约束、具象、引用:查尔斯·伯恩斯坦的《影子时代》对历史的重构(英文)

Constraint,Concrete,Citation:Refiguring History in Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime

近年来,语言诗的抽象性与非指示性已经让位于一种更具有互文性和智性的诗歌,这种诗歌通过考问历史和历史上的文学以求对当下获得更好的理解。在关于两战期间德国伟大的批评家瓦尔特·本雅明的"思想歌剧"《影子时代》中,查尔斯·伯恩斯坦运用了精心制作的语言游戏、文学回声、引用、约束以及"发现的文本"来重新评论这位充满矛盾的德国学者的生平和美学观。即便独立于音乐之外进行阅读,该歌剧剧本深情而又不乏反讽地刻画出本雅明既有瑕疵又感人至深的人物性格。伯恩斯坦常常直接从本雅明的"马赛的麻药"等具体文本中提取语言,通过有意解构语言以创造一个由双关、诡论、警语组成的复杂的网络。不过,这部"蕴含历史的诗作"也非常滑稽,机智诙谐,对观众颇具有吸引力。可以说,这部作品运用中间媒介、声音游戏和语义丰富的语言,既继承了语言诗的众多特征,又较之语言诗思想更深沉、更能激发思想,为当前美国先锋派诗歌发展提供了一个范例。

In recent years, the abstraction and non-referentiality of Language Poetry has given way to a more intertextual and intellectual poetry-a poetry that interrogates history and the literature of the past so as to come to a better understanding of the present. In his ＂thought opera＂ about the great critic Walter Benjamin, Charles Bernstein uses elaborate language games, literary echoes, citations, constraints, and ＂found text＂ to rethink the life and aesthetic of the deeply conflicted German intellectual, whose career was framed by the two World Wars. The libretto Shadowtime, which can be read independently of the music, presents both a loving but also ironic portrait of Benjamin-a character as deeply flawed as he is sympathetic. Bernstein＇ s language, often drawn directly from specific Benjamin texts, like ＂Hashish at Marseilles,＂ is elaborately deconstructed so as to produce a complex network of puns, paragrams, and aphorisms. But this ＂poem including history＂ is also very funny-full of wit and comedy so that it has broad audience appeal. It provides a paradigm for what is happening in avant-garde American poetry today： the use of intermedia, sound play, and semantically charged language that inherits many of the features of the Language movement but is more meditative and thought-provoking.