史春波 译
作为王家新的译者，我已对他的审美向度已有了一定程度亲密的认识，并发现从某些角度来看它与我个人的写作保持着平行。我们都有一点忧郁，时而抒情，但始终在世界冰冷的棱角中经历回火。我乐意相信我们对诗歌的记忆有着相似的态度——它或许是一丝令人回味的馨香，一种丢失的气味，但绝不取悦于人的甜腻的乡愁。在王家的诗歌里，过去时常如同一个出没的幽灵在布施拯救。在它的陈述中，时而温柔，又不时将挂着倒钩的隐晦的现实拷问。
于是我们可以想见为何这样一个诗人会亲近里尔克，尤其亲近策兰，并把大量策兰的诗歌翻译成汉语。跟策兰一样，当生命中的荒凉坦露无遗，王家新也被毁灭和残酷的美以及那些变形的瞬间所吸引。对许多读者来说，策兰的诗歌随着时间而愈发封闭和难以破译，尽管他曾用“不加掩饰的歧义”（undissembled ambiguity）来描述自己后期的诗作。然而，王家新的诗，至少从其截至目前的体现来说，依然是容易进入的，并与世间的事物——与它们的气味、颜色、质地以及施予我们灵魂的细腻而又时常意想不到的张力保持着深刻的联系。像最好的中国古代诗人那样，王家新诗歌的主题与灵感均来自近在咫尺的普通生活，譬如一辆孩子的红色岩石牌自行车在异国的飘雪中被逐渐覆盖。无论是一只柚子的香气，还是一堆叠放的桔子皮，都栩栩如生地诱使着思想坚韧的诗人从记忆深处去摸索其共鸣与意义。而当诗人将我们周遭有形的细节引入写作——那苦涩的，模糊的，喜悦甚或超然的——诗歌便实现了它神圣的瞬间。
倘若诗歌像肯尼思·雷克思洛斯（Kenneth Rexroth）所说的那样是“存在的提升”（the exaltation of being），王家新的声音则不仅在于提升，还在于探究，它取自过去，取自幽深的自我，一笔艰难获得的礼物。法国诗人博纳富瓦（Yves Bonnefoy）评价策兰时曾说“他的词语无法复原他的经历。”对王家新而言，诗歌的任务并非回避这一困境，而是去面对它。当诗人试图唤起某个记忆场景中的物理与情感的特质，不可逆性本身就成为了它自身主题的一部分，但诗人却执着于揭示它是如何框定住回忆并使其变得更加困难的。在一首描述与多年不见面的已成年的儿子重逢的短诗中，他让我们看见啤酒泡沫从杯沿缓缓流至杯底的情景。他已无需告诉我们他的抑或我们应有的感受，那样一幅画面足以唤醒未曾说出的一切。
对和王家新一样经历了文化大革命的同代诗人来说，过去，由于它那充满了苦乐的单纯，也是一片黑暗的平原，在那里，童年在来临的残酷岁月中遭遇恐怖，那潜藏于人性的残忍与背叛化为一段难以磨灭的教训，烙上了见证者的心灵。这些年轻时所造成的创伤，终究无法完全愈合。
王家新所书写的当下，如他所说，是“我们未曾在场的当下”。他目光中那尖锐的洞察力，如此精确，哪怕它触及的是极为短暂的时刻，也击穿了我们共同承受的存在的本质。他发出的是持久的声音。在那曾燃起火光的昏暗壁炉里，冒烟的圆木曾在这里唤回前生的鸟，诗人来到这里，讲述他所听到的一切。
The Scent of Grapefruit--Reading Wang Jiaxin
by George O'Connell
As a co-translator of Wang Jiaxin’s poetry, I have gained some angle of intimacy with his aesthetic, discovering that in certain ways it parallels my own. We are both wistful, lyric by turns, but tempered by the icy edges of the world. I would like to believe we share a similar view towards memory in poetry--a fragrance to savor, a scent of loss, but never the saccharine pleasures of nostalgia. Often in Wang Jiaxin’s work, the past haunts as much as it rescues. Its narrations, momentarily tender, are often interrogated for their barbed or ambiguous truths.
