大海的第三岸:中英诗人互译诗选(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：杨炼

出版社：华东师范大学出版社

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大海的第三岸:中英诗人互译诗选试读：

序一 大海的第三岸——中英诗人对话式互译

瓦尔特·本雅明总是聪颖过人。他称翻译为“第三种语言”，既不同于原文，又不同于普通外文，而是两者之外独具一格的东西。正像铜锡混合成青铜，避开了铜之脆和锡之软，却变得既硬且韧，像另一种元素，让伟大的商代艺术家，熔铸成华美的镇国之宝。换个实在些的比喻，翻译不是砍树，而是植树。砍下的树桩，挪到另一片土地上，也死定了。而植树者是一种“潜泳者”，她（他）沿着叶梢、叶脉、树干、树根潜回作品源头，又从原创经验中，带着对原作构成的全部理解，用另一种语言生长出译文之树。同根异株，形象当然不同，却又活生生一派神似。“第三种语言”，好像在说：诗歌的大海不仅有两岸，更有第三岸。它在诗人和译者良性对话中，让不同语言敞开自身，按最佳配方被再“发明”一次。这化学之变美丽、神奇、迂回曲折，非亲历者不能尽享其妙。由是，在一次英国BBC文学采访中，当我说：“诗歌翻译同时是失去和获得”，竟令那位著名主持人惊奇地瞪大了漂亮的眼睛。

中英诗歌翻译的“传统”堪称丰富，且代表了译诗的两种极端方式：阿瑟·威利式的文笔流畅和庞德式的观念独创。前者翻译的唐诗，有公认的英诗之美，其韵律、节奏、形式工整，活似出自英语母语诗人之手。大约因为形式挑战的严峻，威利稍稍回避在思想、文笔上“双线作战”，而更乐意翻译白居易之类平白流畅的作品。和他相反，大诗人庞德的兴趣，恰恰聚焦于最艰深的语言学本质。他从汉字的构成引申出“意象”观念，强调用具体、结实的形象涵括思想，一举改造了英诗整个面目。当德语的里尔克还津津于“天使”、“玫瑰”等空泛象征，英语的艾略特已砸下“黄昏像个麻醉了的病人躺在手术台上”了。 威利和庞德两位大师并不知道，他们几乎超前一个世纪，开启了今天全球化语境里的中英交流之门。中文和英文，一个三千年从未间断自身之内的创造性转型，一个作为国际通用交流媒介，覆盖了地球上最大的面积（唉，如今中国街头，不冒一声“败败”，谁还会分手告别呢？）。因此，中英交流的思想意义，远超出两个语种，而令全球化处境显形，更启发着每个人应对这处境的方式。这场时间和空间的对话，碰撞、探测、交汇出的，正是二十一世纪人的存在。

这篇序言《大海的第三岸》，意在指出，诗歌探测大海的两个层次：深入诗作和它们的“原版”——在精神困境中思索的人生。中国的二十世纪，除了风暴还是风暴，别说港湾，连平静些的海面也没有。但不止于此，今天，在被全球利益化、玩世不恭化逼近（注意：这“逼近”，是被逼着互相靠近之意）的世界上，哪个文化能洁身自好、优雅独处？用任何语言写下的每首诗，都是一架深海探测器，用语言这根震颤的探针，穿透自身的大海，遥感遥测着每个大海的海底地震。诗人互译，就是探针尖端的轻轻一碰。这里的“互译”是广义的，它不拘泥于固定诗人的“一对一”，而更着眼于中英两个语种之间，“相遇”的各种可能性。一种更广义、却恰和其本意的“一对一”。“同根异株”的诗歌玉树，来自人生又还原为人生，让人类在“根”上互相读懂。因此，这本书绝非泛泛的文化观光，而其实是一个命运共同体。诗歌以其开阔，回馈创造者，并荣膺“唯一的母语”之名。

