镜像·路径·空间——叶芝《驶向拜占庭》的诗意旅行

Mirror Image,Route,and Space: The Poetic Travel of Yeats' s Sailing to Byzantium

叶芝的《驶向拜占庭》是一首关于旅行的诗歌。在诗歌的创作过程中,诗意在不同的文本片段中不断地流动,意味着诗歌本身也经历了一场旅行。对于诗人的自我来说,旅行是不断地自我变形,在自我形象与镜像的张力之下寻求自我的身份。而对于爱尔兰来说,诗歌中的旅行是一段寻找民族定位的精神航程。诗人从他的个人认知出发,为他的民族规划了从边缘到中心、从中心到边缘双向的航行路径。最终,诗人通过想象、象征和自我复制的手段,建构了诗歌中的拜占庭,并将这一空间的表征作为他诗意旅行的目的地、理想之国,以及对于个人和民族身份探究的智性答案。

Yeats' s Sailing to Byzantium is a poem about travel. The poem itself is also an experience of traveling when we look into the process of composing and study the flowing of meaning in the fragments of the text. To the poet,travel is constantly self-transforming and exploring of self-identity under the tension between self-image and mirror image. To the Irish nation,travel in a poem is a spiritual journey of self locating. The poet projects this voyage between the margin and the centre according to his individual knowledge,and marks two different courses on the chart for his nation. Finally,the poet constructs the Byzantium city in his poem by imagining, symbolizing and self duplicating. Yeats takes this representation of space as his destination of the poetic travel,his ideally perfect state,and his intellectual answer to the quest for the identity of self and of the nation.