我為何不讀路易絲·格呂克 【文學理論】

 

【簡介】

這是巴裏·施瓦布斯基2013年在路易絲·格呂克（2020年諾貝爾文學獎獲得者）初獲普利策獎時的一篇評論，由我從英文譯為中文。有趣的是諾貝爾文學獎委員會給格呂克授獎是由於她“表現出具體個人存在狀況所具有的普遍性”（makes individual existence universal）， 意思是她的詩通過描寫具體的個人存在狀況而表現出超出個人的普世現象。而在七年前，施瓦布斯基也用到一模一樣的“普世化”一詞，認為格呂克“對神話人物的使用不過將個人一己問題崇高化，可能並沒有表現出這些問題有什麽普遍性”。施瓦布斯基也不完全是無名小輩。他本人也是藝術評論家及詩人，其藝術評論著作多種由劍橋大學出版社等出版。施瓦布斯基的主要論點是詩歌的主題隻是詩人的手段，而不是詩歌的目的，不是詩歌優劣的標準。詩歌的優劣在於詩歌給予讀者的“語言體驗”。換句話說，以“死亡”、“婚姻失敗”、“異化”、“憂鬱”等有意思的東西為主題遠不能保證成為好詩。就我所讀過的格呂克的部分詩歌而言，我認為施瓦布斯基的評論很有道理。

 

 

Why I’m Not Reading Louise Glück

Barry Schwabsky

 

我為何不讀路易絲·格呂克

巴裏·施瓦布斯基

 

【原文】

Do you pick a destination in order to have a reason to take a walk, or do you take a walk in order to get to a place you have in mind? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Are the words a poet uses essentially a means to convey a thought or feeling he or she has in mind, or is the poem’s subject chosen mainly as a way of helping generate the poem’s language? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. But I confess to being more attracted to the second kind of poetry — or maybe it’s fairer to say I prefer reading poetry as if it were written that way. That doesn’t mean the walk’s endpoint (the poem’s subject) is finally irrelevant to the pleasures of the stroll (the poem). You might not want to end up in some alley where you’re going to get mugged. But the destination is only a small part of the journey you’ve embarked on.

 

【譯文】

你是為了有個理由散步而找個目的地，還是為了到達想去的地方而行走？可能有時是前者，有時是後者。詩人實質上是以詞語作為一種手段來表達他或她的思想、感覺呢，還是利用詩歌的主題來催生詩歌的語言？可能有時是前者，有時是後者。但我承認第二種詩歌更吸引我 -  或者更確切一點說，我傾向於讀第二種詩歌。這並不意味著步行的終點（詩的主題）歸根結蒂與漫步的樂趣（詩）無關。你可能不會想要走進某個會被搶劫的小巷，但是目的地隻是你的旅程的一小部分。

 

【原文】

I started thinking again of the poem’s relation to its subject after reading a review of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962–2012 in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, accessible online to subscribers. Glück is one of the best-known American poets, a native New Yorker who has won just about every prize and honor available — Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, U.S. Poet Laureate — and taught at all the famous places to be taught poetry; better still, as I’ve just learned from Wikipedia, her father helped create the X-Acto knife, a tool I’d recommend to every poet who hopes to carve more precise verses out of the thick and messy matter of our speech. But I’ve never been able to get interested in Glück’s work, and that’s too bad, because I’m always willing to go out of my way in search of a new pleasure. So I started reading the review with real curiosity, hoping that it would show me how to begin liking this poetry.

 

【譯文】

在最近一期的《倫敦書評》（London Review of Books）上讀了關於路易絲·格呂克（Louise Glück）《1962-2012年詩歌》一書的書評後，我就開始重新思考一首詩與它的主題的關係。格呂克是美國最著名的詩人之一，她是紐約人，得過幾乎所有獎項和榮譽 - 普利策獎（Pulitzer），國家書評人協會獎（National Book Critics Circle），和美國桂冠詩人（Laureate）- 並在所有著名的教授詩詞的地方任教；更妙的是，我剛在維基百科中看到，她的父親是X-Acto刀的創造人之一，我曾向所有希望從我們厚重、混亂的話語中雕刻出精致詩歌的詩人推薦過該工具。但是我從來沒有對格呂克的作品感興趣，這太糟糕了，因為我一向是願意費點力氣尋找新樂趣的。因此，我帶著真正的好奇開始閱讀這篇評論，希望它能告訴我如何開始喜歡格呂克的詩。

 

【原文】

But no such luck. Why? Because the essay’s author, Gillian White, an English professor at the University of Michigan, writes about Glück’s poetry as if the most important thing about it is its subject matter. So I know pretty early on in the piece that Glück writes quite a lot about death, and that more broadly she consistently seeks out melancholy subjects. A bit further along, I gather that the stakes of this melancholy are often raised to the pitch of melodrama — that Glück’s is a “gothic” imagination. Well, that sounds entertaining. There’s so much poetry of understatement around (I might even be guilty of it myself) that a bit of blood and guts could be refreshing. But then it seems a rather mundane, even understated, daytime drama kind of gothic: “Marriages fail, tragedy hides beneath pastoral innocence; in a photo taken by one speaker’s mother, ‘not one of us does not avert his eyes.’” In any case, to speak of the gothic is to invoke a set of conventions, but an authenticating detail grounds convention in the poet’s biography: In her youth she suffered from anorexia.