精选在这本诗选中的作品，堪称一种小结，展示了过去历年来中英诗人交流的成果。简单罗列的大项目计有：二四年，中英诗人首次在中国山东万松浦书院互译。二五年，在苏格兰“湾园”艺术中心互译。二六年，中坤诗歌基金会组织的帕米尔之旅上，诗人对此项目的深入探讨。二七年，在安徽黄山地区组织的中英诗人互译对话（我还记得，和尼日利亚诗人奥斐曼比较非洲口头文学音乐性和汉语音调的那个美妙瞬间！）。二八年，在英国威尔士和伦敦举行的“黄山诗歌节”——世界上首次在中英两语种间举行的诗歌节上，英语诗人来自英、美、新西兰、尼日利亚，展示出被不同文化背景“改造”了的英文书写。之后的大动作，是二八年到二一二年，历时四年多，由我和英国诗人威廉·赫伯特牵头，由当今中诗英译最强译者霍布恩和中文诗歌批评家秦晓宇加盟，共同主编的《玉梯》英译当代中文诗选。它厚达近四百页，从原作选择、全书结构，到译文完成度，都堪称一部“极端之书”。它通过诗歌，翻开了当代中国现实、思想、文化的一切层次。全书六个部分，基于六种诗歌形式：抒情诗（直接和古典中国最重要的诗歌传统建立“创造性对话”）；叙事诗（直面传统汉语诗的最弱项）；组诗（以结构完成思想的深层表述）；新古典诗（骄傲的“形式主义”）；实验诗（汉字观念艺术）；长诗（从语言学的海底、穿透层层海流，直到现实的风暴尽收眼底）。《玉梯》被称为过去三十年中国的“思想地图”，恰如英国资深诗刊《诗歌评论》的主编菲奥娜·辛普森对“黄山诗歌节”的称赞：“每个细节都建立在对诗歌的深刻理解上。”没错。因为这“理解”的地基，正是几年来进行的诗人互译。这一系列持续深化的活动，被我称为“思想—艺术项目”。没有它，急剧变化的“中国”这部大书，很难被打开，更别说读懂了。诗歌其实在赋予我们把握人生的形式。通过翻译，让我们潜入、品尝着对方那个大海的滋味，更清晰地理解自己之所在。呵，同时拨动两个大海的波浪，我们飞鱼似的身体多么畅快！

