我们的暮光之地Our Twilight Lands
这是关于帕拉的另一篇文章，分享给大家，依然是中英对照。多批评。
ByLeila Guerriero
March 26, 2012
ON POETRY
莱拉·格里罗
2012年3月26日
关于诗歌
Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero wrote this article, translated by Sarah Foster, based on her interview with Chilean poet Nicanor Parra at his home on the coast of Chile. It was published in the Spanish newspaperEl Paísafter Parra was awarded the Cervantes Prize last December. The prize, given by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, is the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. Parra’s poem “Defense of Violeta Parra”appeared inour two-hundredth issue, on newsstands now. 阿根廷记者莱拉·格里罗根据她在智利诗人尼卡诺尔·帕拉在智利海岸的家中对他的采访撰写了这篇文章，并由莎拉·福斯特翻译成了英文。这篇文章在去年12月帕拉获得塞万提斯奖后发表在西班牙报纸《国家报》上。塞万提斯奖由西班牙文化部颁发，是西班牙语世界中最负盛名的文学奖。帕拉的诗《为维奥莱塔·帕拉辩护》刊登在我们（译注：指的是《巴黎评论》）的第两百期，现已发行。
Reaching the house where Nicanor Parra lives, on Lincoln Street in Las Cruces, a coastal town two hundred kilometers from Santiago de Chile, is easy. The hard part is reachinghim.
到达尼卡诺尔·帕拉的住所很容易，它位于距智利圣地亚哥两百公里的沿海城镇拉斯克鲁塞斯的林肯大街。困难的部分是找到他。
Nicanor Parra Oiundo de San Fabian de Alico is the first-born son out of a total of eight children brought into the world by Nicanor Parra, a high school teacher, and Clara Sandoval. He was born in 1914, was twenty-five during World War II, sixty-six when John Lennon was shot, and eighty-seven when the planes hit the towers.Last September, he turned ninety-seven. Some people don’t even know he’s still alive.
尼卡诺尔·帕拉是高中教师尼卡诺尔·帕拉和克拉拉·桑多瓦尔共八个孩子中的长子。他出生于1914年，二战爆发（译注：以1939年计算）时二十五岁，约翰·列侬被枪杀时六十六岁，飞机撞击“双子塔”时八十七岁。去年九月，他九十七岁。有些人甚至不知道他还活着。
Las Cruces is a town with two thousand inhabitants, shielded from the Pacific Ocean by a bay that embraces several towns: Cartagena, El Tabo. Parra’s house is on a cliff, overlooking the sea. In the garden, a staircase comes down to the front door, where local punks have painted graffiti so that no one will dare touch the house; it says, “Antipoetry.” In the foyer, he has written the names and telephone numbers of his children.
拉斯克鲁塞斯是一个有两千名居民的小镇，被海湾与太平洋相隔，海湾里有几个小镇：卡塔赫纳、埃尔塔波。帕拉的房子在一道悬崖上，俯瞰着大海。花园里，有一道楼梯通向前门，当地的小混混在那里涂鸦，这样就没人敢碰这座房子了；门上写着“反诗歌”。在门厅里，他写了他孩子们的名字和电话号码。
Nicanor Parra’s hair is white. He has a long beard and no wrinkles, only furrows in a face that seems to be made of earth. His hands are tanned, no spots or creases, like two roots rinsed in water. Lying on a table is the second volume of his complete works,Obras completas y algo(1975–2006). In its preface, Harold Bloom writes, “I firmly believe that, if the most powerful poet produced by the New World until now is still Walt Whitman, Parra joins him as an essential poet in our Twilight Lands.” At the end of the eighties, when Parra was still living in Santiago, he stopped giving interviews, and, although there have always been exceptions, he often objects to direct questions in unexpected ways, so that a conversation with him is subject to uncertain diversions, into topics that he repeats and brings up for whatever reason: his grandchildren, the Laws of Manu, the Tao Te Ching, Neruda.
