杨炼：不让这首诗沉沦为冷漠死寂的美

杨炼

“不让这首诗沉沦为冷漠死寂的美”

——杨炼在2018意大利北南国际文学奖颁奖典礼上的受奖辞


一首诗是一个古今中外文化的汇合点。

一首诗被写下，屈原两千三百年前的提问者形象，就被复活：“曰遂古之初，谁传道之？上下未形，何由考之？奥维德两千年前的流亡命运，就继续延伸；杜甫一千二百年前的沉雄笔力，就锻打我们的词句；但丁七百年前裁判世界的目光，就移植到我们眼睛里。一首诗植根于某个时间，又把所有时间包含在这个时间之内，活一次就活在永远。字里行间，只有人性的深度。

我们所处的时代，堪称人类精神困境最深的时代。冷战结束，也结束了一种意识形态群体划分。黑白分明的冷战口号，一夜间失效，代之以名为“全球化”的世界，其间充满奥维德《变形记》般的诡谲错综。我们都像神话人物，从美国夏娃手中接过一只“苹果”，却很少有人想到：一只小小的苹果手机，汇集了中国廉价农民工的血汗、台湾工厂老板、美国品牌的全球巨额利润。这袖珍版的全球化现实，太贴近每个人了，它挑战、击碎了各种空话套话：社会主义、资本主义、东方、西方，专制、民主……当代“变形记”中，概念的偷换混淆，有界限吗？追逐最大利益，需要界限吗？一个可怕的逻辑贯穿世界：思想价值极度混乱，造成人类精神彻底真空，最后只剩自私自利、玩世不恭那唯一的“真实”。抓取眼前利益的疯狂，反衬出当代人精神上的走投无路。我们落下，落下，却不知落点。每个人活在四面八方挥之不去的噩梦中。

那么，诗歌呢？诗歌并非例外。这个世界不缺少诗，相反，互联网无远弗届的沟通，也让诗歌大泛滥。诗人的小聪明，能轻易把蹩脚的诗句，玩转成通向广告词的捷径。无数优美的、动听的、雅致的——可有可无的空话，装饰着噩梦的浮华表面。市场对此心领神会。商业炒作的词典里，也收录了冷战口号、“政治正确”等等标签。但，这和诗歌有关吗？或者说，和人性现实有关吗？诗歌的躯壳，被抽空了对人类真处境的关切，就只剩一种冷漠死寂的美。如果说，一九八九年柏林墙“开门”，标志了冷战时代的结束；那今天世界上，无数道“柏林墙”到处关门，则标志着一个新的黑暗时代在开始。诗人，怎能对此视而不见？诗歌，怎能对此无动于衷？

世界上只有一个大海。今天作一位诗人，必须同时沉入世界各处的海底。从超出我们一切记忆的漆黑、寒冷中，汲取思想的真正能量。简言之，各种群体谎言的自相矛盾，只证实了一点：这是真正返回个人的时代。人性和个性，是诗歌的原点，也是所有文明的共同原点。真正的诗，不是文字游戏，而是在一个人内心里重新发明的文化：我写“把手伸进土摸死亡”，就成为中国饱经沧桑的黄土地的一部分；我写“蓝总是更高的”，就俯瞰着古往今来所有的亡灵；我写“这是从岸边眺望自己出海之处”，就把所有外在漂泊，归纳进一个人（每个人）的内心之旅；我写“Rialto桥 一座雪白的看台”，《威尼斯哀歌》，就吟唱着古往今来“永无抵达 早已来过”的人类难民……一个诗歌意象，是思想和造型能力的合一。一部诗作结构，同时在建立语言和人生的形式。而一位诗人的一生，是以百米短跑速度跑出的马拉松。这一个人的传统，不停重写着所有传统。诗歌充满隐喻，它本身又是一个元隐喻：以创造的活力守护人性。诗思越微妙精美，人性的揭示越曲折深遂。诗不玩超现实游戏，它的目标，是发现“深现实”。我的诗，因此获得了写下的必要性，它从一个否定句开始——“不让这首诗沉沦为冷漠死寂的美”。

由此出发，对仍在艰难、复杂文化转型期的中国，我的思想建议是：“独立思考为体，古今中外为用”。对自问、自省中的世界，我希望，诗歌写出“大历史如何绞缠个人命运，个人内心如何构成历史的深度”，从而同时成为见证和启示。是的，我们正处在一个命运之点上，绝境和机遇、最深的困惑和超强的能量、“不可能”和重新开始，都交汇于此。我们能幸存吗？文明能幸存吗？还是询问诗歌那根探针吧，它正深深扎进心灵地层、聆听、检验着我们的质量。

2001年“911”之后，住在纽约的诗人朋友告诉我，好奇怪，怎么诗歌朗诵会拥满了观众？我暗想，这才对了。可怕的灾难、巨大的疑惑，忽然使人们发现了诗歌的奇异力量：它不重复任何简单化的答案，却沿着隐喻的曲径，细细摸索进人心里问题之所在。当代诗歌因此充溢着思想之美，并带我们回到屈原、奥维德、文艺复兴千古常青的根基上。


杨炼
2018年5月2日，柏林




杨炼受奖词（英文）

REFUSING TO LET THIS POEM SINK INTO DEAD INDIFFERENT BEAUTY


A poem is a point of convergence between cultures, ancient and modern, Chinese and non-Chinese.

