在愛爾蘭追逐葉芝的游魂

In Ireland, Chasing the Wandering Soul of Yeats

在愛爾蘭追逐葉芝的游魂

I will arise and go now. …

我就要?jiǎng)由碜吡?hellip;…

Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. Somehow William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me:

每當(dāng)我從椅子上站起來，準(zhǔn)備離開房間時(shí)，這幾個(gè)字常會(huì)格外頻繁地浮現(xiàn)在我的腦海中。不知怎么地，威廉·巴特勒·葉芝(William Butler Yeats)的詩作《茵納斯弗利島》(The Lake Isle of Innisfree)就像在我腦子里生了根一樣，和其他數(shù)以百萬計(jì)的人一樣，我第一次讀到這首詩是在念大學(xué)的時(shí)候：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. …

我就要?jiǎng)由碜吡?，去茵納斯弗利島……

And I’m off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth.

然后我便真的走了，并不是去牙醫(yī)診所或者商場(chǎng)，而是我的思緒，大步跨越著翠綠的山坡，走向一處神話之地。

A few miles away from the lake is Ben Bulben, a mountain slab that also inspired Yeats.

距離吉爾湖數(shù)英里處，便是本布爾本山，這座厚片狀的巖山同樣為葉芝帶來了諸多靈感。

Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. It would be a four-hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile.

在這首詩篇中，葉芝以一處真實(shí)存在的地點(diǎn)，一座位于吉爾湖中央的島嶼為題。這片湖泊懶洋洋地臥在北愛爾蘭斯萊戈郡的蒼翠之地上，縱情延綿五英里。幾年前的時(shí)候，我恰好人在都柏林，便決定化心動(dòng)為行動(dòng)：前往茵湖島。從我當(dāng)時(shí)為寫作取材的地方到那里，足足需要繞道四個(gè)小時(shí)，但這趟旅程一定值得這番奔波，對(duì)此我毫無半分猶疑。

Thanks to the popularity of the poem (voted by readers of The Irish Times in 1999 as their all-time favorite work of Irish poetry), “Innisfree” is a bit of a brand. There are Innisfree cosmetics, an Innisfree Eau de Parfum, an Innisfree B&B, an Innisfree Hotel and a Rose of Innisfree tour boat that does the lake.

得益于這首詩的流行(在1999年時(shí)被《愛爾蘭時(shí)報(bào)》(Irish Times)的讀者票選為他們素來喜愛的愛爾蘭詩作)，“茵湖島”多少形成了某種品牌效應(yīng)。有以此為名的護(hù)膚品品牌“悅詩風(fēng)吟”，有以此為名的淡香水，有以此為名的早餐旅館，有以此為名的酒店，還有巡游于吉爾湖上的游船“茵湖島玫瑰號(hào)”(Rose of Innisfree)。

But I know these things only from Google. Thankfully, none of it was evident on my drive. I didn’t use a GPS; I just relied on a couple of tiny handmade-looking road signs that popped up as I entered the region, which pointed the way to “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The last stage of the journey involved no tourism bric-a-brac, only small, twisty, increasingly difficult to navigate roads, mossy tree trunks, wind, willows, heather, cloud knuckles and gray rock.

但是我對(duì)這些事物的認(rèn)知，全部來自于谷歌搜索的結(jié)果。幸好，它們一個(gè)都沒有在我的自駕之旅中出現(xiàn)。我當(dāng)時(shí)并沒有使用全球定位系統(tǒng)(GPS)，只是憑借我駛?cè)氘?dāng)?shù)睾笏吹降膸滋幝窐?biāo)行駛，這些指示著前往“茵湖島”道路的路標(biāo)小得可憐，看上去似乎出自手工制作。這段旅程的最后一段看不到任何旅游紀(jì)念品商店，只有又小又繞越來越難分辨方向的小路、長(zhǎng)滿苔蘚的樹干、一路上的大風(fēng)、裊然的楊柳、叢生的石南花、天空中的云脊和灰色的巖石。

When I reached the lakeshore, I found the opposite of a tourist site. I could barely make my way out to the water to get a view, so thick was the shoreline with trees and brush. A farmhouse with a couple of S.U.V.s parked outside stood nearby, and there was a little concrete dock jutting out into the lake, pointed almost directly at Innisfree a few hundred yards away. I got out on the dock, sat cross-legged facing the island, and let the wind say what it had to say. For decades, this place had reverberated in my mind; now I was actually there.

