叶芝诗9首
A sudden blow:the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Among School Children
Ⅰ
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
Ⅱ
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
Ⅲ
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind—
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
在学童中间
一
我边走边问,从长长的教室走过,
一位和蔼的老修女回答着问题;
孩子们做算术、唱歌,
学习各样的读本和历史,
还要做精巧的手工,
时髦样子的那些——而孩子们
时不时地出于好奇,偷眼来看
这位花甲之年的微笑着的名人。
二
我梦一个丽达般的身影,
俯向奄奄的炉火,讲起
一次童年所受的苛责,一件小事
给童心埋下阴影的一天——
待她讲完,我们两人的天性仿佛
出于年轻的同情心而合成一个球体,
或者说——不妨篡改一下柏拉图的妙喻——
成为同一蛋壳里的蛋黄与蛋白。
三
心想着那时的悲与怒,
我看看这个孩子,又看看那个,
想到她在这个年纪是否也是这般样子——
因为天鹅的女儿也会遗传
所有鸣禽的共性——
是否也有这样颜色的脸孔或发辫。
心念及此,直要让我疯狂:
她仿佛一个活生生的孩子在我面前。
诗中的幻想是对茉德·冈深深思念的一种独特的表达,是至情之人才有的感受。
四
她现在的形象在我脑海,
可是出自十五世纪大师的指端?
那凹陷的脸颊,莫不是终日里
以风影为饮食的结果?
而我,虽非丽达般的人物,
却也有过漂亮的羽翎——够了,
何不以微笑面对所有微笑的人,
显示着老去的稻草人正过着舒心的日子。
五
年轻的母亲,膝上有个人形。
受生殖蜜的捉弄,
必将睡眠、哭喊、挣扎着逃走,
是受制于回忆或药物的力量。
她会怎样看她的孩子?假如她只把那人形——
把那头上披着六十多年寒冬的人形——
当作对生他时的剧痛的补偿,
或当作曾对他前程的忧虑的补偿?
六
柏拉图认为自然只是泡沫,
戏弄着万物幽灵般的万变;
亚里士多德挥动着桦木条,
抽打着那万王之王的屁股;
而声名显赫的毕达哥拉斯
从琴弦和琴弓上洞悉:
那星星所唱的、无心的缪斯所听的乐曲:
吓唬鸟儿的旧竹竿上的破衣。
七
修女和母亲们都崇拜偶像,
但那些烛光里的尊容
并不能激起哪位母亲的幻想,
只是使石像或铜像沉静。
但他们也叫人心碎——诸般形象,
诸般激情、虔敬、爱念所熟知的形象,
这些荣耀的神灵,
这些自生的人类理想的嘲弄者。
八
辛劳本身就是开花,就是舞蹈,
只要躯体不为取悦灵魂而伤残,
只要美并非产生于绝望的念头,
只要模糊的智慧并非出于熬夜到通宵。
栗树啊,虬根的花树,
你是叶子、是花朵、还是株干?
踏着节拍的身体,发光的眼神,
我们怎样区分舞蹈与跳舞的人?
The Fool by the Roadside
When all works that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;
When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.
当摇篮与线轴都成往事,
而我,也化作一个影子,
风一样透明,
那时,我想,我就可以找到
一个忠诚的爱人,忠诚的爱人。
A Man Young and Old
I
First Love
Though nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things,
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
Ⅱ
Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.
When the moon sails out.
Ⅲ
The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed;and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
Ⅳ
The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack,
The hare leap to the wood,
And when I pass a compliment
Rejoice as lover should
At the drooping of an eye,
At the mantling of the blood.
Then suddenly my heart is wrung
By her distracted air
And I remember wildness lost
And after, swept from there,
Am set down standing in the wood
At the death of the hare.
V
The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup,
When all but dead of thirst,
Hardly dared to wet his mouth
Imagining, moon-accursed,
That another mouthful
And his beating heart would burst.
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
And for that reason am I crazed
And my sleep is gone.
VI
His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take—
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck—
That she cried into this ear,
‘Strike me if I shriek.'
VII
The Friends of His Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
For that old Madge comes down the lane,
A stone upon her breast,
And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
And she can get no rest
With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
She that has been wild
And barren as a breaking wave
Thinks that the stone's a child.
And Peter that had great affairs
And was a pushing man
Shrieks,‘I am King of the Peacocks,'
And perches on a stone;
And then I laugh till tears run down
And the heart thumps at my side,
Remembering that her shriek was love
And that he shrieks from pride.
VIII
Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then Peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!
IX
The Secrets of the Old
I have old women's secrets now
That had those of the young;
Madge tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge's way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.
X
His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For Peg and Meg and Paris'love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
1'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.
