing, what can all this matter since
572 The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

573 So may the relation of each man be clipped.





Notes

1] Title: by the letter C, Stevens confided to friends in letters that he meant the comic sound of that consonant, broadly understood as k, ts, x, and z as well as c. Stevens compared the noise to the crickets that followed St. Francis, whose order of friars is mentioned in the poem, and illustrates by citing lines 476 and 479 (Letters, 293-94, 351-52, 778). Stevens means to have fun with Crispin. Although a poet, Crispin has four daughters, unlike Stevens (who at the time of the poem\'s composition had no children). It would be misleading to represent this comic epic as seriously autobiographical.
Nota: make a note (Latin).


2] Socrates: Greek philosopher, Plato\'s teacher, executed by poisoning in 399 BC.


3] principium: beginning (Latin).


4] lex: law (Latin).
Sed quaeritur: but it is asked (Latin).


5] nincompated: neologism (not in the Oxford English Dictionary), possibly a fusion of `nincompoop\'("fool") and `pate\' ("head") meaning "foolish-headed. "Stevens used dictionaries heavily at this time (Brazeau, Parts of a World: 40, 68).


6] Preceptor: teacher, school principal.


8] gelatines: jellies.
jupes: women\'s skirts or bodices.


13] silentious: taciturn.


14] Dibbled: made holes.
mustachios: large mustaches.


16] paté: mashed spicy meat spread.
quotha: said he.


18] hibernal: winter.


22] thane: feudal lord (old-fashioned).


24-25] haw Of hum: someone humming and hawing, that is, hesitating over words but preventing interruption by uttering meaningless noises.


27] greenhorns: novices.


31] shanks: legs.
brunt: ruckus.


35] Ubiquitous: ever-present.


36] Polyphony: voices singing different melodies simultaneously.
baton: orchestra conductor\'s wand.


39] Triton: half-fish, half-man, the son of the sea-god Poseidon and Amphitrite.
diaphanes: see-through forms.


54] Bordeaux: southwest French city on the Garonne river.
Yucantan: peninsula extending across southeast Mexico and central America.
Havana: capital city of Cuba.


55] Carolina: city in Puerto Rico.


56] minuscule: script with small letter-forms.


64] parasols: umbrellas.


69] ding an sich: the thing in itself.


85] panoply: impressive garb.


87] caparison: rich trappings, often head-gear.


90] Maya: ancient Amerindian people.


92] toucan: colourful large beaked bird of Central and South Americas.


94] tanagers: American passerine birds.


104] demesne: possession (legal term).


111] vicissitudes: changes in circumstances, good or bad.


113] rucks: undistinguished gatherings.


122] indigenous: native.


126] promenade: stroll.


132] yuccas: woody, white-flowered lily-like plants.


135] coign: corner.


136] catechize: pose questions testing dogma.


143] gobbet: lump.


151] cabildo: town hall or church chapterhouse.


154] gasconade: bravado.


163] flitter: rapid to-and-fro motion.


172] pane: window-pane.


174] Vulcan: lame cuckolded husband of Venus, and the Roman god of fire and blacksmithy.


177] Andean: of the Andes, a mountain chain splitting South America east and west.


178] elate: exhilarated.


182] balustrades: elegant supports in a row.


184] quavers: trills.


188] fagot: bundle of sticks or kindling.


192] strophes: parts of a Greek ode sung when the chorus turns from one side of the orchestra to the other.


203] boreal: northern.


204] pannicles: flower clusters shaped like little Christmas trees.


210] palmettoes: cabbage palmettos, native to the south-eastern USA.
crepuscular: twilight-like.


211] meridians: circles (astronomical, terrestrial).


212] chiaroscuro: picture of blended light and shade.


218] jades: ladies of no reputation.


219] descants: contrapuntal melodies, chanted above the main theme.


226] divagation: unplanned side-trip.
Peking: Beijing, China.


235] sally: excursion.


239] have their habitude: are usually found.


244] obdurate: stubborn.


246] fined: ourified.


247] stops: knobs on a musical instrument for adjusting pitch (and also stay-overs on a trip).


256] fecund: fruitful.


258] featly: adroitly.


259] Irised: showing rainbow-like.


263] rosin: resin, a secretion from pinewood.


264] emanations: emissions.


266] arrant: outright.


270] spur: branch of railway line.


285] Rex and principium: king and founder.


286] Shebang: bunch.


299] invidious: envious, obnoxious.


