Two homeless men lay down on the bench
beneath the boxwood hedge - excellent!
The dark creatures hiding behind the garbage container
are after all children - excellent!
Somebody sprayed out Walter Benjamin's name
from the plaque - excellent!
The black head that moved on the bench
in Walter Benjamin's gardens is not
after all Walter Benjamin - excellent!
They don't allow me to read on the tram, especially you, with your hair swinging
left-right.
You’re tossing it onto the page I am reading, splaaash, all the words vanish
and I have to look up at you.
What would Jane Hirshfield say – why did I stop reading
in the middle of her poem To Judgment: An Assay?
You change my life with your hair
“as eating an artichoke changes the taste/ of whatever is eaten after”, says Jane.
Hair is of a rather odd nature, seemingly dead: you can cut it, you can burn it.
Yet, still grows.
And then my lively fingers comb it, get entangled in it, their life gets entangled,
someone else’s life does, they change their taste.
Suppose I suddenly wish to see your face as you’re tossing your hair.
At its best I can only hope to see
the flash of your hands, that will come out of the blue
to raise your hair, comb it with the fingers,
and then let it mercilessly splash
across the pages of my book,
like foamy water from the bucket thrown out into the street at the end of the shift
at the barber’s.
I know, I will never be able to approach the birds, not even think of
talking with them. Birds are transitive beings between a cube and a
pyramid. The cube contains the password for sweetness, the pyramid an
energy field of everlasting youth. Birds have hollow bones; the air
relaxes inside them as they fly. Inside them is my dream, which I like to
believe is true – it’s my short flight from the top of the hill into the
wagon full of hay. It was the afternoon in July, thousands of small flies
were in the air. Only birds can have birdies, which is the essence of all
forms of endearment. The envy of crickets is a burden to them, but
they endure. It goes easily with the silent fish; they are exactly the same
what birds are, but in the inverted world of water. That’s why they help
them sing rapturously, which is almost a Christian mission. Some people
did know how to talk with them, take St. Francis – the birds used to
peck words from his mouth, and he their warbling, respectively.
Messiaen was just a good student of him who recorded his teacher’s
conversations with approximate exactness. Tell me what happiness is, he
asked and they answered him. What are the cables it uses to travel far
and wide? Does it use wireless connection? Who should I ask about it?
And how much does it cost? But you cannot talk with the birds any
more. Not even like Chinese artist Zhang Huan did – he spread honey
all over his naked body, bathed it in birdseed, sat in the large birdcage
and let the doves peck the seeds on his body. Do we really have to
make them talk with us that way? What? There they are, beneath the
window, pecking. All day long. Once in a while they fly off on some
branch, and then land on the ground again. And peck again. They don’t
grow bigger, don’t get fat, their voices do not change, whether they were
full or starving. They are pecking, but there is nothing to peck. In
winter, blackbirds try to assure the soil that it is still rich, that it has not
gone poor as its grass has withered and it turned cold and seems to be
dying. You are attractive, the birds shout to her and resume pecking,
making little holes to let the warmth come out. Can we trust these
creatures in black? Their hunger is a pledge of truth. Nevertheless, I am
glad that birds and I will never be able to converse. I am talking, but I
haven’t got anything to say, haven’t got anyone to talk to. Hence the
attraction between us that no nocturnal conversation can replace.