毋庸讳言，诗人译诗有弱项有长项。弱项是外语能力。很少有诗人顶着“翻译家”的头衔，因此，无需避讳我们外语的局限。但，更该关注的，是我们的长项：那就是对任何诗意疾如闪电的深彻领悟。这颇像我的另一个命题：“一座向下修建的塔”。那领悟，自顶上灌下，驱策着诗人的浑身器官，向语言敞开。一串“不得不”：苛刻的阅读，残酷的追问，再创造的痛苦和快感。无数“为什么”：为什么一定是这个结构、这个节奏？形式和意味如何互动？在随意找路的自行车上飞翔惯了的诗人，现在成了火车司机，铁轨上的任何石头，只能撞上去！我们的工作，与别人想象的漂亮身段相反，下的其实是极笨的功夫。两个诗人（有时加一个快递语言的“通译”）头挨头，眼盯眼，紧抓笔记本，生怕漏掉任何一丝信息。这哪是阅读？明明是手术室，一个个意象、一行行句子，解剖一首诗的肌理骨骼，还要再吹一口仙气，让它活过来！触发这首诗的人生感受是什么？它的历史背景、文学传承、文化挑战是什么？阐释权并不总在原作诗人手里，因为“探针”刺探得同样专业。谁想靠一句“诗不能解释”推托，或靠躲进意象游戏藏拙，逃不过那架显微镜。这里的两个关键词：一，深刻的（Profound）；二，专业的（Professional）——请注意它们的英语谐音——令无论翻译或被译的诗人，同样经受考验。好在，我们做这件事的前提，就是乐意经受这考验。看看自己的作品，在他者审视下，是否还有意义？是被审读砸成了碎片？抑或一个大海汹涌进另一个大海？检验结果也确实有趣：原作越缺乏想法，翻译越容易。一堆原料，可供译者任意“炒菜”，且经常译作比原作更有味道。反之，从形式到内涵精密讲究的原作，则逼得译者绞尽脑汁、左冲右突，还常常自叹弗如。举我自己的例子，帕斯卡尔·帕蒂很聪明，她激我：“《镜兰》这首诗，只有你能翻译。”呵，拿到手才知道那句话什么意思！诗中圣·琼·佩斯式的长句，绚丽繁复又张弛有致的意象，被英语语法灵活而不失严谨地掌控着，却正点到中文语法松散的“死穴”。比如一句：“ the fossil-flowers with stone petals and sulphur stems”，谐音中两个“f”和六个“s”，绞缠如两条响尾蛇。我只能以中文“化石花有石花瓣”（“化石”、“石花”音响对照）来应对。尚·奥布莱恩的《另一个国家》，把一首酸涩的政治诗，用严格的韵脚变得极其精美，我也不能落了下风。乔治·塞尔特斯的《水》，韵式AB纠缠、顿数一丝不苟，译文必须全场紧逼盯人。他的《疯人院》更绝，一个犹太背景的诗人写的英语诗中，竟用上了一个令人笑不出来的德文词“身体好”，天！这怎么办？我灵光一现，把它译成了二战特色的日本侵华语——“强壮大大的”！

参与中英互译的诗人，大半是中壮年一代作者。这里有年龄因素，他们代表了一个语种的“此在”，其人生经验、思考成熟，创作能量最足。但更重要的，是我们亲历的全球化语境（我该说“困境”？），让我们懂得这深度交流，不仅重要，而且必须。自人类有诗歌史以来，诗人首次如此自觉：大海只有一个。你或者跃入它游得更深更好，或者干脆就没沾水。互译的潜台词是互相检验：多重文化系统参照下，一个诗人的创作还是否“有效”？全球化的推土机，碾平了此前一切群体依托：民族、国家、文化、语种、意识形态，甚至东西方分野，只剩下“一个人和宇宙并肩上路”（拙作《叙事诗》）。而这条路，并非仅仅“向外”走向世界，更是“向内”，世界的分量归根结底又都落到一个人身上。这才是互译之真义：我们字斟句酌、一层层分享的，正是每个文化深处追问自我的能量。它聚焦于这“第三种语言”中，让发现“大海的第三岸”，既超越地理也超越狭隘的文化心理，而归纳出“人”共同的精神历程。那么，“第三岸”是不是正从海底和天空，同时挖掘和俯瞰着我们？我形容过，网络生态犹如大海，文化是船，而诗是船底的压舱石。诗歌稳住那条船，不准它东摇西晃、随波逐流。“大海的第三岸”上，只要你感到一首诗的“好”，它就是你的。任何志愿者，写，译，评，读，哪怕初学外语擦过译诗，都正在“第三岸”上登陆。它，在，我，们，内，部。一条跨越时空、连绵不断的海岸线，正在织成诗人互译的世界网络，这才是真正的、辉煌的“思想—艺术项目”。相对它，这部中英诗人互译诗选，只是一种尝试，一个开端。