尼卡诺尔·帕拉如今已白发苍苍。他有长长的胡须，没有皱纹，只有仿佛由泥土刻成的“沟壑”挂在脸上。他的手晒得黝黑，没有斑、没有褶皱，像两根在水里冲洗过的树根。桌子上放着他的全集——《全集和其他》（Obras completas y algo(1975–2006)——的第二卷。序言中，哈罗德·布鲁姆写道：“我坚信，如果说迄今为止新世界最有力量的诗人仍是沃尔特·惠特曼的话，那么帕拉就是我们暮光之地首屈一指的诗人。八十年代末，当帕拉还住在圣地亚哥时，他不再接受采访，尽管也有例外，他经常反对用意想不到的方式直接提问，因此与他的谈话会受到不确定的转移，进入他重复的话题，无论出于什么原因，他都会提起：他的孙辈、《摩奴法典》、《道德经》、聂鲁达。
Sitting on a low stool covered by a wool blanket, he’s wearing a jean shirt, a beige sweater with several holes, corduroy pants. Behind him, a glass door separates the living room from a balcony with two chairs and, beyond, a backyard full of shrubs and then the Pacific Ocean. He tells me, of his grandson Tololo, “Once the director of his school called an urgent meeting with his mother because they had called his name for attendance and little Tololo didn’t answer. So I tell him, ‘Listen, buddy, why didn’t you answer when the teacher called your name?’ ‘I can’t because my name isn’t Cristobal anymore. Now my name is Hamlet.’ Since then, I gave up literature and now I spend all my time writing down what children say.”
他坐在一张铺着羊毛毯的矮凳上，穿着牛仔衬衫，一件有几个洞的米色毛衣，灯芯绒裤子。在他身后，一扇玻璃门将客厅与一个有两把椅子的阳台隔开，再往后就是长满灌木的后院，然后就是太平洋。他告诉我，关于他的孙子托洛洛，“有一次，他学校的校长叫他妈妈去开一个“紧急会议”，因为老师点名时，小托洛洛不答应。所以我跟他说，‘听着，孩子，老师叫你名字时你为什么不答应？’‘我不能答应，因为我的名字不再是克里斯托瓦尔。现在我叫哈姆雷特。’从那以后，我放弃了文学，如今我把所有时间都花在了记录孩子们所说的话上。”
It may sound like a joke, but it’s not: Parra writes down things he hears from his grandchildren or from Rosita Avendano, the woman who cleans his house, or from random people he sees walking around, and then he transforms them: “Later they wanted to send me to the school / Where the sick children were / But I didn’t put up with them / Because I’m no kind of sick girl / I hate to say it / But I’m just not a sick girl,” he writes in “Rosita Avendano.”
这听起来像个笑话，但并不是：帕拉记下了他从孙辈那里听到的话语，或是从他家的女佣人罗西达·阿薇达诺那里听到的，或是从他看到的四处闲逛的人那里听到的，然后将其转化：“然后他们想送我去/一所智障儿童学校/但我不同意/我没有智障/我口吃/但我不是生病的女孩。”他在《罗西达·阿薇达诺》中写道。
Parra writes with a plain ballpoint pen in plain notebooks, he takes massive doses of ascorbic acid, he always eats the same things: soups,cazuelas,arrollados.He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize and every year for the Cervantes, before winning on December 1, 2011. A while ago they asked him to film a commercial for milk. Shakira was also part of the project, so he told them they should pay him however much they paid her. They say he was paid thirty thousand dollars for a half-minute appearance, so now he tells everyone that he charges one thousand per second. He has two houses in Santiago, one in Las Cruces, and one on Isla Negra. Nobody knows what he does with the houses he doesn’t live in.
帕拉用普通圆珠笔在普通笔记本上写作，他服用大量的维生素C，他总是吃同样的东西：汤、炖肉（cazuelas）、肉馅卷饼（arrollados）。他曾多次获得诺贝尔奖提名，每年都被提名塞万提斯奖，直到2011年12月1日获奖。不久前，有人请他拍摄了一支牛奶广告。夏奇拉也参演了，所以他告诉他们，无论他们付给她多少钱，也应该如数付给他。他们说他半分钟的出场费是三万美元，所以现在他告诉每个人，他一秒钟收费一千美元。他在圣地亚哥有两套房子，在拉斯克鲁塞斯有一套，在内格拉岛（Isla Negra）有一套。没人知道他对自己不住的房子做了什么。 Parra’s childhood was full of hardships and relocations, until, at age sixteen or seventeen, he left alone for Santiago. With the help of a scholarship from the League of Poor Students, he was able to finish his studies at a prestigious institution. He had good grades in the humanities subjects but not in the hard sciences, so he studied math and physics at the Universidad de Chile “to show those bastards that they didn’t know anything about mathematics.” In 1938, while making a living as a teacher, he publishedSongbook Without a Name. In 1943, he traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, to study advanced mechanics at Brown University; in 1949, he went to England to study cosmology at Oxford; and in 1951, he went back to teach math and physics at the Universidad de Chile.