Allegedly, God crouches by each newborn child whispering all sorts of tales into his ear, inducing him to scream. The child’s silence stands for the defeat of God. However, all is bound to end up in the denial of silence. John Cage set a limit to 4’ 33’’; he knew well enough that if we insisted on the silence without limited duration, the boundaries of our world would collapse. Can noise be measured? Probably, some measuring instruments are reliable. Or at least people say so. Take the dead body of the actress Adrienne Shelly. Let’s measure it without any shame and show it in the open casket on the day of the funeral. From her New York office she descended to the apartment below to argue about building noise made by a 19-year-old immigrant construction worker. He does not hesitate a second to strangle her. God had tempted him for nineteen years and won. It was a victory that turned out to be a defeat. The absence of love or God is silence. What is the absence of silence? God can always pose a question that cannot be answered. There is not a single moment without the sound of blood pumping through my veins, without the sound of tiny hairs quivering in my nostrils. Sometimes I cannot get to sleep because I hear my body organs quietly working in the background – honestly, is there anything more dreadful than being constantly aware of the presence of your own body? The body feverishly turning over and over in bed, the body exhaling bitter breath which then hits the pillow, rebounds and finds its way into the ear. My ear is a storehouse that stocks the moaning of a woman making love: it keeps returning to me long after it has vanished. It is a storehouse in whose dark corner the crying of a little girl soars up. In that storehouse a power drill is turned on once in a while to mend the world now completely deranged. Soon a car alarm joins, wailing endlessly. Is it also on the same mission of mending the world? Is it to say that if you do not have a resonant body, you actually do not exist? In the far corner of my aural storehouse a tiny bird warbles, always the same one, always at the same time. His crystal solitary warbling questions the meaning of the crystal night. The bird that I cannot recognize by night comes back by day. If I do not find one in my pocket, some other bird will be hopping before my front-door; shivering, happy for finding a refuge from the heavy rain. Don’t you recognize me, he tells me and starts pecking my palm, refuses to say more, and the next moment he is only a beggar handing me a creased yellowed paper, his eyes betray fatigue and blindness, even some terminal disease. At least take it and read it, he says and as I close the door the paper falls down on the floor, the light goes out. At 4.48 a.m. I slowly descend from my flat to object to the noise made by idle teenagers engaged in endless verbal ramifications in front of my building. They have been tempted for nineteen years now. Of course I know what comes next. It takes a few seconds before I lie there on the ground, beaten black and blue, hardly moving my limbs. Why should I be ashamed of it – I will show my scars, they will not hum only because of me. Let them wail as pressure-cooker, as a long forsaken train whistle. My body has experienced yet another humiliating defeat of words. Yet, I have not lost my faith in them.
after a conversation with András Gerevich in Split 2016 Bečkerek would like to be a metaphor, in an age that has abandoned metaphor, but it's too cheap, and transparent, to be a metaphor, to finish a story or a journey before it even started, without fight no one lives, there is no survival if you do not fight, if you do not foam at the mouth like a wounded boar blankly watching a buck triumphantly disappearing in the deep forest , and when there is no metaphor there is no Becskerek, why are we arguing about the property without its owner? That journey to Becskerek, do you remember it, András, huh? Tell me. You respond in Hungarian, I will ask you in Croatian. You smile in Croatian, I will smile in Hungarian. Becskerek is a new Barcelona in which we had fraudulently dragged poor Catalans. Those eternally land-deprived people. In Becskerek Buffalo Bill exploits shabby Indians. Indigenos. Their white teeth drive locals crazy. In Becskerek we are closest to the obscure idea of Central Europe, in the very place where it disappeared, perhaps on a weather map, perhaps where dead chimneys rise, as well as where the reels with black and white movies with some thin story stop rolling, where energy is free to roam the plains, and where untied shoelaces are considered as a contribution to human freedom, where Handke and Kundera have polenta for breakfast, where candies replace the communist manifesto, and the music school hidden in the alley of chestnuts replaces a synagogue, where dust turns into a fine philosophy, and quinces roll into the meek child's history ... Becskerek is not Split, András, its stones crumble, sinking into the mud. If I really care about the nearest place, which calls for no shortcut, no lollipop to deceive the sense of taste, then I go,I go to Becskerek. 作者: 朱峰 时间: 2018-8-17 16:01
译文流畅自然！《关于鸟》很有意思。5选3本周推荐。作者: 阿泳 时间: 2018-8-17 19:21
感谢朱峰老师 作者: 朱峰 时间: 2018-8-18 15:53
以下建议请参考：
第1首
The dark creatures hiding behind the garbage container
are after all children - excellent!