 

【譯文】

然而不走運。為什麽？因為據評論作者，密歇根大學英語係教授吉莉安·懷特（Gillian White）所言，似乎格呂克詩歌最重要的東西就是它們的主題。因此，我很快就知道格呂克常寫死亡，更寬泛地說，她一直在追尋憂鬱的主題。再往下讀，我發現憂鬱被大大加重到成了誇張劇 — 所謂“格呂克的想象力是‘哥特式’的”。行啊，聽起來很有意思。不痛不癢的詩歌太多了（我可能對此也有責任），來點鮮血和腸肝肚肺可能令人耳目一新。但是再往下看，不過是一種相當平凡的，甚至是不痛不癢的那種電視台放在白天播出的戲劇的哥特式：“婚姻失敗，在田園純真中暗藏著悲劇；在一位講述者的母親拍攝的照片中，‘我們當中沒有一個人會不避開他的目光。’”其實，談到哥特式是要跟一套什麽（習慣）傳統拉上関係，然而習慣（傳統）植根於這段該詩人傳記中發人深省的細節：她年輕時很為厭食症所苦。

 

【原文】

So we seem to know what Glück is about, but still, what is the form of her poetry? About a third of the way into the piece, the critic finally begins to say something about the sort of language through which Glück adumbrates her fraught themes. It is implied that her early writing was kind of fancy — in what way we are not told — but that the consistent development of her work as she’s matured has been toward “a more authentic vernacular; ‘a longer breath’; an enlarged vocabulary; a poem ‘less perfect, less stately.’” Ok, but what makes one vernacular more authentic than another? And doesn’t the expanded lexicon slightly gainsay the idea that poems are turning toward the vernacular, assuming that the Wordworthian “real language of men” (and women) is relatively poor in relation to the studied artifices of poets? The seeming contradiction can surely be argued away, but one would like to see what particular form this critic’s argument would take. But she’s not interested. Rather than expanding on these points, White quickly turns back to thematic matters without pausing to consider what these “technical and stylistic” aspects have to do with the poet’s subject matter: Why is it that Glück has found a more disheveled, expansive, and down-to-earth style better suited to her themes of suffering and loss than the richer, more elegant manner of her early work? The answer: This “plainspoken quality suggests, at one extreme, an oracular, even demonic frankness that exceeds the merely personal.” This is very suggestive, but also puzzling. “Frankness” is a personal trait, so how does it get transfigured into something impersonal? Since “Glück’s poems are written in the first person and cycle through a limited repertoire of places, nouns and themes, including the real names of her ex-husband and son,” it’s hard to credit White’s claim that the poet’s work is in something other than a confessional mode. Glück writes, “When I speak passionately,/that’s when I’m least to be trusted,” but to confess to being an unreliable narrator is still a confession. And her use of mythical figures might work less to universalize these personal issues than to aggrandize them; the difference would all be in the details of the poems’ language, which we still haven’t heard too much about.

 

【譯文】

於是，我們似乎知道了格呂克在講些什麽，但她的詩歌形式是什麽樣的呢？翻過大約三分之一的篇幅，評論家才終於開始說點關於格呂克到底用什麽樣的語言來展現她駭人的主題。評論的意思是她的早期寫作有些花哨 - 我們沒有被告知怎麽個花哨 - 但是隨著她的成熟，她的作品一直朝著這些方向發持續發展：“更加真實的白話”； “更長的呼吸”；更大的詞匯量；一首“不必那麽完美，不必那麽莊重”的詩。好吧，然而是什麽使得一種白話比另一種白話更加真實呢？而且，假設華茲沃思追隨者所謂的“（一般）男人（和女人）的真實語言”相對於詩人所研究的的藝術語言而言要較為貧乏的話，那麽更大的詞匯量與（她的）詩歌正在轉向白話的說法不有點自相矛盾嗎？這位批評家肯定可以通過某種論證來消除這種表麵上的矛盾，但是我倒要想看看這位批評家的論證將采取什麽具體的形式。然而她對進行論證不感興趣。懷特沒有在這些問題上展開討論，而是迅速轉回主題方麵，根本沒有停下來考慮這些“技術和風格”方麵的東西與詩人的主題方麵的東西有什麽關係：何以格呂克所找到的一種更加雜亂、寬廣和接地氣的風格，比起她早期作品中更豐富、優雅的風格更適合她的苦難和損失的主題？答案：這種“直率一方麵讓人感到一種神秘甚至魔幻的、超出了純粹個人的坦誠。”這很有啟發性，但也令人困惑。 “坦誠”是種個人特質，它怎麽轉化成了非個人的東西？由於“格呂克的詩是第一人稱的，並在有數的幾個地點、名詞和主題（包括她的前夫和兒子的真名）中重複”，因此很難相信懷特所說的該詩人的作品不是內心坦白模式而是別的東西。格呂克寫道：“當我熱情洋溢地講話時，那才是我最不該被信任的時候。”但坦白說自己是一個不可靠的敘述者，也還是一種坦白。而且，她對神話人物的使用不過將個人一己的問題崇高化，可能並沒有表現出這些問題有什麽普遍性。區別完全在於其詩歌語言的細節，對此我們還沒看到多少評論。

