Towards the end of his life, Seamus Heaney wanted to share with his readers not so much extravagance as confidence, lightness, and the ability to stay pleased.
happiness
- Born: April 13, 1939, Castledawson, United Kingdom
- Died: August 30, 2013, Blackrock Clinic
Seamus Heaney—who was born on April 13th 1939—saw poetry as general nourishment and necessity. He was as happy gently floating his words in a village hall as in some elitist auditorium
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney, poet, died on August 30th, aged 74
THE eyes first. Kind, brown, narrowing as they smiled. Eyes that had squinted into wind and through smoke: that had seen a river rat “tracing its wet/Arcs on the stones”, wind “quicksilvering” a poplar in one sweep, a cut finger “swaying its red spoors through a basin”. Then the hands: big, red, with squared-off nails. Not a poet’s hands. These had paid out rope in long loops, taking the strain; had dressed a hay-ruck and combed it down; had felt the tug and strum of a fishing line in a river. When they switched to poem-work, his pen (the faithful Conway-Stewart, guttering and snorkelling its full draught of ink) became another tool in a long succession of them: the heavy spade, slicing and nicking the turf with its clean plate-edge; the “rightness and lightness” of pitchfork and rake; the sledgehammer’s gathered force, “so unanswerably landed/The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle”. “Do not waver/Into language,” he wrote. “Do not waver in it.”
He was bookish from boyhood, with a compendium of literature in his head; won a scholarship to Queen’s Belfast, did a lectureship at Berkeley, held professorships at Harvard and Oxford. There were four volumes of critical essays, translations from Greek, Italian, Irish and Anglo Saxon, Latin puns, etymological conversations, a lifelong struggle to resist the seduction of iambic pentameters. He rubbed shoulders with a constellation of great poets: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell. In 1995 he joined the select circle of winners of the Nobel prize. Yet he was always outside the academy. The farm boy from Mossbawn, County Derry saw poetry as general nourishment and necessity, saving proof that “whatever is given/ Can always be reimagined”, and was as happy gently floating his words in a village hall as in some elitist auditorium.
It had begun early, with his mother’s songs; with Hopkins, whose flashingly sprung poems gave him “verbal gooseflesh” at school; with Yeats, the towering and inescapable presence. He wrote first under the name “Incertus”, feeling his way among giants. The past became the shy youth’s touchstone, with its walled solidities of byre, kitchen, thorn tree, cot; of familial love “like a tinsmith’s scoop/sunk past its gleam/in the meal-bin.” He rhymed, he said, “To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”. Then he grew to learn that poetry flowed from self-forgetfulness. From 1972 he made it his day-job, understanding that he had succeeded when the crop of words “felt like its own yield”. Starting with “Death of a Naturalist” in 1966, moving through the bone-vaults of “North” (1975) and the glittering winds of “Seeing Things” (1991) to the mortal quietude of “Human Chain” (2010), there were 12 collections, and no failures.
He should have written more, some said, about the Troubles he lived through, as a Catholic teaching and poetising in Belfast in the 1960s. Indeed he did write about them: the “maimed music” of British helicopters, the “cold raw silence” after Bloody Sunday, the armoured cars in the lane covered with broken alder boughs. He made tender verses of rebel Croppy boys and of his cousin Colum, murdered at random for some sectarian reason, whose body he imagined washing on the grass by Lough Beg, “with blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes”. What he refused to do was propagandise. He would write for himself, not for a cause; would weigh up, rather than weigh in.
Out of the peat
His “fardel” of Catholicism was ever there, the clicking beads and the gold inner gleam of the ciborium, the “tremor and draw” of words he no longer believed but could not disavow. Inevitably, living in the North, he sensed “a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk taller”. Yet he strove to preserve a balance, insisted on his Protestant friendships. “Protestant poets, Catholic poets—and don’t those terms fairly put the wind up you?” His move south, to Glanmore in County Wicklow, in 1972 (“a wood-kerne/Escaped from the massacre,/Taking protective colouring/From bole and bark”) was driven not by funk but by the demands of family and poetry.
It was impossible in any case to avoid the deep history of Ireland, laid down in layers like the black peat he had dug down through on Toner’s Moss; to ignore the ancient kings, monks and wanderers who could be turned up again like bog people, with their patient, ebonised, twisted faces, into the spring light. He too had grown out of this bottomless “sump and seedbed”, “the vowel of earth/dreaming its root/in flowers and snow.” He involved himself wholeheartedly in Ireland’s literary rediscovery of itself in the 1980s, trusting in the power of poetry to drive out the rancid utterances of terrorist and sectarian with “the clear light…leaning in from sea.”
He was taken so comfortably for granted in the pantheon of poets that his going had the shock of a great tree falling. He had written of such a tree, the chestnut planted by his aunt when he was born and then, in later years, chopped down with “the hatchet’s differentiated/Accurate cut”:
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.
Yet his last texted words to his wife were Noli timere, don’t fear.
童元方/著《一樣花開----哈佛十年散記》台北:爾雅出版社,1996
兩篇回憶 Seamus Heaney 在哈佛教現代英詩
Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies...
One half of one's sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one wants to call it. But consciousness and quarrels with the self are the result of what Lawrence called ' the voices of my education'.--Belfast, Seamus Heaney PREOCCUPATIONS: Slected Prose 1968-1978, London:Faber and Faber1980, p.35
And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.
