[资料]艾特温•缪亚（二）
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/edwin_muir/biography
He was was born on a farm in Deerness , Orkney Islands in the remote northeast of Scotland. In 1901, when he was 14, his father lost the farm and the family moved to Glasgow. In Glasgow first his father, then his two brothers, and then his mother died in the space of a few years. His life as a young man in Glasgow was a depressing experience for him, involving a succession of unpleasant jobs. In 1919 he married Willa Anderson (they would later collaborate on English translations of such writers as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch) and moved to London. From 1921 - 1923 he was in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to England in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956 Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels and in 1935 he came to St. Andrews where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (published in 1936). From 1946-1949 he was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. 1950 saw his appointment as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College (college for working class men) near Edinburgh and in 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University. He returned to England in 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffam Priory , Cambridge and was buried near Cambridge.
他出生在苏格兰东北部偏远的奥克尼群岛的迪尔内斯的一个农场里。1901年，他14岁时，父亲失去了农场，全家搬到了格拉斯哥。在格拉斯哥，先是他的父亲，然后是他的两个兄弟，然后是他的母亲在几年的时间里去世了。他年轻时在格拉斯哥的生活对他来说是一段令人沮丧的经历，包括一系列不愉快的工作。1919年，他与薇拉·安德森结婚（后来，他们还合作翻译了弗朗茨·卡夫卡等作家的作品）然后搬到了伦敦。从1921年到1923年，他在布拉格，德累斯顿，意大利，萨尔斯堡和维也纳；他于1924年回到英国。1925年至1956年间，缪尔出版了七部诗集，这些诗集在他死后被收集，并于1991年作为埃特温·缪亚的完整诗集出版。从1927年到1932年，他出版了三本小说。1935年，他来到圣安德鲁斯，在那里出版了备受争议的《司各特和苏格兰》(1936年出版)。1946-1949年任布拉格和罗马英国文化委员会主任。1950年，他被任命为爱丁堡附近纽巴特修道院学院（工人阶级男子学院）的院长，1955年，他被任命为哈佛大学诺顿英语教授。他于1956年返回英国，但1959年在剑桥斯瓦夫修道院去世，葬在剑桥附近。
His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic "Eden" to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work and deeply influenced his life. His psychological distress led him to undergo Jungian analysis in London. A vision in which he witnessed the Creation strengthened the Edenic myth in his mind, leading him to see his life as an individual and his career as a poet as a working-out of archetypal fable. In his Autobiography he wrote, "the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man"; our deeds on earth constitute "a myth which we act almost without knowing it." Alienation, paradox, the existential dyads of good and evil, life and death, love and hate, and images of journeys, labyrinths, time and places fill his work.
他在偏远而未遭破坏的奥克尼的童年对缪亚来说代表了一个田园诗般的“伊甸园”，而他的家人搬到这个城市，在他的脑海里对应着一场与“堕落”世界的深深令人不安的邂逅。这种二分法的情感张力塑造了他的许多作品，并深深影响了他的生活。他的心理痛苦使他在伦敦接受荣格分析。他亲眼目睹这一创造的景象，强化了他心目中的伊甸园神话，使他把自己的人生看作一个个体，把自己的诗人生涯看作是一个虚构的原型寓言。在他的自传中，他写道，“每个人的生活都是对人的生活的无休止的重复表演”；我们在地球上的行为构成了“一个我们几乎在不知情的情况下行动的神话”。异化、悖论、善与恶的存在主义二元对立、生与死、爱与恨，以及旅途、迷宫、时间和地点的意象充斥着他的作品。
His Scott and Scotland advanced the claim that Scotland can only create a national literature by writing in English; an opinion which placed him in direct opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh MacDiarmid. He had little sympathy for Scottish nationalism. Remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain, unostentatious language with few stylistic preoccupations, Muir is a relatively little known but significant modern poet. In 1965 a volume of his selected poetry was edited and introduced by T. S. Eliot. An excellent essay discussing Muir's literary career (Edwin Muir?s Journey, by Robert Richman ) is available in the online archives of The New Criterion. Many of Edwin and Willa Muir's translations of German novels are still in print.