 

【原文】

Reading on in the review, as White traces the shifts in subject matter from each of Glück’s collections of poems to the next, I find occasional mentions of linguistic matters — of the poet’s “lexical wit, her skill with tone, her knowledge of the Anglo-American poetic canon” — but only by the by, without any analysis of specific passages given to illustrate how these virtues manifest themselves. At one point White backtracks to reiterate how the “thick, stacked diction and taut, chewy syntax” of Glück’s early writing “is unlike the plain style that follows” and notes that her lines as well as the poems themselves have grown longer with time. We learn, too, in the next-to-last paragraph of the review, that (despite the enlarged vocabulary mentioned earlier) Glück’s mythicized personal dramas are presented with minimal props and highly abstract settings: “There are no classrooms, bars, supermarkets, highways, restaurants, cars, governments (local or national), hospitals, televisions, radios or gum wrappers.” What are all those different words being used for then, I wonder? Are there really that many words for middle-class discontent?

 

【譯文】

繼續往下讀評論，當懷特從格呂克的一本詩集到又一本詩集追溯主題的變化，我讀到偶爾提及的語言方麵的東西 - 關於詩人的“詞法智慧，語氣技巧，對英美詩歌典範的了解”- 但不過蜻蜓點水，沒有用任何具體段落分析來說明這些優點到底在哪裏。在某処懷特回溯重申格呂克早期寫作中的“厚重，層疊的咬文嚼字”“與隨後的樸素風格不同”，並指出她的句子以及詩都隨著時間的推移而變長了。據該評論的倒數第二段，我們也了解到（盡管前麵提到了更大的詞匯量），格呂克的神話化的個人戲劇以最少的道具和高度抽象的背景所呈現：“沒有教室、酒吧、超級市場、高速公路、飯店、汽車、（地方的或中央的）政府、醫院、電視、收音機或口香糖紙。”我真想知道，到底是誰在使用這麽多不同的詞匯？真的有那麽多用來表達中產階級的不滿的字眼嗎？

 

【原文】

Those are real questions I have, not what are commonly called rhetorical ones. And if I seem to be picking on White or on Glück, that’s not my intention. White’s review struck me as typical of the way poetry is discussed in the mainstream press, not unusual, and I just want to tell reviewers of poetry that there’s at least one reader out there who’s mostly less interested in what someone’s poems are about than in what kind of linguistic experiences the poems make out of what they are about. That’s what it would take to get me to start reading a poet whose works are mostly unfamiliar to me. It’s true that Edgar Allan Poe considered the death of a beautiful woman to be “the most poetical topic in the world” but really, it’s not the subject that makes for poetry, it’s the work on language that the subject enables the poet to do. Until a critic can explain how Glück is reworking our language, I’m not ready to start tackling the 634 pages of her oeuvre. But I’m still ready to be enticed. Is there a critic out there who’s willing to try?

 

【譯文】

這些是我真正的問題，而不是的明知故問。如果我看起來像在對懷特或格呂克吹毛求疵，那不是我的意圖。我所不滿的是：懷特的評論方式正是主流媒體討論詩歌的典型方式，而不是例外。我隻是想告訴詩歌評論家，這世界上至少有一個讀者他遠為更感興趣的是某人詩歌借其主題創造出的語言體驗， 而不是某人詩歌的主題。這種體驗才能讓我開始讀一個很陌生的詩人的作品。的確，埃德加·愛倫·坡（Edgar Allan Poe）認為一美麗女人的死是“世界上最詩意的主題”，但實際上，並不是主題，而是主題幫助詩人成就的語言作品，使詩歌成其為詩歌。在評論家能說出格呂克到底怎麽創新了我們的語言之前，我還不準備翻開她634頁的文集。但是我仍然準備被吸引。有沒有願意嚐試的批評家？