序言 《诗域的统一》《反恐诗歌》丹尼尔•布瑞克 翻译:苏菲

苏菲

《反恐诗歌》封面

意大利全球诗歌选本《反恐诗歌》 序言
《诗域的统一》

作者：美国诗人、评论家丹尼尔·布瑞克
翻译：苏菲

~*~

为了赞美和平
来自许许多多国家的
诗人走到一起。
（丹尼尔·布瑞克）

〜*〜

2015年，11月13日，我花了几小时，撰写一篇诗歌回忆录，名为“圆顶荷兰榆树”。我的家乡，圣保罗，明尼苏达州，过去，荷兰榆树沿着大道种植，树叶和树枝形成圆顶一样拱起的林荫大道和街道。阳光透过圆顶景象非常优美。20世纪70年代， 一场疾病入侵这座城市，几乎所有的树木被破坏，这些美好的事物便注定消亡了。
我曾计划写成记叙文，专注于我的青春期经历，但诗歌决定了不同的写作道路。我追随诗的方向，而并非我的经历，也没有去写这种疾病。另一个问题接管了这首诗，换句话说，死亡之旅。我自然审美能力的增加，证明了写作过程本身已选择的主题。这个计划外的死亡之旅总结了这首诗的新方向：
那景象不仅仅是美丽
本身，我相信
我的美感源..
这一段观察，继续进入冥想的通道：
美并不会以我们的意志和本性而等候。
[..]在阳光下，我们光洁
明亮地，度过我们的人生。
当太阳赋予我们之时，我们必须获得它的赋予。
这种观察模式，被冥想所追随，是抒情诗的典型特征。当其他问题都可以抛开，它发生在片刻的宁静凝视，因为头脑评估其感官体验，并将其置于一个更大的哲学背景，但那天晚上接下来发生的事情构成了这首诗，打破了这个平静。
电脑屏幕上，一个窗口自动弹开，一条简洁的新闻报道：118人在巴黎的恐怖袭击中丧生。我感觉生命从我身上挤出，我肉身和灵魂瘫软。首先想到的是那些悲痛的家人和朋友们，会因为失去亲人，悲痛欲绝。然后，我想到了美丽的巴黎城，灯光之城，在暴力和恐惧中，一片黑暗。对受害者无助的同情，仅仅这些想法，炙烤着我的意识。接下来的几个小时，
这三种感觉淹没了我的心智。某种情况下，我特有的讥讽性格，外在的平和与内心的平静，可能致使我的抒情诗自我抨击。这个事件，此时，需求不同类型的诗句，诗人的真诚和同情。
但我感到无助，无法集中自己的情绪，更别说思想。徒劳感困扰着我，因为一位诗人，由于外部事件而变得沉默，不能履行他或她诗意的使命给人类共同关心的事情，发声。
我转向互联网，发现在Poem Hunter 网，一些我很熟悉的诗人，已经用其它诗歌形式，就这次恐怖事件作出了回应。在这孤零零的房间，这样寂静的夜里，读着他们，谴责暴力、促进和平艺术的悲伤字词，我很是欣慰。
读着他们的诗歌，把我从情感麻痹中拉出，黎明前，我也写了一首诗，作出回应。
接下来的几天里，新闻报道给了我们更多可怕的事件细节、专家评论、时事评述、更多诗人奉献了他们的诗作。法布里奇奥·佛斯尼和我已经，就发表在Poem Hunter网的诗歌，合作编选了六本电子书诗歌集。我们决定与另一位共同主编帕梅拉·斯尼柯若普一起，编选一部新的电子书诗歌集，要求诗歌要反对恐怖主义。当我们邀请诗人加盟后，立刻，几乎有数十位来自许多不同国家的受访者回应。诗人团结起来履行他们诗意的使命：借助他们的声音，拥护人文价值观。
