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.

译文

你是为了有个理由散步而找个目的地，还是为了到达想去的地方而行走？可能有时是前者，有时是后者。诗人实质上是以词语作为一种手段来表达他或她的思想、感觉呢，还是利用诗歌的主题来催生诗歌的语言？可能有时是前者，有时是后者。但我承认第二种诗歌更吸引我 -  或者更确切一点说，我倾向于读第二种诗歌。这并不意味著步行的终点（诗的主题）归根结蒂与漫步的乐趣（诗）无关。你可能不会想要走进某个会被抢劫的小巷，但是目的地只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.

译文

在最近一期的《伦敦书评》（London Review of Books）上读了关于路易丝·格吕克（Louise Glück）《1962-2012年诗歌》一书的书评后，我就开始重新思考一首诗与它的主题的关系。格吕克是美国最著名的诗人之一，她是纽约人，得过几乎所有奖项和荣誉 - 普利策奖（Pulitzer），国家书评人协会奖（National Book Critics Circle），和美国桂冠诗人（Laureate）- 并在所有著名的教授诗词的地方任教；更妙的是，我刚在维基百科中看到，她的父亲是X-Acto刀的创造人之一，我曾向所有希望从我们厚重、混乱的话语中雕刻出精致诗歌的诗人推荐过该工具。但是我从来没有对格吕克的作品感兴趣，这太糟糕了，因为我一向是愿意费点力气寻找新乐趣的。因此，我带著真正的好奇开始阅读这篇评论，希望它能告诉我如何开始喜欢格吕克的诗。

原文

译文

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.

译文

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?

译文

继续往下读评论，当怀特从格吕克的一本诗集到又一本诗集追溯主题的变化，我读到偶尔提及的语言方面的东西 - 关于诗人的“词法智慧，语气技巧，对英美诗歌典范的了解”- 但不过蜻蜓点水，没有用任何具体段落分析来说明这些优点到底在哪里。在某処怀特回溯重申格吕克早期写作中的“厚重，层叠的咬文嚼字”“与随后的朴素风格不同”，并指出她的句子以及诗都随著时间的推移而变长了。据该评论的倒数第二段，我们也了解到（尽管前面提到了更大的词汇量），格吕克的神话化的个人戏剧以最少的道具和高度抽象的背景所呈现：“没有教室、酒吧、超级市场、高速公路、饭店、汽车、（地方的或中央的）政府、医院、电视、收音机或口香糖纸。”我真想知道，到底是谁在使用这么多不同的词汇？真的有那么多用来表达中产阶级的不满的字眼吗？

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?

译文

这些是我真正的问题，而不是的明知故问。如果我看起来像在对怀特或格吕克吹毛求疵，那不是我的意图。我所不满的是：怀特的评论方式正是主流媒体讨论诗歌的典型方式，而不是例外。我只是想告诉诗歌评论家，这世界上至少有一个读者他远为更感兴趣的是某人诗歌借其主题创造出的语言体验， 而不是某人诗歌的主题。这种体验才能让我开始读一个很陌生的诗人的作品。的确，埃德加·爱伦·坡（Edgar Allan Poe）认为一美丽女人的死是“世界上最诗意的主题”，但实际上，并不是主题，而是主题帮助诗人成就的语言作品，使诗歌成其为诗歌。在评论家能说出格吕克到底怎么创新了我们的语言之前，我还不准备翻开她634页的文集。但是我仍然准备被吸引。有没有愿意尝试的批评家？