本帖最后由 田海燕 于 2016-4-14 23:10 编辑
冷霜 诗两首:《〈小王子〉导读》、《傍晚读友人论诗信有作》
Leng Shuang (China): 《“The Little Prince” Reading Guide》、《Writing at nightfall reading a letter from a friend on poetry》
杨 劳伦斯 西思翎 (美国)翻译
Translation by Jan Laurens Siesling (USA)
诗人简介:( Leng Shuang )
冷霜,1973年生于新疆,1990年考入北京大学中文系,2006年获北京大学文学博士学位。做过编辑、记者,现任教于中央民族大学文学与新闻传播学院。著有诗合集《蜃景》,曾获刘丽安诗歌奖、诗建设新锐诗人奖等。
Poet’s Profile:
Leng Shuang, born in Xinjiang 1973, was admitted to the Chinese Department of Beijing University in 1990; he obtained his doctor’s degree in literature there in 2006. After having been an editor and a reporter, he now teaches at the College of Liberal Arts and Journalism of the Minzu University of China (for ethnic minorities). His collection of poems “Mirage” has been awarded the Liu Lian Poetry Prize, the “Constructive Poet” award for his innovative work, and more.
Jan Siesling 简介:
杨 劳伦斯 西思翎(Jan Laurens Siesling) 是艺术史学者和著有小说和诗歌的作家。他的小说常处理艺术,他的艺术的书是处理诗意灵感。他是一个语言的人,在他的自由时间他喜欢翻译,从一种喜爱的语言到另一种。中文很可能变成他的将来的挑战。他生于荷兰,从阿姆斯特丹自由大学取得博士学位。他在法国生活很多年,他的书大多是用法语写的。现在他半年在欧洲,半年在美国。他最近的书“艺术是更多” (Art is More),是一个非传统的历代的西方艺术史。 这本书的纸质版在 www.artismore.org 和电子版在 www.amazon.com 可找到。
Biographical Note
Jan Laurens Siesling is an art historian and a writer of fiction and poetry. His novels often deal with art and his books on art deal with the poetry behind artistic inspiration. He is a man of languages and in his free time he likes to do translations from one beloved language into another. Chinese is likely to become his future challenge. He was born in the Netherlands and he obtained his degrees from the Free University of Amsterdam. He lived in France for many years and most of his books were written in French. Now he spends half of the year in Europe, the other half in America. His most recent book, Art is More, is an unconventional history of Western art through the ages. It is available as a hard copy www.artismore.org or as an e-book on www.amazon.com
Writing at nightfall reading a letter from a friend on poetry
Snow is falling again,
The branches grow a darker hue.
The roof likens a face with sorrowful temples,
The road’s black, wet, its borders mirror the white painted tree trunks.
Streetlights slumbering,
The snow makes the twilight shine, bathing things in pure blue ink.
“The power of truth should come from … …”
My attention dwindles in the middle of your phrase,
It is as if I heard your rapid Southern tongue,
In the eaves dripping the melting snow.
I disagree with you, in my chest emotions multiply,
In my heart I listen to heated arguments, smoke soars.
Invisible snowflakes whirl down and weigh heavy on the dusk.
When on earth will we be free from shame and guilt?
Leng Shuang, poet
Translation Jan Siesling (2016)
冷霜:《傍晚读友人论诗信有作》
雪又落下来了,
树枝的颜色更深。
屋顶显出愁苦的鬓角,
道路湿黑,边沿映出行道树漆白的树干。
街灯睡着,
雪使暮色发亮,使一切像洇在纯蓝墨水里。
“真实的力量来源于……”
我的目光停留在你的词句中,
仿佛听到你急促的南方口音,
像融雪时的檐溜。
我不同意你,我的心情复杂,
我听到心里有人大声争辩,烟雾腾腾。
无法看见的细雪压低了黄昏。
我们何时才能免于羞愧。
“The Little Prince” Reading Guide
Six times or seven the lights switch on and off. But when
On again, the actors, makeup intact, jump onto the stage from four sides,
Bend their bodies in all directions, shooting warm wiggling shadows,
As if their roles, barely turned aside, roll down below their knees.
