希尼诗中的“乡野”与“律令”

Pagus and Disciplina in the Poems of Seamus Heaney

希尼在评论爱尔兰自然诗时提出的“乡野”与“律令”这一对矛盾,也作用于他自己的诗歌创作。乡野代表着纵情抒怀的冲动,与欲望、快感和自由相关。在希尼的诗中,乡野也是北爱尔兰家乡莫斯浜的沼泽湿地,是刻意区别于英国田园风景的蛮荒他者。另一方面,不同层面的律令也在时刻节制着希尼的诗歌创作:对族群国家的效忠,寻找表征民族困境的诗歌象征的责任,以及天主教信仰的约束等。随着北爱尔兰问题的逐渐缓和、诗人诗歌视野的逐渐开阔和他对天主教信仰背景的回归,希尼越来越倾向于在灵光一闪的超验瞬间寻求乡土与律令的调和。在他诗歌中这些物我两忘的顿悟时刻里,自由释放与节制收敛的力量、荒野天成的自然和人文教化的自然、隐士和抄经人之间的矛盾都最终消解了。

Seamus Heaney’s poems are subject to the tension between pagus and disciplina, a pair of contending forces he found in the tradition of Irish nature poems. While pagus represents the lyrical impulse, the desire, pleasure, and freedom involved in the lyrical process, it also stands for the bogland of Heaney’s Mossbawm home, a carefully constructed wild Other of the tamed pastoral beauty of the English landscape. Disciplina, on the other hand, also asserts itself on multiple levels: the obligation to assert tribal allegiance, the moral responsibility of seeking adequate poetic symbols for the national predicaments, and the restrictions and disciplines of the Catholic faith. With the topical issues of the Troubles gradually fading away, his poetic horizon gradually widening, and his Catholic upbringing asserting itself in more salient ways, Heaney seems to embrace a kind of reconciliation between pagus and disciplina in moments of luminous transcendence, where the liberating and the restraining, the wild and the humanized nature, the hermit and the scribe, are united in self-forgetting moments of epiphany.