沃尔科特诗19首-阿九译
1
If, in the light of things, you fade
to our determined and appropriate
distance, like the moon left on
all night among the leaves, may
you invisibly delight this house;
O star, doubly compassionate, who came
too soon for twilight, too late
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire
A heron flies across the morning marsh and brakes
its teetering wings to decorate a stump
that from this time and motion at a period
as such an emblem led Rome's trampling feet,
pursued by late proconsuls bearing law)
and underline this quiet with a caw.
In the small coffin of his house, the pensioner,
A veteran of the African campaign,
Bends, as if threading an eternal needle;
One-eyed as any grave, his skull, cropped wool,
Or lifts his desert squint to hear
The children singing, "Rule, Britannia, rule,"
As if they needed practise to play dead.
Boys will still pour their blood out for a sieve
Despite his balsam eye and doddering jaw;
And if one eye should weep, would they believe
In such a poor flag as an empty sleeve?
[1] 在1976年发表于《美国诗刊》(The American Poetry Review)时，这首诗的标题是“酸葡萄”，编入1984年的《沃尔科特诗选》时才改为现在的题目。全文有不少修改。
[2] “依向阳光”(leans on lght)在1976年初稿里写作“驶在无云的光下”(sails in cloudless light)。
[3] “迷恋”(obsession)在初稿里作“激情”(passion)。
[4] 这里的巨人指奥德修在库克罗普斯遇到的独眼巨人，海神之子波吕菲摩斯(Polyphemus)。他被狡猾的奥德赛刺瞎眼睛后，朝他逃逸的方向扔下了一块巨石，掀起波涛。这暗示了旅程的艰险。
That sail which leans on light,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console. But not enough.
[1] 海杏树，原文作 sea almond (Terminalia catappa)，一种生长在热带和亚热带海边的阔叶乔木，叶子呈椭圆状，厚实如小甲片。
[2] 呼哧声，原文作snorting。注意不是snoring (鼾声)，而是牛马大牲畜呼吸时鼻子里发出的轻微呼哧声；发情中的牲口尤其明显。
[4] 来了，原文作come，指性高潮。傅译作“丢了”，正是中国传统情色文学里的习惯用法，在当代汉语里却很少使用。用“来了”更加自然。
The full moon is so fierce that I can count the
coconuts' cross-hatched shade on bungalows,
their white walls raging with insomnia.
The stars leak drop by drop on the tin plates
of the sea almonds, and the jeering clouds
are luminously rumpled as the sheets.
The surf, insatiably promiscuous,
groans through the walls; I feel my mind
whiten to moonlight, altering that form
which daylight unambiguously designed,
from a tree to a girl's body bent in foam;
then, treading close, the black hump of a hill,
its nostrils softly snorting, nearing the
naked girl splashing her breasts with silver.
Both would have kept their proper distance still,
if the chaste moon hadn't swiftly drawn the drapes
of a dark cloud, coupling their shapes.
She teases with those flashes, yes, but once
you yield to human horniness, you see
through all that moonshine what they really were,
those gods as seed-bulls, gods as rutting swans---
an overheated farmhand's literature.
Who ever saw her pale arms hook his horns,
her thighs clamped tight in their deep-plunging ride,
watched, in the hiss of the exhausted foam,
her white flesh constellate to phosphorous
as in salt darkness beast and woman come?
Nothing is there, just as it always was,
but the foam's wedge to the horizon-light,
then, wire-thin, the studded armature,
like drops still quivering on his matted hide,
the hooves and horn-points anagrammed in stars.
[1] 立马可，原文作Limacol，与市场上销售的一种植物油精同名，用于爽身止痒。
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never
should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood
from everlasting to everlasting.
- Traherne, Centuries of Meditations
Natue seemed monstrous to his thirteen years.
Prone to malaria, sweating inherent sin,
Absolved in Limacol and evening prayers,
The prodigy, dusk rouging his peaked face,
Studied the swallows stitch the opposing eaves
In repetitions of the fall from grace.
And as a gliding silence flushed the leaves,
Hills, roofs, and yards with his own temperature,
He wept again, though why, he was unsure,
At dazzling visions of reflected tin.
So heaven is revealed to fevered eyes,
So is sin born, and innocence made wise,
By intimations of hot galvanize.
This was the fever called original sin,
Such anthropomorphic love illumines hell,
A charge brought to his Heavenly Father’s face
That wept for bat-voiced orphans in the streets
And cripples limping homeward in weak light,
When the lamplighter, his head swung by it hair,
Meant the dread footfall lumping up the stair:
Maman with soup, perhaps; or it cold well
Be Chaos, genderer of Earth, called Night.
