A Midsummer Light’s Nighthouse

Poet: W.N. Herbert

1

In Winter the Old High Light speaks
the language of the sea winds
and the hail: cold unwraps itself, sheet
after sheet, around its weeping edge.

In the spring it rediscovers sunlight,
lets the clouds peel off like gulls
from its lead-lidded eyeball. The earth wind mouths
against the landing door, yammering and keen.

But in the simmer-dim and dark it talks
in its own dialect: sudden as a stairwell
and silent as a corridor when the light-switch
flicks, it tells me how to listen.

2

Where do you think the music comes up from,
manifested in the taut ropes ringing
off masts of fishing boats, the grunt of motors rippling
like a fat moon’s dribble on the river
and the knocking tread that’s boxes, dropped upon the quays?

Where do you think the music groups itself
before the year turns over in the night?
It’s propped against these timbers like a giant lens;
it’s like a sunfish that’s warmed itself in top waters
the eye flashing as it rolls away and drops.

3

It is by how we translate silence that
the dead become retongued: listen to
this empty air that fills two centuries
and more of chamber with the dreaming crush
of families: how it holds the creases in
their faces, how it’s poised between their breaths.

4

Let the admiral slither from
his pedestal, turned from guanoed marble to
white walrus, a crawling beluga,
and pipe in his ship-whistle voice canary songs
of old calamities, wars dissolving on water.

Let the smuggler woman come
in her jellyfish petticoats, ribbons fouled with sons,
smearing the walls with rum-thickened venom,
and slur in old tobacco tones her press-gang blues,
her welcoming couplets like cold thighs.

5

The sea does not bring forth in Autumn
like an orchard - it draws back
like a page that’s pinched for turning.
We read in it abeyance, not a swell.

Therefore the mind exerts its right
to halt the story, poise us on this sill
before the river sweeps the chimes away
and buries yet another solstice out at sea.

These other lives that surged before us,
let them be the gap before this midnight’s tick:
our own no more inhabitable void succeeds it,
and the High Light is our common home.

仲夏灯之夜塔

W.N. Herbert 作
杨 炼 译

一

冬天，老高光灯塔说着
海风的语言
和雹子：冷解开自己，一片
接一片，绕着抽泣的边沿。

春天，它又一次发现阳光，
从它铅皮遮盖的眼球
云朵飞散如鸥鸟，大地的风喃喃
贴紧塔内的平台，口吃而锐利。

但在夏日迟暮和黑暗中它吐露
自己的方言：猝然如一口楼梯的深井
寂静如一条门廊，当灯的开关
一抖，它教我如何去听。

二

你想，这音乐自何方响起，
它来自渔船的桅杆和绷紧
绳索的撞击，马达的呼噜波荡
像河面上一轮臃肿的月亮滴淌
或卸下的鱼篓，声声砸向码头？

你想，这音乐在何处合成自己？
当一年即将翻转进入此夜，
它像块巨大的透镜斜斜撑着楼板；
它像条鳐鱼浮上水面晒暖自己
侧身沉落时眼睛闪闪发光。

三

就这样我们翻译寂静
死者再次开口：聆听
空空的大气用被梦碾碎的家庭们
充溢两个多世纪的房间：
就这样用他们的脸攥紧皱纹，
就这样平衡于他们的呼吸间。

四

让舰队司令倾斜着滑离
他的基座，从鸟粪覆盖的大理石移向
雪白的海象群，一条悠游的小白鲸，
他的船笛吹奏古老灾难的
金丝雀之歌，战争消溶在水上。

让走私的女人在她的海蜇衬裙中
来到，缎带缠结着儿子们，
用罗姆酒调浓的毒液抹墙，
用陈年烟草的音色哼哼一首抓丁队蓝调，
她的迎迓对开如冷冰冰的双腿。

五

海不在秋天分娩
像果园——它退落
像捻起翻动的一页
我们读它的休止，风平浪静。

于是意念施展权力
截断故事，在窗台上平衡我们
趁这条河还未清扫净钟声
还未将又一个夏至葬入海底。

让迎着我们汹涌的生命，
像午夜的嘀嗒之前一道横亘的裂缝：
此后是我们住不进的空虚，
这高高的光是我们共同的家。