祖科夫斯基:“气态”时代诗歌语言的物质性

Zukofsky's Materiality of Language in the Gaseous Age

第二代现代派诗歌代表人物祖科夫斯基的诗学观点的独特之处在于,他意识到了诗歌语言的物质性:语言是一种与人体密切相连的生理性物质,并与人体相互作用。他通过开发语言作用于人体感官的可能性,试图使诗歌成为与人体感官交互融合后的产物。这样的诗歌语言观也有其深刻的社会意义:他将语言分为固态、液态和气态三种,分别体现了各自出现时人类社会的特征。

A leading figure of the second-wave modernist poetry,Louis Zukofsky ties the language and the human body together to give the former a physiological feature and the latter an inseparable umbilical cord attached to the former.He tries also to connect a poem's formative process with the reactions of human sense organs.As technical and disturbingly abstruse as it sounds,his poetics actually has a conservative root.This essay explores its political intention: by dividing the language into solid,liquid and gaseous stages,Zukofsky's linguistic physics stands on the social critique of Ruskin,which sees the development of human society as a depriving process of what makes a human a human.