During a moment it’s hard to adjust, vacuous stares of the audience, applause,
Standing up, banging of the seats, spreading of primitive praise.
Two young fans walk up the stage, they hand flowers
To friends, ask them to pose for a photo. Chaotic light rays
Beam over the wet looking public, above the heads
Floats dust in the hot air, crowds shove to the exits belly to back to belly,
Seals upright. Outside the gates cabs pile up, shouting here yelling there,
Backing up bumper to bumper inch by inch one by one and then off;
After so much commotion the whisper of bicycles calms down to silence.
In the 103 trolley shelter a bunch of girls,
Not unlike artificially modified roses, adorn the
Posters lit up in their backs. When grazed about
By their respective sheepish boyfriends, one can see their free eye
Glance into the empty street. The wind gets cold, still one or two newspaper stands
Expose the full cleavage of an élégante: at Wangfujing Avenue
What counts is what you can see with the naked eye, at daytime,
Fox fur boa mantles and sapphire blue ladies’ lambskin coats,
Loudly advertised, sparkling like stars. But as soon as
The sky’s closed, shop windows become black holes. Dark and empty the night,
Containers full with what foreign garbage? A shipload a day? Where is the prow,
Where is it all bound? Trolley 108 direction Chongwenmen. The policeman
At the Dongdan Crossing directs the traffic of deserted streets,
Rotating it seems for his own sake. Would he be
The switch tender of these streets? Or the lamplighter, for whom
One day equals a minute? Perhaps rather
A condensed king, his loneliness adapted
To the colors of the night, evaporating like spilled beer,
Gasping in his wife’s face when coming home. The trolley howls and rolls,
Leaving him behind, ever smaller in clouds of sand dust,
The image of perfect order like a stamp put on top of
A diminished world. What’s next? “The 106 is horrible.”
Time and again everyone could be transformed into a volcano, squeezed
Into pure lava, but for the moment the humans manage to maintain
Their ordinary solid self. In the dark no one talks.
The road is a constrictor, swallowing a streetcar full of people going to one place.
Behind me the youthful ticket boy announces with total apathy
The stations: for him these names are
Eternity; a far cry from a geographer, it makes him
Sick and tired, “Get off for Swimming Pool,
No swimming pool here,” only the regretful mark of neglect.
How he would rather be with his buddies and cite the names of his champions.
A new transfer and suddenly there is a dense crowd. It thrusts me
Against a stranger, she is a young woman. How awkward I feel.
My thoughts wander astray to the couples after the play, a play
About love, they drank the last drop of their sparkling water,
Stood very close too, and did not say a single word.
Leng Shuang, poet
Translation Jan Siesling (2016)
冷霜:《〈小王子〉导读》
大约是第六、七次,灯全部黑了。当它再次
亮起,演员们从四面跑出来,没有卸妆,
但是朝每一个方向热烈地屈身,影子扭动,
像刚刚脱掉的角色滑到膝盖以下。
一时难以适应,观众们怔怔地鼓掌,
站起身来,带动座椅发出一片简单化的评论声。
一对捧场的年轻人走上前台,向朋友们
献上鲜花,与他们合影。在杂乱的光柱中,
人群看上去湿淋淋的,头顶上飘浮着
尘土和热气,用肚皮挨挨挤挤地涌向门口,
活像海豹。门外,出租车堆在一起,大呼小叫,
有分寸地倒车,一辆接一辆开走;
一阵忙乱之后,推自行车的声音也渐平息。
聚集在103路电车的站牌下面,一些女孩
像经过陌生化处理的玫瑰花,装饰着
身后的灯箱广告。当她们为各自的
绵羊男友所啃食,你看到她们腾出眼睛来扫视
空空的大街。风凉了,一、两处报摊仍然
裸露着整加仑的乳沟:在王府井,重要的
就是你用肉眼所能看见的,白天
狐狸毛领大衣和宝石蓝羊皮女大衣
在扩音器的统治中星星般闪光。现在,
天空打烊,橱窗如洞。黑夜是什么,装满
进口垃圾的集装箱,每天一班?船头在哪里,
开往何方?108路电车开往崇文门。一名交警
在东单十字路口维持着冷清的秩序,
像是在维持自己的转动。他可算是
这条街区的灯塔看守人?或者,掌灯人,
一天等于一分钟?也许,他更像一位
缩写本的国王,一种被改编过的孤独感
仿佛跑了气儿的啤酒,与夜色混杂,
使他回去对着妻子咳嗽。电车轰响,
把他越来越小地留在扬起的灰沙里,
如同一条加盖在折价的世界之上的
笔直的命令。接下来,“106路是悲惨的”,
无数次,它把每一个人都变成火山,挤成
岩浆,但这会儿,乘客尚能保持住
常态下的固体自我。黑暗中没有人说话。
道路如蛇,吞噬满车的人去往同一个地方。
