動身去愛爾蘭追逐葉芝的遊魂

I will arise and go now. …

我就要動身走了……

Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. Somehow William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me:

每當我從椅子上站起來，準備離開房間時，這幾個字常會格外頻繁地浮現在我的腦海中。不知怎麼地，威廉·巴特勒·葉芝(William Butler Yeats)的詩作《茵納斯弗利島》(The Lake Isle of Innisfree)就像在我腦子裏生了根一樣，和其他數以百萬計的人一樣，我第一次讀到這首詩是在念大學的時候：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. …

我就要動身走了，去茵納斯弗利島……

And I’m off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth.

然後我便真的走了，並不是去牙醫診所或者商場，而是我的思緒，大步跨越着翠綠的山坡，走向一處神話之地。

Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. It would be a four-hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile.

在這首詩篇中，葉芝以一處真實存在的地點，一座位於吉爾湖中央的島嶼爲題。這片湖泊懶洋洋地臥在北愛爾蘭斯萊戈郡的蒼翠之地上，縱情延綿五英里。幾年前的時候，我恰好人在都柏林，便決定化心動爲行動：前往茵湖島。從我當時爲寫作取材的地方到那裏，足足需要繞道四個小時，但這趟旅程一定值得這番奔波，對此我毫無半分猶疑。

Thanks to the popularity of the poem (voted by readers of The Irish Times in 1999 as their all-time favorite work of Irish poetry), “Innisfree” is a bit of a brand. There are Innisfree cosmetics, an Innisfree Eau de Parfum, an Innisfree B&B, an Innisfree Hotel and a Rose of Innisfree tour boat that does the lake.

得益於這首詩的流行（在1999年時被《愛爾蘭時報》(Irish Times)的讀者票選爲他們素來喜愛的愛爾蘭詩作），“茵湖島”多少形成了某種品牌效應。有以此爲名的護膚品品牌“悅詩風吟”，有以此爲名的淡香水，有以此爲名的早餐旅館，有以此爲名的酒店，還有巡遊于吉爾湖上的遊船“茵湖島玫瑰號”(Rose of Innisfree)。

But I know these things only from Google. Thankfully, none of it was evident on my drive. I didn’t use a GPS; I just relied on a couple of tiny handmade-looking road signs that popped up as I entered the region, which pointed the way to “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The last stage of the journey involved no tourism bric-a-brac, only small, twisty, increasingly difficult to navigate roads, mossy tree trunks, wind, willows, heather, cloud knuckles and gray rock.

但是我對這些事物的認知，全部來自於谷歌搜索的結果。幸好，它們一個都沒有在我的自駕之旅中出現。我當時並沒有使用全球定位系統(GPS)，只是憑藉我駛入當地後所看到的幾處路標行駛，這些指示着前往“茵湖島”道路的路標小得可憐，看上去似乎出自手工製作。這段旅程的最後一段看不到任何旅遊紀念品商店，只有又小又繞越來越難分辨方向的小路、長滿苔蘚的樹幹、一路上的大風、嫋然的楊柳、叢生的石南花、天空中的雲脊和灰色的岩石。

When I reached the lakeshore, I found the opposite of a tourist site. I could barely make my way out to the water to get a view, so thick was the shoreline with trees and brush. A farmhouse with a couple of S.U.V.s parked outside stood nearby, and there was a little concrete dock jutting out into the lake, pointed almost directly at Innisfree a few hundred yards away. I got out on the dock, sat cross-legged facing the island, and let the wind say what it had to say. For decades, this place had reverberated in my mind; now I was actually there.

當我抵達湖岸時，發現自己完全不像是到了旅遊景點。湖畔沿岸種滿了密集的樹木與灌木，我很難有辦法穿過它們走近湖水，縱覽全湖風光。附近矗立着一座農莊，門外停着幾輛SUV，還有幾座小型的混凝土船塢探入湖中，幾乎直指着就在幾百碼開外的茵湖島。我走到船塢外側，面朝着茵湖島盤腿坐下，任由清風自在傾訴。幾十年來，這處地方一直在我的腦海中縈繞；而此刻，我終於真真切切地置身於此。

Yeats, born in 1865, the son of an artist, was a childlike intellectual. He would forget to eat, or put food in the oven and let it burn. He was devoted to mysticism and séances. He spent decades in love with the Irish nationalist and proto-feminist Maud Gonne; after she rejected his marriage proposal for a final time, he shifted his attention to her daughter.

