10 Success Is Counted Sweetest by E. Dickinson
2012-12-29 21:15阅读：
Emily
Dickinson（艾米莉·狄金森，1830-1886）是在死后受到更多关注的美国女诗人。在她的这首题为Success
Is Counted
Sweetest的诗中，她并没有具体说什么是成功，只是说什么人在什么时候最能理解成功的含义，其中所用的强烈对比给读者留下非常深刻的印象。
一、原诗与译稿
Success Is Counted
Sweetest
By Emily Dickinson
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
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As he defeated -- dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
成功的滋味最为甜蜜
——艾米莉·狄金森
从未成功的人相信
成功的滋味最为甜蜜。
想了解玉液琼浆的味道，
就得身处久渴断水的境地。
王者之师，攻城拔寨，
几乎无人能在今天
把胜利的含义
给说得清清楚楚；
那败北的人——濒死时
耳朵偏偏充塞着
远处传来震天的凯旋号子
当是时肝肠寸断，最为明白。
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二、原诗词汇与句型难点解析以及翻译理据
1、
第二段最后一行结尾处并没有标点符号，所以第二段和第三段实际上是一个有比较对象（so…as…）的长句，第二段和第三段不能各自独立成章。长句如下：
Not one of all the purple Host who took the Flag
today can tell the definition so clear of Victory as he defeated --
dying --on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph burst
agonized and clear!
这个长句可以由如下短句扩展而来：
Not one of the purple Host can tell the definition
of victory so clear as he who is defeated and
dying.
2、
第二段第一行的否定句式如何理解仍然存疑。Not one of
them与No one of
them是否有区别呢？笔者认为是有的，后者表达的是绝对否定。
3、
第二段第一行the purple
Host意为军队，而第二行took the
flag是夺旗的意思，即purple Host (army) and took the
Flag (captured the flag, signifying
victory)。[http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Success.html]
4、
第三段第二行 on whose forbidden
ear的forbidden一词作形容词解，意为excluded
from use or
mention（'forbidden
fruit'），所以原句大意为：最不应该派上用场的耳朵（偏偏充塞着对方高奏的凯歌）。
三、其他译者译文选录
请关注“猎人的诗情画意(独一无二诗歌翻译专门博客/频繁更新全部原创）”发表的题为《成功最甜蜜》的译文。http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=880201&PostID=16423001&idWriter=0&Key=0
另：蒲隆译文
从未取得成功的人们，
认为成功最为甜蜜。
欲品味玉液琼浆
只有你迫切急需。
紫袍裹身的诸公
如今执掌着大旗
谁也说不清楚
胜利的确切含义
他——奄奄一息的败将——
耳朵已经颓唐
忽又迸发出遥远的凯歌
如此痛苦而嘹亮！*
——————————————
*
[美]狄金森（Dickinson,
E.）：狄金森诗选。蒲隆译。上海：上海译文出版社，2010.10,
pp. 4-5
四、关于原诗及其作者
艾米莉·狄金森（Emily
Dickinson，1830-1886）这位美国女诗人近年来在汉语诗歌界的名气越来越大。上海译文出版社2010年10月出版了蒲隆翻译的《狄金森诗选》。该书封底写道：这个选本选诗600首，是艾米莉·狄金森诗选中一个相当周全的选本，“可以说是国内迄今为止最全面、最权威的艾米莉·狄金森诗选”。当然，严格地说，上海译文出版社出版的这部《狄金森诗选》并非英文原文意义上的Collected
Poems of Emily
Dickinson，而是多个汉语译本中的一个而已。（对这个汉语译本，黄福海先生在自己的博克里曾做过评论，题为：译诗与传承——评蒲隆译《狄金森诗选》兼谈当下的译诗。）
英文维基百科有很详细的关于这位美国女诗人的介绍。其中关于她生平和写作风格的介绍颇为值得关注。摘录如下：
Emily Elizabeth
Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts,
to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a
mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the
Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short
time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her
family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the
locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and
her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her
room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by
correspondence.
While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than
a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during
her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was
usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the
conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique
for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically
lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional
capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes
of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her
friends.
Structure and syntax
The extensive use of dashes and unconventional
capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic
vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is
'far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly
supposed'. Dickinson avoids pentameter, opting more generally for
trimeter, tetrameter and, less often, dimeter. Sometimes her use of
these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The
regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a
traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter
for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and
fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though
Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she
also makes frequent use of slant rhyme. In some of her poems, she
varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using
trimeter for lines one, two and four, while only using tetrameter
for line three.
Since many of her poems were written in traditional
ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be
sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also
use the common meter, employing alternating lines of iambic
tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Familiar examples of such songs are
' Little Town of Bethlehem' and 'Amazing
Grace''.
Dickinson scholar
and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not
only with hymns and song-forms but also with psalms and riddles,
citing the following example: 'Who is the East? / The
Yellow Man / Who may be Purple if he can / That carries the Sun. /
Who is the West? / The Purple Man / Who may be Yellow if He can /
That lets Him out again.'
Late 20th-century scholars are 'deeply interested' by
Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation
(line lengths and line breaks). Following the publication of one of
the few poems that appeared in her lifetime – 'A narrow Fellow in
the Grass', published as 'The Snake' in the Republican – Dickinson
complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a full
stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the
entire poem.
Original
wording
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met Him – did you not
His notice sudden is –
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Republican
version
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met Him – did you not,
His notice sudden is.
|
As Farr points out, 'snakes instantly notice
you'; Dickinson's version captures the 'breathless immediacy' of
the encounter; and The Republican's punctuation renders 'her lines
more commonplace'. With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson's
structures and syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are
'aesthetically based'. Although Johnson's landmark 1955 edition of
poems was relatively unaltered from the original, later
s
