英文受奖辞由Brian Holton 翻译：
Translated by Brian Holton August 2018
A SEA BUTTERFLY
Yang Lian
Acceptance Speech
Janus Pannonius International Prize for Poetry
Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory is both heavy and light.
Heavy, in that it is based on the experience of a first-generation exile in the twentieth century, and includes the bullet that shot his father down on the streets of Berlin; light, because Nabokov was also a lepidopterist, and on every page is the fluttering of gorgeous butterflies, the loveliest of which is his limpid and graceful literary style.
oetry dances like a butterfly in flight above heavy life, preserving the soul’s pride.
Hungary and China, though situated at either end of the immensity of Russia, seem to be connected by the migration of butterflies, which makes me feel they are not actually so far apart. I hear in the syllable hun the two-thousand-year-old thunder of horses’ hooves. Yet the contemporary reality we experience together, more like a stormy stretch of sea, is dizzying in the speed of its unpredictable change and the violence of its shock.
In 1989 an officer in the former East German army, muttering No Tiananmen at my hand, opened the gate of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, which symbolized the end of the Cold War era. But not long after that, newly-built Berlin walls were slamming gates shut everywhere in the post-Cold War world, symbolizing the beginning of the Era of Globalization. So what does Globalization mean? The Apple iPhone, bringing together the blood and sweat of Chinese peasants, Taiwanese bosses, and vast global profits, has overnight rendered ineffectual the slogans of the Cold War ideological divide and the black and white slogans of social groups. How logical today’s digital ‘reality’ is: values in confusion - spiritual vacuum – selfishness plus cynicism. The visible Orwellian Big Brother has given way to an invisible Big Brother whose hand reaches into each person’s material desires, manipulating us wherever we are. In the grand unified totality of Profit, the darkness is perfect and complete.
The last line of my poem 1989 is This is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year: this cryptic line baffled many friends at the time, but with reality as witness, is it still incomprehensible?
The question is this: is the butterfly of poetry still here? On the great directionless ocean, where can she fly?
Luckily, poetry is no stranger to adversity. Quite the opposite, for from its birth it has endlessly drawn on the inspiration of nightmares. I am thinking of Qu Yuan two thousand three hundred years ago, the first ever name in the history of poetry in Chinese, who drowned himself in despair while in exile, and like a prophecy, expressed the destiny of poets down all the generations to come. But, at the same time, his masterpiece Heavenly Questions starts with the lines
Who passed down the story
of the far-off ancient beginnings of things?
How can we be sure what it was like
before the sky above and the earth below had taken shape?
He asks almost two hundred questions piled on upon the other, yet refuses to give answers, thereby establishing at one stroke the image of poets through all time as Questioners.
The great storm of the world today is constituted of many deep questions and great tests, not just for nations and societies, but even more for each and every person: socialism, capitalism, dictatorship, democracy, East, West… The clichés of bygone groups can no longer be relied on, for, facing the profoundest spiritual dilemma, has the domain of poetry contracted, or expanded? Is the world of individuality closing down, or opening up? Can we recognise the unchanging in the depths of dizzying changes? Unchanging situations, destinies, as well as ways of reacting – the poet’s doubled awareness of self-position.
The falling evening sets off a little shining leap (from my Butterfly-Berlin). The greater the catastrophe, the clearer the prototypical beauty of the butterfly.
Today is the age of Individual Poetics. Profundity is simultaneously evaluating the individuality of both the person and the poem. Poetry lies low on the seabed, darkly and dispassionately scrutinizing a world of dangerous storms. Please don't misunderstand: this isn't ‘resistance’, for poetry has no need to ‘resist’ anything. It is poetry’s very nature, for, born with self-generated freedom of thought and speech, poetry refuses the shackles of the Berlin Wall under any name.
Today’s poetry rediscovers in language human civilization – even reinvents it. The image of the Sea Butterfly in my Butterfly-Berlin upholds a poetic logic, and breaks through all the logic of power, commerce or practicality. In my poem cycle Where The Sea Stands Still, the line this shore is where we see ourselves set sail asserts by induction, in the penetrating vision of poetry, and brings all outer wandering into the inner journey of one person (every person). At the same time, a poem constructs a shape in language and the shape of life. The primordial metaphor of writing, the more it learns the impossibility of a beautiful line-ending, the more it must be willing to start again from the impossible.
That little shining leap is never fragile, and it lights up an endless gloomy ocean.
Perhaps poetry has always meant definitive and unconditional exile. In a world where the Other has become a cliché, the poet has chosen this position, to be an active, self-aware, poetic Other. We must hold fast to our choices.
PEN is a body which links pens with people. I thank Hungarian PEN for this prize, which reaffirms my obligations to poetry and to life. It crosses geography and culture, and confirms the truth of the maxim, Poetry is our one and only mother tongue.
The butterfly is delicate yet powerful, and has every right to be proud.
oetry dances like a butterfly in flight above heavy life, preserving the soul’s pride.
祝福老师双节快乐
