They have ridden the low moon out of the sky.
Their hooves drum up the dawn.
(他们骑着低矮的月亮驶向天边
他们的马蹄在黎明踏出声声鼓点。)
西班牙语里你不可能骑着低矮的月亮驶向天边,也不可能在黎明踩出鼓点。就是he fell down 或者 he picked himself up这样的句子西班牙语也写不出来。你一定要用“他用尽全力才爬起来”之类的苍白表示才行。而在英语里,动词的使用和词语的位置更加灵活多变。你可以写出:dream away your life; live up to; something you have to live down. 这些西班牙语里不可能表达的句子。而且英语还有复合词。比如说wordsmith(语言巨匠)。西班牙语里你要说un herrero de palabras,又笨拙又虚伪。但是英语不像德语,可以随时随地造新词,你没有盎格鲁—萨克逊人的自由。比如sigefolc,意思是胜利的民族。在古英语里你不会觉得不自然,但是西班牙语就完全不一样了。当然,西班牙语里也有我认为美妙的东西:音调非常清晰。而在现代英语里却失去了开元音。
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
[ 本帖最后由 Bsharribullet 于 2008-8-7 14:44 编辑 ]作者: Bernhardt 时间: 2008-8-7 14:49 标题: 关于Snyder一段简介 He was born on May 8, 1930 in San Francisco, California but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He attended Reed College along with his friends Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, and then went to Berkeley to study Asian Languages. He had a particular interest in Chinese and Japanese culture and poetry, an interest shared by Kenneth Rexroth. Through Rexroth he fell in with the Beat crowd, read his great mythical poem 'A Berry Feast' at the famous 1955 poetry reading at the Six Gallery, and inspired the Zen Buddhist craze that swept the Beats, as well as some notable mountain climbing expeditions that certainly tested the physical endurance of a few writers more accustomed to scaling the inner heights of their minds.
Snyder participated in many left-wing activities, along with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, during the Sixties. He was onstage during the original San Francisco Be-In in January 1967. He has since continued to fight for peace, environmental awareness and freedom from nuclear weaponry, and has never wavered in his devotion to these noble causes.
Bruce Cook said it well: if Ginsberg is the Beat movement's Walt Whitman (he is), Gary Snyder is the Henry David Thoreau.作者: 八和九生 时间: 2008-8-11 10:38
翻译的真好!