Samuel Menashe
萨缪尔·马纳什
Samuel Menashe, a New York poet, died on August 22nd,
aged 85
萨缪尔·马纳什，纽约诗人，卒于二零一一年八月二十二日，享年八十五岁
UNTIL 2009, if you had wandered past 75 Thompson Street in SoHo,
in New York City, you might have glimpsed a face at an upstairs
window. It was an aristocratic face, with a shock of white hair,
and it surmounted—according to the season—a chunky-knit sweater or
a white Byronic shirt. This was the first clue that out of sight,
level with the window sill, was a writing desk, and that at this
desk, on sheets of unruled paper in blue felt-tip pen, Samuel
Menashe was writing poems.
2009年以前，你若曾在纽约苏荷区的汤姆森大街75号楼下徘徊，也许瞥见过楼上窗户中映出的一张面孔。那是一张充满贵族气息的脸庞，配着一头银发。根据时节，那个人或套着一件厚实的针织毛衣，或穿着一件白色的拜伦风格衬衫。而在你视线未及的窗台边，放着一张和它一样高的写字桌，桌上散乱着用蓝色毡头笔书写的稿件。萨缪尔·马纳什正写着诗。
Inklings sans ink/ Cling to the dry/ Point of the pen/ Whose stem I
mouth/ Not knowing when/ The truth will out
无墨之迹/附在干枯的/笔尖/我透露了谁的故事/不知何时/真相大白
They were very short poems. Many were only four lines long. He
began with more, but then worked to make them as concise as
possible. They were honed down to the essence, sculpted like
stones. He left them on scraps of paper all over the
apartment.
这些诗十分短小，许多只写了四句话。它们起初比较长，而后被慢慢修改，直至最为精简。雕刻一般，切磋琢磨成为精华。写着诗的纸片被他随手扔在公寓的每个角落。
A flock of little boats/ Tethered to the shore/ Drifts in still
water/ Prows dip, nibbling
几只小船/被拴在岸边/漂在寂静的水中/船首浮动，一点，一点
Others were not so good. And some, he thought, were no more than
sighs, like the one he once wrote on the sand of an Irish beach for
the tide to take away.
其他的诗没这么好。有一些，他认为只是叹息而已，就像他曾在爱尔兰海滨的沙滩上写的一首诗，他愿海潮将它带走。
Pity us/ Beside the sea/ On the sands/ So briefly
可怜可怜我们/在海边/在沙滩上/多么简短
There were rhyme schemes in his work, but usually just the sort
that cropped up in ordinary speech. He liked plumbing the throwaway
phrases of everyday life: “on the level”, “come to grief”, “at my
wits’ end”. The influences on him, he supposed, were mostly Blake,
Shakespeare and the King James Bible (though he was Jewish, he did
not know Hebrew). He called his poems psalms and sonnets, though he
never consciously wrote in either form. Instead, sitting at his
desk, he pared and pared.
他的诗歌中涵着韵律，但通常只是平时说话中时不时出现的那样。他喜欢用一些大家平日里惯用的说法，如“老实说”、“吃苦头”、“没有办法”。他觉得布莱克、莎士比亚和英王钦定版圣经（虽然他是犹太人，但是却不懂希伯来语）对他的影响最大。他将自己的诗歌归为赞美诗和十四行诗，可他却从未有意地照这两种格式写过，而是坐在桌前一遍遍修改精炼着诗句。
The hollow of morning/ Holds my soul still/ As water in a jar
黎明的虚空/承载住我的灵魂/就像瓶中盛着水
When he told his mother he was working on a poem he had shown her,
she would ask: “How much shorter is it?” But then it was she who,
years ago, had told him to consider the beauty of a tree in its
bareness, not its leaves.
幼时的他告诉母亲他正在修改给她看过的一篇诗时，母亲会问：“你的字数少了多少？”不过，也是他的母亲，曾在多年前教导他要从一棵树的光秃的枝桠中审视出美，而非繁叶之中。
He wrote several poems about lying under trees, gazing at the light
and shade.
