nada’s Reviews > El idioma materno > Status Update

EXTINCTION OF THE CONTINENTS

UNTIL NOT LONG AGO YOU could still count on them. They were a few of the reliable things around, each with its exact shape, its climates, and its races. Even the two immense masses of cold located at both poles contributed with their symmetrical disposition to giving us an overall sense of balance, of shelter from the infinity of the cosmos. Alas, one never tired of identifying the continents in atlases. We had been taught that, in the beginning, there was a single terrestrial expanse called Pangea, which faced the great mass of ocean alone, a huge island within the larger island that was the planet. When Pangea broke apart, the continents with their unmistakable contours came into being, and the ocean also broke into oceans and various seas. We owe so much to that breakage! Had we lived on a single amorphous surface, on a super-compact continent, we would never have invented navigation, and perhaps not any type of travel, and we would have divided into ever more isolated subspecies. It was the fragmentation of Pangea that made us restless, curious, adaptable, and human. They, when they still existed, when they were something more than mere figures on world maps, like now, were for the earth what clouds are for the sky: whimsical shapes making the stark monotony of the sphere livable. The same way a perfect celestial vault, without clouds, would be invisible, and only clouds turn it into the sky, so the planet, thanks to them, was converted into land. How many suicides were not carried out because they remembered at the last moment that there were other continents, different from the one that had led them to desire a premature death! This simple truth convinced them that life could begin again somewhere else, since this was always their primary function while they existed: to remind us that not everything was the same, it was worth moving, and that crossing a large sea of water or sand or ice to arrive at the same known land was finally to be born on this earth.

**大陸的滅絕**

直到不久之前，你還能指望它們。它們是周遭少數可靠的事物，各有其精確的形狀、氣候與人種。就連位於兩極的那兩大團寒冷，也以其對稱的配置，為我們帶來整體的平衡感，一種免於宇宙無垠的庇護感。唉，人們從不厭倦在地圖集裡辨認各大洲。我們曾被教導：起初只有一塊單一的陸地，名為盤古大陸，獨自面對廣闊的海洋，是地球這座更大島嶼中的一座巨島。盤古大陸裂開後，各大洲才帶著各自無可錯認的輪廓誕生，海洋也隨之碎裂成諸多大洋與各式海域。我們欠那次斷裂的太多了！若我們生活在單一而無定形的表面上，在一塊超級緊實的大陸上，我們永遠不會發明航海，或許連任何形式的旅行都不會有，而我們會分化成越來越孤立的亞種。正是盤古大陸的碎裂，讓我們變得躁動、好奇、善於適應，成為人。當它們還存在時，當它們還不只是世界地圖上的圖形——像現在這樣——它們之於大地，正如雲之於天空：以任性的形狀，讓球體赤裸的單調變得可以居住。正如一片完美無雲的穹蒼將是不可見的，唯有雲才使它成為天空；地球也是因為它們，才化為陸地。有多少自殺未曾實行，只因當事人在最後一刻想起還有其他大洲，不同於那塊令他們渴望提早死去的大洲！這個簡單的真理使他們相信，生命可以在別處重新開始，因為這始終是它們存在時的首要功能：提醒我們並非一切都相同，移動是值得的，而橫越一大片水、沙或冰的海洋，抵達同樣熟悉的土地，終究就是在這地球上誕生。

THE SEA ALL AROUND US

WHEN I WAS A CHILD I firmly believed that the sea ceased to produce waves when my vacation was over. Learning that this was not the case, that waves continued breaking on the beach when we were back at school, left me dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand such a waste of energy and beauty. To my mind waves were not only the essence of the sea but summer’s greatest adornment, and I couldn’t imagine that they would continue crashing when nobody was there to see them. Perhaps, I told myself, somebody on the shore stayed to watch over them while we studied, inclined over our notebooks, someone took care not to leave the sea alone with its soul. But the damage was already done and now I could imagine the sea abandoned to its fate, identical to itself in summer and winter, with or without vacationers, and that meant to understand desolation. What is desolation but the lack of waves? The poet said it: “A sea without waves, / desolate.” Because a sea whose waves do not break for anybody is like a sea that doesn’t have them, contrary to the one that saves them up as soon as the last vacationers have turned away, which is how I imagined it as a child. Perhaps that’s where my atheism began, which has hardly wavered, and in the rare moments it has, it was enough for me to imagine the sea in that trance of being more sea than ever when nobody sees it, to know that our life and the sea are alike: without witness and abandoned to our fate. Out of this first metaphysical surprise must have come my propensity to look for the sea everywhere, present in every object and thing, an incubating sea that, to saturate everything, has gathered up, in effect, its waves. So, my childish belief was not so wrong. The sea is not abandoned to its fate because when we turn away from it we carry it inside us and the waves, which as children we believed were silent for almost the entire year, do not stop enthralling us in secret until we see it the next time, and when we see them break on the shore again we understand, amazed, astonished, that not one broke during our absence without us knowing about it and that the sea is never alone with its soul.

