华莱士·史蒂文斯②

　　华莱士·史蒂文斯 Wallace Stevens: Biography
　　Biographical Sketch
　　Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard as a special student from 1897 to 1900 but did not graduate; he graduated from New York law school in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904, the year he met Elsie Kachel, a young woman from Reading, whom he married in 1909. They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book.
　　Stevens became interested in verse-writing at Harvard, submitting material to the Harvard Advocate, but he would be 36 before his first work was published in 1915. He soon was contributing to Poetry (Chicago), and his first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the distinguished firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Though he was always much admired by his contemporaries (There is a man whose work, Hart Crane wrote of him in 1919, makes most the rest of us quail), Stevens felt that the reviews of his 1923 book were less than they should be, and discouraged, wrote nothing through the 1920s. For a second edition of Harmonium, published in 1931, he added only eight new poems.
　　If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named Vice President of his company.
　　All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.
　　When Stevens began to write poems with renewed fluency in the 1930s, he arranged for them to be printed in limited editions at the same time as trade editions were prepared by Knopf. Ideas of Order (1935) and Owl’s Clover (1937) were limited editions by the Alcestis Press, while The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) and Parts of a World (1942) were printed by Knopf, and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du Mal were deluxe volumes issued by the Cummington Press in 1942.
　　In 1939, Stevens was sixty – an age when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves. But Stevens’s best writing still lay before him in the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative wanderings but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples. In the loosely connected stanzas of these sequences, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), Esthetique du Mal (1945), The Auroras of Autumn (1947) and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950), Stevens perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been producing all along – a metapoetry that took lavish delight in commenting upon its own making. At the same time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on aesthetics together in prose sentences, essays he collected in 1951 as The Necessary Angel. And there was one final, magnificent turn to his development. Entering his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly austere, solemn, and strange even to its author.