Preface Ⅰ The Third Shore: Poet to Poet Dialogic Translation

Walter Benjamin was a critic of surpassing insight. He called translation ‘The Third Language’, because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element — and that allowed the great artists of the 2nd millennium BC Shang dynasty to cast their magnificent masterworks in bronze. To take a more realistic figure of speech, translation is not felling trees, but planting them: felled trees hauled to another site are dead, and will remain so, but a tree-planter is a kind of diver, who dives from leaf-tips through veins and trunk to roots back down to the source of a work of art, and from that experience of the moment of creation, brings back a total understanding of the work’s structure, then grows the tree of the translation in another tongue. These two different trees sharing a single root are not, of course, identical, but they are living likenesses of each other. ‘The Third Language’ appears to say this: the vast ocean of poetry has more than two shores, for it has a third one too. The dialogue — positive, benign, virtuous — between poet and translator, in that it allows the essential elements of both languages to be stripped bare, is the optimum formula for the reinvention of both. This is a chemical reaction that is beautiful, miraculous, tortuous and circuitous, and no-one who has not witnessed it can understand the wonder of it. Hence, the eyes of the famous presenter of a BBC literature show widened in surprise when I said that there is both loss and gain in poetry translation.

There is a proud tradition of Chinese poetry in English, and it extends to the two extremes of Arthur Waley’s graceful fluency and Ezra Pound’s conceptual originality. The 7th10th century Tang poems that Waley translated are universally acknowledged to be beautiful English poems, with their carefully structured metres, rhythms, and forms, the very image of poems from the hand of a native English speaker. Perhaps the daunting nature of the formal difficulties involved gave him a tendency to avoid the challenge of ‘fighting on two fronts’, and he was at his happiest translating the gratuitously fluent verse of Bai Juyi and other poets like him. In direct contrast, the great poet Pound’s interests were precisely focussed on the abstruse nature of linguistics itself. Out of the structure of Chinese characters, he created his concept of the image, emphasising the use of specific, concrete images to embody thought, and so at one fell swoop he changed the whole face of English poetry. While Rilke was still waxing lyrical in German over non-specific images like The Angel and The Rose, T.S. Eliot had already broken through to

When the evening is spread against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Though they could not have known it, these two great masters, Waley and Pound, had opened the door to interaction between Chinese and English in today’s globalised context. Chinese and English — one with an unbroken 3,000 years of creative transformation from within, and the other, the international medium of exchange, spread across almost the entire surface of the earth. (And who, on the streets of Beijing today, can leave another without uttering Bye-bye?) Now, the ideological significance of the interaction between Chinese and English has far surpassed the significance of either language alone: by making apparent the plight of the world we all live in, it has inspired all of us to find our own answers to the predicament we are in. This dialogue between time and space, arising from collision, conjecture and convergence, is the very being of 21st-century humanity.

The title of this preface, The Third Shore of the Sea, aims to point out the two levels on which poetry probes the deep sea: firstly, the poems as concrete objects; secondly, their prototypes — the life of a human rooted in a spiritual predicament. In 21st century China, tossed by storm after storm, there isn’t even calm water to be had, far less any port. More than that, though, in this world of enforced global profiteering, cynicism and frivolity, what culture is still untarnished, the elegance of its days still intact? Any poem in any language is a deep-sea explorer penetrating its own vast ocean with the quivering probe of language, registering every sea-floor earthquake with its remote-sensing telemetry. If poets translate each other’s work, this dialogic translation is the gentle piercing of that probe’s point. ‘Dialogic translation’ is a very general term here, allowing as it does for more than the classical one-on-one that ‘poet to poet’ might seem to imply, and including in its purview every possibility of encounters between Chinese and English. It is this broader sense of ‘one-on-one’ that more exactly accords with its basic meaning. The precious trees sharing a single root spring from Life turning back to Life to let humans return to a radical understanding of each other. So this book is no mere jejune tale of cultural sightseeing, but rather the outcome of a community that was destined to come into being. So poetry, by opening this up and giving feedback to its creators, becomes worthy of the rank and title of ‘The Unique Mother Tongue’.