環繞我們的海

小時候，我堅信假期一結束，海就不再製造波浪。得知事實並非如此——當我們回到學校，浪仍持續拍打著海灘——這讓我目瞪口呆。我無法理解這樣浪費能量與美。在我心裡，波浪不只是海的本質，更是夏天最盛大的裝飾，我無法想像在沒有人觀看的時候，它們還會繼續碎裂。或許，我告訴自己，當我們俯身在筆記本上念書時，有人留在岸邊看守它們，有人小心不讓海獨自面對自己的靈魂。但傷害已經造成，如今我能想像海被遺棄給它的命運，夏天與冬天、有沒有度假客都一模一樣，而這就意味著理解了荒涼。荒涼是什麼，不就是沒有波浪？詩人說過：「無浪的海，／荒涼。」因為一片不為任何人碎裂波浪的海，就像一片沒有波浪的海，不同於那片在最後一批度假客轉身離去後，便把浪攢積起來的海——我小時候就是這樣想像它的。或許我的無神論正是從那裡開始的，它幾乎不曾動搖，而在極少數動搖的時刻，我只需想像海在無人觀看時處於那種比任何時候都更像海的出神狀態，便足以明白我們的生命與海相似：沒有見證者，被遺棄給自己的命運。從這第一次形而上的驚異中，必定生出了我到處尋找海的傾向——海存在於每一個物件與事物之中，一片孵育中的海，為了浸透一切，它確實把自己的波浪收攏了起來。所以，我孩提時的信念並沒有錯得那麼離譜。海並沒有被遺棄給它的命運，因為當我們轉身離開它時，我們把它帶在體內，而那些我們小時候以為幾乎整年沉默的波浪，並未停止在暗中迷住我們，直到下一次我們再見到它；當我們再次看見它們在岸邊碎裂，我們驚奇、驚愕地明白了：在我們缺席期間，沒有一道浪的碎裂是我們不知情的，而海從來不曾獨自面對自己的靈魂。

詩句出自墨西哥詩人 Xavier Villaurrutia（薩維爾・維亞烏魯提亞）的〈Nocturno mar〉（海之夜曲），收錄在《Nostalgia de la muerte》（1938）。原文是「Mar sin viento ni cielo, / sin olas, desolado」——Morábito 在原書《El idioma materno》裡引的是「un mar sin olas,/ desolado」，英譯沿用。

TWISTED WIRES

PATRIZIA CAVALLI, THE ITALIAN POET, recounts that as a girl she had the ability to open any closet, any door or drawer for which the key had been lost. “I don’t know how I did it: it inspired me, / it wasn’t science but devotion,” she writes in a poem allusively titled “The Guardian.” All she had to do was insert some twisted wires into the lock and squint her eyes, “listening as if absorbed in prayer,” to reach the hidden “catch” inside the mechanism. She admits, in the same poem, that this skill served her well as an adult for writing poetry. The locks were a kind of “rehearsal” for writing poems. Reading Cavalli would be a healthy thing to do for those poets who have never thought about how crafting a poem can lead to real difficulty of the kind that often overwhelms us and obliges us to give up without having achieved anything, like trying to open a lock without a key. Many of the poems written these days lack even the slightest sense of difficulty, as if the author hadn’t suffered the slightest bit of doubt about being able to write them. The idea of understanding poetry through work, as a gamble, as a game that may or may not be won, is entirely absent in much of the poetry written today. The poems seem to be more the result of a decision than a stroke of luck. Calm and dedicated the poet executed his task, and with that he was satisfied. They seem more like dictations of poems than actual poems, in other words they are poems written not by someone who goes out looking for a poem but by someone who manufactures a poem dictated by his conscience. That said, consciousness is deaf; to act with a conscience is to act with determination, or with our ears covered. This poetry appears to have been written without listening to itself. Dictation, in fact, is exempt from listening. It is also exempt from failure. It would be a good idea for poetry workshops to give students twisted wires to train them to open locks. They would learn to listen, to squint their eyes, to wait attentively, to steady their hand, and, above all, to fail.

扭曲的鐵絲

義大利詩人帕特里齊亞・卡瓦利（Patrizia Cavalli）回憶，她小時候有一種本事，能打開任何鑰匙已經遺失的櫃子、門或抽屜。「我不知道自己是怎麼辦到的：那是靈感，／不是科學而是虔誠，」她在一首題名別有所指的詩〈守門人〉裡這樣寫。她只需把幾根扭曲的鐵絲插進鎖孔，瞇起眼睛，「像沉浸在祈禱中那樣傾聽」，便能觸及機械內部那個隱藏的「卡榫」。她在同一首詩裡承認，這項技能在她成年後對寫詩大有助益。那些鎖是寫詩的一種「排練」。那些從未想過作一首詩可能導致真正的困難——那種常常壓垮我們、迫使我們一無所成地放棄的困難，就像試圖不用鑰匙打開一把鎖——的詩人，讀一讀卡瓦利會是件有益的事。如今寫出來的許多詩，連最輕微的困難感都沒有，彷彿作者對自己能否寫出它們不曾有過絲毫懷疑。把詩理解為一種勞動、一場賭注、一場可能贏也可能輸的遊戲，這樣的觀念在今日大部分的詩裡完全缺席。這些詩看起來更像是一個決定的結果，而非一次運氣的眷顧。詩人平靜而專注地執行了他的任務，並以此為滿足。它們看起來更像詩的聽寫，而非真正的詩；換句話說，這些詩不是由一個出門去尋找詩的人寫的，而是由一個按照自己意識的口述把詩製造出來的人寫的。話說回來，意識是聾的；憑意識行動，就是憑決心行動，或者說，是摀著耳朵行動。這種詩似乎是在不聽自己的情況下寫出來的。聽寫，事實上，免除了傾聽。它也免除了失敗。詩歌工作坊不妨發給學生扭曲的鐵絲，訓練他們開鎖。他們會學到傾聽、瞇起眼睛、專注等待、穩住手，而最重要的是，學會失敗。

For the ancients, desert islands did not represent the occasion for a technological test but a sacred parenthesis. To thrive on them was inconceivable. There could only be, like Philoctetes, bleeding and waiting.

對古人而言，荒島並不代表一場技術考驗的契機，而是一段神聖的括弧。在島上繁盛興旺是無法想像的。唯一可能的，就像菲洛克忒忒斯那樣，是流血與等待。