露易丝·格吕克诗5首
露易丝·格吕克（Louise Glück），1943年生于纽约，在长岛长大。出版著作多部，包括诗集《七世代》；《新生》，该书获“波斯顿书评”的宾汉诗歌奖；《草场》（1996）；《野鸢尾》（1992），获普利策奖、美国诗歌协会的W·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯奖；《亚拉腊》（1990），该诗集获丽贝卡·约翰森·波比特国家奖的诗歌奖；《阿喀琉斯的凯旋》（1985），该集国家图书批评界奖、波斯顿全球文学出版奖，以及美国诗歌协会的梅尔维尔·凯恩奖。她还出版有一本关于诗歌的随笔集《证言与理论：诗歌随笔》（1994），此书获国际笔会/玛撒·阿布朗德的非虚构文类奖。她得到的其他殊荣还包括：柏林根奖的诗歌奖，兰南文学奖的诗歌奖，以及古根海姆与洛克菲勒基金会和国家基金会艺术类的奖金。现居马萨诸塞州的坎布里奇，任教于威廉姆斯学院。1999年她被选为美国诗人学院院长。2003年获普利策奖。
变形记
1．夜
死亡天使低飞
向我父亲的床塌。
只有我母亲看到了。她与父亲
呆在这间屋里。
她曲身向他摸到
他的手，他的额。她是
如此惯于充当母亲
此刻她轻轻抚摩他的身体
就像她对其他孩子们的那样，
开始时轻柔，接着
便习惯了痛苦。
没有什么差别。
就连肺上的斑点
也一直在那里。
2．变形记
父亲已忘了我
在他垂死的兴奋中。
如同一个就要没了吃喝的孩子，
他对一切都不再在意。
我坐在他的床边
生命围绕着我们
如同许许多多的树桩。
有一回，片刻
的最小瞬间，我想到
他现在仍然活着；
他就看着我
像个瞎子瞪眼
瞧着太阳，因为
不管它能对他做什么
一切都已完结。
接着他那被映红的脸
从这份契约上掉转开去。
3．为我的父亲作
没有你我还会活下去
就像我曾经学习
没有母亲而生存。
你认为我不记得那一切了吗？
我已用了我全部的生命去牢记。
如今，那么多的寂寞之后，
死再也吓不倒我，
既不是你的死，也不是我的。
那些词儿，最后时光，
对我也再无威慑力。我知道
热切之爱总会导致悲伤。
这一回，你的身体不能威胁我。
时而，我的手从你脸上掠过，
轻轻地，如一块掸尘布。
还能有什么吓倒我，现在？我感到
再也没有无法解释的寒冷。
与你的面颊相比，我的手温暖
并且充满了温柔。
高山
学生们望着我，满怀期待。
我给他们讲解，艺术的生命其实
是一种无休止的劳作。他们的表情
几乎没变；关于无休止的劳作
他们需要知道得更多一点。
所以我给他们讲述了西西弗斯的故事，
他是如何被判罚将一块石头
推上一座山，并清楚这一努力
会毫无结果
可他仍然无限期地
重复它。我告诉他们
这中间有一种快乐，在艺术家的生命中，
某种逃避裁决的快乐，
而后我又讲到
我自己也正秘密地推着一块石头，
偷偷地把它推上一座山
从它那陡峭的一面
推上去。为什么我要
对这些孩子们撒谎？他们并不在听，
他们不会被蒙骗，他们的手指
在木头桌面上轻轻扣击着——
于是我收回
这个神话；我告诉他们这一切
发生在地狱里，而艺术家说谎
因为他为抵达所困扰，
他感觉到了顶点
就是他将永远栖居的地方，
一个他的负担得到转换的地方：生命中的每一刻，
我都站在这座山的山顶上。
我两手空空。而那块石头
却已增加了山的高度。
成人的悲伤
因为你够傻，傻到只去爱一个地方，
现在你无家可归，一个孤儿
呆在一连串的庇护所里。
你自己根本没有充分准备。
在你眼前，两个人正在老去；
我本应告诉你，两起死亡即将到来。
从未有双亲伴着一个孩子的爱
一直活下去。
当然，现在，已经太晚——
你掉进忠实的浪漫故事的陷阱。
你坚持回去，依偎在
两个忍受一切之后
你几乎认不出的人身边。
要是你曾解救过你自己就好了，
如今那段时光已过：你会变得固执，可怜地
对变化熟视无睹。现在你一无所有：
对你，家是一块公墓。
我见到你把脸挤靠在花岗岩纪念碑上——
你是苔藓，试图生长在那里。
但你不会生长，
你是不会让你自己
抹煞一切的。
（为E.V而作）
夏
记得我们最初快乐的日子，
我们多么强壮，因激情而晕眩，
成天躺着，然后整夜在那张狭窄的床上，
睡在那里，吃在那里：是夏天，
仿佛万物一下子全
成熟了。而我们完全赤裸地躺着却多么热。
时而风儿鼓荡，一棵柳树轻拂着窗户。
然而我们有几分迷失了，你没有感觉到吗？
这张床就如同一只木筏；我感到我们正在漂流
远离我们的本性，漂向一个我们将什么也发现不了的地方。
首先是太阳，然后月亮，变成碎片，
透过柳树映照下来。
谁都能明白。
接着圆圈合拢。慢慢地夜晚变凉；
柳树下垂的叶子
变黄了，凋落了。在我们每个人之中开始了
一种深深的孤立，尽管我们从来没有谈论过这一点，
这遗憾的缺失。
我们再次成了艺术家，我的丈夫。
我们可以重新开始这个旅程。
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Considered by many to be one of America’s most talented contemporary poets, Glück is noted for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death, as well as what poet Rosanna Warren has called its “classicizing gestures” or frequent reworking of Greek and Roman myths such as Persephone and Demeter. According to Warren, Glück’s “power [is] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention” and to “impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.” Glück’s early books feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair, and her later work continues to explore the agony of the self. In the New York Times, critic William Logan described her work as “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.”
