在爱尔兰追逐叶芝的游魂

I will arise and go now. …
我就要动身走了……

Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. Somehow William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me:
每当我从椅子上站起来，准备离开房间时，这几个字常会格外频繁地浮现在我的脑海中。不知怎么地，威廉·巴特勒·叶芝(William Butler Yeats)的诗作《茵纳斯弗利岛》(The Lake Isle of Innisfree)就像在我脑子里生了根一样，和其他数以百万计的人一样，我第一次读到这首诗是在念大学的时候：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. …
我就要动身走了，去茵纳斯弗利岛……

And I’m off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth.
然后我便真的走了，并不是去牙医诊所或者商场，而是我的思绪，大步跨越着翠绿的山坡，走向一处神话之地。

A few miles away from the lake is Ben Bulben, a mountain slab that also inspired Yeats.
距离吉尔湖数英里处，便是本布尔本山，这座厚片状的岩山同样为叶芝带来了诸多灵感。

Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. It would be a four-hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile.

在这首诗篇中，叶芝以一处真实存在的地点，一座位于吉尔湖中央的岛屿为题。这片湖泊懒洋洋地卧在北爱尔兰斯莱戈郡的苍翠之地上，纵情延绵五英里。几年前的时候，我恰好人在都柏林，便决定化心动为行动：前往茵湖岛。从我当时为写作取材的地方到那里，足足需要绕道四个小时，但这趟旅程一定值得这番奔波，对此我毫无半分犹疑。

Thanks to the popularity of the poem (voted by readers of The Irish Times in 1999 as their all-time favorite work of Irish poetry), “Innisfree” is a bit of a brand. There are Innisfree cosmetics, an Innisfree Eau de Parfum, an Innisfree B&B, an Innisfree Hotel and a Rose of Innisfree tour boat that does the lake.

得益于这首诗的流行（在1999年时被《爱尔兰时报》(Irish Times)的读者票选为他们素来喜爱的爱尔兰诗作），“茵湖岛”多少形成了某种品牌效应。有以此为名的护肤品品牌“悦诗风吟”，有以此为名的淡香水，有以此为名的早餐旅馆，有以此为名的酒店，还有巡游于吉尔湖上的游船“茵湖岛玫瑰号”(Rose of Innisfree)。

But I know these things only from Google. Thankfully, none of it was evident on my drive. I didn’t use a GPS; I just relied on a couple of tiny handmade-looking road signs that popped up as I entered the region, which pointed the way to “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The last stage of the journey involved no tourism bric-a-brac, only small, twisty, increasingly difficult to navigate roads, mossy tree trunks, wind, willows, heather, cloud knuckles and gray rock.

但是我对这些事物的认知，全部来自于谷歌搜索的结果。幸好，它们一个都没有在我的自驾之旅中出现。我当时并没有使用全球定位系统(GPS)，只是凭借我驶入当地后所看到的几处路标行驶，这些指示着前往“茵湖岛”道路的路标小得可怜，看上去似乎出自手工制作。这段旅程的最后一段看不到任何旅游纪念品商店，只有又小又绕越来越难分辨方向的小路、长满苔藓的树干、一路上的大风、袅然的杨柳、丛生的石南花、天空中的云脊和灰色的岩石。

When I reached the lakeshore, I found the opposite of a tourist site. I could barely make my way out to the water to get a view, so thick was the shoreline with trees and brush. A farmhouse with a couple of S.U.V.s parked outside stood nearby, and there was a little concrete dock jutting out into the lake, pointed almost directly at Innisfree a few hundred yards away. I got out on the dock, sat cross-legged facing the island, and let the wind say what it had to say. For decades, this place had reverberated in my mind; now I was actually there.

