試譯：〈湍流〉 約翰·蒙塔格【White Water－John Montague】

〈湍流〉　　約翰·蒙塔格（試譯：淺白）
給萊恩·麥凱
 
那泛着光、塗上焦油的
可弋船的皮膚，凌駕
且承受着水流，
──拋蕩並回應着
海濤苛酷的漲落。
 
在木造的肋骨裏面
一陣滑曳的顫亂：光澤
那團銀綠色、黑橫紋、撲騰着的鯖魚；
那虹彩般的弧圈
一尾喘着氣的海鱒。
 
正如一條魚
死前照爍，那最強熾的光，
那盲鰻的鱗片
也閃耀着一種急繁、
窳爛底殘輝：
 
微亮、漂白的──
湍流──
那光，際乎海峽之間
在風暴驟發前。
 
21/10/2025初稿

譯者按：可弋船（currach），愛爾蘭一種傳統、簡便的木舟，多以獸皮包覆，內為格狀的木製骨架。

 
White Water
By John Montague (from his 2004 collection Drunken Sailor)
for Line McKie
 
The light, tarred skin 
of the currach rides 
and receives the current, 
rolls and responds to 
the harsh sea swell. 
 
Inside the wooden ribs 
a slithering frenzy; a sheen 
of black-barred silvergreen and flailing mackerel: 
the iridescent hoop 
of a gasping sea trout. 
 
As a fish gleams most 
fiercely before it dies, 
so the scales of the sea-hag 
shine with a hectic 
putrescent glitter: 
 
luminous, bleached— 
white water— 
that light in the narrows 
before a storm breaks. 

"Something I’ve always admired in Montague’s work is the way he insists on a slow, close, patient looking at things most of us might flinch from. He looks, and keeps looking, until he finds an adequately specific language for the object under his attention. ‘Peer closely,’ he instructs himself (and us) in one poem, ‘All those small / scarlet petals are shivering.’ He will not turn away from hard matters, but insists — with a mixture of fascination, sympathy, and what might be called rapt detachment — on seeing exactly what’s there and then saying it in a manner that’s both plain and at the same time ritualistic — formalized by line and stanza into a fixed ritual instant."

"In the first stanza... it’s the word ‘skin’ that holds my attention... What the speaker sees is a feeling body. Then the difficult circumstance of the boat’s existence is acknowledged, the way it manages what both supports and opposes it — the sea swell it ‘rolls and responds to’. That the swell is ‘harsh’ accentuates feeling as part of the picture."

"...this habit of Montague’s reveals the overarching aesthetic of his verse to be a mix of the visual and the metaphysical. Video ergo sum — I see therefore I am — whatever the cost. For this brave, self-sustaining poet, a diamond clarity of seeing is, I’d hazard, as close as he can come to faith: if all things glow when they’re seen as closely as he insists on seeing them, then that is ‘vision’ in both senses. And I wonder if this obsessive seeing might be connected with the poet’s childhood sense of being seen by Christ, as this appears in ‘Scraping the Pot’, a poem about early Confession experiences... Being visible and vulnerable, he pushes back by means of his own calamitous (and ‘confessional’) clarity of seeing. At the very centre of Montague’s tirelessly vigilant imagination, then, shines this clarity of sight-becoming-insight, vision becoming visionary — a marvellous, marvel-making force that for all these years has won the admiration, affection and gratitude of so many of us."

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