他的《司各特和苏格兰》提出了这样的主张:苏格兰只有用英语写作才能创造出民族文学；这一观点使他直接反对休·麦克迪尔米德的拉兰运动。他并不同情苏格兰的民族主义。缪亚以其平实、朴实无华的语言和极少关注文体的生动而深刻的诗歌为人所铭记，他是一位相对较少为人所知但具有重要意义的现代诗人。1965年，艾略特编辑并介绍了他的诗集选集。一篇讨论缪亚文学生涯的优秀论文（《艾特温·缪亚的旅程》－罗伯特·里克曼）可以在新标准的在线档案中找到。艾特温·缪亚和薇拉·缪亚的许多德国小说译本仍在印刷中。
The following quotation expresses the basic existential dilemma of Edwin Muir's life: "I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937-39.)
下面这段话表达了艾特温·缪亚生活中的基本生存困境：“我出生在工业革命之前，现在大约200岁。但是我已经跳过了大约150年。我实际上是在1737年出生的，在我14岁之前，我从来没有发生过时间上的意外。1751年，我从奥克尼出发，前往格拉斯哥。当我到达的时候，我发现它不是1751年，而是1901年，在我两天的旅程中，150年已经被烧毁了。但我自己仍然是在1751年，并在那里呆了很长一段时间。我这一生都在努力改变那看不见的退路。难怪我对时间如此着迷。”（摘自日记1937-39）
Abraham by Edwin Muir
The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks With the meandering art of wavering water That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way. He came, rested and prospered, and went on, Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms, And over each one its own particular sky, Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed, That went with him but when he rested changed. His mind was full of names Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues, And all that was theirs one day he would inherit. He died content and full of years, though still The Promise had not come, and left his bones, Far from his father's house, in alien Canaan.
Circle and Square by Edwin Muir
‘I give you half of me; No more, lest I should make A ground for perjury. For your sake, for my sake, Half will you take?’
‘Half I’ll not take nor give, For he who gives gives all. By halves you cannot live; Then let the barrier fall, In one circle have all.’
“A wise and ancient scorner Said to me once: Beware The road that has no corner Where you can linger and stare. Choose the square.
‘And let the circle run Its dull and fevered race. You, my dear, are one; Show your soul in your face; Maintain your place.
‘Give, but have something to give. No man can want you all. Live, and learn to live. When all the barriers fall You are nothing at all.’
In Love For Long by Edwin Muir
I've been in love for long With what I cannot tell And will contrive a song For the intangible That has no mould or shape, From which there's no escape.
It is not even a name, Yet is all constancy; Tried or untried, the same, It cannot part from me; A breath, yet as still As the established hill.
It is not any thing, And yet all being is; Being, being, being, Its burden and its bliss. How can I ever prove What it is I love?
This happy happy love Is sieged with crying sorrows, Crushed beneath and above Between todays and morrows; A little paradise Held in the world's vice.
And there it is content And careless as a child, And in imprisonment Flourishes sweet and wild; In wrong, beyond wrong, All the world's day long.
This love a moment known For what I do not know And in a moment gone Is like the happy doe That keeps its perfect laws Between the tiger's paws And vindicates its cause.
Merlin by Edwin Muir
O Merlin in your crystal cave Deep in the diamond of the day, Will there ever be a singer Whose music will smooth away The furrow drawn by Adam's finger Across the memory and the wave? Or a runner who'll outrun Man's long shadow driving on, Break through the gate of memory And hang the apple on the tree? Will your magic ever show The sleeping bride shut in her bower, The day wreathed in its mound of snow and Time locked in his tower?
