靠旋转不停的小齿轮运动的时间
不是我的时间，那停滞的波流。
在轮船叮叮当当报时的
钟声之间，在游弋于下面的
昏暗战舰上的一阵钟声之间，
我几经生死之变，重温了久故的
乔的一生，他活在五次钟声之间。

深邃空蒙垂直的光线
摆渡下明月的落瀑。五次钟声
冷冷荡出机械的音。夜色与水波
涌向黑暗的湍流，港口漂在
空中，十字星座倒悬水中。

亡灵啊，我为什么想起你，为什么
拖起抛泊在时间中的思绪的锚链
从中偷取无谓的回忆？你
弃世而去，你的姓名失去意义；
但仍有什么东西，它张口
对着空间的港口冲击、碰撞、哭诉，
向世人宣告它的愤怒。

你把脸贴在无言的玻璃窗上
痛苦地说话，是喊我吗，阴魂？
大声点，敲窗户，喊出你的名字！

但我什么都听不见，只听到钟声
五次钟声，愚人的计时法。
你的声音消逝，它被生活淹没，
狭窄的生死线谁的声音都无法飞越——
唯有对久已零落成泥土的
尸骨的记忆；对你可能做过，
或者我以为你曾做过的
一些小事的记忆，这些你忘了，
谁能记得呢——那过去的言谈举止
啤酒渍，你面色憔悴，眼睛受伤，
穿着掉了扣子的上衣，大讲
爱尔兰王，讲英国人的背信弃义，
说达灵赫斯特的店老板更糟，
竟然大逆不道，埋怨上帝。
五次钟声。

于是我仿佛看见我们摸黑
来摩尔岸之夜走过的路，听到
那滚滚雷声，受到暴雨利爪的袭击。
夜色深沉，不见你身影面容，
只听空中传来断续的声音
（有如你此刻喊我打碎破璃的声音），
这声音来自我身边的树丛，
声很小，不时被风声盖住，
讲弥尔顿，讲西瓜，讲《人权》，
讲吹笛子，说塔希提女郎
皮肤黑嘴厉害，悉尼女郎
皮肤白嘴也厉害，这是你的看法。
但我只听到断续的词句，于是
弥尔顿变为西瓜，西瓜变为女郎，
好象那晚有五十张嘴讲话，
每棵树上都有人侧耳偷听，
又象什么东西刚刚跑进树丛，
这时惨白溟蒙的闪电，如狂人的
怪念，如石精油的火光，划破长空
以骇人的影相刺裂黑暗。
不论生活怎样贫苦艰难，
谁愿深夜里在五里外
黑暗的乡道上这样赶路，
但你既如此，就自有你的道理。
五次钟声。

在墨尔本，你掉了胃口，
也失了愤怒，胃口和愤怒
被软箭似夏雨和海绵似的潮气
啮噬，缓缓浸渐的潮气
使生命的茂叶枯萎，令头脑迟钝，
让你那充盈过愤怒的皮骨外露，
这就是正直换得的潮湿的喜悦。
我想起你用淡墨写下的话，
想起你的遗物中那本锯掉锁的
日记本，如今这些都毫无用处，
失去了意义，只表明
某人曾活着，而今他死了；
「在拉巴萨。６×８英尺的房间；
因为在塔顶上，冬天屋里
阴冷幽暗。这里堆满各类
杂物——颜色大小各不相同的
五百本书，乱扔在地板上
窗台上和椅子扶手上；
还有枪和各种各样的相片
有我弄来的各类奇珍古完……」

我们在悉尼，借着廉价气灯
投在粉色壁纸上将灭的微光，
讨论怎样才能炸毁地球，
可你却倒活，因此每夜
你都朝母亲的怀抱爬近一刻，
他们依然活着，都还活着——
那些困惑过你青春时代的
肉体的框架和形状，
尤其是你的父亲，那位手里
总是拿着提琴的失明老人，
那墓地的石匠。他用虔诚的梦
刻出富丽华美的灵位碑石，
压在芸芸众生的胸膛上。他们
尸骨相接，无言地愕然面对
人未料到要承担的重负——
那些用美丽的雕石做成的祭饼。

你在何方？潮水将你淹没，
夜半海水的涡流将你淹没，
就像时间，像神秘，像记忆
将你淹没，那停滞的流波。
你无处栖身，而死于安乐者
却躺进各自的死亡走廊——
潮水涌过，波涛从你身上压过
投下波影像投下闪亮的云发，
但它们是水；海石花像百荷
在你口中飘摇，但它们是草；
而你也只是一个不完整的概念。