藏在垃圾箱后面的黑色怪兽
等着所有的孩子们——好极了！
(What are you after? 你想要什么？）
第2首
At its best I can only hope to see
the flash of your hands, that will come out of the blue
to raise your hair, comb it with the fingers,
最好的设想不过是
我盼望看见你的双手，出人意料地闪现
抬起你的秀发，用手指梳理，
（out of the blue 意思是 unexpectedly）
感谢建议和指导：
第一首：
第一处之前和另外的朋友作过类似的讨论。诗中共有两处"after all"。早先提出的意见第一处和您所提一致，第二处：The black head that moved on the bench / in Walter Benjamin's gardens is not / after all Walter Benjamin - excellent! 也译作“黑脑壳原来追的不是沃尔特本杰明”。我提出意见认为不妥。因为这里“all”的意义没有得到安置。所以我维持了原译稿中两处“after all”都采用了“终究”的意思。曾经去信征询原诗作者的意见但未获答复。因为是由英文转译，所以可能是在克罗地亚语译英文过程中造成了一些歧义。从意义上说，你和我另外的朋友的意见在第一处会使诗更有意义。
我准备把第一处修改，按你们意见。
第二首：
完全同意。毕竟没有在英语语境中长期生活，有些细节出就露怯了。谢谢！ 作者: 阿泳 时间: 2018-8-18 17:08
米罗斯拉夫 柯林, 克罗地亚诗人。生于1965年。
1989年获得30岁以下青年诗人Goran诗集奖。
著有六部诗集、一部小说。小说2001年获克罗地亚Jutarnji最佳小说奖。
作品被译介六种语言。
Two homeless men lay down on the bench
beneath the boxwood hedge - excellent!
The dark creatures hiding behind the garbage container
are after all children - excellent!
Somebody sprayed out Walter Benjamin's name
from the plaque - excellent!
The black head that moved on the bench
in Walter Benjamin's gardens is not
after all Walter Benjamin - excellent!
They don't allow me to read on the tram, especially you, with your hair swinging
left-right.
You’re tossing it onto the page I am reading, splaaash, all the words vanish
and I have to look up at you.
What would Jane Hirshfield say – why did I stop reading
in the middle of her poem To Judgment: An Assay?
You change my life with your hair
“as eating an artichoke changes the taste/ of whatever is eaten after”, says Jane.
Hair is of a rather odd nature, seemingly dead: you can cut it, you can burn it.
Yet, still grows.
And then my lively fingers comb it, get entangled in it, their life gets entangled,
someone else’s life does, they change their taste.
Suppose I suddenly wish to see your face as you’re tossing your hair.
At its best I can only hope to see
the flash of your hands, that will come out of the blue
to raise your hair, comb it with the fingers,
and then let it mercilessly splash
across the pages of my book,
like foamy water from the bucket thrown out into the street at the end of the shift
at the barber’s.
I know, I will never be able to approach the birds, not even think of
talking with them. Birds are transitive beings between a cube and a
pyramid. The cube contains the password for sweetness, the pyramid an
energy field of everlasting youth. Birds have hollow bones; the air
relaxes inside them as they fly. Inside them is my dream, which I like to
believe is true – it’s my short flight from the top of the hill into the
wagon full of hay. It was the afternoon in July, thousands of small flies
were in the air. Only birds can have birdies, which is the essence of all
forms of endearment. The envy of crickets is a burden to them, but
they endure. It goes easily with the silent fish; they are exactly the same
what birds are, but in the inverted world of water. That’s why they help
them sing rapturously, which is almost a Christian mission. Some people
did know how to talk with them, take St. Francis – the birds used to
peck words from his mouth, and he their warbling, respectively.
Messiaen was just a good student of him who recorded his teacher’s
conversations with approximate exactness. Tell me what happiness is, he
asked and they answered him. What are the cables it uses to travel far
and wide? Does it use wireless connection? Who should I ask about it?
And how much does it cost? But you cannot talk with the birds any
more. Not even like Chinese artist Zhang Huan did – he spread honey
all over his naked body, bathed it in birdseed, sat in the large birdcage
and let the doves peck the seeds on his body. Do we really have to
make them talk with us that way? What? There they are, beneath the
window, pecking. All day long. Once in a while they fly off on some
branch, and then land on the ground again. And peck again. They don’t
grow bigger, don’t get fat, their voices do not change, whether they were
full or starving. They are pecking, but there is nothing to peck. In
winter, blackbirds try to assure the soil that it is still rich, that it has not
gone poor as its grass has withered and it turned cold and seems to be
dying. You are attractive, the birds shout to her and resume pecking,
making little holes to let the warmth come out. Can we trust these
creatures in black? Their hunger is a pledge of truth. Nevertheless, I am
glad that birds and I will never be able to converse. I am talking, but I
haven’t got anything to say, haven’t got anyone to talk to. Hence the
attraction between us that no nocturnal conversation can replace.
