他山之石 | 诗歌、渗透力和疗愈 下

用诗歌实现乡村孩子自由的情感表达 | 第 314 期

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他山之石，为是光新的固定栏目。通过定期翻译国外关于“现代诗歌”的朗读、创作、活动的文章，实现诗歌更大程度上的探索和借鉴推广。

本文的作者是美国当代著名诗人简·赫希菲尔德（Jane Hirschfield）。此文最初发表在美国诗人学会的双年期刊《美国诗人》2018年春夏一期上，后转载于美国诗人学会的网站上。整篇文章尝试回答诗歌何以治愈人心的创伤这个问题，语言或许较为抽象，但反复读通之后会有顿悟的快感。

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This enlargement of possibility is a taproot of how poems can work to heal even what can’t necesarily be outwardly changed. Among the fracturings of the psyche, powerlessness and invis­ibility are not minimal things. But a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence. Anyone who has written a poem surely has felt this. 

I think of it as the secret happiness of poems. No matter how grief-filled a poem may be in its contents, the making of it allows the poet to drink from the wellspring of freedom—and that increase of freedom and invention cannot help but afford the poet a balancing sense of happiness. When we call a poem “powerful,” that is the power we mean: the power to move the psyche and mind and through them, perhaps, the world’s future.

可能疆界的拓宽是诗歌何以疗愈那些外在未必能被改变的伤痕之根基。精神上的裂痕、无力感和缺乏存在感绝非小事。而一个用文字进行前所未有的创造之人绝非无力之人。创造出为人们带来新的思考和感受的语汇既是情绪的极乐，也是灵魂的解放。扩展现实的疆域以抵抗绝望、抑郁和无能。任何曾写过诗的人都一定有过这样的体会。我把它看作是诗歌隐秘的幸福。无论作品内容本身包含了多少哀痛，创作它的过程都能够让诗人畅饮自由的源泉；更多的自由和创造定会令TA体会到一种与哀痛相抵消的幸福。我们称一首作品“充满力量”，那种力量正是让精神和头脑活起来,从而让整个世界的未来都活起来的力量。

Stanley Kunitz once said, “At every stage in life we need to create a self that we can bear to live and die with.” Every time I think of that sentence, I find myself encouraged by its foundational prem­ise: that we can create, and can create a self. Even the poems that come out of theoretical ground that pulls against what Kunitz describes are enactments of the indomitable resourcefulness of the creative mind and heart.

库尼茨（Stanley Kunitz）曾经说过：“在人生的每个阶段，我们都需要创造出一个自己甘愿以之生和死的自我。”每次想到这句话，我都会感到自己被它隐含的基本前提所鼓舞：那就是我们能够创造，并且能够创造自我。连那些诞生于与库尼茨的叙述相左的理论基础的作品都是我们那富有创造力的头脑和心灵的不屈智慧之证明。

Another element of poetry’s capacity to act as a force of healing is its grounding in connection and interconnection. There is solace in recogniz­ing that whatever happens to a person, someone before us has known it as well. Poetry’s evidence tells us that we are not singled out by our suf­fering; we are brought into the shared life of all who have lived and died before and with us.

诗歌另一个疗愈的本领是植根于联结和互联。认识到“太阳底下没有新鲜事”这一事实能让我们感到一丝慰藉。诗歌作品中的证据告诉我们，受伤不会让我们成为孤岛；所有人都活在我们共同的生活里，和历史,和所有生命一起同呼吸、共命运。

Think of the Buddhist parable of the mus­tard seed. A woman whose child has died is inconsolable. She goes to the teacher Shakya­muni, who she has heard teaches a way to lift human hearts from their suffering, and asks him to bring back her dead child. He answers that he will of course do this, if she can bring him a single mustard seed from any house that has not known death. As the woman goes from house to house, finding no one who has escaped mourning and loss, her grief changes: not a weight erased but a weight made bearable.

这里，可以思考一下佛教关于芥菜种子的寓言故事。一位母亲无法平复内心的丧子之痛。她听说有位叫释伽牟尼的老师能教导人从苦难中超脱出来，便去请他让自己的孩子死而复生。释伽牟尼回答道，只要她能找到一个从没有承受过丧亲之痛的家庭并带回一粒芥菜种子，他就可以帮助她。结果，这位母亲挨家挨户地打听，发现没有任何人可以逃过这样的劫难，她的哀痛之心便起了变化：并不是心灵的重荷被抹去，而是变得可以承受了。

Poems connect us to this sense of shared fate by awakening in us both the remembrance of shared exposure and a fundamental, precise experience of empathy. They loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality. The particularity and unexpectedness of poetry’s language shake us from sleepiness, complacency, habitual mind. Empathy breaks us from the hypnosis of ego’s grip on its own sense of purpose. Empathy brings us to feel that whatever we are aware of becomes part of the larger self. Any image, story, or metaphor is understood by our interior inhabitance of its parts and our rec­ognition that each of those parts is our own face. 

We understand the image of a mountain because we have seen mountains, heard mountains, walked their loose-rock steepness.

