American literary friendships
美国文学友谊
Hers and his
她和他的人生
Jul 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
“BIOGRAPHY first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied,” wrote Emily Dickinson, America’s most famous female poet of the 19th century, uncannily foreseeing how inscrutable a subject she herself would turn out to be.
“人物传记首先让我们相信的就是传记所描写的那个人是多么的不可捉摸，”这是美国十九世纪最著名的女诗人，艾米丽 迪金森所写的一句话。这句话却惊人地准确预言了她自己的命运，最终成为了一个谜一样的人物。
Rather like Emily Brontë, with whom she identified, Dickinson shrank from contact with the world, scuttling off in her signature white dress as soon as a visitor appeared at the door. Reluctant to share her pared-down, laser-sharp and sometimes terrifyingly inward poems through publication-only seven were printed in her lifetime-she nevertheless relied on an iron core of self-belief, quietly prophesying that posterity would recognise her genius.
迪金森和艾米丽勃朗特很相似，她也自认为她们俩是同道中人。迪金森很避世，一有人来访，她那标志性的穿着白色长裙的身影就会急急地逃开。因为不愿意发表她那些阴郁，敏感，甚至有时是晦涩过头的诗作与世人分享，在她生前只有七首诗被刊登出来。但是，她内心仍然坚信自己，暗自预言说自己的才华会被后人所赏识。
Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has usually been patronised as a second-rater who bungled the transmission of Dickinson’s work by allowing too much editorial tampering, a man whose bourgeois conventionality tried to silence a woman poet’s true voice. Yet Ms Wineapple responds to him with compassion and respect, and in doing so makes her book much more than a biography-rather, a sweeping cultural and political history of the lead-up to the American civil war and its aftermath.
迪金森在外人看来波澜不惊的生活早就有人写过，但是Brenda Wineapple却另辟蹊径，将重点放在她和希金森的关系上，正是他最终在迪金森死后将她带入公众的视线。希金森一般被看作是个二流角色，正是他允许别人对迪金森的作品进行过分的编辑和修改而使其未能完整的传承下来。这个男人的中产阶级守旧思想试图扼杀一个女诗人真实的声音。然而，Wineapple女士在写到他时满含同情和敬意，这样就使得她的书看起来并不只是一本传记，而是关于美国内战诱因及其结果的一部透彻的文化史和政治史。
This unusual friendship-which was almost exclusively epistolary-began in 1862 when, in response to an article he had written offering advice to young writers, Higginson received a cream-coloured envelope containing poems and an enquiry: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Ms Wineapple’s bravura critique of this landmark letter, matched by her incisive and readable analysis of the poetry, teases out the ambiguities of Dickinson’s strange personality: her simultaneous desire to reveal and conceal herself, her coy dishonesties and blazing truths, her Olympian knowingness and need for reassurance. In the relationship that resulted it was never quite clear who was the mentor, who the disciple, despite the convenient fiction that Dickinson needed a “Preceptor”.
这段几乎完全建立在书信之上的友谊开始于1982年，当时辛金森写信回复了这个年轻作者的一篇文章并向她提出了一些建议。之后他收到了一封装在奶白色信封的信，里面是几首诗和一个问题：”您是否有太多事务缠身而无法评论说我的诗歌是否生动活泼呢？”Wineapple女士对于这封里程碑式的信件进行了大胆的评论，同时对诗歌进行了深入浅出的分析，并由此颇带些揶揄意味的引出了迪金森乖僻性格的矛盾特征：她既希望展示自己又想将自己隐藏起来；她有时矫揉造作，有时又直言不讳；她有天神般的睿智精明，却又总是患得患失。在两人缘于这封信件的交往中，始终弄不清谁是导师，谁是学生，尽管认为迪金森需要指导的想法看起来更说得通。
The poet was right in supposing Higginson was “occupied”; hers was a life of contemplation, his one of action. Their friendship was the attraction of opposites, and they represent two poles of possible response to their historical moment, in which the issues of race and liberty were pulling the nation apart. Where Dickinson withdrew into the self, Higginson, a passionate abolitionist, tried to realise his ideals, but both were paradoxical individuals.
女诗人认为Higginson事务缠身的想法是正确的；她的人生只关乎思考，而他的人生却在于行动。他们的友谊是异性相吸。他们是对于那一历史时期两种背道而驰的反应的代表，当时种族和解放问题正使得那个国家分崩离析。迪金森完全沉浸在自己的世界里，而希金森则作为一个激进的废奴主义者，竭尽全力要实现他的理想。但他们两人都是性格复杂矛盾的人。
On the question of slavery, the kind and psychologically gentle Higginson came to believe in the use of violence for political ends, preferring “unwise zeal” to “fastidious inaction”. During the civil war, he led a black regiment of freed slaves. In contrast, Dickinson’s quiet and passive exterior belied the aggression of her poetic imagination which at times seems almost callous in its self-centredness and in the uncompromising, even hostile, demands it makes on its readers.
在奴隶制的问题上，本性温和仁慈的希金森开始相信使用暴力来解决政治问题，相比于”挑三拣四的无所作为”，他更倾向于”不理智的热忱”。在内战期间，他领导了一群被解放的黑人奴隶。与此相反，迪金森沉默和消极的掩饰了她诗中的幻想的侵略性特征。这种想象有时候由于过于以自我为中心而显得冷漠，并且对于读者要求过高而显得强硬甚至充满敌意。
Ms Wineapple charts, with wry humour, the battles over the poet after her death, and the attempts of the gushing and ruthless Mabel Todd, who was having an affair with Dickinson’s brother, to hijack her legacy and commandeer Higginson to that end. Mrs Todd believed that she alone could understand and possess Dickinson. Ms Wineapple, by contrast, has too much intellectual integrity to pretend to pin the poet down. Instead she achieves what the best literary biography should: a portrait which provides close-up moments of tangible intimacy while allowing the subject to remain ultimately mysterious.
Wineapple女士以一种反常的幽默感描述了诗人死后的关于她的纷争。Mabel Todd是一个疯狂而冷酷的女人，当时她正和迪金森的哥哥暧昧不清。她认为单凭她自己就可以完全理解和独占迪金森，并且妄图靠迪金森的传奇大赚一笔并且借此控制希金森。与之相反的，Wineapple女士由于知识分子的正义感而无法佯装着贬低诗人，可她却达到了文学传记的极致：既有特写镜头让读者感到人物近在眼前，却又使她最终仍然神秘莫测。
Book details
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
By Brenda Wineapple
Knopf; 432 pages; $27.95
译者：wuxuenib http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=12988&extra=page%3D1