当我抵达湖岸时，发现自己完全不像是到了旅游景点。湖畔沿岸种满了密集的树木与灌木，我很难有办法穿过它们走近湖水，纵览全湖风光。附近矗立着一座农庄，门外停着几辆SUV，还有几座小型的混凝土船坞探入湖中，几乎直指着就在几百码开外的茵湖岛。我走到船坞外侧，面朝着茵湖岛盘腿坐下，任由清风自在倾诉。几十年来，这处地方一直在我的脑海中萦绕；而此刻，我终于真真切切地置身于此。

Yeats, born in 1865, the son of an artist, was a childlike intellectual. He would forget to eat, or put food in the oven and let it burn. He was devoted to mysticism and séances. He spent decades in love with the Irish nationalist and proto-feminist Maud Gonne; after she rejected his marriage proposal for a final time, he shifted his attention to her daughter.
叶芝生于1865年，乃是艺术家之子，他自己则是一名天真烂漫的知识分子。他会忘记吃东西，或是忘记已把食物放进炉子里，任其糊掉。他投身于神秘主义和降神会。他爱慕着爱尔兰独立运动成员、原始的女性主义者茅德·冈(Maud Gonne)，数十年如一日；在她最后一次拒绝了他的求婚后，他便将自己的心力转移到了她的女儿身上。

A few weeks after she, in turn, spurned his marriage offer, he proposed to another woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who, despite knowing where she ranked, became his devoted life partner. As she essentially said after his death, she saw the shimmer of his soul. “For him, every day he lived was a new adventure,” she once told the Yeats scholar Curtis B. Bradford. “He woke every morning certain that in the new day before him something would happen that had never happened before.”
他的求婚一次次地遭到了她的唾弃，于是数周后，他转而向另一名女性乔吉·海德―李斯(Georgie Hyde-Lees)求了婚。她明知自己在他心目中并非首选，却依然成为了对他满怀深情的终身伴侣。就像她在叶芝去世后的精辟之言，她看到了他灵魂中的闪光点。“在他而言，他所过的每一天都是一趟新的历险，”她曾经如此对叶芝学者柯蒂斯·布拉德福德(Curtis B. Bradford)讲述道，“他每天早上醒来时，内心都十分确信，自己面前这新的一天里，一定会发生一些以前没有发生过的事。”

Yeats was in his 50s when he married. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a young man’s poem, written when he was 23. It is filled with a romantic longing for the past: the Irish past, the mythic past and also Yeats’s own. He had spent his childhood in County Sligo before moving to Dublin and then London. This countryside, the lake and its islands, this composition of greens and grays and blues, was fused within him.
叶芝结婚时已50多岁。《茵纳斯弗利岛》则是一首青年的诗篇，是他在23岁的时候写就。诗中充满了对过去的浪漫向往――爱尔兰的过去，神秘的过去，还有叶芝自己的过去。他在斯莱戈郡度过了童年时期，其后迁往了都柏林，后来又去了伦敦。这处乡郊，这片湖泊和湖中的岛屿，这道由绿色、灰色、蓝色共同组成的风景，全部牢牢地烙印在他的血脉中。

When he was a boy, his father had read him Thoreau’s “Walden,” and its pastoral message resonated with the landscape of his childhood. As a young man living in London, trying to make a go of it amid the industrial throb, Yeats reached back to his youth and crafted the poem. The first line signals the self-consciously antiquated style he chose. (Even back in 1888, when the poem was written, people didn’t “arise.”) He filled it with rhyme, pumped it with unapologetically forceful rhythm. He made it, for all its romance, compact, athletic. This is the entire poem.
在他年纪尚幼时，他的父亲曾经为他念过梭罗(Thoreau)的《瓦尔登湖》(Walden)，其中所描绘的田园风光与他童年所看到的这道风景交相辉映。作为一名在伦敦生活，努力想要在工业浪潮中出人头地的青年，叶芝对自己的童年念念不忘，于是创作出了这首诗篇。诗文的第一行便昭示出，叶芝有意识地选择了一种旧派的表达手法。（即使是在该诗成文的1888年，也没有人是“动身”的。）他在整首诗中大量押韵，并在其中注入了一种不容置辩的有力节奏。他在尽情挥洒浪漫的同时，也保持着诗章的简短和动感。以下便是完整的全诗：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
我就要动身走了，去茵纳斯弗利岛，