When a poem is written, the image of the questioner Qu Yuan two thousand three hundred years ago is resurrected: Who passed down the story of the far-off, ancient beginning of things?How can we be sure what it was like before the sky above and the earth below had taken shape? The exile’s fate visited on Ovid two thousand years ago continues and spreads; the serene and magnificent vigour of Du Fu’s style twelve hundred years ago still shapes how we write; Dante’s vision of judgment of history seven hundred years ago has been transplanted into how we see. A poem is rooted in a particular moment in time, but also subsumes all time in that moment, for to live once is to live forever. Between the lines there is only the depth of humanity.

The age we are living in may be said to be the age of the most profound spiritual dilemma in human history. The end of the Cold War brought an end to ideological polarization. All the sharply antagonistic Cold War slogans became invalid overnight, and were replaced by a so-called Globalized World, as bizarre and twisted as a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like characters in amyth, we took the Apple from the American Eve, but few realise that one little Apple phone connects the blood and sweat of low paid rural migrants in China, factory bosses from Taiwan, and the vast global profits of the American brand.This pocket-sized worldwide reality became so familiar to each individual thatit challenged, then shattered, all the empty phrases and formulas: Socialism, Capitalism, East, West, Dictatorship, Democracy – is there any limit to the stealthy blurring of concepts in these, our modern Metamorphoses? Does there need to be a limit to the pursuit of profit? A terrifying logic pervades this world: the worth of thought is in the utmost confusion, leaving a total vacuum in the human mind, where all that is left in the end is a single reality of selfishness and cynicism. The insane scramble for immediate interest we see around us is in contrast to the spiritual impasse in which we find ourselves today. We fall and fall, but don’t know where the point of final impact is. Each one of us lives in an omnipresent nightmare we cannot shake off.


So what about poetry, then? Poetry is no exception. The world isn’t short of poetry: on the contrary, we are inundated by it, via the all-pervading Internet. Poets of little intelligence can turn their halting verses into a shortcut to advertising copy. Endless grace, melody and refinement - now gratuitously empty phrases that decorate the nightmare with agaudy skin. The market knows this well. Cold War slogans and tags like‘political correctness’ are all recorded in dictionaries for commercial exploitation. But what has that to do with poetry? Rather, what has it to do with the reality of human beings today? If a deep concern for the real humanpredicament is disconnected from the shell of poetry, all that is left is a dead, indifferent beauty. Saying that the Berlin Wall ‘opened’ in 1989 marks the endof the Cold War era, but in today’s world countless Berlin Walls are shutting people in everywhere, showing that a new Dark Age is beginning. How can a poet turn a blind eye to this? How can poetry remain indifferent?

In this world there is only one ocean. A poet today must descend to the seabed in every part of the world, to enter into the cold and dark beyond all our memory and draw from it the real power of thought. Inshort, from all kinds of contradictory mass lying that groups produce, the poet must attest one thing: this is in fact the era of the return of the individual. Humanity and individuality are poetry’s original source, and the common sourceof all civilization. A genuine poem is not a word game, but a culture being reinvented in an individual’s heart and mind. I wrote Reach your hand into the earth and touch death and became a part of the long-suffering and enduring yellow earth of China; I wrote Blue is always higher, and looked outover every departed soul from antiquity to the present day; I wrote This shore is where we see ourselves setsail, and summed up all external exile as the individual’s (every individual’s) internal journey; in my Venice Elegy, I wrote Ponte di Rialto a snow-white grandstand, and sang the human refugees who, from antiquity to the present day, are Never arriving came here long ago… A poetic image is the uniting of thought with the power of creation. A poem’s structure is the simultaneous construction of a form of language and life. Yet the life of apoet is a marathon taken at the speed of a 100-metre sprint. It’s a one-person tradition that endlessly rewrites all traditions. A poem is steeped inmetaphor, yet is itself again an original metaphor, to defend humanity with itscreative vitality. The more subtle, elegant, and refined the poetic inspiration, the more circuitously it shows the revelation of humanity. Poetry plays no surrealist games, for its aim is to discover Deep Reality. In this way my poetry is able to gain the necessity of writing, beginning as it does with a negative sentence: refusing to let this poem sink into dead indifferent beauty.

