【英文原声版10】Elisa New：Leaves of Grass

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How did Whitman promote himself?

惠特曼如何自我宣传？

Zachary Davis: In 1855, politicians, business leaders, scholars, and activists were trying to define “America.” The framers who drafted the U.S. constitution had written that “all men are created equal,” but the economy depended on the labor of African slaves and their descendants—people who were, by definition, not free. A growing contingent of political leaders and activists wanted to end slavery, but others refused. This conflict would lead to the Civil War, and approximately 750,000 dead.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1855年，政治家、商业领袖、学者和社会运动者试图定义美国是什么。美国宪法的起草者曾写过“人人生而平等”，但当时美国经济发展依赖于非洲奴隶及其子孙的劳作。从身份上看，这些人不是自由人。越来越多的政界领导人和社会运动者想结束奴隶制，但遭到了一些人的反对。这场分歧导致了南北战争的爆发，大约75万人死亡。

Zachary Davis: So, what was America? Was it a nation of slaves or a nation of equals? Was it nation of individuals...or was it something else?

扎卡里·戴维斯：所以美国是什么？是奴隶制国家还是平等国家？是崇尚个人主义的国家，还是别的什么？

Zachary Davis: In Brooklyn, New York, one poet was trying to answer these questions for himself.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在纽约布鲁克林，一位诗人试图亲自回答这些问题。

Zachary Davis: Walt Whitman was born in New York in 1819, and in 1855, he published his first and only book of poetry. It was called Leaves of Grass.

扎卡里·戴维斯：沃尔特·惠特曼于1819年出生于纽约。1855年，他出版了自己的第一本也是唯一一本诗集，名叫《草叶集》。

Elisa New: Whitman writes in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass that he publishes in 1855, “These United States are themselves the greatest poem.” That's a pretty bold claim both for the United States and for poetry. And that this poet wanted his art to play a role in defining that he would write, “These United States are themselves the greatest poem,” um, speaks to a largeness of ambition, both for the nation and for poetry that I think over the years has made its impact.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼在第一版《草叶集》的序言中写道：“美国本身就是伟大的诗作。”无论对美国还是对诗歌而言，这个说法都相当大胆。这位诗人希望自己的作品能展现自己所说的“美国本身就是伟大的诗作”。惠特曼很有雄心壮志，他的作品在之后的几年里对美国以及诗歌的发展都产生了深远影响。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Elisa New, a Professor of English at Harvard University and the creator and host of the television show Poetry in America, to discuss Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨某一本书带给世界的影响。在本集，我和哈佛大学英语教授埃莉莎·纽一起讨论《草叶集》，纽教授还制作并主持了一档电视节目，名叫《美国诗歌》，今天，我将和她一起来讨论沃尔特·惠特曼的《草叶集》。

Elisa New: Walt Whitman was actually just the son of a Brooklyn carpenter. He worked as a journalist for a whole variety of newspapers, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and started, in fact, as a printer. And so he was a working man.

埃莉莎·纽：沃尔特·惠特曼的父亲只是布鲁克林的木匠。在写《草叶集》之前，惠特曼曾在布鲁克林和曼哈顿的许多报社当过记者，而且最初他只是一名印刷工。可以说他是一位劳动者。

Zachary Davis: Being a printer was hard work. Whitman set each piece of metal type by hand and powered the printing press with a foot pedal. It was a full-body job.

扎卡里·戴维斯：当印刷工很辛苦。惠特曼要徒手设置每块金属活字，脚踩踏板为印刷机提供动力。工作时全身上下都要使劲儿。

Elisa New: Whitman his whole life and certainly all over Leaves of Grass is interested in the great intelligence of the body, the artfulness of people who work in all sorts of crafts, and I think the fact that he evolves from printer to journalist to poet shows in his own story something about the poetry that he would eventually write.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼一生，包括整部《草叶集》，都着迷于人身体之敏捷，着迷于各类手艺人的鬼斧神工。我觉得他从印刷工转行到记者、再到诗人，这样的人生经历预示了他终将会写这样一部诗作。

Zachary Davis: So when does he start writing poetry? Where are they published and what gives them the idea to write this larger collection?

扎卡里·戴维斯：那么他什么时候开始写诗呢？他在哪里出版自己的诗，又为什么想要写这样一整本诗集呢？

Elisa New: Well, when Walt Whitman decides to be a poet, he thinks big. And he starts writing journal entries to himself, not only conceiving the poem as, you know, cousin to these United States, but also calling the book he would write the new American Bible. And so he is not a poet who thinks I'll just publish a, you know, a little sheaf of lyrics and send them around and see what the world thinks of them. He wants to make a major statement.

