2、玉梯：

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

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)


A Single Story Tells His Entire Past

When he opens up the windows of his body which give onto the ocean And leaps towards the sound of thousands of clashing knives


A single story tells his entire past


When all tongues stretch towards this sound

And bite back the thousands of knives of this clashing sound

All days will squeeze into one day


Thus, each year will have an extra day

The last year flips over under the great oak


His memory comes from a cattle pen, overhead is a pillar of lingering smoke

Some children on fire holding hands sing and dance in a circle round the

kitchen knife

Before the flames die down

They persistently rage round the tree

The flames finally injuring his lungs

And his eyes are the festival days of two hostile towns


His nostrils two enormous tobacco pipes pointed at the sky


Women wildly shoot love at his face


Forcing his lips agape


Any moment, a train traveling in the opposite direction to death will pass by Forcing a morning between his outstretched arms


Pressing down the sun’s head

A silent revolver announces the approach of this morning


A morning more cheerless than an empty basin thrown to the ground

A sound of branches breaking in the forest


A broken pendulum on an old door shutter lifted

down from the funereal street

A single story tells his entire past

Death has become a superfluous beat of the heart

When stars dive towards the snake venom-seeking earth


Time rots beyond the tick-tocking of the clock


Rats shed their milk teeth on the rust spots of the copper coffin

Fungi stamp their feet on decaying lichen


The son of the cricket does laborious needlework on his body

And then there is evil, tearing apart his face on a drum


His body now entirely filled with death’s glory


Entirely, a single story tells his entire past

A single story tells his entire past


A thin lanky man sits resting on a tree stump

The first time the sun reads his eyes closely

And closer still it sits on his knees


The sun makes smoke between his fingers Every night I fix my telescope on that spot Until the moment the sun dies out


A tree stump takes its rest where he sat

More silent than a cabbage patch in May


The horse the road walks past in the early morning

Death has fragmented into a mound of pure glass


The sun has become the thunder rolling down the road

of the mourners returning home


And the children’s slender feet tiptoe onto evergreen olive branches

And my head swells up, like millions of horse hooves stamping on drums

Compared to big, crude, curved knives, death is but a grain of sand
So a single story tells his entire life
So a thousand years turn away their face – look

1983 [Gregory B. Lee]

Farewell

Forever embracing the white birch Is just like embracing myself:

a whole mountainful of red peppers stirring me


a whole handful of pebbles scattered on the ground

a whole tree, all of these are my memories...

Autumn is the most desolate of lutes


Things from the past, vigorously strumming:

fields harvested


ah, fields with no home to return to


should you wish to cry, don’t miss this big opportunity!

1983 [Gregory B. Lee]

Looking Out from Death

Looking out from death you will always see


Those whom all your life you ought not to see


You can always be buried somewhere as you please

 Sniff around as you please, then bury yourself there

In a place that makes them hate

They shovel dirt in your face


You should thank them. And thank them again

Your eyes will never again see your enemy

Then from death will come


When they are consumed by enmity, a scream Although you will never be able to hear again

Now that is the absolute scream of anguish!

1983 [Gregory B. Lee]

Milestones

A main road attracts the very first direction that makes you dizzy

That is your starting point. Clouds envelop your head


Preparing to give you a job


That is your starting point

That is your starting point


When the jail squeezes its temperament into a city


Bricks and stones in the middle of the road hold you tight

Every year’s snowfall is your old jacket


The sky, however, is always a blue university

The sky, that miserably pale sky


Sky whose face has just been pinched


Agrees to your smile, your beard
Hastily eating


When you pursue the big tree that penetrates time


Golden rats, having crossed the water, dream of you:


You are a crinkled bean in a fierce storm


You are a chair, belonging to the ocean


Wanting you on the shore of humanity, to study all over again

To seek yourself, on the journey when you know yourself

Northern snow, that’s your road


Flesh on shoulders, that’s your food


Oh traveller you who do not even look back

Of everything you hold in contempt, nothing will ever vanish

1985 [Gregory B. Lee]

Shrubs

What we’ve said over and over they can’t hear

They see each other but do not see


On the surface see but do not see


Roots

However seek each other in the mud

Once found they twist each other to death Amongst us there are people who


Call this behaviour:


Love

Lovers who have just climbed trees

 Are also thinking this over


They call it:


Making love.

1985 [Gregory B. Lee]

Stupid Girl

In the pitch black night dyeing mother’s hair, the sound of horseshoes

Approaches. Mother’s coffin


Starting to put on clothing for mother.


Mother’s shoes climb up the tree alone

Wind left for mother, like iron refuses to disperse

Mother’s end


Means winter


Out of enmity disintegrates

Winter has already completed its oppression


The sound of horse hooves blossoms on the clanging iron plate

On the earth swept to glinting by the snow, the wind


Says the wind is cruel,


Meaning a different sort of cruelty: says


Things which escape into the sky


Are paralysed in mid-air,


Meaning mother’s whole life


Is just ten toes simultaneously broken


Says mother throwing charcoal in the fire
Is throwing a child, meaning a stupid girl
Sympathising with the ashes in the fire


Says this is wrong, meaning:


‘I will offend again!’

1988 [Gregory B. Lee]

Walking into Winter

Sounds emitted by the leaves have changed


Rotting fruit and kernels sting the eyes of the passer-by

On the red roofs where the grain was sunned


Shimmering skulls of tiny insects, piled up as autumn’s substance

A touch of autumn is brushed from a woollen overcoat preparing for winter

Fungi from decaying coffin wood have already walked into winter

Youngsters in sunlight have become ugly

Marble parents sob noisily:

When water at the well-bottom is gone

Ploughs are dead in the ground

When the iron is bent in the smithy’s hands

The harvesters hold bent blades to their breasts

Those in the funeral procession are rolling drunk


The translated sounds of the wheat waves of May are already so remote

Trees contemplate the far away places preparing to marry them off

Cows, in bowel-tightening dung-retaining posture, defy the movement

of the heavens...

1989 [Gregory B. Lee]

In England

After the church spires and the city chimneys sink beneath the horizon

England’s sky is darker than lovers’ whispers


Two blind accordion players, heads bowed, pass by

There are no farmers, so there are no vespers


There are no tombstones, so there are no declaimers

Two rows of newly planted apple trees stab my heart

It was my wings that brought me fame, it was England

Brought me to the place where I was lost


Memories, but no longer leaving furrows

Shame, that’s my address


The whole of England does not possess a woman who cannot kiss

The whole of England cannot contain my pride

From the mud hidden in the cracks of my nails, I

Recognise my homeland – mother


Stuffed into a parcel, and posted faraway...

1989-90 [Gregory B. Lee]