美国诗人Wallace Stevens写的一首好诗
Wallace Stevens(1879 - 1955)出生于宾夕法尼亚州, 在哈佛大学就读, 后来在康涅狄格州一家保险公司工作, 一直到他去世。Stevens是二十世纪美国最杰出的诗人之一, 尽管他的有些诗不太好懂。
著名哲学家、随笔作家(essayist)、诗人、小说家George Santayana(乔治·桑塔亚纳)曾在哈佛大学任教, 后来长期居住于罗马的一个修女院(the Hospital and Convent of the Blue Nuns)。有一天, Santayana跟人讨论英国诗人A. E. Housman, 他坦率地承认了自己的同性倾向:
"I suppose Housman was really what people nowadays call 'homosexual.' I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days - although I was unconscious of it at the time."
有名的美国同性恋作家Gore Vidal(1925 - 2012)有一本自传"Palimpsest", 其中写得最好的一章是"The Guest of the Blue Nuns", 追忆23岁的他1948年在罗马拜访85岁的Santayana。在Santayana面前, Vidal感觉就像斐多(Phaedo)在苏格拉底(Socrates)面前一样, 他认为Santayana "was in every way admirable."
Santayana母语是西班牙语, 但用英语写作, 文笔优美, "Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies"(《英伦独语》)更是精彩纷呈。他的不少警句发人深省, 尤其是这句话广为流传: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
1952年Santayana病逝, Stevens得知后写信给一位友人:
"I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. Fifty years ago, I knew him well, in Cambridge, where he often asked me to come to see him. This was before he had definitely decided not to be a poet. He had probably written as much poetry as prose at that time. It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like the law, which is only a form of the reason) is a jealous mistress."
"The reason is a jealous mistress": 理性和情人一样, 喜欢吃醋。为了纪念Santayana, Stevens写了一首深刻、动人的好诗"To an Old Philosopher in Rome"。Santayana终身未婚, 没有后代, 但只要诗与英语没有消亡, 他就不会被人忘怀。
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end -
The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.
How easily the blown banners change to wings ...
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,
The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled ...
The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,
So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained vaults.
The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names
In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
著名哲学家、随笔作家(essayist)、诗人、小说家George Santayana(乔治·桑塔亚纳)曾在哈佛大学任教, 后来长期居住于罗马的一个修女院(the Hospital and Convent of the Blue Nuns)。有一天, Santayana跟人讨论英国诗人A. E. Housman, 他坦率地承认了自己的同性倾向:
"I suppose Housman was really what people nowadays call 'homosexual.' I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days - although I was unconscious of it at the time."
有名的美国同性恋作家Gore Vidal(1925 - 2012)有一本自传"Palimpsest", 其中写得最好的一章是"The Guest of the Blue Nuns", 追忆23岁的他1948年在罗马拜访85岁的Santayana。在Santayana面前, Vidal感觉就像斐多(Phaedo)在苏格拉底(Socrates)面前一样, 他认为Santayana "was in every way admirable."
Santayana母语是西班牙语, 但用英语写作, 文笔优美, "Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies"(《英伦独语》)更是精彩纷呈。他的不少警句发人深省, 尤其是这句话广为流传: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
1952年Santayana病逝, Stevens得知后写信给一位友人:
"I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. Fifty years ago, I knew him well, in Cambridge, where he often asked me to come to see him. This was before he had definitely decided not to be a poet. He had probably written as much poetry as prose at that time. It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like the law, which is only a form of the reason) is a jealous mistress."
"The reason is a jealous mistress": 理性和情人一样, 喜欢吃醋。为了纪念Santayana, Stevens写了一首深刻、动人的好诗"To an Old Philosopher in Rome"。Santayana终身未婚, 没有后代, 但只要诗与英语没有消亡, 他就不会被人忘怀。
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end -
The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.
How easily the blown banners change to wings ...
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,
The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled ...
The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,
So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained vaults.
The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names
In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
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年轻时的Wallace Stevens |
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年轻时的George Santayana |
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年轻时的Gore Vidal |