埃莉莎·纽：沃尔特·惠特曼决定做诗人的时候，怀揣着远大的愿景。他从写自己的每日见闻开始，不光想让这些诗展现国家社会的状况，甚至还将自己要写的这本诗集称作“新时代美国人的圣经”。他可不是那种只求出版了事的诗人，不想仅仅写一小节诗，发表一下，看看人们的反响。他想要奏响时代的强音。

Zachary Davis: When it came time to publish Leaves of Grass, Whitman went to a print shop where he had worked and printed every page of the book by hand. The first edition included twelve untitled poems.

扎卡里·戴维斯：出版《草叶集》的时候，惠特曼去了自己曾经工作过的那家印刷店，亲自印刷了书的每一页。第一版《草叶集》收录了十二首无题诗。

Elisa New: After he's published the book, he sends it to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

埃莉莎·纽：这本书出版之后，他寄了一本给拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生。

Zachary Davis: Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the leading writers at the time. He was a member of the transcendentalist movement, a literary and philosophical movement that pushed back against scientific rationalism. He was one of Whitman’s influences, and he loved the book.

扎卡里·戴维斯：拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生是当时的著名作家之一。他是超验主义运动的一员，这是一场反对科学理性主义的文学与哲学运动。他的思想影响了惠特曼，当然他也很喜欢惠特曼这本书。

Elisa New: And Emerson says, you know, I had to rub my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were an illusion. And then he says of the book that it is seems to him a marvelous combination of The New York Herald and The Bhagavad Gita.

埃莉莎·纽：爱默生说，我不得不稍微揉揉眼睛，看看这道阳光是不是幻觉。他还说，在他看来，这部诗集完美地融合了《纽约先驱报》和《薄迦梵歌》。

Zachary Davis: The New York Herald was a popular daily newspaper at the time, and The Bhagavad Gita is one part of an ancient Hindu epic. This was an extraordinary praise, and Whitman wasn’t shy about showing it off.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《纽约先驱报》是当时流行的日报，《博伽梵歌》是一部古印度史诗。这句赞美非比寻常，惠特曼也毫不羞于炫耀这点。

Elisa New: That story is worth telling because Whitman, very immodestly and brashly and to Emerson's chagrin, not only prints it, just runs off another page and begins to bind Emerson's letter into new copies of Leaves of Grass. But he puts one of Emerson sentences, namely, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” in gold on the spine of his book. All, all this to say that he's really a hustler and a, you know, a genius—

埃莉莎·纽：有段奇闻异事值得一提，收到回信后，惠特曼非但毫不客气地另起一页，把爱默生这封信加到新一版《草叶集》里印了出来，这让艾默生非常恼火；惠特曼还在书脊上用金色字标出了信里的一句话，“我恭祝您开启这段伟大事业”。这些都说明他还挺会搞噱头的，是个营销天才。

Zachary Davis: No hesitation at self-promotion.

扎卡里·戴维斯：不遗余力地自我宣传。

Elisa New: No, no hesitation at self-promotion. He's very bumptious. And of course, the initial Leaves of Grass is full of material that shocked, full of sexual imagery and full of descriptions of women under their clothes and men under their clothes. That when Emily Dickinson, Whitman’s contemporary, when Emily Dickinson was asked if she had read Mr. Whitman, she said, I have not. I heard he was disgraceful. And so not only not a member of any sort of literary elite, but really a poet and a person willing to push all the boundaries. And yet, it's important to say, Whitman's temperament and personality which one reads in his poem has a sweetness that does some of the work of delivering art that sometimes is unpalatable or even too radical for many readers.

埃莉莎·纽：对，不遗余力地自我宣传。他可一点都不谦虚。当然，第一版的《草叶集》里有很多让人震惊的内容，有很多与性有关的意象，以及很多关于裸体男女的描写。所以当有人问惠特曼同时代的诗人艾米莉·狄金森，问她有没有读过惠特曼的诗，她回答说没有，听说他净写些下流玩意儿。所以说惠特曼不但不属于任何一个文学精英团体，还是个愿意突破所有界限的诗人。不过我必须得说，惠特曼诗里有股甜美的气质，这方便他传递诗里许多读者觉得难以接受甚至太过前卫的内容。

How did Whitman change poetries of his time？

惠特曼如何改变了那个时代的诗歌？

Zachary Davis: Whitman’s work represented a major shift from the poetry of his time—especially the fireside poets, who were the first American poets to rival the popularity of the British. This group was made up of five poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.