Allegedly, God crouches by each newborn child whispering all sorts of tales into his ear, inducing him to scream. The child’s silence stands for the defeat of God. However, all is bound to end up in the denial of silence. John Cage set a limit to 4’ 33’’; he knew well enough that if we insisted on the silence without limited duration, the boundaries of our world would collapse. Can noise be measured? Probably, some measuring instruments are reliable. Or at least people say so. Take the dead body of the actress Adrienne Shelly. Let’s measure it without any shame and show it in the open casket on the day of the funeral. From her New York office she descended to the apartment below to argue about building noise made by a 19-year-old immigrant construction worker. He does not hesitate a second to strangle her. God had tempted him for nineteen years and won. It was a victory that turned out to be a defeat. The absence of love or God is silence. What is the absence of silence? God can always pose a question that cannot be answered. There is not a single moment without the sound of blood pumping through my veins, without the sound of tiny hairs quivering in my nostrils. Sometimes I cannot get to sleep because I hear my body organs quietly working in the background – honestly, is there anything more dreadful than being constantly aware of the presence of your own body? The body feverishly turning over and over in bed, the body exhaling bitter breath which then hits the pillow, rebounds and finds its way into the ear. My ear is a storehouse that stocks the moaning of a woman making love: it keeps returning to me long after it has vanished. It is a storehouse in whose dark corner the crying of a little girl soars up. In that storehouse a power drill is turned on once in a while to mend the world now completely deranged. Soon a car alarm joins, wailing endlessly. Is it also on the same mission of mending the world? Is it to say that if you do not have a resonant body, you actually do not exist? In the far corner of my aural storehouse a tiny bird warbles, always the same one, always at the same time. His crystal solitary warbling questions the meaning of the crystal night. The bird that I cannot recognize by night comes back by day. If I do not find one in my pocket, some other bird will be hopping before my front-door; shivering, happy for finding a refuge from the heavy rain. Don’t you recognize me, he tells me and starts pecking my palm, refuses to say more, and the next moment he is only a beggar handing me a creased yellowed paper, his eyes betray fatigue and blindness, even some terminal disease. At least take it and read it, he says and as I close the door the paper falls down on the floor, the light goes out. At 4.48 a.m. I slowly descend from my flat to object to the noise made by idle teenagers engaged in endless verbal ramifications in front of my building. They have been tempted for nineteen years now. Of course I know what comes next. It takes a few seconds before I lie there on the ground, beaten black and blue, hardly moving my limbs. Why should I be ashamed of it – I will show my scars, they will not hum only because of me. Let them wail as pressure-cooker, as a long forsaken train whistle. My body has experienced yet another humiliating defeat of words. Yet, I have not lost my faith in them.
after a conversation with András Gerevich in Split 2016 Bečkerek would like to be a metaphor, in an age that has abandoned metaphor, but it's too cheap, and transparent, to be a metaphor, to finish a story or a journey before it even started, without fight no one lives, there is no survival if you do not fight, if you do not foam at the mouth like a wounded boar blankly watching a buck triumphantly disappearing in the deep forest , and when there is no metaphor there is no Becskerek, why are we arguing about the property without its owner? That journey to Becskerek, do you remember it, András, huh? Tell me. You respond in Hungarian, I will ask you in Croatian. You smile in Croatian, I will smile in Hungarian. Becskerek is a new Barcelona in which we had fraudulently dragged poor Catalans. Those eternally land-deprived people. In Becskerek Buffalo Bill exploits shabby Indians. Indigenos. Their white teeth drive locals crazy. In Becskerek we are closest to the obscure idea of Central Europe, in the very place where it disappeared, perhaps on a weather map, perhaps where dead chimneys rise, as well as where the reels with black and white movies with some thin story stop rolling, where energy is free to roam the plains, and where untied shoelaces are considered as a contribution to human freedom, where Handke and Kundera have polenta for breakfast, where candies replace the communist manifesto, and the music school hidden in the alley of chestnuts replaces a synagogue, where dust turns into a fine philosophy, and quinces roll into the meek child's history ... Becskerek is not Split, András, its stones crumble, sinking into the mud. If I really care about the nearest place, which calls for no shortcut, no lollipop to deceive the sense of taste, then I go,I go to Becskerek.作者: 阿泳 时间: 2018-8-18 17:10
还是只改了第二首诗。搁置第一首。因为认为毕竟在诗中两个“after all”应该是有关联的。
或许之后会由原诗作者来澄清较好。作者: 朱峰 时间: 2018-8-18 19:33