通过唤醒我们内心对共同经历的回忆及一种根本的和准确的共情体验，诗歌将我们所有人同这种对共同命运的感受联结在一起。它令我们从独自一人的孤单和抹去共性之后的个例中松动出来。诗歌语言的独特性与意外性让我们从困乏、自满和惯性思维中警醒。共情让我们从小我执着于其自身目的性的催眠中解脱。共情让我们感到，我们所了解的一切都成为了大我的一部分。诗歌中的每一个意象、故事或隐喻都被它本就栖居在我们体内的部分及我们对这些部分即是我们自身投射的认识所理解。

我们能读懂一座山的意象，恰是因为我们见过、听过、从碎石嶙峋的陡峭中穿行过。

This process is closer to physiological than rational. When the eighteenth-century German poet Novalis said that poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason, he was speaking against the kinds of narrowing that reduce a person to only body or to only mind—the fallacy, on one side, of believing a person can ever be merely a body or merely a “means of production” and the equal fallacy, on the other, of disembodiment, which reduces us to abstractions, ideologies, and labels. The rational mind, unhampered by poetry, divides; its task is to examine part by part, to be both unimpassioned and compartmental. Intel­lect of this kind is not unneeded. Blind trials in medicine need to be run without weeping. But that fierce rational power, in isolation, is inhuman. Art dwells at the crossroads between what in us is body, what in us is emotion, what in us is history, and what in us is mind. To step into wholeness of seeing and feeling, under any conditions, is in itself restorative. 

Think of the courts of restor­ative justice in Rwanda—through the full telling of the stories of what had happened, the ability of people to live together, even after the terror and madness of genocide, was slowly, tentatively, necessarily returned.

这个过程更贴近生理、而非心智。当十八世纪德国诗人诺瓦利斯（Novalis）写下他的名言“诗能愈合理智造成的创伤“时，他正是在反对那些把人简化为只有肉体或只有心智的狭隘观念。持有这些谬论的人中，一派坚信人只能是一具肉体或生产资料，另一派则把我们简化为只有抽象概念、意识形态和各种标签。未经诗歌打磨的理性头脑将会分裂；它的任务是将事物拆分成部分并逐个检验，需要保持平静和区隔。这样的才智自有它的用处。医学中的盲检需要得到绝对理性的执行。但单独去看那种惊人的理性的力量，实际上是并不人道的。艺术栖居在我们内心深处肉体、性情、历史和心智的十字路口。在任何情况下进入以整全的视角去观照和感受的领域，都是具有复原功能的。

这里可以参照卢旺达修复式法庭的例子，通过完整地复述事件经过，即便是在狂暴骇人的种族大屠杀之后，人们得以共处的能力也都在缓慢但坚定地逐渐复原。

The images, words, metaphors, and sounds of poems harness passion and, with it, compas­sion, to do this work of mutual recognition and expansion. Reading these records of connection, witness, and experience, we begin to remember our continuity, our permeability, our kaleido­scopic participation in a shared whole, the colors and scents, the stories of earth.

诗歌的意象、词语、隐喻和声音唤起了人的热情和同情，以实现互相认同和扩展的目的。阅读这些对于人与人之间的联系、事件的目击和经历的记载，我们开始记住在我们共同拥有的整体中历史的连续性、裂痕中的渗透力和每个人独特的参与度，记住这色彩，这味道，这地球的物语。

I’d like to close with one brief poem I often turn to, a poem of brokenness, permeability, and inclusion. The process of figuring out what it meant, when I co-translated it with Mariko Aratani for The Ink Dark Moon, was, for me, per­manently life-changing. This five-line Japanese Tanka, written a thousand years ago, taught me that to be whole requires letting into your life what you might believe you’d prefer to keep out. It showed me that a fully rounded human life means agreeing to everything—hard or embraced—that all lives will bring.

我想以一首我个人经常反复去读的小诗作为结尾，这是一首关于破碎、渗透和包容的诗。在我与荒谷真理子（中文名周宇音，英文名Mariko Aratani）合译《墨色的月亮》一书时，整个读懂这首诗的过程，于我而言，是永久性地改变了我的生命。这首写于一千多年以前的五行日本短歌教会了我一个道理，做一个健全、完整的人需要让那些你或许坚信自己情愿拒之门外的事物进入你的生命。它告诉我，无论艰难还是欢喜，拥有全面发展的人生意味着接受生命带给你的一切。

Although the wind 

blows terribly here, 

the moonlight also leaks 

between the roof planks

 of this ruined house.

尽管狂风

肆虐地钻进来，

月光也从

这座破房子

        屋顶木板的缝隙中漏下。

译者·苏岩

曾经的老师，现居美国，一名全职妈妈。兴趣广泛，爱好专一。被大宝带着，喜欢上了诗歌，2019年2月加入“是光”，不定期地翻译国外诗歌创作、欣赏和教学方面的文章，给自己充电，也和大家分享。

Source:https://poets.org/text/poetry-permeability-and-healing

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