——中译外——

3、玉梯：

多多的诗（下）8首…………………………………………Gregory B. Lee 译

.                   Watching the Sea 


.                  I’m Reading 


.                  They 


.                  Instant 


.                  In Weather Such As This No Meaning at all Is To Be Had 
From Weather 


.                  The Time I Knew the Bell-sound Was Green 


.                  Locked Direction 


.                  Unlockable Direction 


多多

当代最有名望的抒情诗人，原名粟世征，1951年生于北京，1969年到白洋淀插队，后来调到《农民日报》工作。1972年开始写诗，1982年开始发表作品，1989年出国，旅居荷兰15年，并曾任伦敦大学汉语教师、加拿大纽克大学、荷兰莱顿大学住校作家。多多系朦胧诗主要代表诗人之一，著有诗集《行礼：诗38首》、《里程：多多诗选1973—1988》、《多多诗选》、《多多四十年诗选》等，1986年获得北京大学文化节诗歌奖，2000年曾获首届安高诗歌奖，2004年回国后被聘为海南大学人文传播学院教授，并于2005年获得第三届华语文学传媒大奖2004年度诗人奖。2010年获得纽斯塔特国际文学奖，2010年被邀请到中国人民大学做驻校诗人。

LYRIC POEMS

DUO DUO (b. 1951)


Watching the Sea

Having watched the winter sea, what flows in the veins is surely blood no more

So when making love one should surely gaze on the ocean

Surely you are still waiting


Waiting for the sea breeze to blow on you once more

That breeze will surely arise from the bed

That remembrance is also, surely is


False images of the ocean preserved in the eyes of dead fish

Fishermen are surely engineers and doctors on vacation


June cotton in the earth is surely cotton swabs


Surely you’re all still in the fields seeking vexation


Trees you brush by are surely bruised and swollen


Huge rage surely makes you have a future different from the crowd

Because you are too fond of saying surely


As Indian women will surely reveal their flesh at the waist

The distance to the place you live together is surely not far

The distance to Chinatown is likewise surely not far


Surely there will be a moon shining like a mouthful of spit

Surely there will be people who say that is your health

No longer important, or even more important, surely

Surely it stays in your mind


Just like that arrogant bomb-casing on England’s face

Watching the sea surely uses up your lives


Stars preserved in the eyes have surely become cinders


The ocean’s shadow surely seeped from the seabed to another world

In a night when somebody anyhow must die someone surely must die

Although the ring surely does not wish to be long dead on the flesh

Shooting hormones into a horse’s ass will surely stir it up


So to arrange tidily is then surely to create disorder


When a bicycle chain falls off peddling surely gets faster


The spring wind surely resembles the kidney stone sufferer’s fastened

green belt


The taxi driver’s face surely resembles stewed fruit


When you go home that old chair will surely be young, surely

1989-90 [Gregory B. Lee]

I’m Reading

In the November wheat field I’m reading my father

I’m reading his hair


The colour of his tie, the crease of his trousers

And his hooves, tripped up by shoelaces

Now skating on ice, now playing the violin


The scrotum shrinks, the neck, knowing too well, stretches toward

the sky


I read as far as my father’s being a large-eyed horse

I read as far as his having temporarily left the herd

His coat hanging from a small tree


And his socks, and appearing indistinctly in the herd

Those pallid buttocks, like a meat-stripped

Oyster shell containing a woman’s toilet soap


I read as far as the scent of my father’ s hair oil


The smell of tobacco on his body


And his tuberculosis, illuminating the left lung of a horse


I read as far as a boy’s doubts


Rising out of a patch of golden corn


I read as far as when I was old enough to understand


The red house roofs where grain is dried start to rain


The wheat sowing season’s plough drags four dead horse legs

Horse skin like an opened umbrella, and horse teeth scattered everywhere


I read as far as one face after another is carried off by time


I read as far as my father’s history silently rotting in the ground

Locusts on my father’s body, just continuing to exist alone


Like a -haired barber embracing an aging persimmon tree


I read as far as my father’s returning me again to a horse’s belly

When I just want to turn into a stone bench in the London fog

When my glance passes over the men strolling down the bank-lined

street...

1991 [Gregory B. Lee]

They

Fingers stuck into pants pockets jingling coins and genitals

They’re playing at another way of growing up

Between the striptease artist’s elevated buttocks


There is a tiny church, starting to walk on three horse legs

They use noses to see it


But their fingernails will sprout in the May soil

The yellow earth of May is mound upon mound of flat explosives

Imitated by death, and the reason for death is also

In the very last jolt to the soil of the ironware in heat

They will become a part of the sacrificed wilderness

The silence of the long dead dead before dying

Made all they understood change no more

Their stubborn way of thinking, their doing

Their giving away childhood

Kept death intact


They made reckless use of our experience.

