徐淳刚 译
对于哲学家，“抽象”已是老生常谈。但是今天，在我们艺术家手里，它还是个新玩意。为什么我们的诗歌不能有我们认定的新的特质呢？我们的思想中可以有。如果我们不实践，它就会僵化。我们活着就为它。
也许，只有学者才会重视：一首诗只是一种声音。声音是矿石中的黄金。现在，我们将把声音单独提炼出来，抛弃那些不必要的东西。直到我们发现，写诗的目的就是要应用尽可能多的不同的声音：元音，辅音，标点，语法，词汇，韵律，光有这些还不够。我们还需要借助语境、意义和主题。这才是使诗歌得以丰满的最重要的东西。语言上能做的就这些。韵律也一样——特别是在我们的语言中，韵律其实就两种，严格的抑扬格和宽松的抑扬格。古人虽有多种用法，但还是显得贫乏，如果他们全凭韵律。我们的某些韵律家，为了让一句诗听起来不致单调，会把一个短音从整个音步中拿掉，这样生拉硬拽，实在让人看了难受。冲破呆板的音律，可能的和谐、戏剧性的意义之音远无止境。再说，诗歌只是一种表达的艺术，有声或无声。有声或许更好，就更深远更广阔的经验而言。
如此，就有了一个表达的问题：声音的自由度。让我们再假定：自由度和声音同样是构成一首诗的主要部分。如果它是自由的调子，那就是诗。现在我们的问题是，作为现代抽象主义者，我们要保持这种原生纯粹，要自由自在，但不可杂乱无章。我们招来了不守规矩的人，给予的道路漫无目的，浮想联翩，迫使我们从一个主张到另一种联想，就像炎热的午后，一只蚂蚱的胡蹦乱跳。只有诗歌的主题能让我们安定。正如第一个谜，单调的韵律怎么会产生丰富的音调，同样，一首诗既要保持自由度又要表达主题，同样让人满意，这是第二个谜。
一首诗，它本身应该很情愿为我们揭开谜底。一首诗创造形迹。它始于愉悦，终于智慧。这种形迹就像爱情，没有人会真以为欣喜静止不动。开始，它是欢乐，接着，变得冲动。写下第一行，诗就有了方向，然后就是一个幸运的奔向一首诗的过程，最后在对生活的澄清中戛然而止——没有必要是什么伟大的澄清，像教派的建立那样，只是对混乱暂时的遏制。它有结局，一个无法预料的结局注定如此，从第一个原初心绪的图像——确切而言是从真正的心绪开始。如果意在笔先，将最精彩的留到最后，而没有保持整体的酣畅，那么，它就只不过是一首炫技的诗。它一路走，一路寻找自己的名字，更重要的，它发现最好的措辞在后面等着它，在某个智慧而悲戚的诗行里——那种快乐——就像悲欣交集的酒歌。
作者不流泪，读者不流泪。作者不惊喜，读者不惊喜。对我来说，最初的喜悦便是突然间想起似是而非的东西。此时此地，此情此景，我就像是从云端下来，或像从地底钻出来。一种失去已久的喜悦的认出和事物的跟随。接着，一点一点，意外的惊奇源源不断。最有益的印象好像总是那些我不曾意识到的，没有时间注意到的。结果，我们总是像巨人，把过去的经验奋力抛在我们自己面前，为未来铺平道路，但是有一天，我们不期而遇的某处也许与我们经过的某处相反。道路不是笔直的才更有意思。我们都喜欢手杖有直有曲。现代精密仪器把直的东西弄曲，这在过去是靠眼睛和手。
我知道，为什么逻辑化的自由比紊乱的自由更好。但逻辑是向后的，回溯的，后于行为。诗歌必须看得更远，像预言一样。它肯定是一个启示，或一系列启示，为读者同样为诗人。因为诗的素材一定在诗里面进行，并且超越时空，超越时空之前的关联，超越一切，除了内在关联。我们总空谈自由。我们总是呼吁学校的自由教育，孩子不到十六岁就不许离开学校。我已放弃自己过去的民主观念，我同意给下层人民自由，完全让上层阶级来照顾。政治自由与我无关。我左右消受不起。我所能保持的一切自由只是我运用素材的自由——身体和精神的状况，不时对我经历的巨大的混乱作出反应。
学者和艺术家在一起，常常为搞不清他们的分歧在哪里而烦恼。他们都运用学识工作，但我认为，他们最大的不同在于如何获取学识。学者们一丝不苟，依据逻辑得到他们的学养；诗人则傲然，书里书外都是。他们不刻意追求，而是像经过田野时那样，随便让毛刺粘到身上。没有获取就没有支配，更何况是自赋其值。这第二种本质的学识在原生的思想和艺术中更为常见。一个正上学的孩子，可以按照顺序把他学到的东西一五一十讲出来。艺术家则应当珍视，从之前的有序的时空中抓住某物，干净利落地将之放到一个全新的秩序中去。
不止一次，我已经不能让自己的精神激进，如果对于年轻的信仰者，激进在冒险中还能具有独创性。不过，我还是希望我们的国家具有主动权和独创性。对于我自己，独创性仅仅在于一首诗进行时的清新饱满，像我刚才说的，“始于愉悦，终于智慧”，诗歌的形象和恋爱一样。像熊熊炉火上的一块冰，诗歌必须驾驭它自身的融化。一首诗可以修正，当它已经形成，但不必忧虑如何形成。诗最可贵的特质保证它自身的进行，并且带着诗人一同前行。请读一百遍：诗将永葆清新，如同金属永葆气味。惊奇中显现的意义一旦展开，就绝不会失去。
The Figure a Poem Makes
Robert Frost
Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why cant’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself ? we can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we cant’t in practice. Our lives for it. Then
Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context— meaning — subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters — particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on meters for all tone. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say ,sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience.
Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem can have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.
It should be the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the pulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessary a great clarification, such as sects cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood — and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and save for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad — the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like the giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.
I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelation, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years old of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material — the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.
Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they duffer. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A school boy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.
More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