帕拉的童年充满了艰辛和迁徙，直到十六、七岁时，他独自前往圣地亚哥。在贫困学生联盟（League of Poor Students）提供的奖学金的帮助下，他得以在一所著名院校完成学业。他的人文学科成绩很好，但自然科学学科却不行，所以他在智利大学学习数学和物理，“向那些混蛋证明他们对数学一无所知。”1938年，在以教师身份谋生的同时，他出版了《无名歌集》（Songbook Without a Name）。1943年，他前往罗德岛州的普罗维登斯县，在布朗大学学习高等力学（advanced mechanics）；1949年，他前往英国，在牛津大学学习宇宙学；1951年，他回到智利大学教数学和物理。
Then, in 1949, he publishedPoems and Antipoems, revolutionizing Latin American poetry with deceptively simple language: “Neither very bright nor a total fool / I was what I was: a mix / of oil and vinegar for eating / A sausage of angel and beast!” It had a prologue from Neruda, with whom Parra would come to have a rocky relationship, in part because his poems began to be read as a negative reaction to Neruda’s. This was followed by a very productive period; he published four volumes between 1958 and 1967 and won the Chilean National Literature Prize in 1969.
后来，在1949年，他出版了《诗歌与反诗歌》，用看似简单的语言革新了拉美诗歌：“我既不是很聪明，也不是个大傻瓜/我就是我：可食用的/油醋混合物/天使和野兽的香肠！”（译注：此处为个人翻译）这本书有聂鲁达的序言，帕拉和聂鲁达的关系很不稳定，部分原因是他的诗歌开始被视为对聂鲁达诗歌的负面反应。接下来是一段非常高产的时期；他在1958年至1967年期间出版了四部诗集，并在1969年获得了智利国家文学奖。
In 1970, Parra was fifty-five, pro-Castro, and on the jury for the Cuban Casa de las Americas Prize when he attended a writers’ meeting in Washington and, along with all the other guests, visited the White House. They were invited, unexpectedly, to have tea with President Nixon’s wife. But drinking from Mrs. Nixon’s teacup in the thick of the Vietnam War was enough to finish Parra: Casa de las Americas disqualified him from being part of the jury and showered him with insults.
1970年，帕拉五十五岁，亲卡斯特罗，是古巴“美洲之家奖”（Cuban Casa de las Americas Prize）的评委，当时他参加了在华盛顿举行的作家会议，并与其他所有客人一起参观了白宫。他们意外地被邀请与尼克松总统的夫人一起喝茶。不过，在越南战争最激烈的时候喝了尼克松夫人的茶，就足以让帕拉“滚蛋”：“美洲之家”取消了他的评委资格，并对他进行了大量的侮辱。
Parra’s political position had come under suspicion, and it wasn’t long before his literary works caught up. In 1972, he publishedArtifacts, a series of sayings, accompanied by drawings, that were alternately irreverent, blasphemous, and politically incorrect: “The right and the left united will never be defeated.” The kindest reviewers said that it was not poetry, the harshest critics said it was the best propaganda the fascists could have gotten their hands on. In 1977, during the Pinochet dictatorship, he publishedSermons and Teachings of Christ of Elqu(“I’ll bet my head / that nobody laughs like I do when the Philistines torture him”) andJokes to Confuse the Police(“If it appeared that he appeared, but only in the list of the disappeared”), but, like other poets who stayed in Chile during these years, he was judged with a certain suspicion for not opposing the military regime strongly enough. In 1985, he published another book,Hojas de Parra, and then entered twenty years of silence, broken only in 2004, when he published a translation of Shakespeare’sKing Lear, now considered the best in the Spanish language. “After we publishedKing Lear,” said Matia Rivas, the publisher who approached Parra about the translation, “he went into a university and there were millions of young people following him. He had turned into a rock star.”