你死之夜，我感到海水
攥紧黑色手指，感到你耳膜震裂，
继而是短暂的痛苦，长久的梦境，
不短也不长的虚无；但我
身系此世，不能随你而去，
我红尘翳目，不能与你携手。
如果我能找到答案，能找到
你的价值，能够说你为何生过
又死去；是什么给你生命又将它
索回，那么我能听到你的声音吗？

黑暗中我从窗口望大海波涛
见钻石般细浪和粼粼碧波
拱起鲐鱼形波峰舔舐月色
溶溶的沙滩，洒满浩渺垂直的光；
见远处船只沉睡，港口航标灯
无精打彩地闪闪呼应，
我想听到你的声音，却只听见
一声汽笛，听见远方海鸟
刺裂长空的尖鸣，听见钟声
五次钟声。冷冷荡出的五次钟声。
五次钟声。

1939年

作者 / [澳大利亚] 肯尼斯•斯莱塞
翻译 / 杨国斌

 

Five Bells

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

But I hear nothing, nothing…only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait –
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten – looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells.

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you’d cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.
But all I heard was words that didn’t join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There’s not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that’s what you think.
Five bells.

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you’d written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
“At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room – 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many differant things
And differant curioes that I obtained…”

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water’s over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid –
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.

Kenneth Slessor

 

 

去年秋天的一个夜晚，骆驼等老友与我在农展馆旁麦子店街的「平壤馆」喝酒，穿插在风格简约的大厅中的北韩美女目不暇接，令人沉湎于略显古怪的严肃气氛和批量的「邦女郎」的幻觉中。片刻后，我问骆驼是在哪儿看到《五次钟声》的，他回答说是1990年在河北峰峰下乡时，从一位农业办公室科员花了多半个月工资所购的一厚本《世界名诗鉴赏辞典》中看到的。听到他的话我稍感宽慰，不再为自己当年在成都人民北路的图书市场以批发价购买的《世界名诗一万首》而愧赧。一万首！这名字多像兜售给暴发户的装修材料啊。而《五次钟声》正是其中的一首。

肯尼斯•斯莱塞（Kenneth Slessor，1901-1971）的名字就像澳洲这个孤立的大岛一样偏僻，遥远，在中国人热衷谈论的北美和欧洲的诗歌遗产中默默无闻。这首《五次钟声》也只在罕有的选集中偶露了一下峥嵘。这不免令我要抄写一下诗人的生平与简介：「斯莱塞（1901～1971），出生在澳大利亚新南威尔士州奥兰治城。中学毕业后在悉尼《太阳报》任记者。20年代初结识了著名作家诺曼•林赛，1923年与林赛的儿子杰克•林赛合办《幻影》杂志，产生了重大影响。1926年出版了第一部诗集《大地的来访者》。……在悉尼港的码头上，他哀悼亡友艺术家乔•林奇（Joe Lynch）而写下了澳洲文学史上最伟大的诗篇《五次钟声》。」

这是一首溶解了时间与空间、声音与现象、现实与理念，混同着纯粹诗意的完美之作，不乏神秘与幻美。将波涛暗涌布局复杂的空间场景衔接在诗中的是作者哀恸的情感，对亡友的深切怀念。一切风景与实物都呈现出不可让渡的悲情。「五次钟声」如同回声反复出现，击打着读者被不断激起的情感之弦，直至全诗结束。情感的巨大表现力甚至拉动了诗歌的形式，从文字的闪光，到结构的缜密，再到隐藏于深处的忧思，从无序的杂多提炼拼接的意象浑然一体，天衣无缝。

骆驼与我都为发现彼此均喜欢这首「冷门」的诗 歌而欣喜，5年前他还特意从网上找到了英文原文发给我。如今，我们依然在诗歌的殿堂外逡巡不前，不同的是对一切形式的文学讨论完全丧失了兴趣，仅愿在友情 的庇护下相互依偎着取暖，把大部分前半夜搬进酒馆，然后尽可能的推迟。如同斯莱塞把写诗看成「从地狱寻欢作乐」。生活太热闹了，寒冷却时时袭来。每天都有 人离世，也有人热衷于怀念什么。在春天即将到来的此刻，读一读这首诗，或许会给我们无常的生活带来些许新的热量和安慰？或许世界压根就不冷，仅仅是缺乏一 些轻盈的、「咖啡馆」式的调剂。那也无妨。

荐诗 / 高岭&骆驼
2014/03/07

 

 

题图 / John Olsen, Five Bells, 1963