Scotland 1941 by Edwin Muir
We were a tribe, a family, a people. Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field, And all may read the folio of our fable, Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield. A simple sky roofed in that rustic day, The busy corn-fields and the haunted holms, The green road winding up the ferny brae. But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms And bundled all the harvesters away, Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms. Out of that desolation we were born.
Courage beyond the point and obdurate pride Made us a nation, robbed us of a nation. Defiance absolute and myriad-eyed That could not pluck the palm plucked our damnation. We with such courage and the bitter wit To fell the ancient oak of loyalty, And strip the peopled hill and altar bare, And crush the poet with an iron text, How could we read our souls and learn to be? Here a dull drove of faces harsh and vexed, We watch our cities burning in their pit, To salve our souls grinding dull lucre out, We, fanatics of the frustrate and the half, Who once set Purgatory Hill in doubt.
Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere, Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation, And mummied housegods in their musty niches, Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation, And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches, No pride but pride of pelf. Long since the young Fought in great bloody battles to carve out This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf, Montrose, Mackail, Argyle, perverse and brave, Twisted the stream, unhooped the ancestral hill. Never had Dee or Don or Yarrow or Till Huddled such thriftless honour in a grave. Such wasted bravery idle as a song, Such hard-won ill might prove Time's verdict wrong, And melt to pity the annalist's iron tongue.
Scotland's Winter by Edwin Muir
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill, The sun looks from the hill Helmed in his winter casket, And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky. The water at the mill Sounds more hoarse and dull. The miller's daughter walking by With frozen fingers soldered to her basket Seems to be knocking Upon a hundred leagues of floor With her light heels, and mocking Percy and Douglas dead, And Bruce on his burial bed, Where he lies white as may With wars and leprosy, And all the kings before This land was kingless, And all the singers before This land was songless, This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgement Day. But they, the powerless dead, Listening can hear no more Than a hard tapping on the floor A little overhead Of common heels that do not know Whence they come or where they go And are content With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.
The Animals by Edwin Muir
They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place.
For with names the world was called Out of the empty air, With names was built and walled, Line and circle and square, Dust and emerald; Snatched from deceiving death By the articulate breath.
But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never never turned back Into the memoried day. All is new and near In the unchanging Here Of the fifth great day of God, That shall remain the same, Never shall pass away.
The Castle by Edwin Muir
All through that summer at ease we lay, And daily from the turret wall We watched the mowers in the hay And the enemy half a mile away They seemed no threat to us at all.
For what, we thought, had we to fear With our arms and provender, load on load, Our towering battlements, tier on tier, And friendly allies drawing near On every leafy summer road.
Our gates were strong, our walls were thick, So smooth and high, no man could win A foothold there, no clever trick Could take us, have us dead or quick. Only a bird could have got in.
What could they offer us for bait? Our captain was brave and we were true.... There was a little private gate, A little wicked wicket gate. The wizened warder let them through.
Oh then our maze of tunneled stone Grew thin and treacherous as air. The cause was lost without a groan, The famous citadel overthrown, And all its secret galleries bare.
How can this shameful tale be told? I will maintain until my death We could do nothing, being sold; Our only enemy was gold, And we had no arms to fight it with.
The Child Dying by Edwin Muir
Unfriendly friendly universe, I pack your stars into my purse, And bid you so farewell. That I can leave you, quite go out, Go out, go out beyond all doubt, My father says, is the miracle.
You are so great, and I so small: I am nothing, you are all: Being nothing, I can take this way. Oh I need neither rise nor fall, For when I do not move at all I shall be out of all your day.
It's said some memory will remain In the other place, grass in the rain, Light on the land, sun on the sea, A flitting grace, a phantom face, But the world is out. There is not place Where it and its ghost can ever be.
Father, father, I dread this air Blown from the far side of despair The cold cold corner. What house, what hold, What hand is there? I look and see Nothing-filled eternity, And the great round world grows weak and old.
Hold my hand, oh hold it fast- I am changing! - until at last My hand in yours no more will change, Though yours change on. You here, I there, So hand in hand, twin-leafed despair - I did not know death was so strange.