301] paladin: princely courtier-warrior.


306] bellicose: warlike.


310] collation: light meal, collection.


312] effulgent: brilliant.
azure: light or sky blue.


315] dogwood: woody flowering shrub.


325] Esquimau: eskimo.


326] marimba: xylophone (a row of wooden bars struck by hand with small hammers).
magnolia: showy spring flower.


333] cores: fruit-seeds.


334] psaltery: Biblical stringed musical instrument associated with King David.


336] bays: laurels, awarded for victory.


337] bibbling: drinking.
mescal: Mexican liquor distilled from maguey plants.


338] Aztec: ancient Amerindian people.


339] Sierra: (southern) mountain ranges.


341] pampean dits: ditties (poems) of the South American grassy plains.


343] lucent: bathed in light.


348] verd: green.


349] belle: beautiful.


351] salvers: food-trays.


354] clerks: secretaries.


358] afflatus: divine breathing into (someone).


362] racking: torturous.


379] pasticcio: pastiche, imitative hodgepodge.


380] cozener: cheat.


385] droll confect: amusing sweetmeat.


388] carked: troubled.


390] jig his chits: bounce his little girls.


391] emprize: venture.


397] yarrow: white-flowered herb.


400] cosseted: pampered.


401] suzerain: soveraign.


403] denouement: ending.


405] matinal: early morning.


411] Obliquities: muddled thoughts.


412] Harlequined: played comically in pantomime.
mazily: in a winding, confused way.
mauved: made purple.


414] guzzly: possibly a neologism (not in the Oxford English Dictionary), eagerly guzzled down.


415] hasped: fastened.


418] Arointing: dismissing.
fugal requiems: dirges or chants for the dead, in the manner of a fugue, a contrapuntal weaving of repeated motifs.


420] blubber: weeping.


427] Loquacious: chatty.
ructive: possibly a neologism (not in the Oxford English Dictionary), perhaps belching or violent.


429] crape: crepe, a mourning band worn on sleave or elsewhere.


437] poll: head.


439] shuffled up: confusedly made up.


440] duenna: ancient governess or chaperon.


441] prismy: like a prism, refracting light into its constituent colours.


451] presto: bustle (a rapid musical tempo).


453] condign: decent.


454] Candide: the hero of Voltaire\'s satire of the same name (1759).


458] rapey: possibly like a rope.


459] Annealed: toughened by heating and cooling.


460] quotidian: daily routine.


465] tomtit: little bird.
cassia: herb.


467] crinoline: stiff horsehair or linen fabric.


476] Exchequering: managing state revenue.
piebald: multicoloured.
fiscs: state treasuries.
unkeyed: unentered? not typed in?


478] affined: connected.


479] cantilene: old song.


483] Thrum: strum, pluck the strings of.
douceur: sweetness.


484] pronunciamento and devise: (Spanish) manifesto and opinion (or heraldic design and motto).


485] bluet-eyed: like the American flower of that name.


490] Anabasis: march.


492] phylactery: little container filled with pieces of scripture and worn by Jewish men during prayers.


493] palankeens: covered litters used in India, palanquins.


496] halidom: sacred land.
femes: wives (legal term).


500] mulctings: fines (also frauds).


505] rouges: reds.


508] demoiselle: young lady.


509] capuchins: order of friars of St. Francis of Assisi.


511] coronal: crown or circlet.


519] gewgaws: bright trinkets.


520] din and gobble: noise and feeding.


521] vermeil: vermilion.


525] full-pinioned: with a full wing-spread.


526] botches: messes.
embosomer: possibly a neologism (not in the Oxford English Dictionary), a bosom-companion?


530] pent: shut up.
digit: little thing (finger, toe).


533] struts: upright, somewhat rigid bearings.


534] In couch: bed or sofa?


535] buffo: opera clown.


538] chromatics: highly coloured lights.


540] rout: crowd, hullabaloo.


542] daubed: smeared.


543] main: sea.


547] craw: throat.


549] pith: essential meaning.


552] compendium: encyclopedia.


565] Glozing: gleaming (and glossing).
flicks: strokes.


568] fluster: agitation.