葉芝生於1865年，乃是藝術家之子，他自己則是一名天真爛漫的知識分子。他會忘記吃東西，或是忘記已把食物放進爐子裏，任其糊掉。他投身於神祕主義和降神會。他愛慕着愛爾蘭獨立運動成員、原始的女性主義者茅德·岡(Maud Gonne)，數十年如一日；在她最後一次拒絕了他的求婚後，他便將自己的心力轉移到了她的女兒身上。

A few weeks after she, in turn, spurned his marriage offer, he proposed to another woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who, despite knowing where she ranked, became his devoted life partner. As she essentially said after his death, she saw the shimmer of his soul. “For him, every day he lived was a new adventure,” she once told the Yeats scholar Curtis B. Bradford. “He woke every morning certain that in the new day before him something would happen that had never happened before.”

他的求婚一次次地遭到了她的唾棄，於是數週後，他轉而向另一名女性喬吉·海德―李斯(Georgie Hyde-Lees)求了婚。她明知自己在他心目中並非首選，卻依然成爲了對他滿懷深情的終身伴侶。就像她在葉芝去世後的精闢之言，她看到了他靈魂中的閃光點。“在他而言，他所過的每一天都是一趟新的歷險，”她曾經如此對葉芝學者柯蒂斯·布拉德福德(Curtis B. Bradford)講述道，“他每天早上醒來時，內心都十分確信，自己面前這新的一天裏，一定會發生一些以前沒有發生過的事。”

Yeats was in his 50s when he married. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a young man’s poem, written when he was 23. It is filled with a romantic longing for the past: the Irish past, the mythic past and also Yeats’s own. He had spent his childhood in County Sligo before moving to Dublin and then London. This countryside, the lake and its islands, this composition of greens and grays and blues, was fused within him.

葉芝結婚時已50多歲。《茵納斯弗利島》則是一首青年的詩篇，是他在23歲的時候寫就。詩中充滿了對過去的浪漫嚮往――愛爾蘭的過去，神祕的過去，還有葉芝自己的過去。他在斯萊戈郡度過了童年時期，其後遷往了都柏林，後來又去了倫敦。這處鄉郊，這片湖泊和湖中的島嶼，這道由綠色、灰色、藍色共同組成的風景，全部牢牢地烙印在他的血脈中。

When he was a boy, his father had read him Thoreau’s “Walden,” and its pastoral message resonated with the landscape of his childhood. As a young man living in London, trying to make a go of it amid the industrial throb, Yeats reached back to his youth and crafted the poem. The first line signals the self-consciously antiquated style he chose. (Even back in 1888, when the poem was written, people didn’t “arise.”) He filled it with rhyme, pumped it with unapologetically forceful rhythm. He made it, for all its romance, compact, athletic. This is the entire poem.

在他年紀尚幼時，他的父親曾經爲他念過梭羅(Thoreau)的《瓦爾登湖》(Walden)，其中所描繪的田園風光與他童年所看到的這道風景交相輝映。作爲一名在倫敦生活，努力想要在工業浪潮中出人頭地的青年，葉芝對自己的童年念念不忘，於是創作出了這首詩篇。詩文的第一行便昭示出，葉芝有意識地選擇了一種舊派的表達手法。（即使是在該詩成文的1888年，也沒有人是“動身”的。）他在整首詩中大量押韻，並在其中注入了一種不容置辯的有力節奏。他在盡情揮灑浪漫的同時，也保持着詩章的簡短和動感。以下便是完整的全詩：