當(dāng)我抵達(dá)湖岸時(shí)，發(fā)現(xiàn)自己完全不像是到了旅游景點(diǎn)。湖畔沿岸種滿了密集的樹木與灌木，我很難有辦法穿過它們走近湖水，縱覽全湖風(fēng)光。附近矗立著一座農(nóng)莊，門外停著幾輛SUV，還有幾座小型的混凝土船塢探入湖中，幾乎直指著就在幾百碼開外的茵湖島。我走到船塢外側(cè)，面朝著茵湖島盤腿坐下，任由清風(fēng)自在傾訴。幾十年來，這處地方一直在我的腦海中縈繞;而此刻，我終于真真切切地置身于此。

Yeats, born in 1865, the son of an artist, was a childlike intellectual. He would forget to eat, or put food in the oven and let it burn. He was devoted to mysticism and séances. He spent decades in love with the Irish nationalist and proto-feminist Maud Gonne; after she rejected his marriage proposal for a final time, he shifted his attention to her daughter.

葉芝生于1865年，乃是藝術(shù)家之子，他自己則是一名天真爛漫的知識(shí)分子。他會(huì)忘記吃東西，或是忘記已把食物放進(jìn)爐子里，任其糊掉。他投身于神秘主義和降神會(huì)。他愛慕著愛爾蘭獨(dú)立運(yùn)動(dòng)成員、原始的女性主義者茅德·岡(Maud Gonne)，數(shù)十年如一日;在她最后一次拒絕了他的求婚后，他便將自己的心力轉(zhuǎn)移到了她的女兒身上。

A few weeks after she, in turn, spurned his marriage offer, he proposed to another woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who, despite knowing where she ranked, became his devoted life partner. As she essentially said after his death, she saw the shimmer of his soul. “For him, every day he lived was a new adventure,” she once told the Yeats scholar Curtis B. Bradford. “He woke every morning certain that in the new day before him something would happen that had never happened before.”

他的求婚一次次地遭到了她的唾棄，于是數(shù)周后，他轉(zhuǎn)而向另一名女性喬吉·海德―李斯(Georgie Hyde-Lees)求了婚。她明知自己在他心目中并非首選，卻依然成為了對(duì)他滿懷深情的終身伴侶。就像她在葉芝去世后的精辟之言，她看到了他靈魂中的閃光點(diǎn)。“在他而言，他所過的每一天都是一趟新的歷險(xiǎn)，”她曾經(jīng)如此對(duì)葉芝學(xué)者柯蒂斯·布拉德福德(Curtis B. Bradford)講述道，“他每天早上醒來時(shí)，內(nèi)心都十分確信，自己面前這新的一天里，一定會(huì)發(fā)生一些以前沒有發(fā)生過的事。”

Yeats was in his 50s when he married. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a young man’s poem, written when he was 23. It is filled with a romantic longing for the past: the Irish past, the mythic past and also Yeats’s own. He had spent his childhood in County Sligo before moving to Dublin and then London. This countryside, the lake and its islands, this composition of greens and grays and blues, was fused within him.

葉芝結(jié)婚時(shí)已50多歲?！兑鸺{斯弗利島》則是一首青年的詩篇，是他在23歲的時(shí)候?qū)懢?。詩中充滿了對(duì)過去的浪漫向往――愛爾蘭的過去，神秘的過去，還有葉芝自己的過去。他在斯萊戈郡度過了童年時(shí)期，其后遷往了都柏林，后來又去了倫敦。這處鄉(xiāng)郊，這片湖泊和湖中的島嶼，這道由綠色、灰色、藍(lán)色共同組成的風(fēng)景，全部牢牢地烙印在他的血脈中。

When he was a boy, his father had read him Thoreau’s “Walden,” and its pastoral message resonated with the landscape of his childhood. As a young man living in London, trying to make a go of it amid the industrial throb, Yeats reached back to his youth and crafted the poem. The first line signals the self-consciously antiquated style he chose. (Even back in 1888, when the poem was written, people didn’t “arise.”) He filled it with rhyme, pumped it with unapologetically forceful rhythm. He made it, for all its romance, compact, athletic. This is the entire poem.

在他年紀(jì)尚幼時(shí)，他的父親曾經(jīng)為他念過梭羅(Thoreau)的《瓦爾登湖》(Walden)，其中所描繪的田園風(fēng)光與他童年所看到的這道風(fēng)景交相輝映。作為一名在倫敦生活，努力想要在工業(yè)浪潮中出人頭地的青年，葉芝對(duì)自己的童年念念不忘，于是創(chuàng)作出了這首詩篇。詩文的第一行便昭示出，葉芝有意識(shí)地選擇了一種舊派的表達(dá)手法。(即使是在該詩成文的1888年，也沒有人是“動(dòng)身”的。)他在整首詩中大量押韻，并在其中注入了一種不容置辯的有力節(jié)奏。他在盡情揮灑浪漫的同時(shí)，也保持著詩章的簡(jiǎn)短和動(dòng)感。以下便是完整的全詩：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

