文艺；书评；诗歌与第一次世界大战;诗坛后起之秀;

　　Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. By Matthew Hollis.

　　《如今条条大道通法国：爱德华·托马斯人生最后几年》，马修·霍利斯著。

　　Edward Thomas was a late starter to poetry. “I couldn't write a poem to save my life,” he declared aged 35, when a “literary hack” of minor biographies and travel memoirs, struggling to support a wife and three children. A year later, and three years before he was killed by a passing shell in the Arras offensive in the first world war, he had written and published some of the finest poems to come out of Britain at the beginning of the 20th century.

　　爱德华·托马斯在诗歌方面是一位后起之秀。“我没法靠写诗养家糊口 。”他在35岁时如是说。当时他是一位“受雇文人”，写一些短篇传记和游记，艰难地供养妻子和三个孩子。他在36岁时创作并发表了一些诗歌。在20世纪初的英国，他的这些诗作是最优秀的。又过了三年以后，他在第一次世界大战的阿拉斯战役中被炮弹击中，不幸身亡。

　　What changed Thomas from a middling prose writer to a dazzling poet is the central theme of Matthew Hollis's engaging new book, which won two awards for biography when it came out in Britain last year and is just now being published in America. Mr Hollis, a poet and editor, focuses on the last five years of Thomas's life before he died in 1917.

　　马修·霍利斯这本引人入胜的新书主要讲述托马斯是如何从一位普通的散文作家成为一位杰出诗人的，去年在英国问世时赢得了两项传记奖，眼下即将在美国出版。作者霍利斯既是诗人也是编辑，他主要描写了托马斯在1917年去世之前最后五年的生活。

　　His book begins in London, where Thomas visits a new bookshop dedicated to poetry that had just opened in “shady Bloomsbury”. Around this shop circled the poets that made up literary London at that time: Ezra Pound, an American, who would greet startled visitors to his flat in a purple dressing gown; W.B. Yeats, an Irish poet and playwright who shunned newfangled electricity in favour of candlelight for his evening readings; and Rupert Brooke, a dashing young English poet, who would die a soldier in 1915 from an infection caught while stationed near Greece, and whose poetry sold 250,000 copies in the decade after his death.

　　书中的故事从伦敦开始。在“树影婆娑的布鲁斯伯里”，托马斯来到了一家新开的书店（这里主要销售诗歌作品）。在书店的墙上，到处都是诗集——都出自当时伦敦文学界的主要诗人之手：其中包括美国诗人埃兹拉·庞德——他会穿着紫色的睡袍来接待公寓里的访客，让他们目瞪口呆；爱尔兰诗人兼剧作家 W.B. 叶芝——他在晚上读书的时候喜欢就着烛光，而不用新潮的电灯照明；以及风度翩翩的年轻英国诗人鲁伯特·布鲁克——他曾是一名士兵，1915年驻扎在希腊附近时受到感染，败血症发作身亡——而在他去世后的十年之内，他的诗集售出了25万册。

　　Less glamorous or eccentric than these figures, Thomas was a prolific and occasionally acerbic book reviewer, six feet tall, “slim, loose-limbed and vigorous”, who struggled with near-suicidal depression. He had married while still an undergraduate at Oxford and his relationship with his wife Helen was a troubled one. He often spent time away on the long journeys needed for his travel books, such as the “The Icknield Way”.

　　托马斯不像这些人那么有魅力，也不像他们那么特立独行。他是一位多产的书评家，笔触偶尔会有些尖刻。他身高六英尺，“身材瘦削，四肢柔软灵活，充满了活力”，一直在和极易导致自杀的抑郁症抗争。托马斯还在牛津大学就读时就结了婚，而他和妻子海伦的关系并不好。为了写《伊克尼尔德驿道》之类的游记，他常常出门作长途旅行。

　　Mr Hollis is adept at evoking the atmosphere of the time, and at negotiating the complicated friendships and squabbles between these poets. But it is when Thomas meets Robert Frost, a “Yankee” poet determined to be published in Britain that his book comes to life. It was Frost—a stocky, quick-tempered figure—who persuaded Thomas to write poems, and who believed that “words exist in the mouth, not in books”. Once Thomas decided to write verse, he did so quickly. Spurred on by Frost, and by the oncoming threat of war, at one point he wrote nearly a poem a day, including his much loved “Adlestrop” with its “lazed, heat-filled atmosphere…of that last summer before the war”. Mr Hollis re-creates Thomas's process of writing by comparing the differing drafts of his poems, giving life to his process of composition, and charting the correspondence between Thomas and Frost once the latter had moved back to America.

　　霍利斯擅长营造时代氛围，也擅长描写那些诗人之间复杂的友谊和矛盾。但这本书真正生动的部分是在托马斯遇到罗伯特·弗罗斯特（一位决心在英国发表诗作的“美国佬”诗人）之后。正是这位身材敦实、脾气急躁的弗罗斯特劝说托马斯走上诗歌创作道路的，他还认为“语言存在于口齿之间，而不是在书本里面”。一旦托马斯决定写诗了，他很快就开始了创作。受到了弗罗斯特的鞭策，战争的威胁又隐隐逼近，曾经有段时间他几乎每天就写出一首诗——其中就有那首广为人们称道的《艾德稠普》，诗中描写了“战争爆发前的最后一个夏天……那慵懒、闷热的空气”。霍利斯比较了托马斯不同的诗稿，为这位诗人的创作过程赋予了生命，并记录了弗罗斯特回到美国后两人的通信情况。通过这些途径，霍利斯重现了托马斯的写作历程。

　　In many ways, Thomas was a difficult, reticent figure, who was quite capable of signing off letters to his mother “Yours ever, Edward Thomas”. Even after he had enrolled in the Artists Rifles regiment, he remained painfully shy about his work, hiding his poetry among calculations on the trajectory of shells, or disguising it as prose. This may be one reason why Mr Hollis tends to address his subject formally throughout his book, frequently by his full name, and does not delve—beyond polite speculation—into the various extramarital romances Thomas may have had. Those who want such details will have to go elsewhere. Instead, Mr Hollis captures something far greater than a man's personal life, and far more elusive: the desire and struggle to write, even when you begin, as Thomas put it, “at 36 in the shade”.

　　从很多方面来说，托马斯是一位寡言少语、不易相处的人。他在给母亲写信时，末尾处总是署上“您永远的儿子——爱德华·托马斯”。即使是在他加入艺术家枪兵团之后，他仍然极为羞涩，不愿将自己的作品公诸于众。他把诗作混在炮弹弹道测算纸里，或是伪装成散文。这或许能够从一个方面解释为什么霍利斯在写这本书时自始至终都郑重地论述主题，提到托马斯时常常以他的全名相称，而且并未探究托马斯可能有过的几段婚外恋——只是礼貌地进行了一些推测。想要了解此类细节的读者不得不去别的书中寻找了。而霍利斯所描绘的内容远比诗人的私生活重要，也更加难以捉摸，那就是：创作的欲望、创作的努力——正如托马斯所说，即使这个创作过程是从“36岁时在某片树荫下”开始的。