信箱里看到《纽约时报》的消息：最新的一个是Kerry说叙利亚用了化学武器；更早的一个更令人遗憾：Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-Winning Irish Poet, Dies at 74。我从来不会“主动”读现代诗（不管中国的还是外国的），都是在不期而遇的时候找来看看——今天又相遇了。我本来不知道Heaney，看报告说他是one of the major poets of the 20th century（有些中文介绍甚至说他是当代英文诗写得最好的），忍不住好奇想去看看他的东西。

10年前，Heaney在一次聚会中讲过自己的诗歌：我不知不觉写了40年了，我的诗源自我的成长环境，源自我的童年甚至我的婴幼儿时代，源自爱尔兰，有的还带着美国味儿；我的诗源自焦虑，也源自爱。但总的说来，所有的诗都源自婴儿未孩……

I’mshocked to discover I’ve been writing poems for forty years, so you won’t hearall of them, but I’ll read a few from the beginning and a few from more recentlythat aren’t in any of the books - poems which grew from the world in which Igrew; poems of childhood; poems even of infancy; poems of Ireland, and somepoems with American basis; poems born out of anxiety; poems born out ofaffection. Allpoems, in a sense, are born out of infancy.

最后一点很有意思。H还解释说，infancy源自拉丁文的Infans, 意思是不说，无言，沉默（unspeaking）。所有的好诗都是在沉默里长大的，从本能的需求到将有幸把它正确说出来（all good poems have beengathered in silence and have moved from the to the luck of getting spoken right）。

中国诗人也说infancy，如王国维说的“词人者，不失其赤子之心者也”（《人间词话》），但我们说赤子大概等于说“天真”，与Heaney说“无言”似乎不同。朱子《诗集传》说，“既有思矣，则不能无言”，而诗是有言的最高形式（“形于言之馀也”）。

Heaney的诗，很多事关于生死哲理的，他在那个会上朗诵的最后一首诗，就很代表了那种味道——题目是Postcript，就是P.S.，附言，人生的附言——说人的“西行”：

Thephrase, ‘going west’, from the First World War, has connotations of mortality,fatality, to ‘go west’. And there’s a very beautiful cadence in the last storyof Joyce’s Dubliners, 'The Dead' the story is called, when Joyce says it wastime for him to set out on his journey westward. So this is a memory of a vividjourney westward that we had.

诗的开头几句是很容易勾引人的时空背景：

And sometime make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare,along the Flaggy Shore,

InSeptember or October, when the wind

And thelight are working off each other

So thatthe ocean on one side is wild

Withfoam and glitter, and inland among stones……

如果没有“西行”的概念，也可以联想到许多更美好的东西。

Troy Jollimore评Heaney的最后一部诗集Human Chain说，it infuses thesemeditative poems with a spiritual buoyancy, a subtle and reassuring joy. 这句模糊的评语很有中国古典诗评的味道，只能自己去想象，我是翻译不出来的。（H很喜欢翻译呢，最有名的译品是古诗Beowuf。）