Anyone can see why this poet is drawn to Rilke, and especially to Paul Celan, so many of whose poems he has translated into Chinese. Wang, like Celan, is drawn to erasures, cruel beauties, and those transfiguring moments when life’s starkness is laid clear. For many readers, Celan’s work grew increasingly encoded and hermetic, though he himself described his later poems as “undissembled ambiguity”. Wang Jiaxin’s poetry, however, at least up to its present incarnation, remains accessible, still deeply in touch with the things of this world--their scent, their color and texture, their exquisite and sometimes unexpected pressure on our souls. Like the best Chinese classical poets, he locates his subjects and his inspirations in the ordinary and near at hand. A child’s red bicycle, for instance, slowly drifting over with foreign snow. The scent of grapefruit, or the peels of a tangerine, come wholly to life, yet at the same time summon memories the tough-minded poet probes for resonance and meaning. In registering the concrete details of our world--bitter, ambiguous, joyful, or transcendent--his poems achieve moments of holiness.
If poetry, as Kenneth Rexroth said, is “the exaltation of being”, Wang Jiaxin’s voice not only exalts but explores, retrieving from the past, and from the recesses of the self, a wealth of hard won gifts. The French poet Yves Bonnefoy, speaking of Celan, said “his words cannot recover his experience.” For Wang, the task of poetry is not to flinch from this dilemma, but to face it. Even while evoking the physicality and emotion of a remembered scene, irretrievability becomes its own allied subject, the poet tenacious in revealing how it frames and exacerbates recall. In one short poem about the difficulty in meeting a grown but long absent son, he shows us the foam in an empty beer glass sliding from the rim to the bottom. He does not need to tell us what he feels, what we feel. The image alone conjures everything unspoken.
Like so many Chinese poets of his generation who lived through the cultural revolution, the past, for all its bittersweet innocence, can also be a plain of darkness, where childhood met horror in a brutal coming of age, where unforgettable lessons in the human potential for cruelty and betrayal seared the hearts of its witnesses. These scars, inflicted so young, never fully heal.
Wang Jiaxin’s present, as he says, is “a present in which we are absent”. It is precisely the knowing poignance of his gaze, even as it touches the breathing moment, that strikes through to the essence of our shared existence. His is a voice that lingers. By the dark hearth where once a fire burned, where the steaming logs once whistled back their birds, the poet stands and speaks of what he hears.
附：王家新的诗
柚子
三年前从故乡采摘下的一只青色柚子
一直放在我的书架上
现在它变黄了
枯萎了
南方的水份
已在北方的干燥中蒸发
但今天我拿起了它
它竟然飘散出一缕缕奇异的不散的幽香
闻着它，仿佛有一个声音对我说话
仿佛故乡的山山水水
幼年时听到的呼唤和耳语
一并化为涓涓细流
向我涌来，涌来
恍惚间
我仍是那个穿行在结满累累果实的
柚子树下的孩子
身边是嗡嗡唱的蜜蜂
远处是一声声鹧鸪
而一位年轻母亲倚在门口的笑容
已化为一道永恒的
照亮在青青柚子上的光
2005
和儿子一起喝酒
一个年过五十的人还有什么雄心壮志
他的梦想不过是和久别的
已长大的儿子坐在一起喝上一杯
两只杯子碰在一起
这就是他们拥抱的方式
也是他们和解的方式
然后，什么也不说
当儿子起身去要另一杯
父亲，则呆呆地看着杯沿的泡沫
流下杯底。
2007，12
桔子
整个冬天他都在吃着桔子，
有时是在餐桌上吃，有时是在公共汽车上吃，
有时吃着吃着
雪就从书橱的内部下下来了；
有时他不吃，只是慢慢地剥着，
仿佛有什么在那里面居住。
整个冬天他就这样吃着桔子，
吃着吃着他就想起了在一部什么小说中
女主人公也曾端上来一盘桔子，
其中一个一直滚落到故事的结尾……
但他已记不清那是谁写的。
他只是默默地吃着桔子。
他窗台上的桔子皮愈积愈厚。
他终于想起了小时候的医院床头
摆放着的那几个桔子，
那是母亲不知从什么地方给他弄来的；
弟弟嚷嚷着要吃，妈妈不让，
是他分给了弟弟；
但最后一个他和弟弟都舍不得吃，
一直摆放在床头柜上。
（那最后一个桔子，后来又怎样了呢？）
整个冬天他就这样吃着桔子，
尤其是在下雪天，或灰濛濛的天气里；
他吃得特别慢，仿佛
他有的是时间，
仿佛，他在吞食着黑暗；
他就这样吃着、剥着桔子，抬起头来，
窗口闪耀雪的光芒。
2006，2，望京慧谷阳光