--Seamus Heaney – Nobel Lecture
Crediting Poetry
http://www.nobel.se/
「今日樂上樂,相從步雲衢。」(取材 朱自清《中國歌謠》)
2004
昨天翻《希尼作品及研究目錄》,第一本詩集 Death of a Naturalist ,翻譯成《一個自然主義者的死亡》 ,這可能用類似YAHOO!字典:2. 【人】 自然主義者 ( naturalism ) /3. 【人】 博物學家 /1. 【人】 鳥商;狗商;動物標本剝製者 【注意:Yahoo的順序很奇怪】;Seeing Things 翻譯成《幻視》;The Spirit Level 翻譯成《酒精水準儀》;Opening Ground: Poems 1966-1996 翻譯成 《開墾的土地》
不過,希尼給中文讀者的書信採信手書寫方式,
I would say to Chinese readers that I'm exhilarated to think that we can connect across the great distances – linguistic, geographic, cultural. That tells us something about poetry. The ongoing life of poetry is crucial for our continuing life as creatures of civilization and sensibility and as creatures of intimacy. Poetry is one of the basrious (???), one of the guardians of intimacy. But poetry is also wide-open, it's a public art form. And that is the paradox. A poem has to be available for inspection and at the same time, you know, it must be intimate to the poet. Think of writing a love letter and then think of writing a love poem, and of leaving them both on a table. If someone comes along later and reads the letters, it's an invasion, an intrusion, and the readers would probably be slightly embarrassed. But if love poem, however bad the love poem is, it is not an invasion. The poem is actually an address to you as a reader. It calls you towards it. It is there to be open with you. It is a made thing , but a thing made of inwardness. So the fact that there are Chinese readers means that our belief in the openness of the poem is justified, and secondly, that our sense of its necessity as a help to our continuing to be sensitively human is justified too.
Seamus Heaney
中文版序言
我想向中國讀者說,每當念及我們可以跨越語言、地理、
西默斯 希尼
200年7月
愛爾蘭詩人Seamus Heaney《希尼詩文集》(北京:作家出版社,2001)
《希尼詩文集》所收作品時間跨度有30年,包括從10本詩集中選出的詩作78首,從4本論集中精選出的隨筆、評論16篇,涵蓋了希尼不同時期的創作風格,絕大部分都是首譯。希尼為此中文譯本詩文集專門撰寫了序言。
作者簡介 · · · · · ·
目錄 · · · · · ·
詩選/吳德安譯
《一個自然主義者的死亡》(1966)
挖掘/一個自然主義者的死亡 採黑草莓――給菲力普・赫伯斯班 追隨者/期中假期 卜水者/詩――給瑪蕊 自我的赫利孔山――給邁克・朗利
《進入黑暗之門》(1969) 鐵匠鋪/蓋屋頂的人/半島 革命者的安魂曲/老婆的故事 夜間駕車/化石的記憶 沼澤地――給T・P・佛拉南根
《在外過冬》(1972) 炭化的橡樹/安娜莪瑞什/雨的禮物 布羅格/傳神言者/一首新歌 另一邊/托蘭人/婚禮之日 地獄的邊境/私生子/英國的麻煩 試飛/西部聖地
《北方》(1975) 木斯浜――給瑪麗・希尼(選譯) 葬禮儀式/北方/沼澤女皇 格拉伯男屍/懲罰 演唱學校(選譯) 2、警官拜訪/4、1969年夏/5、養育――給邁克・麥克拉維提
《野外工作》(1979) 牡蠣/圖姆路/飲水 貝格湖濱的沙灘――紀念卡倫・麥卡特尼 傷亡人員/顎音的繆斯 收場白/水獺/臭鼬 忌妒之夢/歌 收穫結/悼念弗朗西斯・萊德維奇 《斯威尼的重構》(1983) 在山毛櫸中/在那時
《斯特森島》(1984) 地鐵中/契訶夫訪庫頁島 砂石紀念品/老熨斗 來自德爾菲的石頭 給邁克爾和克里斯托弗的風箏 鐵軌上的孩子們/斯特森島(選譯)
《山楂燈籠》(1987) 字母/來自寫作的前線 山楂燈籠/來自良心的共和國 冰雹/出空――紀念M・K・H,1911―1984 消失的海島/
《幻視》(1991 ) 視野/乾草杈/方形(選譯)/明亮(選譯)
《酒精水準儀》(1996) 雨聲仙人掌/薄荷 聖人開文和烏鶇 差遣/海灘/在源頭
隨筆・評論/姜濤週瓚穆青傅浩王娟黃燦然馬永波塗衛群胡續冬譯 摩斯巴恩 貝爾法斯特 尼祿、契訶夫的白蘭地與來訪者 舌頭的管轄 進入文字的感情 翻譯的影響 詩歌的糾正 樹上的神 先世之山:論近期愛爾蘭詩歌中的幻景與反諷 信念、希望和詩歌――論奧希普・曼德爾斯塔姆 歡樂或黑夜:WB葉芝和菲利浦・拉全詩歌的最終之物 測聽奧登 數到一百:論伊莉莎白・畢肖普 洛威爾的命令 不倦的蹄音:西爾維妞・普拉斯 歸功於詩――諾貝爾文學獎受獎演說 附錄:希尼作品及研究目錄 · · · · ·
*****
*****
“That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”
—Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75, interviewed by Henri Cole in “The Paris Review” no. 144 (Fall 1997)
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