他的好几首诗写的都是他躺于树下，凝望交错的光影。
Branches spoke/ This cupola/ Whose leaf inlay/ Keeps the sun at
bay
枝如轮辐/分割了穹顶/谁的叶镶嵌于中/隔了春晖
Most of those trees were in Central Park. He walked there in the
afternoons, reciting to himself and memorising, until he
could
watch the sinking sun igniting the windows of the city. He was a
native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn to parents in the dry-cleaning
business, and he had lived alone in his cold-water apartment up
five flights (“these stone steps/bevelled by feet”) since he was
31. The paint was peeling, and books were piled everywhere: on
window sills, on top of cupboards. “Hard covers melt/Welcome the
sun…”
他诗中的那些树大多位于中央花园。午后时分，他会去那儿散步，背诗和回忆往事，直到西沉的落日映红城里一排排的窗。他是土生土长的纽约人，生于布鲁克林，父母开了家干洗店，三十一岁以后都独自住在一个没有热水器的公寓的五楼。（这些石阶/被脚踏成了斜边）。那里墙壁斑驳，书籍遍地，不管是窗台还是柜橱上。“硬皮书软化了/迎接着晨曦”
His kitchen contained a claw-foot bath, a stove and a table. He
heated up his breakfast Quick Oats there, but otherwise ate at
Homer’s Diner (“There’s no place like Homer’s”). Shadowing the
French poets he was fond of (he had studied at the Sorbonne after
his wartime infantry service, and could quote Baudelaire at length)
he was a flâneur des boulevards, mostly at night. He would glance
into the park,
As armed trees frisk a windfall/ Down paths that lampposts
light
他的厨房里有一个爪型支座的浴缸，一个炉子和一张桌子。他在这里热早饭“快快燕麦粥”，但有时也会去荷马餐厅吃早饭。（“荷马餐厅是独一无二的”）
跟随他所喜爱的法国诗人的脚步（他在步兵团服役时曾在索邦神学院学习，谈起波德莱尔更是滔滔不绝），他喜欢漫步于林荫大道，大多是在夜晚。他的目光在公园中轻轻扫过，
“当护栏里的树轻摇着洒落一地果实/当小径深处的街灯洒下一片柔光”
Fingering the skull
He had never intended to become a poet. His major was in
biochemistry. But then he had woken up in the middle of the night,
in Paris in 1949, with a line in his head:
他从没想过成为一名诗人。原本他是学生物化学的。但当他在1949年巴黎的午夜醒来时，脑海中浮现出了一行诗句：
All my life when I woke up at night
我生命中每个午夜梦回的时分
And that was that. The next 62 years were spent on poetry. To him
his works seemed man-sized, populating his apartment, continually
demanding a smoothing here, a chiselling there. To change “the
crinkled leaf of spring” to “spring’s crinkled leaf” was a massive
decision. Each word weighed heavy, and when he came to recite them
(knowing them all by heart) they filled his mouth, sonorous and
huge.
就是这样，在接下来的62年，他成为了一个诗人。对于他来说，他的诗歌好像是他的房客，很是挑剔，总是要求他通顺通顺这里，修饰修饰那里。像把“春日里的皱巴巴的叶子”改成“春日它那皱巴巴的叶子”是非常重大的抉择。写下每一个词都要斟酌再三，而当他背诵它们时，发出的每一个音节都饱满洪亮。
A pot poured out/ Fulfills its spout
水壶倒水/水盈水壶颈
There was no money in it, of course. He had to teach a bit, or work
on cruise ships. The literary magazines took a few of his poems. He
struggled to get published anywhere, though Kathleen Raine and
Stephen Spender took a shine to him in the 1960s, and Penguin
published him in 1996. He would shift Ted Hughes along in Border’s,
to give himself room on the shelf. The big established American
poets seemed to him like medieval abbots visiting each other, while
he remained a hermit outside the walls. He worked with a hand
propping his head, feeling his skull as a memento mori.
当然，写诗可赚不来钱。他为了谋生还教些书，有时在游轮上打打工。虽说文学杂志登过他的一些诗，上个世纪六十年代时凯瑟琳·雷恩和史提芬·斯班德也颇为欣赏他，1996年企鹅出版社还为他出了书，但是发表诗歌本就是件难事，他为此不得不极力奔走。他为了使自己的书能在鲍德书店里占一席之地，会把里书架上泰德·休斯的书往旁边移移。那些功名成就的美国大诗人在他看来就像中世纪里互相串门的修道院长，而他，则是个不理红尘的隐士。他工作时总是用一只手支着头，好似他的头是死兆一样。
Alone in my lair/ With one bone to pick/ And no time to spare
独栖于穴中/只横着一根骨头/争分夺秒
The critical world, in so far as it noticed, was divided about him.
His poems were either crystalline and profound, or slight and
banal. Whichever was true, he laboured on. In 2004 America’s Poetry
Foundation gave him its first Neglected Masters Award. He said he
deserved it, and so he did: the unresting representative of
thousands of other dogged and neglected poets, scribbling and
dreaming at their windows in all the cities of the world.
自从他出名以后，世人对他的评价就是毁誉参半。有的人认为他的诗通透深刻，有的则认为他傲慢平庸。不管如何，他依旧坚持写作。2004年，美国诗歌协会将第一届被忽视大师奖颁给了他。他说，我值得这个奖，而他也真的做到了：他一直积极履行自己的职责，为那成百上千执着却被忽视的诗人们呼喊。那些诗人遍布世界各地，跟他一样怀揣着梦想，临窗而书。
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