一曲文學探戈 科爾姆託賓筆下的畢肖普

Captivating books are often born when one writer is obsessed with another. Nicholson Baker’s “U and I” (about John Updike) and Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage” (about D. H. Lawrence, sort of) spring to mind, but those are wild, hilarious books, alMost like antic pranks. “On Elizabeth Bishop,” the novelist and critic Colm Toibin’s compact new study of the poet’s work, has little in common with them, but it succeeds as a different kind of literary tango. It hums instead of crows. Its pull on the reader is almost tidal.

一個作家迷戀另一個作家的時候，特別容易寫出引人入勝的作品。人們很容易想起尼克爾森·貝克(Nicholson Baker)寫約翰·厄普代克(John Updike)的《U和我》(U and I)，傑夫·戴爾(Geoff Dyer)關於D·H·勞倫斯(D. H. Lawrence)的《出於純粹的憤怒》(Out of Sheer Rage)，不過它們都是瘋狂滑稽的書，有點像小丑的惡作劇。然而小說家、評論家科爾姆·託賓(Colm Toibin)的《關於伊麗莎白·畢肖普》(On Elizabeth Bishop)是對詩人畢肖普的最新研究，內容充實，和上述這些書幾乎沒有共同之處，如同另一曲文學探戈。它並非高聲歡呼，而是輕聲低吟，如同潮汐般席捲着讀者。

The same could be said of Bishop’s poetry. Hers was a virtuosity of shrewdness and precision. Nothing came quickly or easily. She saw the confessional poetry that bloomed into vogue in the middle of the 20th century as a dubious pursuit, for the most part. If someone like Anne Sexton had a tendency to throw everything in, a lot of it erotic and seemingly unfiltered, Bishop tacked in the opposite direction, trusting in the hushed power of what had been left out. She was allergic to the arbitrary and the exorbitant. For her, more pleasure could be found in concealment.

畢肖普的詩歌也具有同樣的特色。她是機敏與精確的大師。在她的詩歌中，一切都徐緩莊重。她認爲20世紀中期風行一時的自白派詩歌大部分非常可疑。安妮·塞克斯頓(Anne Sexton)這類詩人傾向於把什麼都寫進詩裏，其中還有不少情色內容，似乎未經過濾，畢肖普卻走向了相反的方向，相信弦外之音那種靜謐的力量。她對專制與拔高尤爲敏感。對於她來說，藏匿纔是更大的快樂。

“In Bishop’s work, much was implied by what seemed to be mere description,” Mr. Toibin writes. “Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self. The self in Bishop’s poems was too fragile to be violated by much mentioning.”

“畢肖普用很少的描述暗示出大量的言外之意，”託賓寫道，“描寫是一種避免自我描寫的絕望方式；用一種置身自身之外的方式去審視世界。畢肖普詩歌中的自我形象太過脆弱，過多的提及都像是一種侵犯。”

Her self, after all, had endured its share of pain. Destabilization defined her childhood. Her father died when she was an infant. Her mother, mentally ill, was institutionalized when Bishop was 5, and Bishop, after being spirited away to live with relatives in Massachusetts, never saw her again.

畢竟，她本人亦曾像詩歌中的形象那樣忍受痛苦。她的童年充滿動盪，當她尚在襁褓之中時，父親便已亡故。她的母親患有精神疾病，在她5歲時被送入精神病院，畢肖普也被帶到馬薩諸塞州，由親戚撫養，此後終生未能再見過母親。

“Poetry saved my life” — well, there’s a self-help trope that’s all too easy to set to uplifting music. In Bishop’s case it probably happens to be the truth, even if she would have winced at the phrase. What she had to say about her struggles, and about her romantic partnerships, stayed mostly buried in between the impeccably calibrated lines of her poems. Everything that could be gleaned was felt within the quiver of her silences.

“詩歌拯救了我的人生”——人們很容易爲這種勵志式的修辭配上振奮人心的音樂。但在畢肖普這裏，這句話卻是千真萬確，即便她說出這句話時帶着一點畏怯。她不得不說出的那些人生苦鬥乃至浪漫經歷，幾乎都隱藏在詩歌完美精準的字裏行間。一切都需要從她沉默的戰慄中去悉心尋覓和體會。

Mr. Toibin helps us tune into those quiet currents, sometimes at the granular level of commas and cross-outs. “Bishop’s writing bore the marks, many of them deliberate, of much rewriting, of things that had been said, but had now been erased, or moved into the shadows,” he says.

託賓幫助我們品味那些靜默的湍流，有時甚至在逗號和劃線這種細節之中尋覓。“畢肖普的手稿中有很多記號，其中很多都經過深思熟慮，被重寫過多次，是關於曾經說出的事物，但現在已經被劃去，或被塗上陰影，”他寫道。

Of course, there is only so much that can be said about the art of not saying things, and “On Elizabeth Bishop” becomes slightly redundant, here and there, as Mr. Toibin roots around for different ways to say that very thing. The book jolts back to life, after a few of its more monastic passages, whenever glamorous people drop in for the cocktail party. We meet Lota de Macedo Soares, the magnetic architect with whom Bishop lived in Brazil. She brought Bishop as close as she’d ever get to domestic bliss before reacquainting the poet with the ache of loss. (Soares took her own life in New York City in 1967.) There is a dashing cameo by Thom Gunn, the English poet who found rejuvenating exile in San Francisco.

