经济学人73:局外旁观 On the Outside Looking in

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　　文艺；书评；威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯，美国诗人；局外旁观；

　　“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams. By Herbert Leibowitz.

　　《我有要事相告》：威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯生平及作品集。作者：赫伯特·莱博维茨。

　　To his patients in Rutherford, New Jersey¹, William Carlos Williams was just the local boy who had become their local doctor. And yet, as he made house calls, administered vaccinations² or listened to their complaints, he heard not just what they said, but how they said it. A doctor but also a poet, Williams spent his life trying to capture the “infinite variety” of American speech, and to use it to create a uniquely American form of poetic³ verse.

　　对于他的病人来说，威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯只是新泽西州卢瑟福镇一位成长为本地医生的本地男孩。可是，当他出诊、注射疫苗或者倾听病人抱怨的时候，他所听到的不只是病人说话的内容，而是他们说话的方式。身为医生却更是位诗人，威廉姆斯花费一生时间尝试捕捉美国大众语言中的“无限可能”，并以此创作一种美国独有的诗歌体裁。

　　It was not an easy task. As Herbert Leibowitz's new biography shows, Williams remained on the periphery⁴ of 20th-century literature as he spent a lifetime in the “grey-brown landscapes” of suburbia. He was disgruntled, with a severe dislike of many of his fellow poets, especially T.S. Eliot (Williams was both admiring and disdainful of “The Waste Land”), but his poems are now held up as some of the most daring examples of modern American poetry, and he was posthumously⁵ awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1963.

　　此非易事。根据赫伯特·莱博维茨新的传记作品所述，威廉徘徊于20世纪的文学边缘地带，因为他在郊区“灰褐色的风景”中度过了一生。他心怀不满，对同时期的许多诗人报以一种强烈的厌恶之情，尤其是T.S.艾略特（威廉姆斯对《荒原》既钦佩不已又嗤之以鼻），但如今他的诗歌被奉为现代美国诗歌中最大胆的典范，并且在死后他被授予1963年的普利策奖。

　　During his lifetime, however, Williams was “lil Bill” to his bigger, more successful friend Ezra Pound, who laughed at his insistence⁶ on staying in Rutherford. The son of immigrants who never naturalised, Williams's dedication⁷ to America did not flag, though it was a country that often disappointed him. Peopling his poems with “nurses and prostitutes, policemen and religious fanatics⁸, farmers and fish peddlers, drunkards…blues singers and barbers”, Williams wanted to pin down the whole messy country with his short, punchy lines of poetry. Sometimes he succeeded, as when he describes the euphoric crowds at a baseball game, or when he catches a glimpse of “A big young bareheaded woman/in an apron” on the pavement, bending down to remove a nail from her shoe. With the eyes of a doctor, he recorded the quotidian⁹ and the overlooked. He coined the maxim¹⁰ “no ideas but in things”. To his critics, the saying exposed him as an anti-intellectual, or as a poet who could only create “American speech barking at song.”

　　然而究其一生，在比威廉姆斯年长、事业更成功的朋友艾泽拉·庞德看来，威廉姆斯永远都只是“小比尔”。庞德嘲笑他留在卢瑟福镇的执着。作为从未加入美国国籍的移民者之子，威廉姆斯对美国的衷心从未减退，尽管这个国家一再地令他失望。充斥在他的诗歌间的是“护士和妓女，警察和宗教狂热分子，农夫和鱼贩，醉鬼…布鲁斯歌手和理发师”，威廉姆斯意图用他简短有力的诗句来描绘整个国家的世间百态。有时他成功了，比如他描写棒球比赛上的欢快人群，或者当他瞥见“一位硕大的年轻女子不戴帽子/穿着围裙”，在人行道上俯身擦去她鞋子上的一片指甲。他以医生的视角记录那些平凡的事和被忽视的人。他首创了“文中无意，寓境于物”的格言。对威廉姆斯的批评家来说，这个说法暴露了他不是一位智者，或者说，他只不过是一位开创了“美语吠叫诗歌”的诗人。

　　Mr Leibowitz, a New York literary editor, is keen to defend Williams against these charges, and focuses instead on the radical¹¹ aspects of Williams's work. Banned in 1952 from being poetry consultant¹² to the Library of Congress for his left-leaning views, Williams wrote poems in which the Rosenbergs appeared next to Geoffrey Chaucer. As a young doctor just starting out, he had mainly served the Italian, Greek and Polish communities around Rutherford, or attended to bruised¹³ prostitutes or addicts¹⁴ at the French Hospital of New York. As an elderly man with a respected practice, he still preferred the company of the socially marginalised: “I have known the unsuccessful, [and think them] far better persons than their more lucky brothers”.

　　莱博维茨是一位纽约的文学编辑，对于这些攻击，他不仅积极为威廉姆斯辩护，还转而关注威廉姆斯作品中极端的部分。1952年，因为其左倾观点而被赶出国会图书馆的诗歌顾问职位，威廉姆斯写了一首诗，在诗中罗森博格姐弟与杰弗里·乔叟*一同出现。作为一位刚出师的年轻医生，他主要为在卢瑟福镇附近的意大利，希腊和波兰人的社区服务，要么就去纽约的法国医院医治受伤的妓女或瘾君子。作为一位事业体面的长者，他仍然更愿意以社会边缘群体为伴：“我认识那些失意者，并认为他们是]比他们走运的兄弟们要好得多的人。”

　　However, in emphasising this side of Williams Mr Leibowitz skates over the less palatable¹⁵ aspects of his subject's character. A serial¹⁶ philanderer¹⁷ who publicly described his wife as “no Venus de Milo”, his poetry is occasionally voyeuristic¹⁸ and antagonistic¹⁹ towards women: “What I got out of women/was difficult/to assess.” Bitter from his lack of success in America or abroad, and obsessed²⁰ with what he saw as the “European virus” in poetry, the Williams of this biography is not easy company. His poems, composed of short lines like “be a song—made of/particulars”, often resist Mr Leibowitz's lengthy²¹ analysis. Just as he preferred the quiet meadowlands around Rutherford to the glamour²² of literary New York, so too Williams manages to evade²³ his biographer's gaze. Like a figure in one of his poems, he remains²⁴ on the sidelines, looking in.

　　然而，莱博维茨在着重描写威廉姆斯上述方面的同时，一笔略过了他的主角品格中不太值得称道的方面。公然比喻自己妻子是“米罗的维纳斯”却到处寻花问柳，他的诗歌偶尔透露出对女性的窥私欲和轻视：“我从女人中得到的/很难/评价”。苦于他在美国或国外都缺乏成功，并且执迷于诗歌中他所谓的“欧洲病毒”，该传记中的威廉姆斯并不是惬意的阅读伴侣。他的诗歌由像这样的短句组成：“一首歌——到处是/细节”，常常与莱博维茨冗长的分析矛盾。就如同他喜爱卢瑟福镇周边的安静草地甚于纽约文坛的魅力，威廉姆斯同样也设法避开其传记作者的注视。就如同他诗歌中的一位人物一般，他在局外逗留，旁观。

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