Why do I imagine the death of Mandelstam
Why does my gift already look over it shoulder
and pass this very page into eclipse?
Why does the moon increase into an arc-lamp
and the inkstain on my hand prepare to press thumb-downward
What is this new odour in the air
that was once salt, that smelt like lime at daybreak,
and my cat, I know I imagine it, leap from my path,
and my children’s eyes already seem like horizons,
and all my poems, even this one, wish to hide?
Still haunted by the cycle of the moon
Past the crouched whale’s back of Morne Coco Mountain,
I gasp at her sane brightness.
The breeze freshens the skin of the earth,
Of shadows down Morne Coco Mountain,
Happy that the earth is still changing,
That the full moon can blind me with her forehead
And that fine sprigs of white are springing from my beard.
Map of the New World: I. Archipelagoes
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbours
The ten-years war is finished.
The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.
From "Collected Poems, 1948-1984"
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
The fist clenched round my heart
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved
past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of
plunging howling into the abyss.
I remember the cities I have never seen
exactly. Silver-veined Venice, Leningrad
with its toffee-twisted minarets. Paris. Soon
the Impressionists will be making sunshine out of shade.
Oh! and the uncoiling cobra alleys of Hyderabad.
To have loved one horizon is insularity;
it blindfolds vision, it narrows experience.
The spirit is willing, but the mind is dirty.
The flesh wastes itself under crumb-sprinkled linens,
widening the Weltanschauung with magazines.
A world's outside the door, but how upsetting
to stand by your bags on a cold step as dawn
roses the brickwork and before you start regretting,
your taxi's coming with one beep of its horn,
sidling to the curb like a hearse -- so you get in.
alone. Without wife and children,
I have circled every possibility
to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,
we shed freight but not our need
for encumbrances. Love is a stone
under grey water. Now, I require nothing
no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,
we can sit watching grey water,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life.
After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.
you ought to go to bed at night
The grey horse, Death, in profile bears the young Titus
To dark woods by the dying coal of day;
The father with worn vision portrays the son
Like Dürer's knight astride a Rosinante;
The horse disturbs more than the youth delights us.
The warrior turns his sure gaze for a second,
Assurance looks its father in the eye,
The inherited, bony hack heads accurately
Towards the symbolic forests that have beckoned
Such knights, squired by the scyther, where to lie.
But skill dispassionately praises the rider,
Despair details the grey, cadaverous steed,
The immortal image holds its murderer
In a clear gaze for the next age to read.
from the summer-sleeping house
days that outgrow, like daughters,
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
this live of ocean that's self-love.
To change your language you must change your life.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues
Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.
Once I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.
I watch the best minds rot like dogs
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know too many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.
All its indifference is a different rage.
荷兰：阿伦茨 林德纳 挪威：安德森 伯依松 豪格 易卜生 耶可布森 波兰：阿斯内克 赫伯特 卡波维兹 卡缅斯卡 科诺普尼茨卡 克拉辛斯基 鲁热维奇 米哈尔斯基 密茨凯维奇 米沃什 （张曙光译① ② 胡桑译 诗100首 《礼物》 《和珍妮谈天》） 罗兹维克 辛波丝卡 （李以亮译 黄灿然译 《万物静默如谜》） 申切斯卡 扎加耶夫斯基 （李以亮译 黄灿然译） 葡萄牙：安德拉德 安德雷森 阿拉乌若 卡蒙斯 奥里维拉 佩索阿 肯塔尔 萨拉马戈 希尔·维森特 罗马尼亚：阿尔盖齐 阿列克山德里 巴科维亚（桑婪译） 尼娜·凯瑟 考什布克 多伊纳什 尼娜·卡西安 奈古列斯库 托马 马林·索列斯库 斯特内斯库 俄罗斯：《伊戈尔远征记》 安德烈·别雷 阿赫玛杜琳娜 阿赫玛托娃 阿利耶娃 安年斯基 列·阿龙宗（晴朗李寒译） 巴尔蒙特 勃洛克 勃留索夫 波普拉夫斯基 西蒙诺夫 叶赛宁 （《波斯抒情》 刘湛秋 茹香雪 译） 费特 古米廖夫 霍达谢维奇 赫列勃尼科夫 维亚·伊万诺夫 杰尔查文 吉皮乌斯 加姆扎托夫 卡拉肖夫(晴朗李寒译）