反调：里尔克只是气体

J. D. MCCLATCHY 星期一诗社 2024-01-10

Every trade has its patron saint, and if butchers and silversmiths, why not poets? Since I can remember, poetry’s patron saint—revered and invoked—has been Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s understandable why Rilke is the favorite of fledglings: young poets continue to see in him what they want to see in themselves. Even as a teenager, Rilke had an ardent, if unfocused, sense of literary ambition; he was alternately depressed and exhilarated, or “ill” and in need of both attention and solitude; he was swept by tides of concentration and idleness; he was a snob who liked to walk barefoot, passionate about “spirituality” and “simplicity”; he was a passive and self-pitying sexual predator; he liked to read his work aloud, by the light of flickering candles, to a room of hushed admirers; he was even a vegetarian. Starter poets, their training wheels still attached, thrill to the oppressive gloom of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and to the sententious twaddle of Letters to a Young Poet.每一个行业都有它的守护神，如果屠夫和银匠，为什么不是诗人？从我记事起，诗歌的守护神是雷纳·玛丽亚·里尔克。里尔克为什么是初出茅庐的宠儿，这是可以理解的：年轻的诗人们继续从他身上看到他们想要看到的东西。即使在十几岁的时候，里尔克就有一种强烈的、即使不专注的文学抱负感；他时而郁郁寡欢，时而“病入膏肓”，既需要关注又需要孤独；他被专注和闲散的潮流所席卷；他是一个喜欢赤脚行走的势利小人，对“灵性”和“简单”充满激情；他是一个被动而自怜的性掠食者；他喜欢借着摇曳的蜡烛，对着一屋子安静的崇拜者大声朗读他的作品；他甚至是个素食主义者。初出茅庐的诗人们，他们的训练轮还挂着，他们对马尔特·劳里德斯·布里奇的笔记本上令人压抑的阴郁和给一个年轻诗人的陈词滥调的信件感到兴奋。

As a selfish poseur, Rilke can scarcely be matched. (Of course, there are poets—Ezra Pound leaps to mind—whose character was baser and whose work is emptier.) It’s not realistic to claim that has nothing to do with his poetry, but it doesn’t affect my judgment of his achievement. And I am willing to overlook the flaccid sentimentality of his early books. But the high esteem in which his later work is held—especially his two final sequences, The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus—puzzles me. Even in these poems, there are brilliant strokes, and some of the old chestnuts—“The Panther,” say, or “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes”—still have their gleam and bite. But far too much of The Duino Elegies is pretentiously obscure—obscure, that is, to the point not of fascination but of tedium. Montale can be as hermetic, but his poems always seem grounded in remembered detail. They are like Braille: I can sense it means something, though I can’t understand it. Rilke, on the other hand, is just gassy. What I dislike about so many of his poems is their unattached feeling. His buzzwords—soul, longing, life, gaze, thing, eternal—float aimlessly. Lines like “Does not his passionate oneness with her pure / features derive from your celestial fire?” or this sodden mess—作为一个自私的装腔作势的人，里尔克几乎无法与之匹敌。（当然，也有诗人庞德跃跃欲试，他们的性格更卑鄙，作品更空虚。）声称与他的诗歌无关并不现实，但这并不影响我对他的成就的判断。我也愿意忽略他早期作品中的软弱多愁善感。但他后来的作品，尤其是他的最后两部作品，杜伊诺的挽歌和献给奥菲斯的十四行诗，受到人们的高度尊重，这让我困惑不解。即使在这些诗中，也有精彩的笔触，一些古老的栗子“黑豹”或者“奥菲斯，欧丽迪斯，赫耳墨斯”仍然闪烁着光芒。但是，太多的杜伊诺挽歌都是自命不凡的晦涩难懂，也就是说，到了一个不是引人入胜的地步，而是单调乏味的地步。蒙太尔也可以是封闭的，但他的诗似乎总是以记忆中的细节为基础。它们就像盲文：我能感觉到它意味着什么，尽管我不明白。另一方面，里尔克只是气体。他那么多诗我不喜欢的是他们的孤立无援的感觉。他的流行语灵魂，渴望，生命，凝视，事物，永恒漫无目的的飘荡。像“他与她的纯洁/五官的激情合一不是来自你的天火吗？“或者这烂摊子——

What we have is World
and always World and never Nowhere-Without-Not:
that pure unguarded element one breathes
and knows endlessly and never craves

(the translations are by Edward Snow) are nearly comic in their portentousness.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is marketing. Rilke is now sold as “wisdom literature.” It is hardly surprising that one of Rilke’s most prominent recent translators, Stephen Mitchell, went on to offer versions of mystical poetry, along with the Tao. There is now a collection called Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties. Rilke as Rumi? Or would it be fairer to wonder if Rilke hasn’t become—or at least isn’t being sold as—the Kahlil Gibran of the intellectual set. For my money, that turn of events seems sadly appropriate.我怀疑，问题的一部分是市场营销。里尔克现在被称为“智慧文学”。里尔克最近最著名的翻译家之一斯蒂芬·米切尔（Stephen Mitchell）继续提供神秘诗歌和道的版本也就不足为奇了。现在有一个集叫做《爱与其他困难》。里尔克和鲁米一样？或者，如果你想知道里尔克是否还没有成为或者至少没有被当作知识界的卡利尔·吉布兰来出售，那会不会更公平一些呢。对我来说，事态的转变似乎很合适。

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