在这个前言里，我已经略微提及，来自熟悉的抒情诗中的另类诗，诗中诗人谈及诗人个性特征问题。这样的另类诗并非起源于诗人的个体自觉意识，而是世界上的事件。约翰·济慈在生命的尽头，就面对这种另类诗歌的缺乏。在他未完稿的史诗，“海伯利安的陨落”，开幕篇的修订本里，他描述自己遇见一个全新的女神缪斯，名为莫内塔，她严词斥责他未能写出另类的诗歌。莫内塔对谦卑的诗人说：
没有人能够篡夺[诗意的成就] 高地
但，那些，在世上遭受着灾难的人们
是不幸的，他们不会让这个高地安宁。
济慈与1819年，写下这几行，但他未能活着写出他要表达的诗，然而，我们21世纪初的诗人，当然可以。在未能完成这一使命之前，我们不应该松懈。
这种诗被称为“政治诗”，但政治的词根，是一个争论不休的词汇，带有太多的内涵，我们可能并没有打算去研究它。这种诗被称为 “良心诗”，但坚持给诗定位，在于诗人的个体意识。美国当代女诗人卡洛琳·佛姬杜撰了一个更具包容性的词，来自波兰诗人，切斯瓦夫·米沃什的“诗之见证”， 她转逆了一个词条短语，并为我们提供了“见证之诗”。她的术语引起了我们对 “什么诗”的注意，而非“什么人”的注意：诗人从外部世界，看到内部世界，在那里找到主题，诸如“灾难的世界”唤起诗人的意识作出响应，并参与其中。
卡洛琳·佛姬本人，写出令人吃惊的“见证之诗”。在“起义笔记”里，她回忆起一位年长的亲人告诉她关于20世纪30年代难民的困境：
安娜说，我们都被发配：波兰人、罗马尼亚人、吉普赛人。
于是，她用手指在喉咙上画十字。
安娜·阿赫玛托娃伟大的诗篇，“安魂曲1935—1940”，纪念遭受斯大林主义压迫的受害者。在她的散文序言中，她告诉我们她的动机，在这个恐惧事件中的绝望与希望：
一个女人，嘴唇冻得发紫，从奄奄一息的人群中惊醒..
“这个你能描述吗？”
我说：“我能”
然后，笑容稍纵即逝，正如她脸上以往的笑容。
米格尔·埃尔南德斯，在西班牙内战期间，被佛朗哥军队监禁，并判处死刑，在监狱里，写了一些令人绝望的诗歌，表达他渴望与妻子和儿子团聚：
我在你的生命里漱口。
我听到空间，和无穷发出隆隆声，似乎向我倾泻而来。
我该回去轻吻你，
我必须回去..
他没能回去，法西斯谋杀了他的肉身，并不是他的遗产，作为“见证之诗人”。
在诗的末尾，他给亲人承诺：
三个字，
你继承了三起火灾：
生，死，爱。它们在那里驻留，写在你的唇上。
巴勒斯坦诗人，拉希德·侯赛因，富有表现力地叙述了，共同生活在暴力的气氛里：
我打算把生活转变成战争的一切可能性，
这样我爱情的种子便可以长大，
我打算给上帝打一百万次电话。
我打算继续唱歌，越来越多，
我打算继续长大。
尽管多年监禁的政治犯，阿卜杜拉·拉拉比，肯定他纯粹的，人的幸福：
多年以来..
脑海里，这么多流星雨
这喷泉温柔的低语
并未减弱，
囚犯，陌生的幸福。
诗人抒情的声音，并没有减弱，它被经历的苦难和见证唤醒了。
回应“世界的灾难”并没有牺牲抒情性。这就是为什么我把这篇前言命名为“诗域的统一”