帕拉的政治立场受到了怀疑，不久之后他的文学作品也受到了质疑。1972年，他出版了《史前古器物》（Artifacts），这是一系列带有绘图的谚语，交替出现的是不敬、亵渎和政治上的不正确：“左派和右派联合起来是永远不可战胜的。”最善良的评论家说这不是诗，最苛刻的批评家说这是法西斯分子能得到的最好的宣传。1977年，在皮诺切特独裁统治期间，他出版了《埃尔基基督的讲道和传教》（“我敢打赌/当受到俗人的折磨时/没有人能像我一样大笑”）和《迷惑警察的笑话》（“如果他出现了，也是出现在失踪者的名单之上”），但是，与那些年留在智利的其他诗人一样，他也因为没有强烈反对军事政权而受到了质疑。1985年，他又出版了一部诗集《帕拉之叶》（Hojas de Parra），然后进入了二十年的沉默期，直到2004年才打破，当时他出版了莎士比亚的《李尔王》的译本，现在被认为是西班牙语中最好的。“我们出版了《李尔王》之后，”与帕拉接触的出版商马蒂亚·里瓦斯说，“他走进一所大学，有成千上万的年轻人跟着他。他变成了摇滚明星。”
Since 1998 he has been—more or less—single. “What I really need / is a Maria Kodama / who can take care of my library […] with a young widow in the picture / […] the coffin looks rosecolored / even stomach pains / brought on by the Stockholm academics / disappear like magic,” he wrote. In his old age, he has started to get a reputation for being eccentric. He buys clothes from a second-hand store in the Port of San Antonio, a rough neighborhood, but he gets along pretty well there, like everywhere else. A while ago, when some of his writing notebooks were stolen from his house, he found out that some local dealers had received them as a payment, so he went to look for them and they were returned with apologies.
自1998年以来，他一直——或多或少——单身。他写道：“我急需的是/一个玛利亚·儿玉/掌管图书馆/[......]有着未来的年轻寡妇做伴/[......]棺材看起来会很美/连被那些斯德哥尔摩的学者/引发的胃痛/也会奇迹般地/烟消云散。”晚年，他开始有了古怪的名声。他在圣安东尼奥港的一家二手商店买衣服，那是一个治安不佳的社区，但他在那儿和其他地方一样过得很好。前段时间，他的一些写作笔记本在家里被偷了，他发现当地的一些商店收到了这些笔记本作为付款，于是他去寻找这些笔记本，它们带着歉意被送了回来。
His reluctance to publish is legendary. Even when Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales was publishing two more books—After Dinner Declaration(2006) andThe Return of the Christ of Elqui(2007)—he took years to sign the contracts, months to work out satisfactory versions for publication. The process of putting together his complete works took almost a decade.
他不愿意出版是出了名的。即使在迭戈·波塔莱斯大学出版了另外两本书——《饭后演讲》（2006）和《埃尔基基督归来》（2007）时，他也花了几年时间来签署合同，花了几个月来制作、确定令人满意的出版版本。编辑他的全部作品花了将近十年时间。
—Are you satisfied with your complete works? — Surprised. I read those poems, and I don’t feel like I was the person who wrote them. I think I never wrote anything because I have always just pulled things out of the air.
— It’s pretty here, no? —Yes, it would be nice to live here. — More like, to die. Think about everything that’s been done, and still they haven’t figured out this one thing. —Which thing? — Death. They’ve figured out other things. But why don’t they concentrate on that?
- 你对自己的全部作品满意吗？
- 很意外。我读了那些诗，不觉得是我写的。我认为我从未写过任何东西，因为我总是凭空捏造一些事情
- 这里很美，不是吗？
- 是的，如果能住在这里就好了。
- 更像是，要死在这儿。想想做过的一切，他们仍然没有弄清这件事。
- 什么事？
- 死亡。他们弄清了其他。但为什么不集中精力做这件事呢？
Article ©Leila Guerriero/EL PAÍS S.L. 2011.
作者：莱拉·格里罗，西班牙《国家报》，2011年