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

我就要動身走了，去茵納斯弗利島，

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

搭起一個小屋子，築起泥笆房；

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

支起九行雲豆架，一排蜜蜂巢，

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

獨個兒住着，蔭陰下聽蜂羣歌唱。

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

我就會得到安寧，它徐徐下降，

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

從朝霧落到蟋蟀歌唱的地方；

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

午夜是一片閃亮，正午是一片紫光，

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

傍晚到處飛舞着紅雀的翅膀。

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

我就要動身走了，因爲我聽到

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

那水聲日日夜夜輕拍着湖濱；

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

不管我站在車行道或灰暗的人行道，

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

都在我心靈的深處聽見這聲音。

Of course, as I approached the lake, the poem was reverberating in my mind, and at first the imagery seemed to live up to it. The lake is five miles long, fringed with greenery; moody hills rise on the opposite shore. The furrowed water was dotted with little islands, some of them very atmospheric. As it happens, though, Innisfree is not one of the atmospheric ones. It’s tiny, and looks like a bur, a bristling seed pod, almost angrily sprouting trees and brush from its humpy back.

不消說，當我一步步地接近吉爾湖時，這首詩也在我腦海中不斷迴盪，詩中所傳達的意象，第一次在我的眼前鮮活了起來。吉爾湖全長5英里，沿岸一篇鬱蔥；起伏不定的山丘在對岸拔地而起。湖有波紋，其間點綴着幾處小島，其中幾座別有一番朦朧的美感。只是茵湖島偏巧不是當中很有氛圍的一座。它面積很小，看上去就像一根鑽頭，一隻豎立的豆莢，在它隆起的島脊上，樹木與灌木的長勢沖天。

Some have speculated that Yeats chose it because of the poetry in the syllables of its name, and the last syllable’s suggestion of freedom. You’d have a hard time building a cabin on it, and it’s too lumpen for a glade.

曾經有人猜測，葉芝之所以選擇這裏，全因其島名發音中的詩意，最後一個音節“free”更是象徵着“自由”之意。要想在這座島上建一間小屋實屬難事，而若以林間空地的標準而言，這島又嫌太過破敗。

But to leave it at that — to say that Yeats picked a dud — would be like declaring that you had no music in your soul. The whole landscape echoes the poem. You realize, sitting there, identifying the sound of the lake water with the deep heart’s core, that the Yeats who wrote the poem does not actually intend to retreat from the world and move to this spot. He is reaching for something. He is aware, at 23, of death and the inexorability of change. He is searching, trying to find his balance, his center. He knows he left it somewhere in his past, as we all have done.

但若是在這個話題上就此打住――承認葉芝就是選了一處不毛之地――又好像宣告着，自己的靈魂中沒有樂章流淌一樣。整道風景都在應和着這首詩歌。你坐在那裏，在心靈的深處分辨着湖水的聲音，便會領悟到，寫下這首詩的葉芝，並不是真的想要搬到這座小島，避世隱居。他是在求索某樣東西。他在年僅23歲的年紀，就意識到了死亡和世事變遷的無情。他在尋找，試圖找到自己的平衡，自己的中心點。他知道自己將這種平衡遺落在了過去的某處，就像我們所有人一樣。

The poem is a mental exercise, a meditation. You could perform the exercise in a parking garage. It isn’t meant to be enacted.

這首詩就是一次腦力遊戲，一次神遊。你可以在停車場裏玩玩這個遊戲。它並不需要受到任何限制。

Then I realized that my meditation was different from Yeats’s. If he was using his mind to find his center, I was using him — using history, poetry, travel — to get to the same place.

然後我意識到，我的神遊與葉芝的並不相同。如果他是在利用自己的思想定位自己的中心，那麼我就是在利用他――利用歷史、詩歌與旅行――來達到同樣的目的。

And there I was. All of County Sligo is “Yeats Country.” He mined it, traced its contours, translated them to verse: “black wind,” “wet winds,” “noisy clouds,” “thorn-trees,” “the clinging air.” He did it so thoroughly, it’s almost as if the craggy loveliness of the countryside were carved to suit his poetry, rather than the other way around.

而且我確實做到了。整個斯萊戈郡都是“葉芝郡”。是他發掘了它，勾勒出了它的輪廓，將它們一一化爲了詩句：“黑色的風”，“潮溼的風”，“嘈雜的雲”，“荊棘樹”，“粘滯的空氣”。他將一切做得如此徹底，簡直仿若這處鄉郊令人神往的重巒疊嶂本就是爲了成就他的詩作而生，而不是他的詩在應和這些風景。

“Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car,” from Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” describes a misty waterfall to the north that seems like something out of Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit.”