The work selected for this anthology represents a brief summary of several years of poetic exchange between Chinese and English: in 2004, poets met for the first time to co-translate at the Wansongpu Academy in Shandong Province; in 2005, the dialogic translation was held at the Cove Park artists’ retreat in Scotland; in 2006, the ZhongKun Poetry Foundation organised a trip into the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia, which gave the poets more chances to explore both the idea and the project; in 2007, the translation dialogue was organised by Huangshan District in Anhui Province (I still remember a delightful moment when the Nigerian poet Odia Omeifun and I compared the musicality of African oral literatures with the tones of the Chinese language); in 2008 the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival took place in both Wales and London — this was the world’s first-ever Chinese-English poetry festival, and English-speaking poets came from the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Nigeria, showing how English writing has been transformed by contact with different cultures. The most significant activity since then has been from 2008 to 2012, when the Scottish poet W.N. Herbert and I entered into an alliance with the doyen of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation, Brian Holton, and the Chinese literary critic Qin Xiaoyu, to produce Jade Ladder, an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry in English. Jade Ladder runs to almost 400 pages, and in its choice of original poems, its overall structure, and even in the worked fullness of its translations, it is an ‘Extreme Book’. Through the poetry it presents, it opens up, layer by layer, China’s present reality, thought and culture. The book is in six parts, each corresponding to one poetic form:

●LYRIC POEMS: directly instituting a dialogue with China’s most important poetic tradition;

●NARRATIVE POEMS: confronting the greatest weakness of Chinese poetry;

●NEO-CLASSICAL POEMS: formalist, and proud of it;

●SEQUENCES: a profound statement of how structure completes thought;

●EXPERIMENTAL POEMS: conceptual art in Chinese characters;

●LONG POEMS: the penetration of every ocean current from the sea-floor of linguistics, upward to a panoramic view of current tempests and storms.

Jade Ladder may be thought of as a mind-map of China through the last thirty years, or, as Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, the UK’s premier poetry journal, put it when commending the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival in an e-mail to me, “Every detail is built on a profound understanding of poetry”. This base of detailed understanding is what has allowed dialogic translation to happen over the last few years. I have called this series of steadily deepening activities the Art & Thought Project. Without it, the great and rapidly-changing book of China would be impossible to open, let alone understand. Poetry gives us a form with which to handle life. We can slip in and taste our partner’s ocean via translation, to see more clearly where we stand. And, oh, how happy we are in the bodies of flying fish, as we stir up the waves of both oceans!

No need to be shy about it: when poets translate poetry there are both strengths and weaknesses. Very few poets can be dignified with the title of ‘translator’ because, and there is no way to avoid saying this, our foreign-language skills are limited. But, and this is a point to note, our strength is in our lightning-quick grasp and profound comprehension of any poetry whatever. This resembles another proposition of mine, that poetry is ‘a tower built from the top downward’. This profound comprehension pours down and awakens every organ in the poet’s body, opening it up to language. A string of MUSTs: harsh and exacting reading, merciless interrogation, re-created sorrows and joys. An infinite number of WHYs: why is this structure needed, why is this rhythm needed? How are meaning and form interacting? The poet, used to flying along on his bicycle and choosing any route he pleases, has now become an engine driver, destined to collide with every rock on the rails! Our work is the opposite of the cute posing that most people imagine, as it actually involves a lot of dull, unthinking effort. Two poets, with sometimes an interpreter added for the express delivery of language, go head to head and eyeball to eyeball, notebooks in hand, terrified lest the slightest nuance is missed. In what sense is this ‘reading’? It’s clearly an operating theatre, where image after image, line after line, the flesh and the bones of a dissected poem are exposed, until, with a puff of magic, we bring it back to life again! What does it feel like to detonate a poem? What is its historical background, its literary inheritance, its cultural challenge? The right of explication is now out of the creator’s hands, because this invasive probing of dialogic translation is no less professional than the author’s own. Anyone who tries to hide behind the excuse that ‘poetry is untranslatable’, or who hides behind the images and plays dumb, will not escape this microscope. The two key words here are PROFOUND and PROFESSIONAL — note the euphony here — and for both the translator and the poet being translated they bring an equal test. To see your own work subject to the scrutiny of another — how can that not be significant? Does evaluation smash it into smithereens? Or does one ocean go surging into the other? The results of these tests are really interesting too: the fewer the ideas in the original, the easier will translation be. Any translator can arbitrarily cook something up from a heap of raw material, and it is often the case that the translation has more flavour than the original, but on the other hand, an original whose form and connotation are crafted with precision will have the translator racking his or her brains, caught between conflicting priorities, and more often than not feeling he or she is not up to the task at all. To take an example of my own, the very intelligent Pascale Petit grabbed my attention when she said, “Only you could translate Mirror Orchid”, but it wasn’t until I got my hands on it that I saw what she meant: the long lines reminiscent of Saint-John Perse, the gorgeous and complex images with their intriguing mixture of tension and release, and all controlled by the dexterity and rigour of English grammar — these unerringly show up the Achilles heel of the free and unfixed grammar of Chinese. Take this line, for example —