569] obstreperous: unruly.
作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
给个连接

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2012.html
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
很好,期待看你译完。我的评介版也在进行中。
作者: 萼别    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
可以作英语教学用
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
这个跟教学关系不大,史蒂文斯的语言太怪了。
作者: 二十月    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
很多大诗人都在他的中后期自然转入了对本体的关注上。
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
这首算是史蒂文斯的前期代表作之一,他大器晚成,40几岁的时候才出第一本诗集。


[此贴子已经被作者于2005-11-2 0:41:09编辑过]

作者: 陈舸    时间: 2007-8-4 13:25
期待二位的翻译
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
我又看了一遍你的翻译,觉得你的诗里也有史蒂文斯修辞的迹象。

有的译法很好,比如“掘进”,但还是有不少译法不能赞同。
作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
史蒂文斯应该对我有些影响,不过我并未刻意地去吸收或排斥他的东西,所以自觉的界限不甚分明。

我看到你的第一章翻译,正在琢磨,一些地方也有不同的意见。其中部分差异明显是个人的语感有所不同,但另外有部分差异就是完全的判然两别,我不知道谁错了。当然我错的可能会比较大一点,因为我在国内,也没有资料,是从网上找到这手诗硬抠出来的。

另外,我一直以来坚持“绝对直译”(绝对当然是夸大之眼,直到什么程度也很难说,但我一般尽量保留包括句式、语序在内的文本原样),但现在这个原则逐步有些松动,有空的话打算重新整理一遍。

其实,全手诗的后面几章我也都已译出,但一直不太满意,感觉把握不大,他写到后头真有点云里雾里越见越奇了,又没有定下心来整理,故而搁置了,现在借助你的激发,希望能早点搞定。
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
直译也是一种意译,把man翻译成人,说到底也还是意译。
佩服你的刻苦精神,我是读过关于此诗的一些评论,准备以后挑两篇翻译成中文。
作者: 陈舸    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
这首诗打印下来看了,希望能看到一个全的译文,老军兄辛苦了
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
这是我翻得,先对照一下吧。 我还需要一个月的时间,才能把它弄完。
明年再翻译两篇关于此诗的评论。



作为字母C的喜剧演员




没有想象的世界


请记录:人是其土地的智能,
是至高无上的魂灵。也就是说,
蜗牛的苏格拉底,梨的音乐家,
来源和法律。但问题是:这同一副
万物的假发,这昏头呆脑的学究,
也是大海的督学吗?海上的克里斯宾
在他的生涯里,生出一丝疑惑。
一只眼睛,在果冻和裙裾之间,
在乡野的莓子之间最为灵活,理发师的眼睛
属于陆地的,属于生蔬苗圃的,
属于质朴的棉被的眼睛,克里斯宾之眼,
瞩目的不是一堆杏子,而是一条条海豚
默然无声的海豚,它们的长嘴,
穿掘过波浪,虬髯蓬松的波浪,
在神秘莫测的世界里,是神秘莫测的毛发。


人人都吃以一块咸肉饼,即使吃的是盐,
他说道。重要的不是失去的陆地,
也不是无关大海和盐分的暖冬,
或者一气吹来的,风的百年身。
真正重要的,是被污染抹黑的
只会越抹越黑的个人神话。克里斯宾,
跳蚤的琵琶演奏家,恶棍,领主,
缠着缎带的手杖,咆哮的马裤,中国的
披风,西班牙的小帽,专横的哼哈里的
嗬呼,刨根问底的植物学家,座下有一帮
哑口无言的,少女般的初学者的
词典主编,这时候凝视着自己,海之镜中
浮现出的,一个劲瘦的航行者。
被劈成踢踏作响的音节的,
在群集的声调之下风暴般涌动的,是什么词
能命名这个置身一浪浪冲击的短腿人?
克里斯宾,被浩瀚卷走。
残留在体内的全部生命
缩小成他耳中一个击鼓的声音,
无所不在的震荡,击掌和叹息,
群音齐响,漫过他指挥棒的击刺。