The Combat by Edwin Muirr （附 王军译文）
It was not meant for human eyes, That combat on the shabby patch Of clods and trampled turf that lies Somewhere beneath the sodden skies For eye of toad or adder to catch.
And having seen it I accuse The crested animal in his pride, Arrayed in all the royal hues Which hide the claws he well can use To tear the heart out of the side.
Body of leopard, eagle's head And whetted beak, and lion's mane, And frost-grey hedge of feathers spread Behind -- he seemed of all things bred. I shall not see his like again.
As for his enemy there came in A soft round beast as brown as clay; All rent and patched his wretched skin; A battered bag he might have been, Some old used thing to throw away.
Yet he awaited face to face The furious beast and the swift attack. Soon over and done. That was no place Or time for chivalry or for grace. The fury had him on his back.
And two small paws like hands flew out To right and left as the trees stood by. One would have said beyond a doubt That was the very end of the bout, But that the creature would not die.
For ere the death-stroke he was gone, Writhed, whirled, into his den, Safe somehow there. The fight was done, And he had lost who had all but won. But oh his deadly fury then.
A while the place lay blank, forlorn, Drowsing as in relief from pain. The cricket chirped, the grating thorn Stirred, and a little sound was born. The champions took their posts again.
And all began. The stealthy paw Slashed out and in. Could nothing save These rags and tatters from the claw? Nothing. And yet I never saw A beast so helpless and so brave.
And now, while the trees stand watching, still The unequal battle rages there. The killing beast that cannot kill Swells and swells in his fury till You'd almost think it was despair.
The Fathers by Edwin Muir
Our fathers all were poor, Poorer our fathers' fathers; Beyond, we dare not look. We, the sons, keep store Of tarnished gold that gathers Around us from the night, Record it in this book That, when the line is drawn, Credit and creditor gone, Column and figure flown, Will open into light.
Archaic fevers shake Our healthy flesh and blood Plumped in the passing day And fed with pleasant food. The fathers' anger and ache Will not, will not away And leave the living alone, But on our careless brows Faintly their furrows engrave Like veinings in a stone, Breathe in the sunny house Nightmare of blackened bone, Cellar and choking cave.
Panics and furies fly Through our unhurried veins, Heavenly lights and rains Purify heart and eye, Past agonies purify And lay the sullen dust. The angers will not away. We hold our fathers' trust, Wrong, riches, sorrow and all Until they topple and fall, And fallen let in the day.
The Good Man in Hell by Edwin Muir
If a good man were ever housed in Hell By needful error of the qualities, Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil, Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,
Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate, Fill half eternity with cries and tears, Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate In patience for the first ten thousand years,
Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat That, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill, Forcing his praying tongue to run by rote, Eternity entire before him still?
Would he at last, grown faithful in his station, Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell, And sow among the damned doubts of damnation, Since here someone could live, and live well?
One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace, Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in, Hell be a place like any other place, And love and hate and life and death begin.