the fossil-flowers with stone petals and sulphur stems

here, the F and S sounds are entwined in euphony, like two rattlesnakes. In response to this, all I could do in Chinese was

huashi hua you shihua ban

Sean O’Brien’s acerbic political poem Another Country is given an exquisite beauty and delicacy by the use of strict rhyme, and I wasn’t going to be beaten at that game. In George Szirtes’ Water, the AB rhyme scheme is so meticulously and systematically intertwined with the rhythm that the translated text must mark and shadow every one of these moves from beginning to end. His Asylum is another beauty: in it, a poet of Jewish extraction unexpectedly uses the German word Gesundheit to comic effect. Good lord, what was I to do with that? Then the penny dropped, and I used the kind of broken Chinese the Imperial Japanese Army used in WWII.

The majority of poets involved in dialogic translation are in their thirties, forties and mid-fifties, so, because of their age, they are self-aware users of language, well supplied with experience of life, mature in their thought and creative powers. More important, though, is the globalised context (or predicament?) of our own personal experience; the profound level of exchange this makes possible is not just important, but indispensable. For as long as humans have made poetry, poets have been aware of one thing: there is only one sea, and you either dive in and swim deeper into it, or you simply don’t get wet. Dialogic translation implies mutual assessment: with reference to so many multi-faceted cultural systems, can a poet’s creative work still be ‘valid’? The steamroller of globalisation is flattening all the previous supports for communities: ethnicities, nations, cultures, languages, ideologies — even the dividing line between East and West — until all that is left is

[1]

Yet this road is not solely one that leads toward the outside world, because it is even more an inward one, for, in the final analysis, all the burden of the world falls on the shoulders of the individual. And this is the true significance of dialogic translation: as we weigh each and every word, sharing layer after layer of meaning, then here, in the deep places of every culture our own personal powers are interrogated. This focus on The Third Language makes manifest the Third Shore of the Sea, transcending the limits of geography, as well as the narrow limits of culture-bound psychologies, and exemplifying the common course of our shared humanity. Now, is The Third Shore of the Sea excavated from the sea-floor, and simultaneously surveying us from the heavens? I have described the ecology of the internet as like the ocean, with culture the boat, and poetry the ballast in its hold. Poetry keeps the boat stable, preventing it from rolling and yawing or drifting with the current. On The Ocean’s Third Shore all you need is to think a poem is good for it to become your own. Any volunteer, through writing, translation, criticism, reading, even a beginner whose first lessons have touched on translation, can land here, right on The Third Shore of the Sea.

IT/IS/IN/SIDE/US

An unbroken and forever unfolding shoreline that transcends time and space is even now weaving a worldwide web of co-translating poets. Here is the genuine, the magnificent Art & Thought Project. Faced with that, this anthology of dialogic translation into Chinese and English is only a first attempt, only a beginning.（Translated by Brian Holton）

[1] From my own unpublished Narrative Poem.

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