马婷·拜勒恩《蜘蛛桥梦》

马婷·拜勒恩（Martine Bellen），诗人、编辑，小说家、兼剧作家，著有六部诗集，两部歌剧和一部小说。这里译出的几首诗按诗人创作的前后排列，从她在30岁到50岁之间的几本诗集里选出。谈到这几首诗，拜勒恩说，她常常边看书边写作，读女性作家和有关强势女性的的作品和生平，让她在写作中探索个人生活中的问题，同时认识世界，历史、现实和将来。和这些不平凡的女性神交得以使她从理智和情感上有一种归属感，认同感，得以拜师学习，建立个人诗学的体系传统。这同时也是一种写作方式，比如“蜘蛛桥梦”一诗就是读日本平安时代女作家紫式部的《源氏物语》时写作的。其中有些诗句和故事背景来自紫式部原作，也有莎士比亚剧作人物麦克贝斯夫人的影子。“献给H.D.”则是在读美国旅欧女诗人H.D. 生平和H.D.的《献给弗洛伊德》一书时的写作，诗人被H.D. 与弗洛伊德的友谊和H.D.在弗洛伊德的帮助下，身心转变和自我发现的过程深深感动。其中三首诗都与弗洛伊德与H.D.的友情有关，与弗洛伊德对H.D的精神分析诊治有关。这里面故事套故事，希腊女诗人萨福的诗篇和写作方式也涉入拜勒恩的创作。H.D在二战烽烟四起的伦敦看望逃难中的弗洛伊德，老人的猫和老人对将临战事和死亡的坦然让我们重温历史的同时看到了诗人本身自我发现自我认识的过程。“家政哲学”是另一位美国女诗人艾米莉·迪金森家藏的一册书的题目，被拜勒恩拿来做了这篇颇有趣味的短诗的题目。这里诗人对诗的形式作尝试性的扩展，比如在诗里加多层次的注释，按语，运用技术性写作语言和散文语言。除了文学文化背景的复杂，拜勒恩的诗难译之处还在于她的诗常靠词的声音组织发展。本译者学识诗技有限，努力加倍也有时顾头顾不了脚，有了音韵却没了形象，更多的时候还是以意象为主，达意为主。又常常把英语原诗中刻意的辅音重复，词根的重复，不得已转变成汉语元音的重复，词尾的重复，甚至偏旁字形的统一，通过如此种种变化企望让译诗与原作靠拢。

蜘蛛桥梦

I．

因为她感觉家里幽深处的黑暗最可怕

因为天上的云追踪悲哀的线条

她放行

于海

        用心挑选我们出行的好日子

        蜜色的月亮，满圆两天之后

羡慕激来的海浪总要回头，但划着它们离去避免纠缠

连天都要“关门”

        “面对无脊椎动物的习惯

连意识都要失控”

船藏在忧郁的浪谷里，我们浪花飞溅的浆诱起的泪滴滑过，头上大雁鸣叫，野的，几乎看不见，没有另外的讲法。

        “我赶上了摆渡船

                在以前从来没赶上的地方“

母亲在身边把我的手放在她胸前，非常严肃，让我想到谁都知道鳄鱼吃自己的孩子和其他冷的东西。天暗下来，我问他这是不是个坏兆头，我们也许该朝另一方向出发，但我的声音非常轻，因为他看起来特别粗鲁而且多变，就像马上就要下雨的天。我害怕，全身紧张；想叫他停下来，嗓音蹦出来，

        “当我准备好离开时，

        心里已经是清晨了”。

II

一个漫长的冬日，在雪里走过别致的渔村和这些不能识别这个曲调的乡下人，他们已被诱惑到海风里冻死

        “我给你带

        一瓶烧酒和炸鱼”

一位能做的事只剩下等死的老太太，为了祈求下世的好报，把一个盛满鸡冠花的套盒奉献给寺院。她后来梦见一个没能认出她来的男人。没有一次幽会比这一次好—拥有很长时间，两个情人一次又一次拿起又放下同样的石子，仿佛永远如此，并不影响另外各种更大势力的配置。可以当作一个游戏，也可以知道想要的结果，但当情况看来就要到达预计，其他方向好像业已改变，到现在结果还很遥远。这些从没人打理的花园隐蔽着狐狸，猫头鹰从早到晚在长疯的林子里嚎叫。

她曾经比她应得的或想象的更贴近。

III

我们不该让它如此约束我们

IV

她的头发在下落时收拢

竹叶

十尺长，塞满香炉和试管

种下去的药草

剩下的，或踏平的细径

在苦艾丛中

“我那时以为不幸福，现在不比那时好”。

这月的第五天（最吉利的日子）

        母亲说那本大书里该写的都写了，所以我就开始写我的小书，自己做个小角色玩儿一把，在天蓝的米纸上用左手写。我选择别人的字眼而不用自己的。母亲，我问，你是不是在讲命数有定？除了死的日子，我还能做任何值得记载的事吗？上帝是个数学家，写了这么多数字，记着所有的事成和事败。算盘子和念珠。她把我的手指和脚趾用布条绑起来，我流血。我是你的母亲，要准备好，我的责任就是要让你小，有规矩。