特里登,这位水淋淋的,溶化在变幻的
透明蓝绿之中的现实主义者,他古老的年纪
是海里纷纷的浮词,克里斯宾会迎着它前进吗?
这罗嗦的,水淋淋的年纪,对着太阳的怜悯
窃窃低语,每到夜晚会召集海上
群星的大聚会,并倒卧在蹄声清脆的
月轮的通道上。是什么,让特里登成为
特里登,这与他本身无关,他几乎荡然无存,
除了在微弱的,怀念的姿态里,
像波涛中现形的手臂和肩膀,
在这里,在起伏跳荡的风中,
他仿佛催人入幻的号角,在那里,
又变成一个沉没下去的嗓音,既属于记忆,
又属于遗忘,轮换着两种曲调。
一个古代的克里斯宾就这样溶化了。
暴风雨中的男仆被废掉。
从波尔多到尤卡坦,然后到哈瓦那,
再到卡罗丽纳。简单的旅程。
克里斯宾,最小的手写字母,在大风中
对着动荡的一切,痛感斯文扫地。
如霜的盐分,笼罩在他的精神上,
无生命的盐水,如冬天的露珠
化在他体内,直到他一无所有,
除了某个更荒凉,更空旷的自我
在一个更荒凉,更空旷的世界上,那里的太阳
并不是太阳,因为它从未用温和的殷勤,
照耀苍白的女伞,从未像甲虫一样
跑动在礼拜堂里,照耀贞节的花束。
对着他的噼啪声,一只小喇叭
狂烈地发出天国的嘲笑。克里斯宾
变成一个向内的航行者。

这是真正的物自体,终于
克里斯宾面对着它,一个发声的东西,
然而,它从遥远的黑暗里喷出的言辞
跟他的决不相类,一个可见的东西,
不容纳无足轻重的特里登,与在别处
跟他纠缠难分的影子无关。这是豁然的
隔绝。罗曼司最终的扭曲变形
放弃了贪得无厌的自我主义者。大海
既隔绝了陆地,又隔绝了自我。
在现实面前,没有什么能救助。
克里斯宾注视,克里斯宾被更新。
想象,在这里,无法遁入
李子的诗篇,去避开那宏大的,
征服的,终结之音的严峻峭拔。
陈腐生活的从头浇透,不再落下。
这绮丽的,暴风般的华服是什么?
它从何种轻捷的毁灭中衍生?
它是风云的盛装,是某物
用来保持,被巨大的存在震碎的
种种小计谋的完整。




关于尤卡坦的雷暴

在尤卡坦,加勒比圆形竞技场的
玛雅的十四行诗人们,不顾鹰隼,绿色巨嘴鸟
和蓝色松鸦,仍然对着夜鸟唱出情歌,
仿佛高居在橙色空气中的,
棕榈树上紫红的唐纳雀们,都太野蛮。
可是,克里斯宾已经一无所有,
从任何寻常道理中,都不指望得到帮助。
他是被大海变得鲜明活跃的人,
一个来自光彩四射的横渡之旅的人,
他被小喇叭吹亮,令人绝望地清晰,
从潮汐起落的天空的种种发现之中
新颖地现形,身受不会停息的,神谕的震荡。
他继续前进,进入一派蛮荒的色彩。
在自己的领地上,他成长得多么茁壮,
这位昆虫的听众!他,曾在公园里看见
逝去的秋天以庄重的忧郁迈出阔步;他,
年年为春天写出一个对句,那是一篇
有关深沉的欢乐的论文——在航行中
停靠在一片群蛇的土地上,他发现
他的沧桑变化,张大了他的领悟力,
让他在情绪的错综里,变得复杂
在所有的欲望里,变得古怪难惹,这正是
他内心贫困的标志。他和其他自由人一样,
是朝向内心格格脆响的坚果壳。
他使用暴力是为了扩张,而不是出于
昏庸,比如,把中途醒来的睡眠者
重新催眠的音乐。他觉察到
被他的热力突然招来的清凉,
还有,绿色的,正演变成仪范的
野蛮风俗——只存在于他的鹅毛笔
涂鸦出的寓言,只存在于这清凉的
当地的露珠,它有让贞男烈女难以置信的,
凌厉多姿,未经驯服的美学,泥土的薄荷。
克里斯宾预见到一次离奇的巡游,
或者,那是更高贵的东西,他感知到的
是根本的命运,根本的力量与悲痛,
还有未曾见过的,美丽的赤裸
它全力使用着,棕榈的野性,
丝兰繁育的,浓密的,煞白之花上的
月光,黑豹的足迹。
怪力乱神与其本质的诗篇
仿佛两个前来谈判的精灵
身披大西洋海岬的光辉,
被克里斯宾和他的鹅毛笔盘查。
而他们前来谈判的主题是这样的土地:
如此葱茏,旁枝与锯齿的垂条从生,
如此纷绕,蟒类盘踞于紫色的林莽,
一片深红的花冠,在它们的藏身处
为丛林熏香,如此纹章焕然,
在花蕾鸟喙与果实斑驳的皮肤上
泼染红黄蓝绿之色,这片土地
像一个冲撞喧闹的节日,属于那些
汁水满溢的,在黄金母性的温暖中
扩张的,丰满长成的种籽们。