Starting from here, my philosophical proposition to a Chinastill undergoing a difficult transformation would be this: Independent thought as the essential root; ancient and modern, Chinese ornon-Chinese as selectively useful in practice. My poetry, I hope, can express to a world engaged in scrutinizing itself how History is entwined with individual destiny, and how the individual mind is shaped out of the depths of History, thereby becoming both witness and inspiration. Yes, we have reached a fateful point where impasse and opportunity, the most profound confusion and the most powerful capabilities, impossibility and a fresh start, are allconverging. Can we survive? Can civilization survive? Best to ask the probethat is poetry, for it plumbs the depths of the human heart, listens with respect, and inspects us all for quality.

After Nine Eleven in 2001, a poet friend who lives in NewYork told me how strange it was that poetry readings were attracting surprisingly full houses. I thought to myself, Of course, that’s right! A terrible disaster, huge uncertainty, these had suddenly made people realise the strange power of poetry: it doesn’t just repeat simplified answers, but follows the winding path of metaphor to explore where the questions are hidden in our hearts. That’s why contemporary poetry is teeming with beauty of thought, which takes us back to our eternally living roots in Qu Yuan, Ovid, and the Renaissance.


Yang Lian, May 2, 2018, Berlin


NOTES

Qu Yuan (340 BC - c. June 6th, 278 BC) is the first named poet in Chinese history. The quotation is from his Heavenly Questions, in David Hawkes’ Penguin Classics translation of Songs of the South.

Du Fu (2nd December 712– 770 AD) the great Tang Dynasty poet, particularly celebrated for his exquisite use of poetic form in depicting his wandering life.

Venice Elegy: Poem cycle completed by Yang Lian in June andJuly 2017, when he stayed in Venice, courtesy of the Emily Harvey Foundation.

(Translated by Brian Holton)



附：授奖词（意大利文、中文、英文）

Motivazione Yang Lian

La biografia di Yang Lian ha avuto a che fare con diversi luoghi e terre, e la sua lingua poetica si è adattata a tutte le forme di vita e agli stati d’animo, conservando l’autonomia e la sovranità impareggiabili. Nella raccolta Dove si ferma il mare (Damocle, 2016), traduzione di Claudia Pozzana, il poeta si pone di fronte al mare della lingua, riconosce il naufragio scampato e decide di fermare il mare. Yang Lian elabora la parola nelle sue forme essenziali - sentimenti e razionalità, per affermare che il nome del poeta deve rimanere assente. Il codice poetico riconosciuto si rifà alla tradizione, lo ripete e lo rende universale. E’ la forma più alta di un poeta che chiede l’oblio. Lo hanno invocato i più grandi dell’umanità, come Ivo Andrić, premio Nobel, che chiede una “stilla di oblio”, una forma di pudore che affida alle sue metafore per fronteggiare le ostilità della vita. La poesia di Yang Lian, composta in cinese che ha il verbo uguale al presente, al passato e al futuro, chiede l’oblio e consegna ai posteri un valore temporale infinito.


2018 NordSud Internationale Prize Foundation Pescarabruzzo
(Premio Internazionale NordSud)


杨炼的履历含括不同国度。他的诗歌语言适应一切形式的生活和心态，又保持了无与伦比的自主与独立。在Claudia Pozzana翻译成意大利文的诗集《大海停止之处》中（Damocles, 2016），诗人站在语言的海岸上，辨认出幸存的遇难船只，并决定令大海停止。杨炼详释这个词感情和理性的根本形式，以确认诗人必须隐姓埋名，而被辨识的诗意代码指向传统，重申它并使其具有普遍性。这是诗人索取遗忘的最高形式。历史上最伟大的人物谈论过这一点，如诺贝尔奖获得者伊沃·安德里奇（Ivo Andrić），他寻求“一滴遗忘”，用一种谦逊的形式，委托他的隐喻去面对生命的敌意。杨炼的诗歌，用中文写成，以同一形式的动词，处理现在、过去和未来，索取遗忘并传递给后代一种拥有无限时间的价值。

Yang Lian has been connected with numerous countries and although his poetic language has adapted to all forms of life and moods it has always preserved its incomparable autonomy and sovereignty. In the collection Dove si ferma il mare (Damocle, 2016), translated by Claudia Pozzana, the poet faces the sea of language, recognises the cast away who has escaped and decides to stop the sea. Yang Lian uses language in its essential forms. The emphasis is on feelings and rationality in order to assert that the poet’s name must remain absent. His distinctive poetic style takes its inspiration from tradition, it repeats it and makes it universal. It is the most noble form for a poet who seeks oblivion. The greatest figures in human history have invoked it, such as the Nobel Prize author, Ivo Andrić, who sought a “drop of oblivion”, as a form of modesty that he entrusts to his metaphors in order to face life’s hostilities. Yang Lian’s poetry, composed in Chinese, whose verbs have the same form for the present, past and future, seeks oblivion and gives an infinite temporal value to posterity.