波拉尼奥留在人世放荡又深情的诗集

At Play in the Field of Verse
By DWIGHT GARNER August 12, 2013
书评
波拉尼奥留在人世放荡又深情的诗集
DWIGHT GARNER 2013年08月12日
The great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño liked to argue, plausibly enough, that poetry is a higher calling than fiction.
伟大的智利作家罗伯托·波拉尼奥(Roberto Bolaño)生前喜欢主张说，诗歌是比小说更高级的一份天职。这听起来貌似相当有理。
He also liked to argue, with no plausibility at all, that he was a better poet than a novelist. “The poetry,” he said, “makes me blush less.” Like so many writers, Bolaño (1953-2003) was an unreliable guide to his own oeuvre.
他还喜欢主张说，他自己当诗人比当小说家更优秀。这听起来就似乎毫无道理了。“诗歌，”他说，“不那么令我脸红。”与好多好多作家一样，波拉尼奥(1953—2003)面对自己的艺术作品，也是个不靠谱的向导。
His collected verse, now in a plump, handsome bilingual volume called “The Unknown University,” has flecks of the intense pleasures contained in his best novels: [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] (1998), [要查看本链接请先注册并登录] (2000) and[要查看本链接请先注册并登录](2004). But you will need to pan for these, like someone searching for gold in a river bottom.
他的诗歌目前以双语辑录成全集，鼓鼓的一册，很漂亮，书名《未知的大学》(The Unknown University)。书中零星可见一些亮点，给人以强烈快感——这在他最好的几部小说中也能找到：《荒野侦探》(The Savage Detectives [1998])、《智利之夜》(By Night in Chile [2000])、《2666》(2666 [2004])。但你要慢慢翻淘，才能看见这些闪耀，就像在河底淘金一样。

Bolaño died too young, of liver disease, at 50. Before his death he had time to begin compiling this volume and to give it its title. He also had time to compose a few wily and emotion-filled late poems, some of them addressed to his very young son. A lovely one begins:
波拉尼奥英年早逝，死于肝脏疾病，享年50岁。去世前，他还来得及亲自着手编纂这部集子，并定立标题。他亦来得及创作最后一些老谋深算又充满感情的诗歌，其中几首写给他非常年幼的儿子。有一首很优美，是这样开头：
Read the old poets, my son
and you won’t regret it
Between the cobwebs and rotten wood
of ships stranded in Purgatory
that’s where they are
singing!
ridiculous and heroic! 
读老诗，儿子
你绝不会后悔
乱蛛网与腐木萦绕
搁浅在炼狱的困船
老诗人就在那里
歌唱！
荒谬可笑、英勇雄壮！
The bulk of the poems in “The Unknown University” were written when Bolaño was in his 20s, however, and very often they read like juvenilia — the unrhymed free verse of a man who was equal parts poet and poet manqué, a word-drunk literary drifter still finding his voice. Many are autobiographical, and, like his fiction, they are filled with starving, wandering, jousting, ***-mad, aggrieved, ego-dented poets and artists.
然而，《未知的大学》里大部分诗，都是波拉尼奥20多岁时所写，往往读来也确实像青少年作品——无韵的自由体诗歌——作者有几分诗人样，便有几分不成器的诗人样，是个沉醉于文字的文学漂泊者，仍在寻找自己的声音。许多诗作都具自传性，而且，像他的小说一样，充满了饥饿、浪荡、争勇好斗、疯狂沉醉性事、备受苦恼、自尊心受创的诗人和艺术家们。
There are moments of bliss. Bolaño had one of 20th-century literature’s great dirty minds, and many of this volume’s best lines are unpublishable here. The words of a pimp, from a poem titled “Big Silver Waves,” can stand in for these bits: “wham bam wham bam times infinity.”
其中有极乐愉悦的时刻。波拉尼奥的思想，是20世纪文学史上最下流猥亵的几副头脑之一，这册诗集中许多最好的诗行不宜在此见刊，倒能借用这首题为《大银浪》(Big Silver Waves)的诗中一个皮条客的话：“啪啪啪乘以无限大。”
Just as often, he was a deep romantic. “At 4 a.m. old photographs of Lisa/between the pages of a science-fiction novel,” he writes. In a poem called “Hope” he declares, “I thank heaven for having made love/to the women I’ve cared about.” He tended to walk around lovesick. One poem ends with this line: “Crack, goes your heart.”
亦常见他浪漫主义深情时。他写道：“凌晨4点，莉莎的旧照／夹在一本科幻小说书页间。”在题为《希望》(Hope)的一首诗中，他宣称：“感谢上天，我做了爱／与我在意的女人。”他动辄游走于相思边缘。有首诗结尾是这么一行：“咔嚓，裂了你的心。”
Poverty is an abiding theme. “The gods haven’t granted you money/but they’ve granted you strange whims,” he writes in an untitled poem. In another he utters: “Money like the umbilical cord that connects you to girls and the landscape./Money that I’ll never have and that by exclusion makes me a hermit, the protagonist who suddenly goes pale in the desert.”
贫穷也是始终不渝的主题。他在一首无题诗中写道：“神明没赐予你钱／但赐予了你突发奇想。”在另一首中则说：“钱像脐带连接着你，与女孩儿们和风景。／钱我是永远也不会有的，没钱我就是个隐士，是荒漠中突然苍白的主角。”
As always, he is good on writing and the writing life. In a poem called “There Are No Rules,” he declares: “Tell that stupid Arnold Bennett that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.” This poem ends, hilariously, with the following word in parentheses: “Applause.”