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
搭起一个小屋子，筑起泥笆房；

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
支起九行云豆架，一排蜜蜂巢，

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
独个儿住着，荫阴下听蜂群歌唱。

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
我就会得到安宁，它徐徐下降，

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
从朝雾落到蟋蟀歌唱的地方；

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
午夜是一片闪亮，正午是一片紫光，

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
傍晚到处飞舞着红雀的翅膀。

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
我就要动身走了，因为我听到

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
那水声日日夜夜轻拍着湖滨；

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
不管我站在车行道或灰暗的人行道，

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
都在我心灵的深处听见这声音。

（文中所涉叶芝诗作译文出自袁可嘉译本）

Of course, as I approached the lake, the poem was reverberating in my mind, and at first the imagery seemed to live up to it. The lake is five miles long, fringed with greenery; moody hills rise on the opposite shore. The furrowed water was dotted with little islands, some of them very atmospheric. As it happens, though, Innisfree is not one of the atmospheric ones. It’s tiny, and looks like a bur, a bristling seed pod, almost angrily sprouting trees and brush from its humpy back.
不消说，当我一步步地接近吉尔湖时，这首诗也在我脑海中不断回荡，诗中所传达的意象，第一次在我的眼前鲜活了起来。吉尔湖全长5英里，沿岸一篇郁葱；起伏不定的山丘在对岸拔地而起。湖有波纹，其间点缀着几处小岛，其中几座别有一番朦胧的美感。只是茵湖岛偏巧不是当中很有氛围的一座。它面积很小，看上去就像一根钻头，一只竖立的豆荚，在它隆起的岛脊上，树木与灌木的长势冲天。

Some have speculated that Yeats chose it because of the poetry in the syllables of its name, and the last syllable’s suggestion of freedom. You’d have a hard time building a cabin on it, and it’s too lumpen for a glade.
曾经有人猜测，叶芝之所以选择这里，全因其岛名发音中的诗意，最后一个音节“free”更是象征着“自由”之意。要想在这座岛上建一间小屋实属难事，而若以林间空地的标准而言，这岛又嫌太过破败。

But to leave it at that — to say that Yeats picked a dud — would be like declaring that you had no music in your soul. The whole landscape echoes the poem. You realize, sitting there, identifying the sound of the lake water with the deep heart’s core, that the Yeats who wrote the poem does not actually intend to retreat from the world and move to this spot. He is reaching for something. He is aware, at 23, of death and the inexorability of change. He is searching, trying to find his balance, his center. He knows he left it somewhere in his past, as we all have done.
但若是在这个话题上就此打住――承认叶芝就是选了一处不毛之地――又好像宣告着，自己的灵魂中没有乐章流淌一样。整道风景都在应和着这首诗歌。你坐在那里，在心灵的深处分辨着湖水的声音，便会领悟到，写下这首诗的叶芝，并不是真的想要搬到这座小岛，避世隐居。他是在求索某样东西。他在年仅23岁的年纪，就意识到了死亡和世事变迁的无情。他在寻找，试图找到自己的平衡，自己的中心点。他知道自己将这种平衡遗落在了过去的某处，就像我们所有人一样。

The poem is a mental exercise, a meditation. You could perform the exercise in a parking garage. It isn’t meant to be enacted.
这首诗就是一次脑力游戏，一次神游。你可以在停车场里玩玩这个游戏。它并不需要受到任何限制。

Then I realized that my meditation was different from Yeats’s. If he was using his mind to find his center, I was using him — using history, poetry, travel — to get to the same place.
然后我意识到，我的神游与叶芝的并不相同。如果他是在利用自己的思想定位自己的中心，那么我就是在利用他――利用历史、诗歌与旅行――来达到同样的目的。

And there I was. All of County Sligo is “Yeats Country.” He mined it, traced its contours, translated them to verse: “black wind,” “wet winds,” “noisy clouds,” “thorn-trees,” “the clinging air.” He did it so thoroughly, it’s almost as if the craggy loveliness of the countryside were carved to suit his poetry, rather than the other way around.
而且我确实做到了。整个斯莱戈郡都是“叶芝郡”。是他发掘了它，勾勒出了它的轮廓，将它们一一化为了诗句：“黑色的风”，“潮湿的风”，“嘈杂的云”，“荆棘树”，“粘滞的空气”。他将一切做得如此彻底，简直仿若这处乡郊令人神往的重峦叠嶂本就是为了成就他的诗作而生，而不是他的诗在应和这些风景。

“Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car,” from Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” describes a misty waterfall to the north that seems like something out of Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit.”
叶芝另一首诗《被偷走的孩子》(The Stolen Child)中有一句“那儿，溪流曲折／从葛兰卡的山坡上坠泻”，描绘的是一处流向北方、雾气缭绕的飞瀑，看上去很有彼得·杰克逊(Peter Jackson)执导的电影《霍比特人》(Hobbit)中的世界的感觉。

A few miles away from the lake, the stupendous mountain slab called Ben Bulben rises like a natural acropolis, the home of some ancient race of Irish gods, a height whose purpose can only be to evoke awe. It became another geographic touchstone for Yeats — so much so that in his poem “Under Ben Bulben,” he eerily directs the reader to his own grave, in the nearby cemetery of Drumcliffe. Actually it’s the grave of another Yeats he refers to, an ancestor. But after his own death, in France, his body was transferred there, as if people treated his poem as a last will and testament.
距离吉尔湖几英里开外的地方，一座体型庞大的厚片状山丘有如一道天然屏障般矗立于此，它名唤本布尔本山(Ben Bulben)，是爱尔兰上古时期某些神祇的家园，那般高耸的身姿唯一的作用必定就是唤起人们的敬畏之心。它成了叶芝的另一处试金石地标――在他的诗作《本布尔本山下》(Under Ben Bulben)中，他很诡异地引导着读者造访了他自己的墓地，就在此山附近的鼓崖公墓(cemetery of Drumcliffe)内。实际上，此处乃是他提到的另一位叶芝，一位先祖的墓穴所在。但是在他本人于法国过世后，他的遗体也被转送到了这里，就好像人们将他的这首诗作视为了他的遗愿，他的遗嘱。

It’s only a four-mile drive from the shore of Lough Gill to Sligo town, and civilization. Sligo is an ancient and lively enough little center, dominated by its cathedral and ringed with pubs where there’s nonstop rugby and soccer on the telly and you can order not just Irish stew and Guinness, but also chicken curry and New Zealand sauvignon blanc. For a tourist, it’s the practical base. But pleasant as this is, it was the antithesis of why I had come. Yeats’s meditations weren’t urban, and neither was mine.
吉尔湖畔距离斯莱戈郡以及文明世界，仅有四英里的车程。斯莱戈郡是一处历史悠久、生机盎然的中心小郡，受本地的大教堂管辖，四周遍布着大小酒馆，里面没有没完没了地播着橄榄球和足球节目的电视，而你可以点的菜品和酒水不仅有爱尔兰炖菜和健力士黑啤酒(Guinness)，还有咖喱鸡和新西兰白苏维翁葡萄酒。对于游客而言，这里就是你的活动基地。不过尽管这一切令人心生愉悦，却与我造访此地的用意截然相反。叶芝的神游无关都市，我的也不是。

I am told that there are enormous salmon lurking beneath the waters of Lough Gill, and that otters make the lake their home, and that the lush forest along the banks called Slish Wood, which Yeats in “The Stolen Child” calls Sleuth Wood, harbors rare orchids, ivies and thistles, and that, yes, the evening can be full of the linnet’s wings. I saw none of these remarkable things.
有人告诉我说，在吉尔湖的水面之下，潜伏着大量的鲑鱼；也有人说，水獭们也在吉尔湖安了家；还有人说，湖畔沿岸那片名唤斯利什森林(Slish Wood)，但在叶芝的诗作《被偷走的孩子》中被写成斯留斯森林(Sleuth Wood)的茂密树丛里，生长着珍稀的兰花、常春藤和蒺藜；更有人说，没错，这里的黄昏时刻真的会有红雀羽翼四处拍打。可这些壮观的美景，我一样也没有见着。

But I saw others.
但是我看到了另一番风景。