1991 [Gregory B. Lee]

Instant

The instant the sound of the street cellist recollects


In the sky at dusk the last brilliant fleck of sunlight is dying out

Dying over an old railroad station

A grey intestine opens wide in the sky


Outside it there is nothing


Except for a weight, still sitting atop the river’s surface

That was the weight of the church shimmering


Now, it seems there is only silence

After the sound of the cello there is only silence

Trees quietly change colour


Children quietly drink their milk


The sand freighter quietly sails by

We watch, like tiles quietly watching a roof


We sniff the air of when whoever and we were together

It’s already quietly died out

Whoever existed, it was only light displayed no more

Whoever left themselves, it was only an instant

Whoever said that instant was our whole life


And this instant, the sound of Scottish rain

Suddenly pattering on a basin –

1992 [Gregory B. Lee]

In Weather Such As This No Meaning At All Is To Be Had From Weather

Land has no boundary, railroad tracks no direction

Rejected by a dreamed-out dream


Stuffed into a shoebox


Controlled by a sort of lack of means of denouncing

In the time an insect takes to walk by

Those fearful of death increase their dependence on fear

In weather such as this


         You are an interval in the weather

Whatever you stare at you are forgotten by

Inhaling what it exhales, it bores into your smell

Staring upon the change before daybreak


You find the opportunity to turn into grass

Passing by trees grown by people


You forget everything

In weather such as this


You won’t stand by weather’s side

Nor will you stand by faith, only by the side of fabrication

When horses’ hooves no longer fabricate dictionaries


Ask your tongue to fabricate hornets no more


When wheat in fabrication matures, afterwards rots away


Would you please eat up that last plum in the nightingale’s song

Eat it up, then leave the sound of winter on the branch

In weather such as this

Only fabrication advances

1992 [Gregory B. Lee]

The Time I Knew the Bell-sound Was Green

From whichever way the tree faces I accept the sky

In the trees hide olive green words


Like light hiding in a dictionary

Recorded by stars that have passed on

Balanced by flocks of blinded birds, light

And its shadow, death and death to come

Two pears swaying, on the tree


Fruit has the earliest shadow


Like the bell-sound hiding in the trees

On the trees, December wind resists yet fiercer wine

There is a gust of wind, hastening the arrival of discourse

Blocked by the upright post of the granary, blocked off

Dreamt by the marble stone’s bad dream, dreaming of


Being startled by the sound of the wind going down to the tombstone, startled awake


The last leaf flees to the sky

Autumn’s writing bursts from the tree’s death

Just then, the bell-sound illuminates my face

For the last time delivering a golden sky –

1992 [Gregory B. Lee]

Locked Direction

It was the unemployed locksmiths who were the very first to direct your gaze

When your hovering buttocks passed through the shadow of the apple tree

To the glum face of a cook, turning towards the fields

When tongues kneel down, gradually kneel in the same direction

They cannot find the mouth that can say you


They want to say something but cannot manage to

Say: There are still two olives

When kissing you can become robust


And there is another tongue, which can be a wine bottle corkscrew

And there are two clouds on a clear day, embracing on the river bank

There’s the kiss you shared with another right now becoming the

wild strawberries that grow in the borderlands

What’s it matter that tongues are agreed

It’s in the midst of corn that there are riddles! History’s decayed


And marble bites your neck
Two olives, riddles within riddles


Control the magnet in the bird’s head, shaking ancient scenery


Maybe making people’s nothingness vacillate between two pillars of cement

Only then will the dead have souls

On a street of black umbrellas


There’s a heavy bag of oranges about to be picked up


From within a poisonous oyster another sky is about to open up

In the horse’s head, a marble bathtub cracks:

Green time approaches

A frozen chicken in the refrigerator earnestly hopes


Two raisins dependent on the roast leg of lamb earnestly hope

From within unforecastable weather


From within the dripping sound of coaxing a boy to pee

From within the skimmed milk


From within the last operation

Earnestly hope, together with golden sand to blaze once again into the storm

A storm rises from within the sweat glands of smoked meat

and the armpits of violence

When ice floes deploy the posture of pregnant women to stay afloat

Earnestly hope are the only words they leave behind


When your hovering buttocks break open locked direction


Obstruct with naked flesh the passing of the long night

The words they leave are the sperm that pierce through cement –

1994 [Gregory B. Lee]

Unlockable Direction

It was the unemployed locksmiths who were the last to direct your gaze

When your hovering buttocks pierced through the roast chestnut man’s coma

To a cook’s covered-up face, kneeling towards the fields

When tongues kneel down, gradually kneel in different directions

They find the mouth that can say you


But say no more. Say, they abolish it

Hear say: There are still two olives

When kissing you may become robust


Hear say there is a tongue may replace a wine bottle corkscrew


Who says there are two clouds on a clear day, embracing on a river bank

Whose kiss was shared with whom became the wild strawberries that grow

in the borderlands


It doesn’t matter that the corn agreed

It’s in the midst of the shadow that there’s corn. History’s decayed


There are shadows of marble biting your neck


The shadows of two olives, shadow within shadows


Break open the magnet in the bird’s head controlling the salad in the bird’s crop Maybe making people’s nothingness stagnate between two pillars of cement

The dead will never again have souls

On a street once filled with black umbrellas


There’s a heavy bag of oranges that has finally been picked up


Grey skies from within a poisonous oyster flick open a big stage prop

The thought in the horse’s head, as clear as a light bulb filament:

In a performance green time approaches

A frozen chicken in a refrigerator wakes up


Two raisins dependent on a roast leg of lamb wake up


From within already-forecast weather


From the dripping sound of inhibiting a boy’s peeing
From within skimmed sperm


From within an operation there wasn’t strength to complete


Wake up, together with golden sand once again blaze into the storm

A storm that bursts out from within the shower head

When pregnant women deploy the posture of ice floes to stay afloat

Floating is the only word they leave behind


When your hovering buttocks lock up that unlockable direction

Confess with naked candour the passing of the long night

The sperm they leave behind are words built to death by cement.

1994 [Gregory B. Lee]