The Horses by Edwin Muir （附 王佐良译文）
Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came. By then we had made our covenant with silence, But in the first few days it was so still We listened to our breathing and were afraid. On the second day The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer. On the third day a warship passed us, heading north, Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter Nothing. The radios dumb; And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms All over the world. But now if they should speak, If on a sudden they should speak again, If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, We would not listn, we would not let it bring That old bad world that swallowed its children quick At one great gulp. We would not have it again. Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. The tractors lie about our fields; at evening They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting. We leave them where they are and let them rust: "They'll molder away and be like other loam." We make our oxen drag our rusty plows, Long laid aside. We have gone back Far past our fathers' land. And then, that evening Late in the summer the strange horses came. We heard a distant tapping on the road, A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again And at the corner changed to hollow thunder. We saw the heads Like a wild wave charging and were afraid. We had sold our horses in our fathers' time To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield. Or illustrations in a book of knights. We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited, Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent By an old command to find our whereabouts And that long-lost archaic companionship. In the first moment we had never a thought That they were creatures to be owned and used. Among them were some half a dozen colts Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden. Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads, But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
《马》
[英]艾特温•缪亚（一八八七，-一九五九）
那场叫世界昏迷的七日之战过后 不过十二个月， 一个傍晚，夜色已深，这群奇怪的马来了。 那时候，我们刚同寂静定了盟约， 但开始几天太冷静了， 我们听着自己的呼吸声音，感到害怕。 第二天， 收音机坏了，我们转着旋钮，没有声音； 第三天一条兵舰驶过，朝北开去， 甲板上堆满了死人。第六天， 一架飞机越过我们头上，栽进海里。 此后什么也没有了。收音机变成哑巴， 但还立在我们的厨房角落里， 也许还立在全世界几百万个 房间里，开着。但现在即使它们出声， 即使它们突然又发出声音， 钟鸣十二下之后又有人报告新闻， 我们也不愿听了，不愿再让它带回来 那个坏的旧世界，那个一口就把它的儿童 吞掉的旧世界。我们再也不要它了。 有时我们想起各国人民在昏睡， 弯着身子，闭着眼，裹在穿不透的哀愁之中， 接着我们又感到这想法的奇怪。 几架拖拉机停在我们的田地上，一到晚上 它们象湿淋淋的海怪蹲着等待什么。 我们让它们在那里生锈—— “它们会腐朽，犹如别的土壤。” 我们拿生了锈的耕犁套在牛背后， 已经多年不用这犁了。我们退回到 远远越过我们父辈的土地的年代 接着，那天傍晚， 夏天快结束的时候，那群奇怪的马来了。 我们听见远远路上一阵敲击声， 咚咚地越来越响了，停了一下，又响了， 等到快拐弯的时候变成了一片雷鸣。 我们看见它们的头 象狂浪般向前涌进，感到害怕。 在我们父亲的时候，把马都卖了， 买新的拖拉机。现在见了觉得奇怪， 它们象是古代盾牌上的名驹 或骑士故事里画的骏马。 我们不敢接近它们，而它们等待着， 固执而又害羞，象是早已奉了命令 来寻找我们的下落， 恢复早已失掉的古代的友伴关系。 在这最初的一刻，我们从未想到 它们是该受我们占有和使用的牲畜。 它们当中有五六匹小马， 出生在这个破碎的世界的某处荒野， 可是新鲜活跳，象是来自它们自己的伊甸园。 后来这群马拉起我们的犁，背起我们的包， 但这是一种自由的服役，看了叫我们心跳， 我们的生活变了；它们的到来是我们的重新开始。
（王佐良 译）
译者注：这是缪亚的名作之一，受到普遍赞扬。诗人假想一场原子大战过后，生活回到了单纯朴素的农耕时代，一群神秘的马到来，象征着一种古老的友伴关系的重新恢复。“自由的服役”是他强调的一点。
——摘自王佐良《英美现代诗谈》P23-26
北京出版社，2018-2，《大家小书》
The Incarnate One by Edwin Muir
The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream, And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae. I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream, Christ, man and creature in their inner day. How could our race betray The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?
The Word made flesh here is made word again A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook. See there King Calvin with his iron pen, And God three angry letters in a book, And there the logical hook On which the Mystery is impaled and bent Into an ideological argument.
There's better gospel in man's natural tongue, And truer sight was theirs outside the Law Who saw the far side of the Cross among The archaic peoples in their ancient awe, In ignorant wonder saw The wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside, Not knowing that there a God suffered and died.
The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down, Pagan and Christian man alike will fall, The auguries say, the white and black and brown, The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all Invisibly will fall: Abstract calamity, save for those who can Build their cold empire on the abstract man.
A soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown Far out to sea and lost. Yet I know well The bloodless word will battle for its own Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell. The generations tell Their personal tale: the One has far to go Past the mirages and the murdering snow.
