《Gratuitous beauty》，翻译诗兼拾得诗，拾得自我的《译想天开》，找我可买到

By Ouyang Yu
《Gratuitous beauty》

翻译是一件让人害怕的事，特别是翻着、翻着，一切都很顺利，但突然就会出现一个简单得不能再简单，又难得不能再难的字或词或句子，就像下面这句话中的“gratuitous”一字样：

In 1880 he (Saint-Gaudens) could give Dr. Henry Shiff’s bronze beard a labile, gratuitous beauty of texture akin to Monet. (p. 106)

怎么译？

老实说，不好译。为此，我还专门在网上用“gratuitous beauty”二字，进行了关键词搜索。一望而知，这是一个英文常用词，说的是那种不需要花一分一厘钱，就可免费得来的美景或美物，如天空中仿佛建筑或油画的云彩。用英文来讲，那都是可以称作“gratuitous beauty”的。

我呢，是这么译的：

1880年，他能把亨利·希夫（Henry Shiff）医生的胡须，用青铜雕塑出一种几近于莫奈那种瞬息万变，又不讲道理的质地之美。

现在想起来，当时我这么译，与我早年对美的理解有一定的关系。二十来岁时，我写了一首诗，题为《美》。该诗开篇是这么写的：

美在肌肉突露的手臂勾住尼龙衫下的柔软腰肢
美在唇儿相碰时那一微米的间隙
美在“泼喇”击响耳鼓却从眼角溜走溅起水花的大鱼
美在整座森林一动不动淋着喧响的大雨
美在昏黄的玻璃后蓝色透明的窗帘微微颤栗

最后结尾时，诗人说：“美在毫无意义毫无道理。”

没想到，隔了三十几年，这种见解还渗透在我对美的理解上。[1]

不过，还是不太满意。大约也是福至心灵，我忽然想起我自己早年创作的一首英文诗，题为“Moon over Melbourne”（《墨尔本上空的月亮》），其中有句云：for all the breeze and the moon i get i don’t spend a penny。[2]

随之想到，古人似乎确有“清风明月不用买”的诗句。好，有了：

1880年，他能把亨利·希夫（Henry Shiff）医生的胡须，用青铜雕塑出一种几近于莫奈那种瞬息万变，清风明月不用买的质地之美。

上面就是我修改后的译文。

[1] 遗憾的是，我没有把这首诗选入我的《二度漂流》中。

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

002, from Poetry Remarks

By Ouyang Yu
Image
Mel C. Thompson Publishing, San Francisco, 2013, p. 23. [I said 'no page number' because my lower ear mark concealed it, my apologies. Then I thought: What a fantastic idea if there's no page numbers! I have a book that has no Contents although it timidly carries page numbers. See Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes . Wild Peony, 2002. In future, I'd make a poetry book with no Contents and no page numbers. Why make things so easy for people that they won't even bother reading?] This book is long out of print, so don't start thinking that I'm trying to promote something. I've only got one copy in the world and I'm not selling it.
Read more

LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...
Read more

Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publish...
Read more