Glück is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), winner of the National Book Award, and Poems 1962-2012 (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The poet Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” Her first book of poetry, Firstborn (1968), was recognized for its technical control as well as its collection of disaffected, isolated narratives. Helen Vendler commented on Glück’s use of story in her New Republic review of The House on Marshland (1975). “Glück’s cryptic narratives invite our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, ‘solve’ the allegory,” Vendler maintained. But she added that “later, I think…we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls.”
Glück’s poems in books such as Firstborn, The House on Marshland, The Garden (1976), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris (1992) take readers on an inner journey by exploring their deepest, most intimate feelings. Glück’s ability to create poetry that many people can understand, relate to, and experience intensely and completely stems from her deceptively straightforward language and poetic voice. In a review of Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles, Wendy Lesser noted in the Washington Post Book World that “‘direct’ is the operative word here: Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.” Lesser went on to remark that “the strength of that voice derives in large part from its self-centeredness—literally, for the words in Glück’s poems seem to come directly from the center of herself.”
Because Glück writes so effectively about disappointment, rejection, loss, and isolation, reviewers frequently refer to her poetry as “bleak” or “dark.” The Nation’s Don Bogen felt that Glück’s “basic concerns” were “betrayal, mortality, love and the sense of loss that accompanies it… She is at heart the poet of a fallen world.” Stephen Burt, reviewing her collection Averno (2006), noted that “few poets save [Sylvia] Plath have sounded so alienated, so depressed, so often, and rendered that alienation aesthetically interesting.” Readers and reviewers have also marveled at Glück’s gift for creating poetry with a dreamlike quality that at the same time deals with the realities of passionate and emotional subjects. Holly Prado declared in a Los Angeles Times Book Review piece on The Triumph of Achilles (1985) that Glück’s poetry works “because she has an unmistakable voice that resonates and brings into our contemporary world the old notion that poetry and the visionary are intertwined.” Glück’s Pulitzer prize-winning collection, The Wild Iris (1992), clearly demonstrates her visionary poetics. The book, written in three segments, is set in a garden and imagines three voices: flowers speaking to the gardener-poet, the gardener-poet, and an omniscient god figure. In the New Republic, Helen Vendler described how “Glück’s language revived the possibilities of high assertion, assertion as from the Delphic tripod. The words of the assertions, though, were often humble, plain, usual; it was their hierarchic and unearthly tone that distinguished them. It was not a voice of social prophecy but of spiritual prophecy—a tone that not many women had the courage to claim.
Meadowlands (1996), Glück’s first new work after The Wild Iris, takes its impetus from Greek and Roman mythology. The book uses the voices of Odysseus and Penelope to create “a kind of high-low rhetorical experiment in marriage studies,” according to Deborah Garrison in the New York Times Book Review. Garrison added that, through the “suburban banter” between the ancient wanderer and his wife, Meadowlands “captures the way that a marriage itself has a tone, a set of shared vocal grooves inseparable from the particular personalities involved and the partial truces they’ve made along the way.”
Vita Nova (1999) earned Glück the prestigious Bollingen Prize from Yale University. In an interview with Brian Phillips of the Harvard Advocate, Glück stated: “This book was written very, very rapidly… Once it started, I thought, this is a roll, and if it means you’re not going to sleep, okay, you’re not going to sleep.” Although the ostensible subject matter of the collection is the examination of the aftermath of a broken marriage, Vita Nova is suffused with symbols drawn from both personal dreams and classic mythological archetypes. Glück’s next collection, The Seven Ages (2001) similarly takes up both myth and the personal in forty-four poems whose subject matter ranges throughout the author’s life, from her earliest memories to the contemplation of death. Glück’s next book, Averno (2006) takes the myth of Persephone as its touchstone. The book’s poems circle around the bonds between mothers and daughters, the poet’s own fears of ageing, and a narrative concerning a modern-day Persephone. In the New York Times, Nicholas Christopher noted Glück’s unique interest in “tapping the wellsprings of myth, collective and personal, to fuel [her] imagination and, with hard-earned clarity and subtle music, to struggle with some of our oldest, most intractable fears—isolation and oblivion, the dissolution of love, the failure of memory, the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit.”
William Logan called Glück’s A Village Life (2009), “a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say.” The book is a marked formal departure for Glück, relying on long lines to achieve novelistic or short-story effects. Logan saw A Village Life as a latter-day Spoon River Anthology in its use of “the village as a convenient lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her [Glück’s] life without.” Dana Goodyear, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times found A Village Life “electrifying,” even as it presumed to tell its “polite” story of a “dying agriculture community, probably in Italy, probably some time between the 1950s and today.” Goodyear added: “Ordinariness is part of the risk of these poems; in them, Glück hazards, and dodges, sentimentality. The near miss makes us shiver.” Glück’s selected Poems 1962-2012 (2012) was published to great acclaim. While highlighting her work’s fierceness and “raking moral intensity,” in the words of New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner, the collection also allowed readers to see the arc of Glück’s formal and thematic development. According to Adam Plunkett, reviewing the collected poems in the New Republic, “Very few writers share her talent for turning water into blood. But what emerges from this new, comprehensive collection—spanning the entirety of her career—is a portrait of a poet who has issued forth a good deal of venom but is now writing, excellently, in a softer vein.”
In 2003 Glück was named the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until 2010. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008, she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award, and in 2015 she received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Glück is currently writer-in-residence at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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