美国国家公共电台 NPR Seamus Heaney Poems Come To Life In Belfast, Ireland

 

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The poet Tess Taylor left her home in California last winter to spend this semester teaching in Northern Ireland. She says she's felt poetry come to life and is learning about the value of place.

TESS TAYLOR: As our plane flew low over sheep pasturing near Lough Neagh two days before New Year's, I felt the thrill of knowing I'd be matching names I'd read in poems to their places - Anahorish, Tyrone, Wicklow, Derry. This was a landscape I'd spent years reading about in Seamus Heaney poems. Outside in winter light, thick mists wove through tangled¹ trees. In Northern Ireland, stories and histories often fork and fork again, changing depending on who's telling them.

During my first week, I heard two radically² different versions of the troubles from two different cab drivers. At the very least, it's a landscape of many ghosts and many voices. As the winter rain in Belfast fell around me, I kept thinking about how Heaney uses these voices lovingly in poems that seem to belong not only to his neighbors, friends, countrymen but to bogs³ and trees and even to the ground itself.

As Belfast's new vowels⁴ and rainy gutters⁵ gurgled past, I found myself absentmindedly reciting "Gifts Of Rain," a poem Heaney wrote about the voice of his own hometown river. The tawny⁶ guttural water spells itself - Moyola, its own score and consort⁷, betting the locale in the utterance⁸. Betting the locale in the utterance, I thought admiring, how Heaney makes stories belong to a landscape and a landscape belong to its stories.

And yet, a few weeks later while studying drafts of the poem in Dublin, I learned that Heaney wrote this very poem not in Belfast but in Berkeley, Calif., where I'm from and where Heaney actually lived, having his own adventure away from home in 1970 and '71 just as Belfast was beginning to explode in a series of consecutive⁹ bombings.

It seems that Heaney first composed "Gifts Of Rain" on a rainy Berkeley morning over 5,000 miles away from the memory of the river he was writing about. He used the distance and the space of California to craft the sound of home. During these months looking back towards America from a long distance, during what seems to be a critical juncture¹⁰ for our country, I've been thinking too about our complicated stories, our tangled paths, about what our sounds of belonging might be.

In Belfast, I think about what it means to try to root in a place that has, for the moment at least, come through rough and unsettled days to forge its own fiercely one still delicate piece.

I wonder what voices I am hearing, what poems I need to write. I wonder what my river sounds like, and I wonder what home I might make out of its flowing.

SHAPIRO: Tess Taylor is teaching at Queen's University in Northern Ireland.

(SOUNDBITE OF GLEN HANSARD AND MARKETA IRGLOVA'S, "SWELL SEASON")

1 tangled   

adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• Your hair's so tangled that I can't comb it. 你的头发太乱了，我梳不动。
• A movement caught his eye in the tangled undergrowth. 乱灌木丛里的晃动引起了他的注意。

2 radically   

ad.根本地，本质地

参考例句：

• I think we may have to rethink our policies fairly radically. 我认为我们可能要对我们的政策进行根本的反思。
• The health service must be radically reformed. 公共医疗卫生服务必须进行彻底改革。

3 bogs   

n.沼泽，泥塘( bog的名词复数 )；厕所v.（使）陷入泥沼， （使）陷入困境( bog的第三人称单数 )；妨碍，阻碍

参考例句：

• Whenever It'shows its true nature, real life bogs to a standstill. 无论何时，只要它显示出它的本来面目，真正的生活就陷入停滞。 来自名作英译部分
• At Jitra we went wading through bogs. 在日得拉我们步行着从泥水塘里穿过去。 来自辞典例句

4 vowels   

n.元音，元音字母( vowel的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Vowels possess greater sonority than consonants. 元音比辅音响亮。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Note the various sounds of vowels followed by r. 注意r跟随的各种元音的发音。 来自超越目标英语 第3册

5 gutters   

（路边）排水沟( gutter的名词复数 )； 阴沟； （屋顶的）天沟； 贫贱的境地

参考例句：

• Gutters lead the water into the ditch. 排水沟把水排到这条水沟里。
• They were born, they grew up in the gutters. 他们生了下来，以后就在街头长大。

6 tawny   

adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色

参考例句：

• Her black hair springs in fine strands across her tawny,ruddy cheek.她的一头乌发分披在健康红润的脸颊旁。
• None of them noticed a large,tawny owl flutter past the window.他们谁也没注意到一只大的、褐色的猫头鹰飞过了窗户。

7 consort   

v.相伴；结交

参考例句：

• They went in consort two or three together.他们三三两两结伴前往。
• The nurses are instructed not to consort with their patients.护士得到指示不得与病人交往。

8 utterance   

n.用言语表达，话语，言语

参考例句：

• This utterance of his was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter.他的讲话引起阵阵哄然大笑。
• My voice cleaves to my throat,and sob chokes my utterance.我的噪子哽咽，泣不成声。

9 consecutive   

adj.连续的，联贯的，始终一贯的

参考例句：

• It has rained for four consecutive days.已连续下了四天雨。
• The policy of our Party is consecutive.我党的政策始终如一。

10 juncture   

n.时刻，关键时刻，紧要关头

参考例句：

• The project is situated at the juncture of the new and old urban districts.该项目位于新老城区交界处。
• It is very difficult at this juncture to predict the company's future.此时很难预料公司的前景。