Captivating books are often born when one writer is obsessed with another. Nicholson Baker’s “U and I” (about John Updike) and Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage” (about D. H. Lawrence, sort of) spring to mind, but those are wild, hilarious books, almost like antic pranks. “On Elizabeth Bishop,” the novelist and critic Colm Toibin’s compact new study of the poet’s work, has little in common with them, but it succeeds as a different kind of literary tango. It hums instead of crows. Its pull on the reader is almost tidal.
一个作家迷恋另一个作家的时候，特别容易写出引人入胜的作品。人们很容易想起尼克尔森·贝克(Nicholson Baker)写约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)的《U和我》(U and I)，杰夫·戴尔(Geoff Dyer)关于D·H·劳伦斯(D. H. Lawrence)的《出于纯粹的愤怒》(Out of Sheer Rage)，不过它们都是疯狂滑稽的书，有点像小丑的恶作剧。然而小说家、评论家科尔姆·托宾(Colm Toibin)的《关于伊丽莎白·毕肖普》(On Elizabeth Bishop)是对诗人毕肖普的最新研究，内容充实，和上述这些书几乎没有共同之处，如同另一曲文学探戈。它并非高声欢呼，而是轻声低吟，如同潮汐般席卷着读者。
The same could be said of Bishop’s poetry. Hers was a virtuosity of shrewdness and precision. Nothing came quickly or easily. She saw the confessional poetry that bloomed into vogue in the middle of the 20th century as a dubious pursuit, for the most part. If someone like Anne Sexton had a tendency to throw everything in, a lot of it erotic and seemingly unfiltered, Bishop tacked in the opposite direction, trusting in the hushed power of what had been left out. She was allergic to the arbitrary and the exorbitant. For her, more pleasure could be found in concealment.
毕肖普的诗歌也具有同样的特色。她是机敏与精确的大师。在她的诗歌中，一切都徐缓庄重。她认为20世纪中期风行一时的自白派诗歌大部分非常可疑。安妮·塞克斯顿(Anne Sexton)这类诗人倾向于把什么都写进诗里，其中还有不少情色内容，似乎未经过滤，毕肖普却走向了相反的方向，相信弦外之音那种静谧的力量。她对专制与拔高尤为敏感。对于她来说，藏匿才是更大的快乐。“In Bishop’s work, much was implied by what seemed to be mere description,” Mr. Toibin writes. “Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self. The self in Bishop’s poems was too fragile to be violated by much mentioning.”
“毕肖普用很少的描述暗示出大量的言外之意，”托宾写道，“描写是一种避免自我描写的绝望方式；用一种置身自身之外的方式去审视世界。毕肖普诗歌中的自我形象太过脆弱，过多的提及都像是一种侵犯。”
Her self, after all, had endured its share of pain. Destabilization defined her childhood. Her father died when she was an infant. Her mother, mentally ill, was institutionalized when Bishop was 5, and Bishop, after being spirited away to live with relatives in Massachusetts, never saw her again.
毕竟，她本人亦曾像诗歌中的形象那样忍受痛苦。她的童年充满动荡，当她尚在襁褓之中时，父亲便已亡故。她的母亲患有精神疾病，在她5岁时被送入精神病院，毕肖普也被带到马萨诸塞州，由亲戚抚养，此后终生未能再见过母亲。“Poetry saved my life” — well, there’s a self-help trope that’s all too easy to set to uplifting music. In Bishop’s case it probably happens to be the truth, even if she would have winced at the phrase. What she had to say about her struggles, and about her romantic partnerships, stayed mostly buried in between the impeccably calibrated lines of her poems. Everything that could be gleaned was felt within the quiver of her silences.
“诗歌拯救了我的人生”——人们很容易为这种励志式的修辞配上振奋人心的音乐。但在毕肖普这里，这句话却是千真万确，即便她说出这句话时带着一点畏怯。她不得不说出的那些人生苦斗乃至浪漫经历，几乎都隐藏在诗歌完美精准的字里行间。一切都需要从她沉默的战栗中去悉心寻觅和体会。Mr. Toibin helps us tune into those quiet currents, sometimes at the granular level of commas and cross-outs. “Bishop’s writing bore the marks, many of them deliberate, of much rewriting, of things that had been said, but had now been erased, or moved into the shadows,” he says.
托宾帮助我们品味那些静默的湍流，有时甚至在逗号和划线这种细节之中寻觅。“毕肖普的手稿中有很多记号，其中很多都经过深思熟虑，被重写过多次，是关于曾经说出的事物，但现在已经被划去，或被涂上阴影，”他写道。Of course, there is only so much that can be said about the art of not saying things, and “On Elizabeth Bishop” becomes slightly redundant, here and there, as Mr. Toibin roots around for different ways to say that very thing. The book jolts back to life, after a few of its more monastic passages, whenever glamorous people drop in for the cocktail party. We meet Lota de Macedo Soares, the magnetic architect with whom Bishop lived in Brazil. She brought Bishop as close as she’d ever get to domestic bliss before reacquainting the poet with the ache of loss. (Soares took her own life in New York City in 1967.) There is a dashing cameo by Thom Gunn, the English poet who found rejuvenating exile in San Francisco.