我就要?jiǎng)由碜吡?，去茵納斯弗利島，

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

搭起一個(gè)小屋子，筑起泥笆房;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

支起九行云豆架，一排蜜蜂巢，

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

獨(dú)個(gè)兒住著，蔭陰下聽蜂群歌唱。

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

我就會(huì)得到安寧，它徐徐下降，

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

從朝霧落到蟋蟀歌唱的地方;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

午夜是一片閃亮，正午是一片紫光，

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

傍晚到處飛舞著紅雀的翅膀。

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

我就要?jiǎng)由碜吡?，因?yàn)槲衣牭?/p>

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

那水聲日日夜夜輕拍著湖濱;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

不管我站在車行道或灰暗的人行道，

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

都在我心靈的深處聽見這聲音。

Of course, as I approached the lake, the poem was reverberating in my mind, and at first the imagery seemed to live up to it. The lake is five miles long, fringed with greenery; moody hills rise on the opposite shore. The furrowed water was dotted with little islands, some of them very atmospheric. As it happens, though, Innisfree is not one of the atmospheric ones. It’s tiny, and looks like a bur, a bristling seed pod, almost angrily sprouting trees and brush from its humpy back.

不消說，當(dāng)我一步步地接近吉爾湖時(shí)，這首詩也在我腦海中不斷回蕩，詩中所傳達(dá)的意象，第一次在我的眼前鮮活了起來。吉爾湖全長(zhǎng)5英里，沿岸一篇郁蔥;起伏不定的山丘在對(duì)岸拔地而起。湖有波紋，其間點(diǎn)綴著幾處小島，其中幾座別有一番朦朧的美感。只是茵湖島偏巧不是當(dāng)中很有氛圍的一座。它面積很小，看上去就像一根鉆頭，一只豎立的豆莢，在它隆起的島脊上，樹木與灌木的長(zhǎng)勢(shì)沖天。

Some have speculated that Yeats chose it because of the poetry in the syllables of its name, and the last syllable’s suggestion of freedom. You’d have a hard time building a cabin on it, and it’s too lumpen for a glade.

曾經(jīng)有人猜測(cè)，葉芝之所以選擇這里，全因其島名發(fā)音中的詩意，最后一個(gè)音節(jié)“free”更是象征著“自由”之意。要想在這座島上建一間小屋實(shí)屬難事，而若以林間空地的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)而言，這島又嫌太過破敗。

But to leave it at that — to say that Yeats picked a dud — would be like declaring that you had no music in your soul. The whole landscape echoes the poem. You realize, sitting there, identifying the sound of the lake water with the deep heart’s core, that the Yeats who wrote the poem does not actually intend to retreat from the world and move to this spot. He is reaching for something. He is aware, at 23, of death and the inexorability of change. He is searching, trying to find his balance, his center. He knows he left it somewhere in his past, as we all have done.

但若是在這個(gè)話題上就此打住――承認(rèn)葉芝就是選了一處不毛之地――又好像宣告著，自己的靈魂中沒有樂章流淌一樣。整道風(fēng)景都在應(yīng)和著這首詩歌。你坐在那里，在心靈的深處分辨著湖水的聲音，便會(huì)領(lǐng)悟到，寫下這首詩的葉芝，并不是真的想要搬到這座小島，避世隱居。他是在求索某樣?xùn)|西。他在年僅23歲的年紀(jì)，就意識(shí)到了死亡和世事變遷的無情。他在尋找，試圖找到自己的平衡，自己的中心點(diǎn)。他知道自己將這種平衡遺落在了過去的某處，就像我們所有人一樣。

The poem is a mental exercise, a meditation. You could perform the exercise in a parking garage. It isn’t meant to be enacted.

這首詩就是一次腦力游戲，一次神游。你可以在停車場(chǎng)里玩玩這個(gè)游戲。它并不需要受到任何限制。

Then I realized that my meditation was different from Yeats’s. If he was using his mind to find his center, I was using him — using history, poetry, travel — to get to the same place.

然后我意識(shí)到，我的神游與葉芝的并不相同。如果他是在利用自己的思想定位自己的中心，那么我就是在利用他――利用歷史、詩歌與旅行――來達(dá)到同樣的目的。

And there I was. All of County Sligo is “Yeats Country.” He mined it, traced its contours, translated them to verse: “black wind,” “wet winds,” “noisy clouds,” “thorn-trees,” “the clinging air.” He did it so thoroughly, it’s almost as if the craggy loveliness of the countryside were carved to suit his poetry, rather than the other way around.

