【经济学人】独特的玛丽安·穆尔丨2017.06.01丨总第930期

New Collected Poems. By Marianne Moore. Edited by Heather Cass White. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pages; $30. Faber & Faber; £30.

新诗集。作者玛丽安·摩尔。编辑希瑟·卡斯白、法勒、斯特劳斯和吉劳克斯; 费伯出版社；480页;30美元； 30英镑。

MARIANNE MOORE, who died in 1972, was one of the defining voices of American Modernism, but she always made life difficult for her admirers. There have been several versions of her collected or complete poems, but none has quite done her justice. Until now. Why? Because she was always fiddling with her own work, rewriting it, or leaving poems out altogether. As she aged, she tended to make light of her early work, or resketch it completely. Occasionally, these meddlings—these wasplike buzzings about—could be injudicious. Moore was not the best custodian of her own work. At last, a complete collection—variants and all—of her writings, from first to last, has been chronologically ordered.

玛丽安·穆尔于1972年去世，她的作品是美国现代主义文学的具有影响力的声音之一。但是，她总是会给为她的崇拜者带来难题。她的诗集和成诗已经有好几本了，但没有一部能尽显她的才华。为什么？因为她总是折腾自己的作品，一会儿重写或者干脆丢弃诗歌。随着年龄的增长，穆尔开始嫌弃自己的早期作品,或者完全否认。有些时候断断续续是无益的。穆尔并不会经营自己的作品。最后，她完整的收藏品和全部作品自始至终都要按时间顺序排列。

Moore was born in Missouri in 1887, but by 1918 had settled in New York with her mother. And there she stayed. She would never marry. Instead, she became the editor of the Dial, an influential literary review of the 1920s, and her tastes and her strong opinions helped to shape the reading habits of generations of poetry lovers. But it is as a poet that she stands alone.

1887年，Moore出生于密苏里，然而于1918年与母亲定居于纽约。她留在那里，践行不婚主义。她成为了二十世纪二十年代颇具影响力的文学评论《Dial》的编辑，她的品味和她的强烈见解帮助塑造了几代诗歌爱好者的阅读习惯。但作为一个诗人，她却是孤独的。

There is no one quite like her, no one to whom she could be compared, such is her rootedness in her own hugely eccentric and wilful Moore-ishness. Her poems are finically, even excessively observant, and scrupulously formally structured, with, on occasion, the most improbably outrageous of end-rhymes. She had a passion for animals, birds, flowers and insects. Her painstaking descriptions of the odd characteristics of such creatures (she had a great fondness for compound adjectives) cause her poems to read at times like high-literary glosses on David Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” decades before its time.

没有人与她相似，也没有人可以与她比较，这正是由于她内心巨大的偏心和Moore式的固执。她的诗歌是吹毛求疵的，甚至过度敏锐，并有着一丝不苟正式的结构，有时，也会有反常的尾韵。她酷爱动物、鸟类、花卉和昆虫。她细致地描述这些生物的奇特性（她非常喜欢复合形容词）（这）使得她的诗歌有时阅读起来像几十年前David Attenborough上《地球》的高级文学注释。

• Rootedness 根深蒂固

• Eccentric  adj.古怪的，异常的;偏离轨道的;离心的 n.古怪的人;[物]偏心轮

• wilful  adj.（指坏事）故意的;（指人）任性的，固执的

• observant  adj.善于观察的，观察力敏锐的;严守教规的

• scrupulously  adv.一丝不苟地;小心翼翼地，多顾虑地

• outrageous  adj.粗暴的;无法容忍的;反常的;令人惊讶的

• glosses  n.（页末或书后的）注释( gloss的名词复数 );（表面的）光滑;虚假的外表;用以产生光泽的物质

• v. 粉饰;注解( gloss的第三人称单数 );掩饰（错误）;把…搪塞过去

Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly what she is writing about because her poems are always tacking sideways, reaching out for ever more oddball comparisons—on one occasion she likened Handel to a frigate pelican.（读者试译句） Her manner of writing can be positively Jamesian in its degree of verbal attentiveness. She peppered her poems with epigrams. She loved odd words like “picardel”—an Elizabethan ruff. And the concluding line of “Half Deity” reads: “His talk was as strange as my grandmother’s muff.” She would also add in, for good measure, a freight of quotations from unusual sources: a magazine, say, or a member of the clergy.

（期待您的翻译，明天会有针对这句话的长难句解析哟~）在动词使用方面，她的风格就像是积极版的詹明姆（Jamesian）。她的诗句中充满了讽刺的内容。她十分喜爱一些古怪的单字，比如皮卡德（“picardel”）—这是一种伊丽莎白时代的环状领子。在“半神”中的结束语写到：“他的谈话就和我祖父的皮手笼一样。”而且她还喜欢额外的摘抄一些非常规来源的材料：杂志，谈话，亦或来自一位神职人员。

• Pelican n. 鹈鹕

• Frigate n. 护卫舰; 快速舰船

• Pepper n. 辣椒; 胡椒; 胡椒粉

   vt. 在…上撒胡椒粉; 使布满

• epigram n. 机智的短诗，警句，讽刺诗

• muff n. 皮手笼，笨拙的人，接球失败

   v. 弄糟，漏接（球），失败

• for good measure额外的量，外加的项目

• clergy n. （尤指基督教堂内的）牧师，教士; 〈废〉学问

As she aged, her poems became more moralistic, and Moore herself became a literary celebrity, seen about town in her cape and her tricorn hat. She rather enjoyed it, and even played up to it. In 1955 the Ford Motor Company asked her to suggest names for a new model. She opted for Utopian Turtletop or Mongoose Civique. Ford used Edsel instead. In 1968 she threw the first pitch of the season at Yankee Stadium. Baseball had engaged her before, as a poet rather than a participant. “Baseball and Writing” was published in the New Yorker in December 1961. The poem begins like this: “Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting/and baseball is like writing./You can never tell with either/how it will go/or what you will do…” Moore please.

随着年龄的增长，她的诗开始往道德说教发展，而她自己也逐渐成为文学领域的名流，从她的斗篷和三角帽能够看出来。她十分乐在其中到了为之迷醉的程度。1955年福特公司请她为一辆新的车模命名。她最终敲定了Utopian Turtletop或者Mongoose Civique。然而福特公司最终选择了Edsel。1968年她在扬基体育馆发飙了这季度的第一篇作品。她以前也接触过棒球，不过不是作为参与者而是作为诗人。1961年12月“棒球与创作”刊载于New Yorker上。这首诗开头写到：“狂热？不，创作是激动人心的/棒球就像创作。/你永远也无法知道/情况会如何发展/或者你将做什么…”天啊

•   cape n. 海角; 斗篷; 披肩; 岬

• tricorn adj. 三角的  n. 三角帽

• opt vi. 选择，挑选

• Fanaticism n. 狂热，盲信，着迷

翻译 ▍E-R-2

审核 ▍Michelle Kang

图文编辑 ▍喵喵

责任编辑 ▍毛毛