一如往常，他善于书写的是写作，和写作的生活。在一首叫做《没有规则》(There Are No Rules)的诗中，他宣称：“告诉那个愚蠢的阿诺德·贝内特(Arnold Bennett)，他所有关于情节的规则只适用于小说，而且是模仿别的小说的小说。”这首诗结尾处很搞笑，在括号里写了一个词：“鼓掌。”
A handful of these poems are something akin to sly masterpieces. In “Ernesto Cardenal and I,” he imagines walking with[要查看本链接请先注册并登录]and former Roman Catholic priest and asking:
这样的诗中，有几首有点像是狡诈的杰作。在《埃内斯托·卡德纳尔与我》(Ernesto Cardenal and I)中，他想象自己与这位尼加拉瓜诗人兼前罗马天主教神父散步，问道：
Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven
that is communism,
is there a place for homo***uals?
Yes, he said.
And for impenitent masturbators?
For *** slaves?
For *** fools?
For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed
with enemas,
for those who can’t take it anymore, those who really truly
can’t take it anymore?
And Cardenal said yes.
神父，在天国里
共产主义了，
有没有一席之地给同性恋？
有，他说。
那不知悔改的自渎狂呢？
***呢？
性蠢呢？
虐恋癖呢，卖淫女呢，那些痴迷于灌肠的呢，
那些再也受不了了的人呢，那些真的真正的
再也受不了了的人呢？
卡德纳尔说有。
That is merely an excerpt. The corner of that page will remain turned down in my edition of “The Unknown University.” So will the page that contains the unnamed naming poem that begins this way:
这只是个选段。我的《未知的大学》这页会一直折个角。还有一页也是，那是一首没命名的点名诗，开头是这样的：
Goodnight cornea goodnight
black nails goodnight wrists
goodnight bitten neck good
night anus goodnight nose red
from cold goodnight hairy stomach
goodnight lines of my palm
goodnight knees ...
晚安眼角膜晚安
黑指甲晚安手腕
晚安被咬的脖子晚
安肛门晚安冻红的
鼻子晚安长毛的肚皮
晚安我手掌的纹
晚安膝盖……
This poem becomes more arch and graphic as it waltzes along.
这首诗如华尔兹般轻快演进，后面愈发调皮、生动。
To remark that most of the poems in “The Unknown University,” which have been fluently translated from the Spanish by [要查看本链接请先注册并登录], are not major work is not to remark that they are actively bad or painful to read. They are merely larval. Many are vignettes, full of play, written almost like journal entries. One unnamed poem begins with the line “Middle Ages of long hair untouched by the wind” and does not improve from there. Others pile on disconnected images. Here is the entirety of one not untypical untitled poem:
《未知的大学》由劳拉·希利(Laura Healy)从西班牙文流利译为英文。若评论说这里面大部分诗歌算不上大作，那并不是说这些诗就十分糟糕或惨不忍“读”。这些诗只是些幼体。其中许多都是小品文，充满玩闹，写得几乎像是日记。有一首无名诗开头一行是“风不触及长发的中世纪”，后文再无改善。其他一些诗则堆叠无关联的图像。下面就是一首并非不具代表性的无题诗全文：
No one sends you letters now  Under the lighthouse
at dusk  Lips parted by wind
They’re *** a revolution to the East  A cat
sleeps in your arms
Sometimes you’re incredibly happy
没有人给你寄信了如今　在灯塔下面
的黄昏时　唇被风分开
他们正给东方搞一场革命　一只猫
睡在你的臂弯
有的时候你难以置信地开心
The sound “The Unknown University” mostly makes is that of a promising young writer seeking his way in the world of words.
《未知的大学》主要发出的声音，是一个有前途的年轻作家的声音，他正在词语的世界里寻找他的路。
Among its finest pleasures are its earthiest ones, so allow me to close with a snippet of the poem “Money,” which is about what happens when Bolaño unexpectedly finds himself with some pesetas in his pocket:
在该书最精美的文字乐趣中，亦可见波拉尼奥最世俗朴实的诗作。所以，请允许我以《钱》(Money)一诗中的一个片段作为结束吧。这首诗描写了他意外在自己口袋里发现几块钱后发生的事：
... I decided to buy a couple
blank tapes to record Cecil Taylor
Azimuth Dizzie Gillespie Charlie Mingus
and have myself a good pork steak
with tomato and onion and fried eggs and write
this poem or this note which is like a lung
or a provisional mouth saying I’m
happy because it’s been a long time since
I’ve had this much money in my pockets
……我决定要买几盒儿
空白磁带来录塞西尔泰勒
方位角迪兹吉莱斯皮查尔斯明格斯
再给自己来一块上好猪排
配上番茄和洋葱还有煎蛋还要写
这首诗或这个字条这像个肺
或是张临时的嘴在说我很
开心因为已经很久没像现在
我这样口袋里有这么多的钱
（诗中塞西尔泰勒、方位角、迪兹吉莱斯皮、查尔斯明格斯，分别指塞西尔·泰勒[Cecil Taylor]、Azimuth、迪兹·吉莱斯皮[Dizzie Gillespie]、查尔斯·明格斯[Charlie Mingus]；次者为爵士乐团，其余三者为爵士乐手——译注）
Bolaño was hungry, this book reminds you, for just about everything.
这本书提醒你：波拉尼奥饥渴，几乎渴望一切。