张 耳 / 译

Martine Bellen's 'The Vulnerability of Order'

An interview with Martine Bellen

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

Episode #40 of CCP was entitled “The Contemporary Logos,” a title borrowed from an essay by Fanny Howe, the first guest for the show. That conversation was transcribed many years back and published in Jacket (issue 28). In Fall 2011 Evergreen student Samantha Siciliano had a chance to transcribe the second half of that key program: an interview with poet Martine Bellen on her book of that year The Vulnerability of Order, published by Copper Canyon Press. I'm happy to be able to present that interview here. Certainly one of the preoccupations of CCP has been the use of “spiritual” vocabularies in the act of making poetry (without any quotation marks around the poem).

Leonard Schwartz: Martine Bellen is the author of numerous collections of poetry including most recently, The Vulnerability of Order published by Copper Canyon Press. The Vulnerability of Orderaccording to Ann Lauterbach “...Brings to contemporary poetics an acute, agile intelligence revealed in a dazzling array of linguistic orders, as vulnerable as they are powerful. Her inquiry into the nature of spirit is informed by arcs of interlocking knowledge, from a variety of religious practices to biographical incidents in the lives of seven heretical women.” Welcome, Martine Bellen. read more

'So Translating'

Zhang Er and Bill Ransom in conversation

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

Zhang Er Photo by Star Black.

Zhang Er’s book So Translating Rivers and Cities was published by Zephyr Press in 2007, the original Chinese poems and the English translations en face. We spoke about the book for  CCP episode 161 in 2008 (listen there for her reading in Chinese of the poem).  Novelist and poet Bill Ransom was one of the co-translators, and he joined us for the drama in studio that day. (Other co-translators who contributed to the book are Bob Holman, Arpine Grenier, Timothy Liu, Susan Schultz, and myself.)  The transcription was done by Claire Sammons, now a graduate student at Columbia College in Chicago. 

Leonard Schwartz: Today’s guests in studio are Zhang Er and Bill Ransom. Zhang Er has a new book out, entitled So Translating Rivers and Cities. The poems are translated from the Chinese by a number of people, including Bill Ransom, poet, author of six novels and six collections of poet. Both are in studio. Welcome Zhang-Er.

Zhang Er: Thank you, Leonard.

Schwartz: And welcome, Bill Ransom.

Bill Ransom: Yes, thanks Leonard.

Schwartz: Great to have you both here and thinking on your feet, literally in the studio. Zhang Er, So Translating Rivers and Cities brings together a number of different periods of your writing, and a number of different books, as I mentioned published by Zephyr Press. I was hoping that you and Bill could read the extended poem, “Mother Event” from the book. Can you say a little about the poem, Zhang Er, and Bill could you say a little about the translation process? read more

Listening to the Arabic

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

To say that the transcendental is historically constituted amounts to saying that universality cannot be assigned to it; it is necessary to think of a particular transcendental. But after all, there is nothing more mysterious than what is collectively called a culture.  — Guy Lardeau, “L’histoire comme nuit de Walpurgis”

In such manner Guy Lardeau invites us to contemplate a contradiction – the particular transcendental. Contradiction, because one of the attributes of the transcendental is held to be its universal grounds. Contemplation, because that is what the mind does, at least one committed to both a cognitive process and a mode of thought that goes beyond the simply analytical. One concept that may occur to us here is “strategic transcendentalism”: one holds a condition to be transcendental or necessary to perception itself for specific political or tactical purposes. Another phenomenon that may come to mind here is that of the lyric poem: the lyric poem is a construct capable of maintaining equilibrium among contradictions and as such is singly able to accommodate the needs of such a slippery imperative (“negative capability”). Surely the allure of the poem is partly this, and the concomitant promise of mystery without belief. Our texts are the living evidence of an ethics of ambiguity.

I positioned the transcendental lyric in like manner in my essay from the 1990’s “A Flicker At The Edge Of Things.” Things here — “here” variously meaning in what passes for my mind, the room in which I sit and write, America, the shifting continents — flicker, and poetry is still the flicker at the edge. read more

Scenes from the Balkan Wars

On Christopher Merrill's 'Only The Nails Remain'

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

I interviewed Christopher Merrill on his book Only The Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Warsin June 0f 2004 (Cross Cultural Poetics #39). To my mind his remains the best book on those conflicts, and the fact that his journalistic efforts focus so centrally on the activities of the poets in that region is noteworthy. (I plan to speak with him again soon about his new book The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, which takes us with him on his travels through Malaysia, China, and The Middle East.) At the same time that conversation, and the transcript we did of that interview, also serves to remind us of our own political dilemmas of the not very distant past. It follows here:

Leonard Schwartz: Christopher Merrill is a poet and critic, and the author and translator of more than a dozen books, including the highly praised Only The Nails Remain: Scenes From The Balkan Wars. He is also the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Welcome, Christopher Merrill. 

