〈助力〉 保羅·布萊克本（試譯：淺白）
在農場是無所謂的；糧倉
後面，隨便一處草叢，背挨着
任何近便的樹；冬天時
的木棚，退處到一角
如果真見需要的話。
但在一個八百萬人的城市中，人
不能不自為謹戒，在
西59街底停車場裏
它早已荒爛成一片碳渣。
但在第三街某爿店外
那淺窄的門道，際乎
街燈與黑暗之間，
那是我身前那同是喝酒的人的行列
畀了我勇氣
（lo que me dió valor.）*
17/9/2025初稿
*原文為西班牙文，與「what gave me courage」義同。
The Assistance
By Paul Blackburn
On the farm it never mattered;
behind the barn, in any grass, against
any convenient tree; the
woodshed in winter, in a corner
if it came to that.
But in a city of eight million one
stands on the defensive
In the West 59th Street parking lot
it has long since sunk into the cinders.
But in the shallow doorway of
a shop on Third Avenue, between
the dark and the streetlight,
it was the trail of the likewise drinking-man who preceded me
that gave me courage
lo que me dió valor.
1953
按：此乃據Donald Allen所編The New American Poetry, 1945-1960裏的版本。
"I'd like to speak personally of this extraordinary poet, and take that license insofar as these poems are personal, often bitterly so. I wonder if any of us have escaped the painful, self-pitying and meager defenses of person so many of them invoke. What we had hoped might be, even in inept manner worked to accomplish, has come to nothing—and whose fault is that, we ask. Certainly, not mine? Having known both of these dear people, and myself, I have to feel that there will never be a human answer, never one human enough.
When Paul Blackburn died in the fall of 1971, all of his company, young and old, felt a sickening, an impact of blank, grey loss. I don't know what we hoped for, because the cancer which killed him was already irreversibly evident—and he knew it far more literally than we. But his life had finally come to a heartfelt peace, a wife and son so dear to him, that his death seemed so bitterly ironic.
Recalling now, it seems we must have first written to one another in the late forties, at the suggestion of Ezra Pound, then in St. Elizabeth's Hospital. We shared the same hopes for poetry, the same angers at what we considered its slack misuses. Paul was without question a far more accomplished craftsman than I... He was the first poet of my generation and commitment I was to know, and we talked non-stop, literally, for two and a half days. I remember him showing me his edition of Yeats' Collected Poems with his extraordinary marginal notes, tracking rhythms, patterns of sounds, in short the whole tonal construct of the writing. He had respect then for Auden, which I did not particularly share... He was already well into his study of Provencal poetry, which he'd begun as a student in Wisconsin, following Pound's direction and, equally, his insistence that we were responsible for our own education.
As it happened, we shared some roots in New England, Paul having lived there for a time with his mother's relatives when young. But the Puritanism he had to suffer was far harsher than what I had known. For example, his grandmother seems to have been classically repressed (her husband, a railroad man, was away from home for long periods) and sublimated her tensions by repeated whippings of Paul. He told me of one such time, when he'd been sent to the store with the money put in his mitten, on returning he'd stopped out front and the change, a nickel, somehow slipped out into a snowdrift. And as he scrabbled with bare hands trying to find it, he realized his grandmother was watching him from behind the curtains in the front room, then beat him when he came in. Those bleak Vermont winters and world are rarely present directly in his poems, but the feelings often are, particularly in his imagination of the South and the generous permission of an unabashed sensuality. At one point during his childhood, a new relationship of his mother's took him out of all the grey bleakness to a veritable tropic isle off the coast of the Carolinas. I know that his mother, the poet Frances Frost, meant a great deal to him-and that her own painful vulnerabilities, the alcoholism, the obvious insecurities of bohemian existence in the Greenwich Village of her time, pervades the experience of his own sense of himself. His sister's resolution was to become a nun.
...
During the sixties I was able to see Paul quite frequently, although he lived in New York and I was usually a very long way away. He and Sara were good friends to us, providing refuge for our daughter Kirsten on her passages through the big city... Elsewise Paul certainly did drink, did smoke those Gauloises and Picayunes, did work at exhausting editing and proofing jobs for Funk & Wagnall's, etc., etc. It's a very real life.
The honor, then, is that one live it. And tell the old-time truth. Of course there will be human sides to it, but Paul would never argue that one wins. To make such paradoxic human music of despair is what makes us human to begin with. Or so one would hope."
-Robert Creeley, Preface from "Against the Silences", from（https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/blackburn/blackburn_creeley_preface_to_against_the_silences.html）
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