主题：【Jacky 园】诗为什么重要

     Poetry dosen't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poety has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competions for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.

      就多数人而言，诗无关紧要。他们该干嘛还干嘛，基本不去请教他们的莎士比亚、华兹华斯或弗罗斯特。有人不免会问：在21世纪，诗歌是否还有一席之地？这年头音乐视频和卫星电视当道，一再挤压诗的空间。况且欣赏诗劳心费力，不仅需要精力集中，具备一定的分析技巧，而且还要对诗歌的发展历程有所了解。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attatch to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands. 

      在19世纪，诸如司各特、拜伦和朗费罗之类的诗人备受全世界人民的喜爱，他们的诗作总是洛阳纸贵，而且他们都是文化巨人。但那个年代的读者选择不多。笔者认为——不一定对——那时的人是真真正正地喜爱诗歌。诗歌为他们讲述故事，既愉悦身心，又发人深省。诗歌提供了词藻来抒写他们的感情。那时的人也喜欢民谣。从某种意义上来说，音乐与诗歌融为一体。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjuctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century--or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.

      一到20世纪，事情有点走样：诗歌变得“棘手”了。这时的诗作开始反映现代文化的复杂性及其重大分裂。艾兹拉·庞德、希尔达·杜利特尔、T.S. 艾略特、玛丽安·摩尔、华莱士·史蒂文斯等人的著作对读者要求甚高，其一便是大量查阅文化方面的参考书，而这些书所涉及的主题甚至在20世纪初就已鲜为人知。举例而言，要能轻松自如地阅读庞德和艾略特的诗篇，读者需要对希腊诗歌和拉丁诗歌有所了解。这类知识就过去的求学者而言是十分平常的，各类经典是当时上中产阶级所有教育的基础。对20世纪以及今天的大多数读者来说 ，情形就不尽相同了。如今的教育更大众化，而经典研究已交付于一小部分热心学者。要赏析高度现代主义时期的格律诗，只能依赖篇幅冗长的注脚。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     Yet poetry can make a difference in the lives of readers. I've always known that myself, having read and written poems for at least four decades. Every morning I begin the day with a book of poems open at the breakfast table. I read a poem, perhaps two. I think about the poetry. I often make notes in my journal. The reading of poetry informs my day, adds brightness to my step, creates shades of feeling that formerly had been unavailable to me. In many cases, I remember lines, whole passages, that float in my head all day--snatches of song, as it were. I firmly believe my life would be infinitely poorer without poetry, its music, its deep wisdom.

      然而，诗歌确实能改变读者的生活。这点我深有感触，我自己读诗写诗已四十余载。每天清晨我的餐桌上都摊着一本诗集，美好的一天就此拉开序幕。我会读一篇诗，兴许两篇；脑子里思忖着；还时常摘抄一些在日记本里。读诗充实了我的生活，照亮了我的路途，带来种种前所未有的感受。很多时候，我记起一些诗句，或是一整段。它们整天萦绕在我脑海里，仿佛段段乐章，大抵如此。要是没有诗歌及其动人旋律与深刻智慧，我坚信我的生活会贫乏得多。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     One tends to forget that poetry is wisdom. I bring to mind Plato, who wished to ban all poets from his ideal republic because he thought they were liars. Reality, for Plato, was an intense, perfect world of ideas. The material world represents reflections of that ideal, always imperfect. Artistic representations of nature were thus at sevral removes from the ideal, hence suspicious.

      人们常常容易忘记诗也是一种智慧。我想到了柏拉图：他希望将所有诗人拒于他的理想国之外，只因他认为诗人不过是些骗子。对柏拉图来说，本真的世界应该是由炽热和完美的理念构建而成的理想国。现实世界不过是这个理想国的映射，总非完美；而艺术又是现实世界的映射，与理想国已相隔好几重，因此更不可信。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     But Plato also had other worries about poets. In the Republic, he complained that they tend to whip up the emotions of readers in unhelpful ways. They stir feelings of "lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure." Poetry "feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up," he said, while only the "hymns of gods and praises of famous men" are worthy of readers. The law and reason are far better.  

      但柏拉图对诗人还有其它顾虑。在其《理想国》一书中，他埋怨诗人常常煽动读者的情绪，这些情绪有百害而无一利。他们激起读者的“性欲、愤怒以及其它一切情绪，还有欲望、痛苦、愉悦”等感觉。他说，诗歌“不但不浇熄激情，反倒在旁煽风点火”；而事实上只有“圣贤的赞歌颂词”才配拥有读者。理性和法要好得多。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     Although Plato didn't sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets--Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others--lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.   

      尽管柏拉图并未使诗歌销声匿迹，但他对这门技艺的猜忌导致了诗人们从此几乎没有过像样的社会地位。就算是广欢迎的浪漫主义诗人诸如拜伦、科尔律治、济慈、雪莱、华兹华斯等人，当时也不过是社会的边缘人，过得并不怎么体面。下至现代诗人比如艾伦·金斯堡更是转而嘲笑自己的祖国。诗人总有种潇洒不羁之气，所以在社会大餐桌上向来不是最受欢迎的客人。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     Teachers and professors have long considered poetry a useful part of the curriculum, and one of the last places where poetry remains a central part of the culture is the classroom. To a degree, poets have been "domesticated" by the academic village, welcomed into its grove. Frost was among the first poets to get a big welcome on the campus, and he taught at Amherst College for much of his life, with stints elsewhere. He spent his last decades crisscrossing the country, appearing at colleges, reading and lecturing to large audiences. He believed firmly in poetry as a means of shaping minds in important ways.