何其太繁。柔情蜜意的移民者
在鹦鹉的怪叫中发现新的现实。
还是别提这些琐碎事情。现在,
当这位怪异的发现者走过港口的街道,
视察市政厅和大教堂正面的
威仪,记录着笔记,他听到
墨西哥以西一片轰然,到来的
仿佛是击鼓声耸人听闻的声势。
白色的市政厅,暗淡下去
大教堂的威容阴沉如苍天,悲戚中
被联翩而来的迅捷阴影所吞噬。
轰响落下之时愈加宽阔,大风
暴烈之气的号角,携狠重之嚎叫,
雷霆硬生生地到来,比巴松管发出的
复仇的音乐更加可怖。神秘的
姿态横生的闪电,惨白地
来回飞动。在这里,克里斯宾,逃走。
写注释的人,也会有他的踌躇。
他跟其他人一起,跪进大教堂,
这位根本的命运的鉴赏家
感触到精微的思想。风暴
是众多感叹中的一种,它感叹的东西
如此尖厉,超过他曾在寒夜里听到的
广告牌的咿呀低泣,或者在窗玻璃上
看到的仲夏热气的的诡计。这是——
力量的疆域,事实的精髓,一个男仆
想要追寻占有的,火神的音符,
一个让他在言语中嫉羡的事物。

屋顶上的暴雨仍在嗡嗡震响
他感到安第斯山的呼吸。他的思想自由
更甚于自由,得意,热切,深刻,
发奋去对待一个占有他的自我,
他从那个粗砺的城里启航之时
它还不在他的体内。在他之上,向西排开
群峰的脊背,紫云的雕栏,雷霆在其中
于霹雳声中下降,它的语声巨型的颤动
降临,让克里斯宾也去狂呼。
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
过段时间,我们同时把全诗的翻译拿出来吧。
作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
好的,多交流,甚好
作者: 王敖    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
史蒂文斯做诗人的态度让我很佩服,他比我们绝大多数人都极端,完全不受公众反应的左右,完全不在乎文坛或诗坛的风气,不理会旁人的议论,他知道自己是个大才,思考的都是大问题,但也不妨碍他为了自娱自乐而写那么多有趣的短诗, 他一辈子纯粹是写自己想写、能写的东西。

这种人的存在,对我来说是个榜样。
作者: 太上老军    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
对,我以为他对诗歌的态度够强硬,所以他对待所谓诗坛、舆论、公众的态度也够强硬,当然,这一切都建立在他强大的生存能力之上。对我而言,靠诗歌生活是不道德的,诗歌就应当成为一种副业。
史蒂文斯诗中的拟声词颇值得注意,我最近在考虑如何在诗中把一些词语拟声化,把它们从意义中挤出来。另外,中国古诗中有些拟声词的运用也很好,值得参照。
作者: 陈舸    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
“史蒂文斯诗中的拟声词颇值得注意,我最近在考虑如何在诗中把一些词语拟声化,把它们从意义中挤出来。另外,中国古诗中有些拟声词的运用也很好,值得参照。”

有同感。老军和王兄的翻译再细读,并期待
作者: 二十月    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
以下是引用王敖在2005-11-4 4:44:55的发言:
史蒂文斯做诗人的态度让我很佩服,他比我们绝大多数人都极端,完全不受公众反应的左右,完全不在乎文坛或诗坛的风气,不理会旁人的议论,他知道自己是个大才,思考的都是大问题,但也不妨碍他为了自娱自乐而写那么多有趣的短诗, 他一辈子纯粹是写自己想写、能写的东西。

这种人的存在,对我来说是个榜样。


说的好。
作者: 二十月    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
以下是引用王敖在2005-11-4 4:44:55的发言:
史蒂文斯做诗人的态度让我很佩服,他比我们绝大多数人都极端,完全不受公众反应的左右,完全不在乎文坛或诗坛的风气,不理会旁人的议论,他知道自己是个大才,思考的都是大问题,但也不妨碍他为了自娱自乐而写那么多有趣的短诗, 他一辈子纯粹是写自己想写、能写的东西。

这种人的存在,对我来说是个榜样。


说的好。
作者: 陈舸    时间: 2007-8-4 13:30
怎么王敖的翻译给排成这样了?
作者: 龙贝尔    时间: 2007-8-4 13:32
作素材用.




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