求教：squat pen & coarse boot

白马西北驰

[原文]

Digging

Seamus Heaney [1939-]
  
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

[拙译]

挖

我手指头与大拇指之间
夹着一支粗短的钢笔 ；漂亮得像把枪。

窗下，声音清晰刺耳
铁锹深入碎石地面：
我父亲，在挖土。我俯视

直看到他绷紧的屁股在花坛间
低下去，又起来二十年过去
在土豆垄间有节奏地弯腰
他一直在那儿挖着。

钓鱼靴 踏住铁锹上沿，锹把儿
倚着膝盖内侧稳稳撑住。
他挖出长茎，深深插入闪亮的锹刃
撒播我们捡的新土豆
喜爱它们在我们手中冰凉的坚硬。

老天爷，这老头子能使锹。
就和他老头子一样。

我祖父一天里割的泥炭块
比透纳沼任何人都多。
有一次我带给他一瓶牛奶。
瓶口用纸松松塞着。他直起身
喝了它。马上又弯下腰
麻利地切啊削啊，把浮土
扬过肩头，为找到好泥炭，
越挖越深。挖着。

种上土豆泥土气味冰凉，湿润的泥炭
呱唧啪嗒响，锹刃切断活的树根、
草根咔嚓响，在我头脑中苏醒。
但我没有铁锹，不能像他们那么干活。

在我的手指和大拇指之间
夹着一支粗短的钢笔。
我要用它来挖掘。

My Interpretation

1. The speaker sits before a desk, with a fountain pen in hand. The focus is on the pen. It’s as neat and trim as a gun. A pen can be seen as an icon of intellectual life. The semicolon in the second line serves to isolate and foreground the image of the pen. Moreover, the assonances, “snug” and “gun” , help to reinforce this impression. The speaker cherishes his pen. The pen indicates the identity of the speaker, that is, a writer.

2. The tense is still the present simple in this stanza. The speaker hears the sound made by my father when he is digging. “I” sit indoors writing or trying to write something with a pen. My father is laboring outdoors with his spade. “I” am a writer, while the father is a peasant.
The sound of the spade hitting the ground is discordant. The field is filled with gravel. The life is hard.

3. The father has done this kind of work in the field for more than twenty years. He digs the field and sews potatoes into it. Potato is the commonest grain in Ireland.
In this stanza, the tense slips from the present simple to the past progressive:
Bends low, comes up twenty years away …
Where he was digging.
  The change in tense indicates the shift from presentation to recollection.

4. This stanza is a detailed description of how the father did his job. He put one foot upon the upper edge of the spade, and set the shaft against the inside knee to dig. This scene has a strong sense of reality. The coarse boot indicates that the soil is dump. The boot is also an icon of the life of Irish people. The father weeded the field, and made deep furrows to sew the potatoes. At that time, the speaker worked together with his father. The fresh memory of the feeling about the newly picked potatoes shows the speaker’s elegiac emotion toward the past countryside life.

5. This stanza is a natural transition to the recollection of the speaker’s grandfather.

6. The grandfather was good at gathering and treating turf. Turf is made from dried peat and can be used as fuel, which is a unique production of the bog region in North Ireland. It’s an icon of local life in there. The speaker recollects that as a child once he brought a bottle of milk to his grandfather working in the field. We can see concrete details, for instance, the bottle is sealed loosely with a lump of paper, which makes the speaker’s memory convincing and vivid. Then, the scene of the grandfather’s working is represented, focused on the action of digging. The word “digging” in the last line of this stanza is isolated by a period preceding it.

7. This stanza is a recap of the foregoing scenes: scattering potatoes, gathering and cutting turfs, and weeding. The speaker is thinking of all these scenes. Then, the tense shifts back to the present simple: “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” The speaker faces up to the reality, that is, at present he is no longer a peasant, but a writer.

8. In the last stanza, the focus is on the squat pen again. What the speaker can do is but to write. The last line is a metaphor: “I’ll dig with it.” This is the pivot point.
On the one hand, the modal “’ll” refers to future time. This extends the poem’s vision from the past through the present to the future. On the other hand, the metaphor associates “the pen” with “the spade” through deliberately collocating the verb “dig”—which is usually collocated with “spade”—with the pen. The speaker will dig the memory and the significance of the life of the past, the present, and the future with the squat pen, that is to say, he decides to write about the Irish people’s history and life.

问题:

我觉得squat pen和coarse boot是专名，后者也许是我试译的“钓鱼靴”，不过无缘亲见，所以求教各位：英语国家中是不是有这两种东西？

当然我的试译一定还存在许多问题，也请大家一并指教。

拜谢！

醉乡常客

怎么回事啊？

都等着过年去了

woi55

专有名词没找到，倒是从这些文章看，这两个词似乎都没有什么特别之处，说是专名似乎有点附会：

http://www.wowessays.com/dbase/ae3/tmw196.shtml
http://british-poetry.suite101.c ... mus_heaneys_digging

感觉此处的coarse，应该就是OED中的这个意思：
Ordinary, common, mean (in the depreciatory sense of these epithets); base; of inferior quality or value; of little account.