當然，關於弦外之音的藝術有很多東西可寫，託賓用各種不同的方法來說這一件事，因此《關於畢肖普》時常出現略顯冗長之處。之後本書又回到畢肖普的生活，一些豐富多彩的段落中描寫了不少有趣的人物，他們彷彿來參加雞尾酒會一般。我們可以讀到羅塔·德·馬賽多·索萊斯(Lota de Macedo Soares)，畢肖普後來和這位迷人的建築師一起定居巴西。她帶給畢肖普前所未有的家庭幸福，但後來又令詩人重新品嚐到失落的痛苦（索萊斯於1967年在紐約自殺身亡）。湯姆·甘恩(Thom Gunn)的客串出場也很醒目，這位英國詩人曾逃往舊金山，並在此地煥發新生。

And it’s still impossible for a reader to resist getting sucked into the orbit of Robert Lowell, the rapaciously brilliant and royally messed-up literary lion whom Bishop considered her closest friend. The cat-and-mouse dynamic of Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence remains, in Mr. Toibin’s telling, as riveting as a series on Netflix or HBO, and probably ought to become one.

讀者也忍不住會被羅伯特·洛威爾(Robert Lowell)所吸引，畢肖普曾把這位才華橫溢、神經兮兮的文學之獅引爲自己生平最親密的朋友。畢肖普與洛威爾的通信如同貓鼠遊戲，在託賓的敘事中，簡直像Netflix或HBO臺的劇集一般引人入勝，或許也應該拍一部電視劇纔對。

All the while another skilled writer floats in and out of the gathering, carefully toting a tray of fresh ruminations about, say, Bishop’s roots in Nova Scotia or a spell she spent in Key West, Fla.: This is our host, Mr. Toibin, whose own fondness for the poetics of restraint makes him a simpatico interpreter of Bishop’s ethos and stanzas. Mr. Toibin writes of the trauma of seeing his own father, with “an enormous gash on the side of his head,” after a brain operation in Ireland. Mr. Toibin’s father had trouble speaking after that. So did Mr. Toibin, who somewhere along the way had begun to stammer.

另一位天才的作家也不時浮出水面，用心地帶來新鮮的思考，諸如畢肖普在新斯科舍的根源，或者她在弗羅裏達的凱·韋斯特讀過的時光——這就是我們的主人，託賓先生，他熱愛詩歌中剋制的美學，因此對畢肖普的氣質與詩行的解析也格外親切。託賓的父親在愛爾蘭動過腦部手術，託賓曾經寫過此事帶給他的創傷，他看到父親“頭顱一側有一道巨大的傷口”。手術後他的父親有了語言障礙，託賓自己也開始有了口吃的毛病。

“I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said,” he writes.

“我和沉默十分親近，就是那些未被說出的、那些心照不宣的事情，”他寫道。

In a sense, his new book operates as a persuasive argument in favor of muting the trumpet. If you are a consumer of contemporary poetry, it is likely that there is a word that you encounter with alarming, and possibly annoying, frequency. That word is “suddenly.” Suddenly the moon gleams through the shifting clouds, suddenly the whales break through the surface of the ocean, suddenly (with an implied gasp) a whirling fog of confusion dissipates and everything becomes clear.

某種程度上，他的新書是一個主張平息喧囂的頗具說服力的論證。如果你讀當代詩歌，那麼很可能會經常看見這樣一個字眼，並且有可能會覺得它很討厭。那就是“突然”——“突然，月亮從漂浮的雲層裏露出面容”，“突然，鯨魚躍出洋麪”，“突然（意味深長地停頓一下），迷惘之霧消散殆盡，眼前的一切頓時清晰起來。”

The word suggests the presence of easy epiphanies. Absorb too many of these poems, and you’ll not-so-suddenly begin to wonder whether human beings are even capable of quite so much instantaneous catharsis.

這個詞暗示着一種過於輕易的當下頓悟。這種情緒貫穿在太多類似的詩歌之中，你會漸漸覺得，人類其實並沒有能力得到那麼多瞬間的淨化。

Bishop tended to be immune to anything instant, but it’s worth noting that even she succumbed to the charms of “suddenly.” We encounter that adverb in “The Moose,” when the animal in the title of the poem emerges on a road through a forest:

畢肖普不是那麼容易受到瞬間的影響，但值得注意的是，她也曾屈服於“突然”的魅力。我們會在她的《麋鹿》(The Moose)一詩中遇到這個字眼，詩中那隻鹿從樹林裏來到公路之上：

—Suddenly the bus driver

——突然，巴士司機

stops with a jolt,

猛地剎車

turns off his lights.

熄掉車燈。

A moose has come out of

一隻麋鹿走出

the impenetrable wood

無法穿透的樹林

and stands there, looms, rather,

站在路中央，或者

in the middle of the road.

不如說是赫然聳現（本處使用包慧儀譯本——譯註）

As Mr. Toibin points out, “The Moose” stands as one of Bishop’s finest achievements, one that’s suffused with the anxiety of her leaving home as a child, and it took her a couple of decades, maybe longer, to complete. If anyone had earned the right to use “suddenly,” she had.

託賓指出，《麋鹿》是畢肖普最精美的作品之一，充滿兒時離家的焦慮，這首詩歌花了她二十餘年的時間寫就，或許還要更長。如果有人有權利使用“突然”這個字眼，那個人便非她莫屬。