XI
From‘Oedipus at Colonus'
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is carried to the bridegroom's chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
她的心有如石铸,从此
我的一切事情
再不顺遂,因为
若伸手在月亮上摸索,
定是神经出了问题。
她的微笑改变了我的面容,
自她去后,我如戏中的丑角,
来回踱步,
内心荒芜,
还不如群星在天上的轨迹
自月亮离开之后。
二
人的尊严
她的好意就像那月亮,
若我可以
把其中捉摸不透的、而对所有人
都一样的东西称作好意,
好像我的忧伤只是一个剧中场景,
衬着身后装饰过的墙壁。
于是我躺倒,像一块石头
躺倒在枯树下边。
若能把心中痛苦向着
掠过的鸟儿嘶喊,
或许我才能平复一些,但我无言,
出于人的尊严。
三
美人鱼
美人鱼发现一位游水的少年,
便捉他来,做自己的情郎,
紧紧拥抱着他的身体,
恣意地笑着,潜入水底;
却忘记了啊,在残忍的欢娱里,
便是有情人也会溺毙。
四
野兔之死
我指出那狂吠的犬群所在,
好让野兔跳入树林,
当我对那低垂的眼眸致意时,
对那涨红的脸儿致意时,
便有了恋人的欢愉。
突然间,我心绞痛,
因她失神的容颜,
遂忆起那野性早失,
便被推离,我站在
那片树林里,
站在那野兔死去的地方。
五
空杯
疯子找到了一只杯子,
在焦渴的时候
却不敢沾唇,
心在迷乱,怕着
若喝上一口,
那狂跳的心就会爆裂。
去年十月我找到了那只杯子,
却发现它已是一只空杯,
我因此而疯癫,
因此而疏远了睡眠。
六
他的回忆
我们应该远离他们的目光,
只如圣灵般出现,
身躯碎裂如荆棘,
任由凛冽的北风吹打,
想想已死的赫克托尔吧,他的名字
如今已再无人知。
我的所言所行
女人们并不关注,
她们宁可离座
去听驴子的歌声,
而我那荆棘般的手臂,
也曾有位美人枕过。
那是整个部落里最美的人儿,
与我欢愉——
她曾使伟大的赫克托尔威风扫地,
还毁灭了一座特洛伊,
而她,“若我尖叫就再用力些吧,”
——曾在我耳边这样私语。
七
他青年时代的朋友们
是笑声而非时光
沙哑了我的声音,
每到月圆的时候
我陷入笑的痉挛,
因老梅吉从小巷走来,
抱着一块石头,
一块裹了斗篷的石头,
她嘴里喃喃着不停,
唱着催眠的歌儿,
她曾狂野过,如今
却如碎裂的浪花,无力生育
把石头当作婴儿。
彼得是个精力过人的家伙,
有过非凡的种种情事,
他高喊着以孔雀王自诩,
在石上歇息;
而我大笑着直到泪水流下,
心脏的胸口急跳,
想起从前,她的尖叫是因为爱情,
他的叫喊是因为骄傲。
八
夏天和春天
我们坐在一棵老棘树下,
谈了整整一晚,
谈起我们有生之年
做过的事,说过的话;
我们谈起成年的时候
裂去了一个完整的灵魂,
谈到只有依偎在彼此的怀里
那灵魂才能再度合一;
彼得突然露出凶巴巴的表情,
因为他和她
也是在这棵树下
似曾同样谈起过他们共同的童年。
啊,怎样的萌芽初吐,
怎样的花团锦簇,
当我们拥有着整个夏季,
而她,拥有着全部的春天。
九
老人的秘密
如今,我知晓了老妇的秘密,
知晓了她们年轻时的往事;
梅吉告诉了我一位恋人溺死的经过,
她的话像一支古老的谣曲,
那是我年轻时候
也不敢想象的事情。
要是玛格丽也在,
也会被这些故事惊得无言,
而我们虽然三人一起,却只感到孤单;
因为,今天在世的人啊,
无一知晓我们所知的往事,
无一知晓我们所说的故事。
在所有逝去的人当中,
有那么一个男人曾经被女人们喜欢,
有那么一对恋人曾经相爱多年,
许许多多的故事,
富贵,贫贱,
不再流传。
十
他的狂野
啊,让我上马,起程,
在无数残骸中穿行,
因为年轻的
佩格、麦格、帕里斯的恋人
都已逝去,而留下的人
用绸缎换取了麻布。
如果我在那里,无人知晓,
我会让一只孔雀啼叫,
因这对一个活在回忆中的男人
是件再自然不过的事情;
在无比的孤独里,我情愿照看一块石头,
给它唱催眠曲听。
十一
出自《俄狄浦斯在科洛努斯》
安于上天给予的生命,不要祈求长寿,
倦旅中的老者啊,别再回想往昔的欢愉,
若一切渴望都归于徒劳,欢愉即会变作对死亡的渴望。
甚至,从那为记忆所珍藏的欢愉里,
也会生出死亡、绝望、家庭的分裂、种种人世的纠葛,
一如这流浪的老丐与这些被上天厌弃的孩童所知。
在满是回声的长街上拥挤着跳舞的人群,
在火把与喧闹的歌声中,新娘被领入新郎的卧房,
我赞美那结束短暂或漫长生命的沉默的亲吻。
如古代作家们所说,最好的事情莫过于从未活过,
莫过于从未汲取过生命的气息,从未凝视过白昼的眼眸,
其次,才是一声愉快的晚安和迅速的转身离去。
Symbols
A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A blind hermit rings the hour.
All-destroying sword-blade still
Carried by the wandering fool.
Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.
Spilt Milk
We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.
The Nineteenth Century and After
Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
After Long Silence
Speech after long silence;it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom;young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
窗帘也遮住了不友好的夜色,
我们不停地谈论着
艺术与诗歌的崇高主题:
衰老即是智慧;年轻时
我们彼此相爱却懵然不知。
Long-Legged Fly
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks;her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
推荐阅读: