Mahmoud Darwish
穆罕默德.达维希
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestine, died on August 9th, aged 67
穆罕默德.达维希，巴勒斯坦之音，2008年8月9日逝世，享年67岁
POETRY exercises a special power for Arabs. To a people of desert origins, it takes the partial place of icons and cathedrals, stage drama and political oratory. Yet the Arab canon extends far wider, linking the tribal bards of pre-Islamic Arabia to Sufi mystics, bawdy medieval jesters and angst-ridden modernists. Poetry also carries a special meaning for exiles, who must sustain themselves with what they can carry, their lightest but most precious burdens being memory and language.
诗歌给予阿拉伯人一种特殊的力量。对一个起源于沙漠的民族而言，它部分地取代了圣画和大教堂、舞台剧和政治演说。然而阿拉伯诗歌流传却更为深远，它将前伊斯兰阿拉伯国家的部落诗人与苏菲神秘派、淫秽的中世纪小丑以及饱受焦虑摧残的现代主义者串联在一起。诗歌对流放者而言也含有特别的意义，流放者必须以自己的负荷能力养活自己，他们最轻但却最珍贵的负担便是回忆和语言。
Exile was certainly personal to Mahmoud Darwish. His first forced flight came in 1948, when he was seven. Fearing the advance of Israeli forces, his family abandoned their ancestral wheatfields in Western Galilee and walked, destitute, to the apple orchards of Lebanon. Sneaking back across the border later, they found their village razed to make way for Jewish settlement. His father became a labourer; his family, having missed a census, were classed as “present-absent aliens”.
被流放，这自然是穆罕默德.达维希的私事。他第一次被迫逃离是在1948年，当时年仅7岁。由于惧怕以色列军队前征，他的家庭舍弃了他们位于西加利利地区的祖传麦田，穷困潦倒，徒步走至黎巴嫩的苹果园。之后他们越过边境，溜回家园，却发现他们的村庄早已被夷为平地，成了犹太人定居点。他的父亲沦为苦力；他的家庭，因错过人口普查，被列为”暂住-无籍异乡人士”。
But exile was also an experience that Mr Darwish shared with his entire people, the Palestinians. Sixty years after the creation of Israel, more than half of them remain in physical exile from their homeland, while the rest, partitioned into enclaves under various forms of Israeli control, remain exiled from each other and from the wider Arab world. Mr Darwish was their voice and their consciousness.
但是，被流放也是达维希先生与其整个巴勒斯坦民族的一种共同经历。以色列成立60年以来，半数巴勒斯坦人仍然背井离乡，而其余众人，也散居于这片飞地，以种种形式受制于以色列人，依旧流离于大阿拉伯世界以外。达维希先生是他们的声音，也是他们的良知。
It was a role that often bothered him. Rightly, he felt it belittled his devotion to the poetic craft and made him over-solemn. He sometimes berated his huge audiences when they clamoured for nationalist odes rather than the subtler, metaphysical verse of his later years. He fretted that some would recall only lines such as “Go! You will not be buried among us,” and forget those praising a Jewish lover or commiserating with an enemy soldier.
这是一个经常让他苦恼的角色。确切来说，他感到这贬低了他对于诗歌艺术的投入，也让他显得过于严肃。当他为数众多的听众为民族主义颂词拍掌叫好，但却无视他晚年更加微妙和形而上学的词句时，他时而会苛责他们。他很怕一些人只记得”去吧！你不会和我们埋葬在一起，”这样的词句而忘记那些赞美一位犹太情人或同情一位敌兵的诗句。
Yet it was inescapable that he should be lauded as Palestine’s poet laureate, and not merely because his words were made into popular songs and splashed as headlines to sell newspapers. His own life was entwined with the tragic Palestinian national narrative. When he was barely in his teens, the village schoolmaster tasked him with writing a speech to mark Israel’s independence day. He wrote it as a letter to a Jewish boy, explaining that he could not be happy on this day until he was given the same things that the Jewish boy enjoyed. This earned him a summons before the Israeli military governor, who warned him that such behaviour could get his father’s pass revoked, making him unable to work.
然而，无可回避，他理应被誉为巴勒斯坦的桂冠诗人，这不仅仅是因为他的话被编作流行歌谣并被刊作报纸头条以刺激报纸销售。他的一生与悲剧性的巴勒斯坦民族故事相互交织。当他才刚刚十几岁时，村里的校长便赋予他一项任务，写一篇演讲以标志以色列独立日。他像给一个犹太小男孩儿写信一般，解释说这一天他不高兴，除非他也能得到犹太男孩儿所享受的东西。这让他得到以色列军政府首长的召唤，并受到警告，这样的行为会让他父亲失去证件，无法工作。
A few years later Mr Darwish took the bus to a poetry festival in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. He read one long poem, and was asked to recite more. All he had was a crumpled paper on which he had jotted some rough verse inspired by a visit to the Israeli police, to renew his travel pass. The poem included these lines:
几年后，达维希先生乘坐汽车去以色列最大的阿拉伯城镇拿撒勒参加诗歌节。他朗诵了一首长诗，又被要求再多背诵几首。他只有一张皱巴巴的纸，上面摘记着一些粗糙的诗句，这是他去以色列警署续签证件时突发的灵感。那首诗含有如下诗句：
Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks…
记下！
我是一个阿拉伯人
你们偷走了我祖先的田园
偷走了我耕耘的这片土地
还有我的子孙
你们什么都没留下
除却这些荒石…
The result was electric. The crowd demanded three encores, and Mr Darwish’s fame was born. By the mid-1980s, his 20 volumes of verse had sold well over a million copies.
结果如同电流一般。群众要求再读三遍，达维希先生声名鹊起。到20世纪80年代中期，他的20多本诗集销量超过100万册。
For all that time he had no country of his own. Though a citizen of Israel, he was too often jailed there for his activism, and eventually had his citizenship revoked. He tried living in Moscow, then Cairo, then Beirut, where Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation had been allowed to build a proto-state in exile. When Israel invaded in 1982, Mr Darwish sailed for Tunis and later lived in Paris. Not until 1996, after the Oslo peace agreement made it possible, did he return to Palestine.
那段时间，他没有自己的祖国。尽管身为以色列公民，他却常因自己的行动主义被捕入狱，并最终被剥夺公民权。他尝试居住在莫斯科、开罗、贝鲁特等这些亚西尔.阿拉法特的巴勒斯坦自由组织能够建立流放政权的地区。1982年以色利发起进攻，达维希乘船前往突尼斯，后来居住在巴黎。直到1996年，奥斯陆和平协议创造了可能性，他才重返巴勒斯坦。
But Palestine was a shambles. Arafat’s dictatorial style repulsed him; the drift towards the second intifada of 2000, and the vicious schisms that followed, reduced him to despair. Much of his later verse avoided overtly political themes. After a heart attack in 1998, he wrote:
但是巴勒斯坦已是一片混乱。阿拉法特的独裁主义令他厌恶；2000年第二次巴勒斯坦大起义以及其后残酷的宗派分裂让他陷入绝望。他晚期大多数诗歌都明显地避免触及政治话题。1998年，在一次心脏病发作后，他写道：
One day I shall become what I want.
One day I shall become a thought,
Which no sword will carry
To the wasteland, nor no book;
as if it were rain falling on a mountain
split by a burgeoning blade of grass, where neither has power won
nor fugitive justice.
One day I shall become a bird,
And wrest my being from my non-being.
The longer my wings will burn,
The closer I am to the truth,
Risen from the ashes.
终有一天，我会成为我想要的
终有一天，我会化为一缕思绪
没有一把剑能带走它
去向荒原，即便书本亦无力；
就像雨滴落在山上
任由草叶的萌芽将其劈裂，两者均无力获胜
逃亡者和司法亦对彼此无能为力
终有一天，我会变作一只鸟儿
在非存在中挣扎生存
我的翅膀燃烧的愈久
我愈接近
浴火重生的真理
Yet he could never fully escape the duty to help his people sustain their sense of destiny. In his last poem, Mr Darwish described Palestinians and Israelis as two men trapped in a hole:
然而，他永远不能逃脱帮助其民族维系命运感的使命。在他的最后一首诗中，达维希先生将巴勒斯坦人和以色列人描述为困在同一个洞穴里的两个人：
He said: Will you bargain with me now?
I said: For what would you bargain
In this grave?
He said: Over my share and your share of this common grave
I said: Of what use is that?
Time has passed us by,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a killer and the killed, asleep in one hole
And it remains for another poet to write the end of the script.
他说：你现在要和我商议吗？
我说：为什么而商议
在这个坟墓里？
他说：为这个普通坟墓中，我的坟位和你的坟位
我说：那有何用？
时光流经我们身畔
我们的命运是规律中的例外
这里躺着一个杀手和被害者，长眠于同一个洞穴
待另一位诗人，撰写剧本的结尾
译者：安圈儿 http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=13592&highlight=