葉芝另一首詩《被偷走的孩子》(The Stolen Child)中有一句“那兒，溪流曲折／從葛蘭卡的山坡上墜瀉”，描繪的是一處流向北方、霧氣繚繞的飛瀑，看上去很有彼得·傑克遜(Peter Jackson)執導的電影《霍比特人》(Hobbit)中的世界的感覺。

A few miles away from the lake, the stupendous mountain slab called Ben Bulben rises like a natural acropolis, the home of some ancient race of Irish gods, a height whose purpose can only be to evoke awe. It became another geographic touchstone for Yeats — so much so that in his poem “Under Ben Bulben,” he eerily directs the reader to his own grave, in the nearby cemetery of Drumcliffe. Actually it’s the grave of another Yeats he refers to, an ancestor. But after his own death, in France, his body was transferred there, as if people treated his poem as a last will and testament.

距離吉爾湖幾英里開外的地方，一座體型龐大的厚片狀山丘有如一道天然屏障般矗立於此，它名喚本布爾本山(Ben Bulben)，是愛爾蘭上古時期某些神祇的家園，那般高聳的身姿唯一的作用必定就是喚起人們的敬畏之心。它成了葉芝的另一處試金石地標――在他的詩作《本布爾本山下》(Under Ben Bulben)中，他很詭異地引導着讀者造訪了他自己的墓地，就在此山附近的鼓崖公墓(cemetery of Drumcliffe)內。實際上，此處乃是他提到的另一位葉芝，一位先祖的墓穴所在。但是在他本人於法國過世後，他的遺體也被轉送到了這裏，就好像人們將他的這首詩作視爲了他的遺願，他的遺囑。

It’s only a four-mile drive from the shore of Lough Gill to Sligo town, and civilization. Sligo is an ancient and lively enough little center, dominated by its cathedral and ringed with pubs where there’s nonstop rugby and soccer on the telly and you can order not just Irish stew and Guinness, but also chicken curry and New Zealand sauvignon blanc. For a tourist, it’s the practical base. But pleasant as this is, it was the antithesis of why I had come. Yeats’s meditations weren’t urban, and neither was mine.

吉爾湖畔距離斯萊戈郡以及文明世界，僅有四英里的車程。斯萊戈郡是一處歷史悠久、生機盎然的中心小郡，受本地的大教堂管轄，四周遍佈着大小酒館，裏面沒有沒完沒了地播着橄欖球和足球節目的電視，而你可以點的菜品和酒水不僅有愛爾蘭燉菜和健力士黑啤酒(Guinness)，還有咖喱雞和新西蘭白蘇維翁葡萄酒。對於遊客而言，這裏就是你的活動基地。不過儘管這一切令人心生愉悅，卻與我造訪此地的用意截然相反。葉芝的神遊無關都市，我的也不是。

I am told that there are enormous salmon lurking beneath the waters of Lough Gill, and that otters make the lake their home, and that the lush forest along the banks called Slish Wood, which Yeats in “The Stolen Child” calls Sleuth Wood, harbors rare orchids, ivies and thistles, and that, yes, the evening can be full of the linnet’s wings. I saw none of these remarkable things.

有人告訴我說，在吉爾湖的水面之下，潛伏着大量的鮭魚；也有人說，水獺們也在吉爾湖安了家；還有人說，湖畔沿岸那片名喚斯利什森林(Slish Wood)，但在葉芝的詩作《被偷走的孩子》中被寫成斯留斯森林(Sleuth Wood)的茂密樹叢裏，生長着珍稀的蘭花、常春藤和蒺藜；更有人說，沒錯，這裏的黃昏時刻真的會有紅雀羽翼四處拍打。可這些壯觀的美景，我一樣也沒有見着。

But I saw others.

但是我看到了另一番風景。（文中所涉葉芝詩作譯文出自袁可嘉譯本）