Christopher Merrill: It’s nice to be here, Leonard. 

Schwartz: Your book, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes From the Balkan Wars, is an extraordinary book. The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle wrote, “a poet who has journeyed often on foot through the Balkans, Merrill presents anecdotes from ordinary people encountered during his wanderings, as well as from friends in the arts, and political leaders. read more

CCP and eco-poetics

Some listenings

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

Photo credit: Ariel Goldberger

 “Nature” is the unconscious.

The sense of this statement is often more immediately clear to sculptors, to painters, and to other artists who work with physical materials, than it is to writers – or to scientists.

As one carves the stone or fashions the wood what one desired or feared comes gradually into view, unknowns are realized in the emerging form, an ambient mystery is for that moment determinate, the non-human is realized in its naissance. To speak of birth is already to anthropomorphize, the image at risk of becoming more and more obvious to the extent we begin to mold it to our image. As opposed to an idea of Nature as the given, I want to identify the non-self identical with “Nature” in order to help me distance it from the definition of Nature that would put it in contrast to History.

Nature is the unconscious. Which is to say that when one picks up materials and begins to tinker with them in a certain way: when one picks up language and begins to fiddle with it, as it were absent-mindedly, or by way of automatic writing, or by chance operations, or by working from the black of the page, the unconscious begins to come into view. What was in the dark comes into the arena of humanly generated light. What was coiled in the unconscious enters the social.

This distinction is not the same as that between subjective and objective, or inside and outside: it is closer to that between wilderness and civilization. In other words, I am referring to a distinction that has been abrogated on earth. Wilderness no longer exists in some pure form, not since the invention of the atom bomb: all present forms of wilderness are dependent on a contingent human choice to go on, to resist the death drive as it were, and therefore, are not independent of human choice. “Nature" is where what we know of ourselves as humans leaves off, where what we don’t know of ourselves as human begins, and yet where something is all the same encountered.

Lila Zemborain's 'mauve sea-orchids'

A theory of eros, March 30, 2008

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

One of the most intriguing books of poetry I’ve read and had the chance to discuss in the last few years is Lila Zemborain’s mauve sea-orchids... important for its aestheticism, for its erotics, for its contribution to an eco-poetics, and for the sheer physical delight of the book as book. I’m happy to be able to present a transcript of my March 3oth, 2008 conversation with Zemborain on and around this amazing book.  The transcription was done by Danielle Vogel, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Denver.

Leonard Schwartz:  Today’s guest is Lila Zemborain.  She’s a poet from Argentina who’s been based in New York now for many years. Her new book is called mauve sea-orchids and it’s published by Belladonna* Books.  About the work, Forrest Gander writes: “In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.”  Welcome, Lila Zemborain.

Lila Zemborain:  Thank you very much for having me. read more

Zurita

On Raul Zurita's visionary poetics

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

I first heard Raul Zurita read his poems on May 6th, 2010 at Poets House, on the occasion of the great Chilean poet’s visit to NY. The reading was from his book Purgatory, published in 1979 in Spanish and in 2010 by the University of California Press in translation by Anna Deeny, who was also on hand that evening to read her translations. Zurita’s reading moved me to the core. Others I spoke to after the reading were similarly astounded. In performance, Zurita’s visionary poetics proves its own language like none other. Since then I’ve called Zurita twice in Santiago, the first time to record him reading from Purgatory (CCP #219), the second time reading from Inri (CCP #234), translated by William Rowe and published by Marick Press.

From Zurita’s Inri:

Strange baits rain from the sky. Surprising bait falls falls upon the sea. Down below the ocean, up above unusual clouds on a clear day. Surprising baits rain on the sea. There was a love raining, there was a clear day that’s raining now on the sea.

In 1973, the U.S. backed military coup in Chile led to the eighteen year rule of the Pinochet regime.read more

For the Arabic language

Maged Zaher

LEONARD SCHWARTZ

Upon moving to Olympia, WA, in 2003 and starting up the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, my first impression was that Seattle was a suburb of Cairo. That was because two of the first people I met in the area were Maged Zaher and Mohammed Metwalli, both émigré poets from Egypt's capital. They immediately made me feel part of a larger conversation about poetry that was happening amongst themselves and many other of Egypt's writers the next block over, in Egypt. How to resist the death grip and the officialdom of the Mubarak regime without opening the door to fundamentalist attitudes towards the poetic word that might suppress it? To what extent might the prose poem, and a flattening of the lyric, help to undermine a certain hyperbole perceived as problematic for the Arabic language? What is the most productive way to lay out a lineage of modern Egyptian poetry?

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人生而自由 但无往不在枷锁之中