2020年经济学人 爱尔兰女诗人伊万·博兰德(1)（在线收听）

Eavan Boland, poet, died on April 27th, aged 75

诗人伊万·博兰德于4月27日去世，享年75岁。

When summernights were warm, Eavan Boland liked to stand in the front doorway of her small suburban house in Dun- drum, outside Dublin. She would look at the buddleia, and at the lamplight glossing the leaves of the hedge. Yet these things were not simply visible to her. She saw them with her body. It was as if she was part of some great continuum, or stood in a place of myth, like the women singers she imagined in the hard west of Ireland whose mouths were filled with "Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars/and exhausted birds".

在温暖的夏夜，伊万·博兰德喜欢站在她位于都柏林郊外顿鼓镇的小房子的门口。她常常会看着醉鱼草，还有照着树篱叶子的灯光。然而，她不仅仅是看到了这些东西。伊万是全身心地感受到了它们。伊万就好像是一个伟大的连续体的一部分，或者是处在一个神话之境，就像她想象中的爱尔兰西部的女歌手一样，他们总是歌唱着“大西洋风暴和乌云遮住的星星以及疲惫的鸟儿”。

This sense of communality, which led her to be one of Ireland's finest poets, was essentially a woman's feeling. And it was missing almost entirely from Irish poetry. There the voice was male, bardic, authoritative, grown sweet and self-confident on the flattery of princes. It was "I", not "we". The poet was a hero, a seer, a towering figure (Yeats above all), whose themes were history, epic and elegy. This was not a world for women.

这种集体的感觉本质上就是女性的感觉，它让伊万成为了爱尔兰最好的诗人之一。而且它几乎不存在于爱尔兰诗歌中。爱尔兰诗歌中全是男性的、吟游诗人的、权威的声音，在王子们的奉承下变得和谐而自信。它关乎于“自我”，而不是“我们”。诗人是英雄，是先知，也是豪杰（尤其是耶茨），他们创作的主题是历史，史诗和挽歌。这不是一个女性的世界。

When they featured in the work they were mostly objectified, passive and silent. No page recorded "the low music/of our outrage". Their own poems were not encouraged, as if they were women's-magazine things that would defile the pure, visionary flow. If she were to write in the men's style, with their assurance, she would fit right in, as she fitted into the clever literary conversations in the pubs round St Stephen's Green when she was at Trinity College.

当女性出现在诗歌里，她们通常会被客观化，被动而沉默。没有描写“低微的声音或我们的愤怒”的内容。人们不鼓励女性写诗，把她们写的诗当做是女性杂志里面的东西，这些东西会玷污诗意的纯洁和远见。如果伊万按照男性的风格写作，带着男性的自信，那她会完美融入他们，就像她在三一学院的圣斯蒂芬格林酒店附近的酒吧里，融入了那些睿智的文学对话一样。