在我背后,年轻的电车售票员有气无力地
报出站名:对于他来说,这些站名
就是永恒;而与地理学家们不同,他对此
无比厌倦,“是的,从游泳池站下车
并没有游泳池”,它只是一处荒废的记号,
相比起来,他更愿意和小哥们儿一起背诵球星。
再次转车时人突然很多,我不得不与一位
陌生的少女挨得很近,我感到尴尬,
并再次想到那些散场时的情侣,在一部
有关爱情的话剧结束之后,在喝光了矿泉水
之后,也是这样挨得很近,却一言不发。
Translator’s remark.
Leng Shuang makes no secret of his source: he puts it in the title of his poem of fifty dense lines. He presupposes that everybody knows the French story of “The Little Prince”, and it should be so, also in China. I was lucky to discover a bilingual English-Chinese edition of the tale, happy to read it again. How charming, how mysterious, how natural! It had to change my feeling about Leng’s poem, adding a layer of understanding. It justifies this note after translating. It is my pleasure to indicate a few parallels between Leng’s verses and his inspiration. In doing so I am aware that I turn the poem’s title upside down: I use the tale as a guide to get closer to the poem. From what follows, the reader is free to pick whatever seems worthwhile.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote his novella (for children from 8 to 88, as the old expression has it) in 1942, when he was in the USA, in exile from his fatherland, occupied by the Nazis. It came out the following year, published by an American company, in French and English. The writer was also a soldier. He had fought for his country as an aviator and now continued, while waiting for a new occasion to fly, as a self-appointed cultural diplomat: with his pen he wanted to urge the USA into a war effort sustaining the liberation of Europe and Asia. Rationally considered, this mission seemed way above the capacities of a novelist. But Antoine de Saint-Exupéry believed in miracles. He had good reasons for it, since a miracle saved his life when his plane crashed one day in the middle of the Sahara desert. “The Little Prince” is, let’s never forget, an auto-biographic tale, a miraculous story, only children can join in, and that is exactly why we recognize it as true. Truth, surprisingly, is what we don’t see. Truth shows us, like children often do, the absurdity of the adult world.
Leng Shuang’s poem is not a tale, but it observes reality, one might say, with the eyes of the Little Prince. The reality is that of a modern big city, possibly Beijing, but it could be Chicago as well, or Moscow, or our own. It is a city by night, a real and cold and lonely night. There has been a play the poet has seen (perhaps “The Little Prince” adapted for the stage?) and its magic doesn’t fade with the end of the performance. It moves from the stage into the public and from there into the night over the town where the poet travels homeward. Inevitably the images from the tale invade his view of the city. They occupy his vocabulary to describe it, and create a poetic and ever so genuine (humoristic, enigmatic, oneiric) order. They send some chaotic light beams over a few telltale fragments of modern life. Here are some examples in random order: the true rose, as opposed to the defamiliarized roses on planet earth (I translated as “artificially modified”); the sheep (the grazing boys as well as the lambskin’s overcoats); the fox with its huge tail; the boa constrictor swallowing not an elephant but a trolley; the policeman lamplighter; and so on, the king of the reduced world, the geographer, the volcanos, the streetcars like micro-planets, the fountain and the well, the silence of the dark. I invite the reader to find more intriguing parallel metaphors. I couldn’t help introducing the switch tender, maybe too free a translation of the lighthouse keeper, but so close to the Little Prince’s story.