而且我確實(shí)做到了。整個(gè)斯萊戈郡都是“葉芝郡”。是他發(fā)掘了它，勾勒出了它的輪廓，將它們一一化為了詩句：“黑色的風(fēng)”，“潮濕的風(fēng)”，“嘈雜的云”，“荊棘樹”，“粘滯的空氣”。他將一切做得如此徹底，簡(jiǎn)直仿若這處鄉(xiāng)郊令人神往的重巒疊嶂本就是為了成就他的詩作而生，而不是他的詩在應(yīng)和這些風(fēng)景。

“Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car,” from Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” describes a misty waterfall to the north that seems like something out of Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit.”

葉芝另一首詩《被偷走的孩子》(The Stolen Child)中有一句“那兒，溪流曲折/從葛蘭卡的山坡上墜瀉”，描繪的是一處流向北方、霧氣繚繞的飛瀑，看上去很有彼得·杰克遜(Peter Jackson)執(zhí)導(dǎo)的電影《霍比特人》(Hobbit)中的世界的感覺。

A few miles away from the lake, the stupendous mountain slab called Ben Bulben rises like a natural acropolis, the home of some ancient race of Irish gods, a height whose purpose can only be to evoke awe. It became another geographic touchstone for Yeats — so much so that in his poem “Under Ben Bulben,” he eerily directs the reader to his own grave, in the nearby cemetery of Drumcliffe. Actually it’s the grave of another Yeats he refers to, an ancestor. But after his own death, in France, his body was transferred there, as if people treated his poem as a last will and testament.

距離吉爾湖幾英里開外的地方，一座體型龐大的厚片狀山丘有如一道天然屏障般矗立于此，它名喚本布爾本山(Ben Bulben)，是愛爾蘭上古時(shí)期某些神祇的家園，那般高聳的身姿唯一的作用必定就是喚起人們的敬畏之心。它成了葉芝的另一處試金石地標(biāo)――在他的詩作《本布爾本山下》(Under Ben Bulben)中，他很詭異地引導(dǎo)著讀者造訪了他自己的墓地，就在此山附近的鼓崖公墓(cemetery of Drumcliffe)內(nèi)。實(shí)際上，此處乃是他提到的另一位葉芝，一位先祖的墓穴所在。但是在他本人于法國(guó)過世后，他的遺體也被轉(zhuǎn)送到了這里，就好像人們將他的這首詩作視為了他的遺愿，他的遺囑。

It’s only a four-mile drive from the shore of Lough Gill to Sligo town, and civilization. Sligo is an ancient and lively enough little center, dominated by its cathedral and ringed with pubs where there’s nonstop rugby and soccer on the telly and you can order not just Irish stew and Guinness, but also chicken curry and New Zealand sauvignon blanc. For a tourist, it’s the practical base. But pleasant as this is, it was the antithesis of why I had come. Yeats’s meditations weren’t urban, and neither was mine.

吉爾湖畔距離斯萊戈郡以及文明世界，僅有四英里的車程。斯萊戈郡是一處歷史悠久、生機(jī)盎然的中心小郡，受本地的大教堂管轄，四周遍布著大小酒館，里面沒有沒完沒了地播著橄欖球和足球節(jié)目的電視，而你可以點(diǎn)的菜品和酒水不僅有愛爾蘭燉菜和健力士黑啤酒(Guinness)，還有咖喱雞和新西蘭白蘇維翁葡萄酒。對(duì)于游客而言，這里就是你的活動(dòng)基地。不過盡管這一切令人心生愉悅，卻與我造訪此地的用意截然相反。葉芝的神游無關(guān)都市，我的也不是。

I am told that there are enormous salmon lurking beneath the waters of Lough Gill, and that otters make the lake their home, and that the lush forest along the banks called Slish Wood, which Yeats in “The Stolen Child” calls Sleuth Wood, harbors rare orchids, ivies and thistles, and that, yes, the evening can be full of the linnet’s wings. I saw none of these remarkable things.

有人告訴我說，在吉爾湖的水面之下，潛伏著大量的鮭魚;也有人說，水獺們也在吉爾湖安了家;還有人說，湖畔沿岸那片名喚斯利什森林(Slish Wood)，但在葉芝的詩作《被偷走的孩子》中被寫成斯留斯森林(Sleuth Wood)的茂密樹叢里，生長(zhǎng)著珍稀的蘭花、常春藤和蒺藜;更有人說，沒錯(cuò)，這里的黃昏時(shí)刻真的會(huì)有紅雀羽翼四處拍打?？蛇@些壯觀的美景，我一樣也沒有見著。

But I saw others.

但是我看到了另一番風(fēng)景。