　　Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on the imagination. (His prose essays were useful allies in this strategy.) But the sheer verve of local moments, the sumptuous texture of outstanding passages, simply dissolves as pretense the notion that a philosophical enterprise might be underway. Few poets have so fully enjoyed not just their indulgence in their own language but also the game that elaborately insists no such indulgence is occurring.
　　《我叔叔的单片眼镜》
　　一
　　“天空的母亲，云雾的女王，
　　噢，太阳的权杖，月亮的王冠，
　　没有什么，不，不，决没有什么
　　像两个攻杀的词语撞击的锋刃。”
　　就这样，我用绚丽的诗韵嘲弄她。
　　或者说，我是在嘲弄我自己？
　　真希望我是块石头，但有头脑。
　　思绪喷出泡沫的大海，再次把她
　　这些贼亮的泡泡儿，偷冒出来。
　　随后，我体内更咸的水井深处的
　　上涌，爆出水花般的音节。
　　二
　　红色的鸟儿，飞越金地板。
　　他是在风，氤氲和羽翅的歌队里
　　寻找席位的红鸟——找到的瞬间
　　他会摇身倾泻一场暴雨。
　　我要抚平这布满皱褶的东西吗？
　　我是一个富翁，向继承人们问好；
　　也正因为如此，我也向春天问好。
　　对我唱骊歌的，是前来欢迎的歌队。
　　而春天，再也不可能越过子午线了。　
　　可是你，却被奇闻轶事保佑着，
　　假装相信一种星光四射的知识。
　　三
　　那么，坐在山中池畔，古老的
　　中国人梳妆打扮，或在长江上
　　精研胡须，他们是否并无所求？
　　我不想去演奏那历史的降音阶。
　　你知道，喜多川歌磨的美人们
　　在她们会说话发髻中探索爱的目的
　　你记得巴斯温泉中高耸如山的头饰。
　　呀！自然中竟未留下一缕卷发，
　　莫非所有的美发师都白活了吗？
　　为什么，对这些勤奋的鬼魂
　　毫无怜悯，你云鬓纷乱地从睡梦中走来？
　　四
　　甜美无瑕的生命之果，似乎
　　全因自己的重量而落向大地。
　　当你还是夏娃之身，如今已酸涩的果汁
　　未经品尝地，清甜在果园的极乐中。
　　苹果，和所有的骷髅一样，适合
　　成为帮助我们理解圆形的书，
　　它和骷髅一样出色地成形于
　　走向腐烂，重归土地的东西
　　但它另有特长：作为爱的果实
　　它是一部疯狂到无法阅读的书，
　　除非一个人读它就是为了打发时光。
　　五
　　西方的高天，烧着一颗暴怒之星。
　　它被置于此处，为的是赤焰般的小伙子
　　和他们身边甜香弥漫的处女。
　　爱的剧烈，与大地勃发的生机
　　共用着一个尺度。在我看来，
　　萤火虫电火迅疾的敲击
　　漫长地嘀嗒出又一年的时光。
　　可你呢？当你最初的形象
　　展现你和一切尘土的联系，请记住
　　那些蟋蟀，如何在苍茫之夜，跃出了
　　养育它们的草丛，宛如一群小小的亲眷。
　　六
　　如果，四十岁的男人去画湖泊
　　易逝的众蓝一定浑然地为他们浮现
　　根源的灰蓝色，那遍布世界的色彩。
　　一种物质，在我们的体内大行其道。
　　然而，在我们的艳遇中，登徒子们洞悉
　　纷纭的波澜，他们屏着呼吸的笔触
　　记录下每一次稀奇古怪的转折。
　　当登徒子们头发渐秃，艳情
　　也会萎缩，藏身罗盘仪和课程表，
　　在内省的放逐中，说教不休。
　　这是只为风信子准备的主题。
　　七
　　比太阳更远，众天使骑的骡子
　　通过一座座耀眼的雄关，漫步而来
　　它们的铃声，叮玲玲降临世间。
　　骡夫们优雅地，挑选着道路。
　　这时候，一群百夫长狂浪大笑着
　　猛击尖啸在桌子上的酒盏。
　　这个寓言，最终的意味是：
　　天国之蜜，不知道会不会到来
　　但是人间的甜，随时来回来去。
　　试想，这些信使们的行旅中，捎来了
　　一位被永恒的绽放催升的花姑娘。
　　八
　　像个书呆子，我注视，爱情中，
　　古老的情状，触动着新的头脑。
　　它萌发，它绽放，它结果之后就去死。
　　这平凡的比喻，揭示一种真谛。
　　花期已逝。我们从此是果实。
　　两只金葫芦，在我们自己的藤上涨满 ，
　　进入秋气，溅上霜花，老来肥壮，
　　怪诞地变形。我们悬挂着——
　　像生疣的南瓜，烙着条纹和色斑。
　　笑哈哈的天空，将俯视我们两个
　　被蚀骨的冬雨，淘洗成空空的壳。
　　九
　　在行动抽疯，喧哗迭起，嘶叫
　　缠着冲撞，迅疾而肯定的诗中
　　当人致命的思想，在战乱里
　　成就诡诈的命运，丘比特的守护者
　　来给四十岁的信念作道场吧。
　　最可敬的心，最放荡的奇想
　　仍比不上你放得更开的开阔。
　　为了让献祭丰盛，我向一切声响，
　　所有思想，所有的一切，征询乐曲
　　和骑士们的气魄。可我去哪里寻找
　　华丽之极的乐章，可以配上这伟大的颂歌？
　　十
　　幻想的阔少在他们的诗中
　　留下神秘之喷涌的纪念册，
　　自动浇灌他们粗粝的土壤。
　　我是个自耕农，跟那帮家伙一样。
　　可我不认识魔法树或香枝
　　没见过银红和金朱的果子。
　　但毕竟我认得一棵大树
　　和我头脑中的东西形似。
　　它巨人般站立，它的尖顶招来
　　所有的鸟，在它们生命中的某刻。
　　鸟儿飞走时，那尖顶仍然尖在树顶。
　　十一
　　假如一切真的都是性，任何发抖的手
　　都能让玩偶一般的我们，尖叫“想要”。
　　但请注意，命数会无耻地背叛，让我们
　　喜怒无常，哼哼唧唧，伤心时就乱嚷
　　心虚的豪言壮语，还从疯疯闹闹中
　　掐出千姿百态，全然不顾
　　那第一位的，最高的律法。这惨痛的时光！
　　昨夜，我们并坐，身旁的一池红粉
　　与飞驰在明亮的铬黄中的百合花
　　被剪成碎光，针对着星星的寒芒，
　　而一只青蛙，轰响腹中讨厌的和声。
　　十二
　　那是一只蓝鸽子，侧身盘旋于
　　碧空，一圈，一圈，又一圈。
　　那是一只白鸽子，倦于飞行，
　　振翅扑向地面。像一位黑暗的拉比
　　年轻的我，在清高的研究中
　　观测人类的本性。我每天都发现
　　人类验证了我切碎的世界中的一小块。
　　后来，像一位玫瑰的拉比，我追求
　　而且仍在追求，爱的起源
　　和历程，但到如今我才明白
　　振翅之物的投影是这么清晰。