至于squat, 或许有两方面的含义。第一次出现的时候，对应的是gun，可以理解为一种posture；第二次出现的时候，对应的是spade（dig），就应该是一种shape了。当然从词性考虑，posture一说也不正确，只能说是一种由词本身的多义带来的联想。

gun和spade的深意，见上引第一个URL所述：

“...Heaneys use of the word gun to describe his “squat pen” in line 2 places the emphasis on machinery allowing a comparison of the human condition to present technology. This theme continues throughout the poem,...

...Thus, Heaney finds beauty in the commonplace, and brings it out in his Digging, creating with his “squat pen”, as if it were a spade, and not a gun, as in line 2, as active as his imagination, not resting in the least, as in the first stanza...”

这里的这个theme一说，倒能帮助我们理解coarse的含义：这也是一种human condition嘛。

俺不懂诗，不着边际地胡说八道一通，白马老师某怪。

parivraj

呵呵，可能都忙着买（卖？）年货吧？

我也瞎google了几个，http://www.english-resources.co.uk/EXAMPLES/Seamus%20Heaney.htm 这个是"squat pen"搜索结果的第一项，估计二兄都看过了，从它的练习一看，这两个词组和其他的一些都归到“a technique of combining one very graphic - sometimes unexpected - adjective with a key

bulunuo

楼主兄翻译的有些问题，就是在描写父亲过渡的时候，时态没有表达出来。明显有两个时态，一是现在时，我在rests，父亲在digging。父亲digging，让我想到了20年来某个春天（？），他将我们picked的土豆种到土地里。父亲digging又让我想起祖父，他在挖泥炭的时候，我去送牛奶。然后，我的脑袋里充满的是味道和声音（而不是画面），这又使我坚定了digging的决心，又恢复了现在时态。时态的转移，最容易让人把握诗人的情感的走向了。

按：诗歌的解读，最重要的是重复的词句，最重要的词无疑是digging，贯穿整个文章；第二个算是The squat pen rests，和digging相对，很奇怪的是，楼主兄特意（？）省略了rests。
关于重复的字句，楼主兄可参见我分析余光中的诗（在学术论坛里，没有给威望什么的），也可以去参考我求书求的《重复与小说》。

那么这首诗的妙在何处呢？说实在话，看楼主兄的诠释，似乎不得要领（原谅我说话太直接）。其实也许不难理解，任何父亲与儿子的主题都是差不多的，对父辈命运的反抗与接受。对于这首诗，也差不多。可记得关于笔的一个比喻？是枪，枪是什么含义呢？，第二个无疑是spade（But I've no spade to follow men like them……i I'll dig with it.）。诗末是接受了父辈的命运，可诗开始的时候，却是反抗的，枪是一种对抗的态度。也许这种联想并不明确，在后面，诗人表达了他的态度：look down（这是一种双关，表面上是俯视，其实是轻视或者鄙视）。这首诗从开头到结尾，诗人的情感发生了怎样的变化？

白马西北驰

感谢两位老师指点。

我的疑问只是瞎猜而已

爱哭版说的有道理，这首已经有人译过，都是这么处理的，例如：

袁可嘉：粗壮的笔/粗劣的靴子
傅浩：胖墩墩的钢笔/ 粗糙的靴子


parivraj指点的是，“专名”（proper noun）是误用，这里我想说的充其量是“商品名”罢了。

我瞎猜的依据（其实是没有依据，呵呵）：

"the squat pen"在第一节和最后一节以完全相同的形式重复出现，有点奇怪：如果squat仅是一个形容词，为了行文简洁，第二次出现同一件物品，这个用过一次的形容词可以省略。当然爱哭版给出了一种解释。

coarse boot的根据好像充分一点：

http://www.jaypeakvermont.org/jaypeakhistory.html


“TROY - Junction of the great trunk roads from Montreal and Quebec. Birthplace of J. Clement Brown, noted inventor of labor saving packeting machines. Original home in Orleans County of the coarse boot industry. Contains emmense beds of iron ore and is the site of numerous waterfalls.”



从这段话看，coarse boot应该是一种商品，而且能够形成一个产业；应该不会是“粗劣靴子业”吧。

还有这个网址有一篇文章：
http://www.celticcousins.net/irishiniowa/fashionsandfun.htm

The men and boys began to go barefooted a little earlier in the season, say
as soon as the grass came. Shoes were not worn by the men at that time, nor
for years later, as articles of dress. The coarse boot was worn throughout
the week, and the more fastidious young men indulged in light calfskin
boots, with high, narrow heels, for Sunday wear. If these boots had
attractive fancy tops, the dud of those days wore his pants stuffed inside
of them, and sat on the front row of "puncheons" at meeting, with his legs
crossed at a conspicuous height, much to the admiration of the fair sex...