丹尼尔·布瑞克，圣保罗·保罗，2015年12月


（苏菲散文汉译英 2016-01-07   中国 广州）

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The Unified Field of Poetry, FOREWORD, to
The Global Poetry Anthology ‘POETRY AGAINST TERROR’ e-book
Written by Daniel J. Brick
Translated by Sophy Chen

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From many countries
The poets come together
To celebrate peace.
(Daniel J. Brick)

〜*〜

On November 13, 2015, I spent several hours composing a Poem of Memory, called ‘A Dome of Dutch Elms’. In my hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, Dutch Elm trees had been planted along boulevards, and they formed a dome of leaves and branches arching over boulevards and streets. Sunlight filtering through that dome was a lovely sight. The loveliness was doomed when a disease invaded the city in the 1970s and destroyed virtually all of the trees.
I had planned to write that narrative but the poem decided on a different course, focusing on my adolescent experience. I followed the poem’s direction instead of mine, and did not deal with the disease. Another issue took over the poem, namely, rites of passage. My developing appreciation of natural beauty proved to be the theme the very process of writing had chosen. This unplanned passage summed up the new direction of the poem:
That sight was not only beautiful
in itself, but I believe the source
of my sense of beauty..
This passage of observation segues into a passage of meditation:
Beauty does not wait upon our wills or nature.
[..] We who live out lives, burnished
and bright, under the light of the sun
must take what is offered, when it is offered.
Such a pattern of observation followed by meditation is characteristic of a kind of lyric poetry. It occurs in a moment of calm regard, when other issues can be set aside, as the mind assesses its sensory experiences and places them into a larger philosophical context, but what happened next on that night of composing this poem shattered that calm.
A window opened automatically on my computer screen with the terse news report: 118 killed in terrorist attack in Paris. I felt the life squeezed out of me, I went limp in body and soul. My first thought was of the grief family and friends would be feeling over the loss of their loved ones. Then I thought of the beautiful city of Paris, the City of Lights, darkened by violence and fear. It was only after these thoughts that a helpless compassion for the victims seared my consciousness. These three sensations swamped my mind for the next several hours. At some point the irony of my privileged situation of external peace and internal calm that made my lyric poem possible assailed me. This event, this time demanded a different kind of poem from sincere and caring poets. But I was feeling helpless, unable to focus my emotions, much less my thoughts. This sense of futility bothered me, because a poet rendered silent by external events is not fulfilling his or her poetic mission, which is to give voice to common human concerns.
I turned to the internet and found that poets at Poem Hunter, some of whom were familiar to me, were already responding to this terrible event with that other kind of poem. It was heartening in the isolation of my apartment, in the silence of the night, to read their words expressing grief, condemning violence, promoting the arts of peace.
Reading their poems pulled me out of my paralysis of emotion, and before dawn, I too had written a poem in response.
Over the next few days, as news reports gave us more horrendous details and pundits commented on and assessed the facts, more poets offered their poems. Fabrizio Frosini and I have co-edited six eBooks of poems by poets who post their poems at Poem Hunter. Along with another co-editor, Pamela Sinicrope, we decided a new eBook of poems against terrorism was required. When we invited poets to join us, there were almost immediately tens and tens of respondents from many different countries. The poets had rallied to fulfill their poetic mission: to lend their voices in support of humane values.
I have alluded, in this Introduction, to a different kind of poem from the familiar lyric poem in which a poet speaks about issues of a personal nature. This other kind of poem does not derive from the poet’s individual consciousness, but from events in the world. John Keats confronted the need for this other kind of poem at the end of his life. In the revision of the opening canto of his unfinished epic, The Fall Of Hyperion, he describes himself meeting a new Muse named Moneta, who sternly chides him for failing to write this other kind of poetry. Moneta says to the humbled poet:
None can usurp this height [of poetic achievement]
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
Keats wrote those lines in, but did not live to write the poetry they embody, but we poets of the early 21st century certainly can. And we should not rest until we have fulfilled that mission.
This kind of poem has been called ‘The Political Poem’, but the root word politics is a vexed word with too many connotations we may not intend. It has been called ‘The Poem of Conscience’, but that persists in locating the poem in a poet’s individual consciousness. A more inclusive term was coined by the American poet, Carolyn Forche. She reversed the terms of a phrase by the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Witness of Poetry’, and offered us ‘The Poetry of Witness’. Her term directs our attention to the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’ of the poem: the poet is looking outward, into the world, and finds his subject there, as ‘the miseries of the world’ summon him to become aware, to respond, to participate.
Carolyn Forche herself has written striking Poems of Witness. In ‘The Notebook Of Uprising’, she recalled what one of her aged relatives told her about the plight of refugees in the 1930s:
Anna said we were all to be sent: Poles, Romanians, Gypsies.
So she drew her finger across her throat.
Anna Ahkmatova’s great poem, ‘Requiem 1935-1940’, remembers the victims of Stalinist oppression. In her prose preface, she tells us about her motivation in a chilling incident of despair and hope:
A woman, with lips blue from the cold, started out of the torpor common to us all..
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can"
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
Miguel Hernandez, imprisoned by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and condemned to death, wrote desperate poems in prison expressing his longing to be reunited with his wife and son:
I sink my mouth in your life.
I hear the booming of space, and infinity seems to have poured itself over me.
I shall return to kiss you,
I must return..
He did not return, the fascists murdered his body but not his heritage as a Poet of
Witness. At the very end of his poem, he promises his loved ones:
Three words,
three fires have you inherited:
life, death, love. There they abide, inscribed on your lips.
The Palestinian poet, Rashid Husayn, speaks eloquently of the common life in an atmosphere of violence:

I will transform my life into all likelihoods of war,
So that the seed of love within me may grow,
and I will phone God a million times.
I will go on singing, more and more,
I will go on growing.
Despite years of imprisonment as a political prisoner, Abdellatif Laabi affirmed his purely human happiness:
So many years..
So many shooting stars inside my head
the fountain of tenderness murmurs
insistently
the strange happiness of the prisoner.
The lyric voice of the poet is not diminished but aroused by sufferings endured and witnessed. There is no sacrifice of lyricism in responding to ‘the miseries of the world’. That is why I titled this Introduction The Unified Field of Poetry.

Daniel J. Brick, S. Paul, December 2015

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