Everything changes in Leng’s metamorphosis of the tale into a poem, but not the essential reality of the authentic personal dream. Something strangely human confirms itself as their basic tone. In “The Little Prince”, a moral tale, there is no moralizing. The child never accuses, because it speaks in the name of love. The adult on the contrary feels shame or guilt for the loss of innocence. That is the end of the dream. There we stand, confronted to love in a modern city. Is the questioning poet, in this cold world, no other than our heartwarming Little Prince?
JLS
译者的话
对于(冷霜:《〈小王子〉导读》)这首诗的来源,冷霜没有秘密:就把它放在了他的稠密的五十行诗的标题中。他猜想每个人都知道法国故事《小王子》 ,应该是的,在中国也是。我很幸运发现了这个故事的英中双语版,很高兴又把它读了一遍,多么迷人,微妙,和 自然。它不得不改变我对冷的诗的感受,为我增加了一层理解。它也交代了我翻译之后加的这个注解。我乐于指出一些冷的诗句及其妙想之间的相似之处。这样做时,我知道我把诗的标题颠倒了:我用这个故事为指导以更贴近诗句。以下,读者自由选取任何值得的信息。
安托万 圣 埃克苏佩里在1942年写了他的中篇小说(给8到88岁的孩子,如古语所说),当时他在美国,是一个流放者,祖国被纳粹占领了。书第二年出来了,由美国一家公司用法语和英语出版。作者还是个军人。他作为一个飞行员为他的国家而战,现在继续着,在等待新的飞行时机的时候,他是一个自我任命的文化外交官:用笔他想敦促美国涉入一个继续解放欧洲和亚洲的战争努力。理性地考虑一下,这一使命似乎远远超过一个小说家的力所能及。不过,安托万 圣 埃克苏佩里相信奇迹。他对此有充分的理由,因为某天他的飞机在撒哈拉沙漠中坠毁是一个奇迹救了他的生命。《小王子》是,让我们永远别忘记,一个自传体的诉说,一个神奇的故事,只有孩子才能加入,而那正是为什么我们意识到它是真的。令人吃惊的是,真是我们看不见的。真,像孩子常做的那样,显示给我们成人世界的荒唐。
冷霜的诗不是一个故事,它观察了现实,可以说是用小王子的眼睛。这是一个现代大城市的现实,可能北京,也会是芝加哥,或莫斯科,或者我们自己居住的城市。城市在夜晚,一个真实的, 冷而孤寂的夜晚。诗人看了场演出(可能是《小王子》改编成的舞台剧?),它的魔力没有随着演出的结束而褪去。这魔力从舞台游动到大众中间,又从那里进入夜晚的城市,诗人往家的方向。不可避免地,故事里的形像侵入了诗人看到的城市景象。他们占居了他描述城市的词汇,创造了一个诗意又那么真实的(幽默的,谜一般的,梦似的)条理。他们把一些混乱的光束照向一些现代生活中泄露真情的片段。这里我用随机的顺序给几个例子:真的玫瑰,相对于地球上的陌生化的玫瑰(我翻译成 “人工改变了的”); 绵羊(啃食的男友和羊皮的大衣); 有巨大尾巴的狐狸; 蟒蛇吞的不是大象而是电车; 警察掌灯人; 等等,还有缩写本的国王,地理学家,火山,微行星般的电车,泉水和井,黑暗的静寂。我邀请读者去发现更多奇妙的并行隐喻。我忍不住介绍进来扳道工,可能是对于“灯塔看守人”的太自由的一个翻译,但很接近小王子的故事。
在冷将这个故事变形成诗时,每个东西都变了,但没有变的是真正个人梦的深层现实。一种神奇的人性的东西确认自己为它的基调。 《小王子》是一个道德的故事,但没有说教。因为是在爱里说话,孩子从不指责。反而成人为失去纯真而觉羞愧。那是梦的结束。我们站在这里,一个现代都市里,面对着爱。质疑的诗人,在这冰冷的世界,无异于温暖我们心的小王子吧?
杨 劳伦斯 西思翎
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