当然，关于弦外之音的艺术有很多东西可写，托宾用各种不同的方法来说这一件事，因此《关于毕肖普》时常出现略显冗长之处。之后本书又回到毕肖普的生活，一些丰富多彩的段落中描写了不少有趣的人物，他们仿佛来参加鸡尾酒会一般。我们可以读到罗塔·德·马赛多·索莱斯(Lota de Macedo Soares)，毕肖普后来和这位迷人的建筑师一起定居巴西。她带给毕肖普前所未有的家庭幸福，但后来又令诗人重新品尝到失落的痛苦（索莱斯于1967年在纽约自杀身亡）。汤姆·甘恩(Thom Gunn)的客串出场也很醒目，这位英国诗人曾逃往旧金山，并在此地焕发新生。And it’s still impossible for a reader to resist getting sucked into the orbit of Robert Lowell, the rapaciously brilliant and royally messed-up literary lion whom Bishop considered her closest friend. The cat-and-mouse dynamic of Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence remains, in Mr. Toibin’s telling, as riveting as a series on Netflix or HBO, and probably ought to become one.
读者也忍不住会被罗伯特·洛威尔(Robert Lowell)所吸引，毕肖普曾把这位才华横溢、神经兮兮的文学之狮引为自己生平最亲密的朋友。毕肖普与洛威尔的通信如同猫鼠游戏，在托宾的叙事中，简直像Netflix或HBO台的剧集一般引人入胜，或许也应该拍一部电视剧才对。All the while another skilled writer floats in and out of the gathering, carefully toting a tray of fresh ruminations about, say, Bishop’s roots in Nova Scotia or a spell she spent in Key West, Fla.: This is our host, Mr. Toibin, whose own fondness for the poetics of restraint makes him a simpatico interpreter of Bishop’s ethos and stanzas. Mr. Toibin writes of the trauma of seeing his own father, with “an enormous gash on the side of his head,” after a brain operation in Ireland. Mr. Toibin’s father had trouble speaking after that. So did Mr. Toibin, who somewhere along the way had begun to stammer.
另一位天才的作家也不时浮出水面，用心地带来新鲜的思考，诸如毕肖普在新斯科舍的根源，或者她在弗罗里达的凯·韦斯特读过的时光——这就是我们的主人，托宾先生，他热爱诗歌中克制的美学，因此对毕肖普的气质与诗行的解析也格外亲切。托宾的父亲在爱尔兰动过脑部手术，托宾曾经写过此事带给他的创伤，他看到父亲“头颅一侧有一道巨大的伤口”。手术后他的父亲有了语言障碍，托宾自己也开始有了口吃的毛病。“I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said,” he writes.
“我和沉默十分亲近，就是那些未被说出的、那些心照不宣的事情，”他写道。In a sense, his new book operates as a persuasive argument in favor of muting the trumpet. If you are a consumer of contemporary poetry, it is likely that there is a word that you encounter with alarming, and possibly annoying, frequency. That word is “suddenly.” Suddenly the moon gleams through the shifting clouds, suddenly the whales break through the surface of the ocean, suddenly (with an implied gasp) a whirling fog of confusion dissipates and everything becomes clear.
某种程度上，他的新书是一个主张平息喧嚣的颇具说服力的论证。如果你读当代诗歌，那么很可能会经常看见这样一个字眼，并且有可能会觉得它很讨厌。那就是“突然”——“突然，月亮从漂浮的云层里露出面容”，“突然，鲸鱼跃出洋面”，“突然（意味深长地停顿一下），迷惘之雾消散殆尽，眼前的一切顿时清晰起来。”The word suggests the presence of easy epiphanies. Absorb too many of these poems, and you’ll not-so-suddenly begin to wonder whether human beings are even capable of quite so much instantaneous catharsis.
这个词暗示着一种过于轻易的当下顿悟。这种情绪贯穿在太多类似的诗歌之中，你会渐渐觉得，人类其实并没有能力得到那么多瞬间的净化。Bishop tended to be immune to anything instant, but it’s worth noting that even she succumbed to the charms of “suddenly.” We encounter that adverb in “The Moose,” when the animal in the title of the poem emerges on a road through a forest:
毕肖普不是那么容易受到瞬间的影响，但值得注意的是，她也曾屈服于“突然”的魅力。我们会在她的《麋鹿》(The Moose)一诗中遇到这个字眼，诗中那只鹿从树林里来到公路之上：—Suddenly the bus driver
——突然，巴士司机stops with a jolt,
猛地刹车turns off his lights.
熄掉车灯。A moose has come out of
一只麋鹿走出the impenetrable wood
无法穿透的树林and stands there, looms, rather,
站在路中央，或者in the middle of the road.
不如说是赫然耸现（本处使用包慧仪译本——译注）As Mr. Toibin points out, “The Moose” stands as one of Bishop’s finest achievements, one that’s suffused with the anxiety of her leaving home as a child, and it took her a couple of decades, maybe longer, to complete. If anyone had earned the right to use “suddenly,” she had.
托宾指出，《麋鹿》是毕肖普最精美的作品之一，充满儿时离家的焦虑，这首诗歌花了她二十余年的时间写就，或许还要更长。如果有人有权利使用“突然”这个字眼，那个人便非她莫属。