試譯：〈光天化日〉 約翰·蒙塔格【A Bright Day －John Montague】

光天化日　　約翰·蒙塔格（試譯：淺白）
給約翰·麥加恩
 
有時我會看到它——切實
　如一白晝，或山丘——
是道出某事物時，最可能將它說得澈亮
　的唯一方式。
 
不同於那種累疊的繁采
　來自舊時的歷史言語——
彼等濃膩的、麝香的氣息！
　而是一種遲緩的準確性
 
透過儀式化其細節
　以重塑經驗——
窗幔前淺色的蛛網，一張松木桌
　的闊度，直到全部事物
 
皆嬰帶上一種巫惑似的光澤——
　甚至連那壁爐架上的鐘
都忽以猛疾的喜悅，揮顫着雙臂
　——有關如此、如此、及如此。
 
30/4/2024初稿

A Bright Day
By John Montague (from his 1967 collection A Chosen Light)
for John McGahern
 
At times I see it, present
  As a bright day, or a hill,
The only way of saying something
  Luminously as possible.
 
Not the accumulated richness
  Of an old historical language —
That musk-deep odour!
  But a slow exactness
 
Which recreates experience
  By ritualizing its details —
Pale web of curtain, width
  Of deal table, till all
 
Takes on a witch-bright glow
  And even the clock on the mantel
Moves its hands in a fierce delight
  Of so, and so, and so. 

圖片源自網絡。

"‘A Bright Day’ is a visionary poem, an undisappointed Gile na Gile(i.e. Brightness of Brightness)... Since I first read it more than forty years ago I have loved it for its art, at once delicately tentative and utterly surefooted...

"Here the vision is mediated through a window, a wind’s eye between the hill outside and table inside, between the permanent and the immanent; but it is mediated also through the poet’s ear, through enjambements that hesitate and pass as ineluctably as the second hand of that clock on the mantel, through rhymes that compound the ritual with the usual, commingle the ‘hill’ with the ‘possible’, the ‘richness’ with the ‘exactness’, the ‘all’ with the ‘details’, the ‘so’ with the ‘glow’. And by the end of the poem that ‘witch-bright glow’ beyond the curtained pane transmits a weird electric charge into the language. There is magic, we might say, in the molossus(三個長音節構成的音步)...

"In every decade since the late 1950s there have been classic Montague achievements in both registers (i.e. mythos and modernity)... but of none (might say), ‘This is better than “A Bright Day”."

-From Chosen Lights: Poets on Poems(ed. by Peter Fallon), Seamus Heaney on the poem