也可以说明确实有这么一种东西。

不过证据确实不多，而且不够直观、详细，所以也搞不清这究竟是什么样一件东西。也许就是一种半成品或未经过精加工的“粗胚靴子”？

bulunuo

诗歌刚开始的时候，诗人就将一只rest的笔推送到读者面前。这支笔为什么休息呢？它为什么会被想象成一只枪呢？诗人处于一种停滞的状态，如果通观全诗，诗人是在选择，这种选择开始的时候是以反抗的态度出现的。诗人手拿着笔，比父辈有更多的“选择”，他可以不从事体力活动来养活自己和全家；诗人厌倦父辈的digging一辈子，但诗人也收到祖辈宿命的压抑，那不但是父辈，也是历史的压力，是使父辈不得不接受digging一辈子的宿命。对历史和命运的反抗，使诗人愿意以笔为枪。
但回忆，是回忆而不是这种“虚拟的反抗”很快接手了诗人的情感。父亲在种土豆。第一次，一个闪亮的名词出现了，loving，爱死了土豆硬而凉的感觉。
接着，是对父亲的赞美，天哪，他能handle铁锹。这种赞美，使得我又联想到另一个使铁锨高手，我爷爷。我想到了爷爷挖泥炭的时候，我去给他送牛奶（那是儿童的时候吧）。
请大家留心，开始的时候，诗人是在二楼（以上），俯视父亲的劳动；回忆让他回到地面上，跟父亲一起劳动，并由衷赞美；他又digging回忆（借用了美国电视heroes的话），爷爷的劳动，使他仰望这些父辈们。然后，是大地的味道和挖掘的声音。诗人从楼阁又回到了大地上，但诗人也终于意识到自己无法再从事父辈的digging生活了（时态重回现在时），他有他新的命运。但这命运，一定是与大地相连的（父亲digging的时候，是播种生命；爷爷digging的时候，是获取温暖）。这大地便是诗人及父辈的历史与环境。
和所有的诗一样，诗最后诗人的情感获得了平和，这是经历紧张，快乐，尊重，警醒后的平静。诗人找到了自己的宿命，这命运和父辈相似又完全不同。这是一种新的劳动，却仍然是和大地相连的。

诗歌非常华彩的地方，不是诗人接受了父辈的命运，而是诗人回忆里两次递给他们东西，一次是土豆块，一次是牛奶。诗人没有写他递的动作，只写了递送以后的心情，他能参与到他们的digging工作，的确是一种幸福。这种幸福是决定性的，能够接管前面的反抗。

在诗歌的最后，诗人rest的笔终于派上了用场，他也许不再休息（犹豫）了吧。

多谢，有冒昧地地方见谅。squat pen 大约不是专用词，只是表明rest的状态，农民休息多是蹲着（这一点暗示诗人内心并没有远离父辈）。coarse 就是粗，怀疑是一种橡胶靴，在泥地里干活，穿这种靴子，烂泥粘上了一洗就掉了。也可能是硬靴，这样踩铁锹上沿不疼（软鞋就疼了）。

lovewnx

squat pen和coarse boot都不出自英语国家吧。

parivraj

白马兄看得细，昨儿个比较乱，我都没拿coarse boot当关键词来搜，惭愧。

兄找的后一个链接挺有价值的，因为这记录的是爱尔兰人的事，而这位诗人也是爱尔兰人，联系比较明确（楼上lovewnx兄说“不出自英语国家”不太好理解，倒是就算都是英语国家，也得分个远近），把含义弄得清楚或许可以把它跟当地传统贴得更紧密一些。不过我想这种鞋子既然是广泛穿的，就多半应该算是成品，加工就算我们看着不很精细，也更多是个标准的问题，对当时的使用者而言，那样肯定就够了。另外google books里有本“Between Worlds: MLA Update”，解释这首诗说The "coarse boot" is designed for heavy, fast, and rugged work，应该可以再给白马兄的推断提供些支持，但如果要弄清楚商品特征的话，这还是不够（书里或许还有别的信息，但是摘录视图看不到更多了），可行的一个办法或许是给可能了解情况的网站写信问问，比如兄找的后一个链接就有可能给兄答案（但她有一年多没更新了），爱尔兰也有好些诗歌论坛，可以发帖子，或者，找找这老头的联系方式直接给他写邮件？哈哈。

白马西北驰

引用第6楼bulunuo于2009-01-20 23:59发表的 :
诗歌刚开始的时候，诗人就将一只rest的笔推送到读者面前。这支笔为什么休息呢？它为什么会被想象成一只枪呢？诗人处于一种停滞的状态，如果通观全诗，诗人是在选择，这种选择开始的时候是以反抗的态度出现的。诗人手拿着笔，比父辈有更多的“选择”，他可以不从事体力活动来养活自己和全家；诗人厌倦父辈的digging一辈子，但诗人也收到祖辈宿命的压抑，那不但是父辈，也是历史的压力，是使父辈不得不接受digging一辈子的宿命。对历史和命运的反抗，使诗人愿意以笔为枪。
.......

兄读得比较细，有些地方有启发，有些地方也许有“过度阐释”之嫌。

容我改天多聊一些，再请兄教正吧，先祝新春愉快：）

bulunuo

没有给分，我觉得很失落呀。

嘿嘿，祝白马兄及其他楼上诸位及wio55兄春节快乐呀。