基本內(nèi)容
華萊士·史蒂文斯 Wallace Stevens: BiographyBiographical 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 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 Owlu2019s 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 u2013 an age when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves. But Stevensu2019s 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 u2013 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.
《我叔叔的單片眼鏡》
一
“天空的母親，云霧的女王，
噢，太陽的權(quán)杖，月亮的王冠，
沒有什么，不，不，決沒有什么
像兩個攻殺的詞語撞擊的鋒刃�！�
就這樣，我用絢麗的詩韻嘲弄她。
或者說，我是在嘲弄我自己？
真希望我是塊石頭，但有頭腦。
思緒噴出泡沫的大海，再次把她
這些賊亮的泡泡兒，偷冒出來。
隨后，我體內(nèi)更咸的水井深處的
上涌，爆出水花般的音節(jié)。
二
紅色的鳥兒，飛越金地板。
他是在風，氤氳和羽翅的歌隊里
尋找席位的紅鳥——找到的瞬間
他會搖身傾瀉一場暴雨。
我要撫平這布滿皺褶的東西嗎？
我是一個富翁，向繼承人們問好；
也正因為如此，我也向春天問好。
對我唱驪歌的，是前來歡迎的歌隊。
而春天，再也不可能越過子午線了�！�
可是你，卻被奇聞軼事保佑著，
假裝相信一種星光四射的知識。
三
那么，坐在山中池畔，古老的
中國人梳妝打扮，或在長江上
精研胡須，他們是否并無所求？
我不想去演奏那歷史的降音階。
你知道，喜多川歌磨的美人們
在她們會說話發(fā)髻中探索愛的目的
你記得巴斯溫泉中高聳如山的頭飾。
呀！自然中竟未留下一縷卷發(fā)，
莫非所有的美發(fā)師都白活了嗎？
為什么，對這些勤奮的鬼魂
毫無憐憫，你云鬢紛亂地從睡夢中走來？
四
甜美無瑕的生命之果，似乎
全因自己的重量而落向大地。
當你還是夏娃之身，如今已酸澀的果汁
未經(jīng)品嘗地，清甜在果園的極樂中。
蘋果，和所有的骷髏一樣，適合
成為幫助我們理解圓形的書，
它和骷髏一樣出色地成形于
走向腐爛，重歸土地的東西
但它另有特長：作為愛的果實
它是一部瘋狂到無法閱讀的書，
除非一個人讀它就是為了打發(fā)時光。
五
西方的高天，燒著一顆暴怒之星。
它被置于此處，為的是赤焰般的小伙子
和他們身邊甜香彌漫的處女。
愛的劇烈，與大地勃發(fā)的生機
共用著一個尺度。在我看來，
螢火蟲電火迅疾的敲擊
漫長地嘀嗒出又一年的時光。
可你呢？當你最初的形象
展現(xiàn)你和一切塵土的聯(lián)系，請記住
那些蟋蟀，如何在蒼茫之夜，躍出了
養(yǎng)育它們的草叢，宛如一群小小的親眷。
六
如果，四十歲的男人去畫湖泊
易逝的眾藍一定渾然地為他們浮現(xiàn)
根源的灰藍色，那遍布世界的色彩。
一種物質(zhì)，在我們的體內(nèi)大行其道。
然而，在我們的艷遇中，登徒子們洞悉
紛紜的波瀾，他們屏著呼吸的筆觸
記錄下每一次稀奇古怪的轉(zhuǎn)折。
當?shù)峭阶觽冾^發(fā)漸禿，艷情
也會萎縮，藏身羅盤儀和課程表，
在內(nèi)省的放逐中，說教不休。
這是只為風信子準備的主題。
七
比太陽更遠，眾天使騎的騾子
通過一座座耀眼的雄關，漫步而來
它們的鈴聲，叮玲玲降臨世間。
騾夫們優(yōu)雅地，挑選著道路。
這時候，一群百夫長狂浪大笑著
猛擊尖嘯在桌子上的酒盞。
這個寓言，最終的意味是：
天國之蜜，不知道會不會到來
但是人間的甜，隨時來回來去。
試想，這些信使們的行旅中，捎來了
一位被永恒的綻放催升的花姑娘。
八
像個書呆子，我注視，愛情中，
古老的情狀，觸動著新的頭腦。
它萌發(fā)，它綻放，它結(jié)果之后就去死。
這平凡的比喻，揭示一種真諦。
花期已逝。我們從此是果實。
兩只金葫蘆，在我們自己的藤上漲滿 ，
進入秋氣，濺上霜花，老來肥壯，
怪誕地變形。我們懸掛著——
像生疣的南瓜，烙著條紋和色斑。
笑哈哈的天空，將俯視我們兩個
被蝕骨的冬雨，淘洗成空空的殼。
九
在行動抽瘋，喧嘩迭起，嘶叫
纏著沖撞，迅疾而肯定的詩中
當人致命的思想，在戰(zhàn)亂里
成就詭詐的命運，丘比特的守護者
來給四十歲的信念作道場吧。
最可敬的心，最放蕩的奇想
仍比不上你放得更開的開闊。
為了讓獻祭豐盛，我向一切聲響，
所有思想，所有的一切，征詢樂曲
和騎士們的氣魄�？晌胰ツ睦飳ふ�
華麗之極的樂章，可以配上這偉大的頌歌？
十
幻想的闊少在他們的詩中
留下神秘之噴涌的紀念冊，
自動澆灌他們粗糲的土壤。
我是個自耕農(nóng)，跟那幫家伙一樣。
可我不認識魔法樹或香枝
沒見過銀紅和金朱的果子。
但畢竟我認得一棵大樹
和我頭腦中的東西形似。
它巨人般站立，它的尖頂招來
所有的鳥，在它們生命中的某刻。
鳥兒飛走時，那尖頂仍然尖在樹頂。
十一
假如一切真的都是性，任何發(fā)抖的手
都能讓玩偶一般的我們，尖叫“想要”。
但請注意，命數(shù)會無恥地背叛，讓我們
喜怒無常，哼哼唧唧，傷心時就亂嚷
心虛的豪言壯語，還從瘋瘋鬧鬧中
掐出千姿百態(tài)，全然不顧
那第一位的，最高的律法。這慘痛的時光！
昨夜，我們并坐，身旁的一池紅粉
與飛馳在明亮的鉻黃中的百合花
被剪成碎光，針對著星星的寒芒，
而一只青蛙，轟響腹中討厭的和聲。
十二
那是一只藍鴿子，側(cè)身盤旋于
碧空，一圈，一圈，又一圈。
那是一只白鴿子，倦于飛行，
振翅撲向地面。像一位黑暗的拉比
年輕的我，在清高的研究中
觀測人類的本性。我每天都發(fā)現(xiàn)
人類驗證了我切碎的世界中的一小塊。
后來，像一位玫瑰的拉比，我追求
而且仍在追求，愛的起源
和歷程，但到如今我才明白
振翅之物的投影是這么清晰。