      长久以来，教师教授们就认为诗歌是课程中的有益部分，诗歌作为文化核心的最后几个地方之一也正是在课堂。某种程度上，诗人被“圈养”在学术小村庄，委身于这片小树林。弗罗斯特是最早一批在校园大受欢迎的诗人之一。大半时间他在阿默斯特学院任教，同时兼一些其它工作。生命的最后几十年他奔波全国，现身各高校，为广大听众朗读和演讲。他坚信诗歌对于塑造思想至关重要。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     In "Education by Poetry", one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you." Those are very large claims.  

      在其论文《用诗歌来教育》（他最好的论文之一）中，弗罗斯特提出：了解诗歌如何起作用对心智正成型的人来说极为关键。他甚至还说出这样的话：要是比喻学得不到家，在哪儿你都不安全。因为那些修辞格会让你不安，“你不知道还有望驾奴它们多久，说不定什么时候它们就把你甩落在地。”这些话已经说得很重了。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     Poets do make large claims, and they are usually a bit exaggerated. In his "Defense of Poetry", Shelley famously wrote:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." I prefer the twist on that offered by a later poet, George Oppen, who wrote:"Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world." 

      诗人有时候说话是比较重，常常还稍带夸张。在其作品《为诗辩护》中，雪莱曾写下名言：“诗人是这个世界的无名立法者。”我个人更喜欢这句话的另一个版本，出自随后的诗人乔治·奥本之手：“诗人是无名世界的立法者。”

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     I don't especially want poets to make laws or rule the world. For the most part, they would perform very badly in those public ways. The world of the poet is largely an interior world of the intellect and the emotions--where we mostly live, in fact. And poetry blosters that interior realm. In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become "so violent," both physically and spiritually. He succinctly defined poetry as "a violence from within that protects us from a violent without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives." 

      我并不推崇诗人去立法或治世，最主要的原因是他们做不来这种抛头露面的工作。诗人的世界是一个才华闪耀、情感丰富的内在世界——事实上这也是我们大家的主要栖息地。诗歌则支撑了这一内心王国。1942年在普林斯顿大学做演讲时，当时的世界战火纷飞，史蒂文斯思虑颇深，他说20世纪已变得“如此暴力”，无论是现实层面还是精神层面。他将诗歌概括为“一股内在力量，使我们免受外界暴力之苦。它是一种想象力，在背后支撑我们抵挡现实的压力。总而言之，它看来近乎自卫；而这一点，毫无疑问，正是诗歌的表达即诗文的声音得以帮助我们度过此生的原因。”

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     The pressure of reality is indeed fierce, and yet poetry supplies a kind of counter-pressure, pushing back against external forces that would overwhelm and obliterate the individual. Poets give a voice to the world in ways previously unacknowledged. We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in ferocious contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society's explosions.  

      现实的压力的确很大，而诗歌则提供了一种反压力，在背后支撑我们，使我们能抵挡住外界种种压力而不被镇住被打垮。诗人们向这个世界发出一种前所未知的声音，我们读诗时就能聆听到，它平和纤细，遗世独立，与文化界的大声疾呼和社会的浮躁之音形成鲜明对比。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     I always define poetry for my students as a language adequate to our experience--to our full experience, taking into the account the interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains. It gives voices to tiny thoughts, to what the Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a lovely poem, calls "Oddments Inklings Omens Moments." One does not hope for poetry to change the world. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for Yeats that "Poetry makes nothing happen." That is, it doesn't shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn't usually send masses into the streets to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subltety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

      给学生上课时，我总是把诗歌定义为一种语言，有了它我们的体验就已足够——我们的全身心的体验，包括内心世界的低谷、高潮和宽广平原。它表达微小思想的声音，描绘苏格兰诗人和学者阿拉斯塔尔·雷德在一首可爱的诗中称为“零星的迹象、征兆的瞬间”的东西。谁也没有希冀靠诗歌去改变世界。奥登当年为叶芝撰写悼词时就曾指出“诗歌无力促成任何事情。”也就是说，它并不主宰股市沉浮，也不能说服独裁者下台；它并不经常将广大民众送上街道游行示威对战争以示抗议或是请愿以实现经济公正。它只会默默地起作用，塑造读者的内涵，为他们的思想增添诸多微妙，让他们的世界变得复杂。

 译者：Jacky Xiao

     Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exsit. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct our arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called "spiritual". He puts forwards three principles worth considering:

"Words are signs of natural facts."

"Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts."

"Nature is the symbol of the spirit."

      人之所以为人，正是因为拥有语言。我说故我在。我们拥有神奇能力，可以用语言代替肢体动作，可以发表声明和提出请求，可以抒发情感，可以建立论据，可以得出结论。诗的语言很重要，因为它精确具体，并且拉着我们向现实世界靠近。爱默生在其论文《自然》中表明：语言的那种纯粹的活力把我们引向可以称之为“精神”的方向。他提出的三个原则值得我们考虑：

“语言是自然事实的表征。”

“特定的自然事实象征着特定的精神事实。”

“自然是精神的象征。”

 译者：Jacky Xiao