扎卡里·戴维斯：惠特曼的作品展现了当时诗歌的重大转变。尤其是对当时诗歌届流行的“炉边诗人”来说，他们是美国最早一批流行程度堪比英国诗人的诗人。“炉边诗人”共有五位，他们是：威廉·卡伦·布莱恩特，亨利·沃兹沃思·朗费罗，约翰·格林利夫·惠蒂尔，奥利弗·温德尔·福尔摩斯和詹姆斯·罗素·洛厄尔。

Zachary Davis: In the 1850s, most Americans did their evening reading by the light of the fire. Electric lights were not commercially available, and even oil lamps were a luxury many could not afford. Without radio or TV, poetry served as a popular entertainment for families around the country. The Fireside Poets were among the most popular writers around. They favored conventional rhyme schemes and meters, making their poems easy to memorize and recite and contributing to their popularity in both schools and homes.

扎卡里·戴维斯：19世纪50年代，大多数美国人晚上在炉火边读书。电灯当时还没有商用，连煤油灯也是很多人买不起的奢侈品。人们没有电视看，没有广播听，诗歌就自然被美国家庭拿来消遣生活。“炉边诗人”是当时最受欢迎的诗人群体之一。他们喜欢用传统的韵律模式，使诗歌朗朗上口、深入人心，在美国学校和家庭中广为流传。

Zachary Davis: The fireside poets were largely influenced by 18th century English poetry, in both verse and image.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在韵律和意象方面，“炉边诗人”都深受18世纪英国诗歌的影响。

Elisa New: The books published by these poets, the Firesides, would typically have a frontispiece image where the poet in a glossy cravat, his beard lustrous, stood in front of a bookcase looking at a book, and the image of the poet these would project was intellectual—

埃莉莎·纽：“炉边诗人”的诗集通常都会附上一张卷首图，图上诗人戴着富有光泽的领结，胡须茂密，站在书架前看书。这些诗人的形象都很文质彬彬。

Zachary Davis: Sophisticated.

扎卡里·戴维斯：有模有样。

Elisa New: Sophisticated, intellectual. And if they had bodies, you certainly didn't know it. Whereas Whitman, his frontispiece portrait is a full body shot. He's got his hand on his hip. His shirt is open. You can see hair on his chest. and he's looking at you in this come hither sort of way.

埃莉莎·纽：有模有样，文质彬彬。在图上你可看不到他们的全身。但惠特曼不一样，他的卷首图是一张全身像：他把手放在屁股上，衬衫敞着，你都能看到他的胸毛，他就这样盯着你。

Elisa New: And then one opens the book and the lines themselves run over from one page to another without breaks. They don't rhyme. It's hard to tell where one poem begins and the next begins. Whitman is writing in a style that's completely unconventional.

埃莉莎·纽：打开书，你会发现诗一行连着一行，一页接着一页，都没有分诗节。整首诗也不押韵，你都分不清一首诗在哪儿开头、下一首又在哪里开始。惠特曼的写作风格与传统截然不同。

Elisa New: The conventional poets, the poets of Whitman's day wrote poems that you can kind of hold in your head. They fit in your consciousness. You can carry them inside you. And Whitman writes a poem and this is, for me, really radical about him and irresistible about him. He writes a poem that's bigger than himself, that's bigger than itself, that's bigger than any reader. In the ways maybe that the United States.

埃莉莎·纽：传统的诗人，包括惠特曼同时代的其他诗人的诗，可以带给你深刻的印象。它们符合你对诗的一贯理解，你可以牢牢记住它们。惠特曼的诗在我看来真的很前卫，也真的让人无法抗拒。他不仅仅为自己、为诗歌发展本身、为读者而写，可以说更是在为整个美国而写。

Elisa New: The idea of the United States, the potential of the United States is bigger than its geographic boundaries. The idea that meaning lies beyond the constructs that we create is, in some ways, the single contribution that Whitman made. And it's a really inspiring contribution and a lot of areas for what it says about democracy, for what it says about ourselves, for what it says about how much we understand about the world.

埃莉莎·纽：而他所谓的美国是指美国的内在特质，而不仅限于地图上的地理概念。这种认为国家的内涵超越其疆域的观点，是惠特曼独有的贡献。这个观点非常鼓舞人心，鼓舞着人们去思考民主、思考自我、思考我们对整个世界的认知有多少。

Zachary Davis: Do you think it's fair to characterize the Fireside Poets as drawing from the European tradition that's trying to, you know, create European poetry? And is Whitman creating the first American poetry?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您觉得可以这么说吗：“炉边诗人”只是在继承欧洲传统，创造欧洲形式的诗歌，而惠特曼才是开创美国诗歌的第一人？

Elisa New: The Firesides wanted to accomplish something pretty important for Americans: They wanted that to help the country have a culture and have a global culture. Right?

埃莉莎·纽：“炉边诗人”想要做一件对美国来说至关重要的事，那就是为美国创造文化，而且是全球通行的文化。对吧？

Elisa New: They wanted to bring European forms to America. Help Americans familiarize themselves with them and then to use them.

埃莉莎·纽：他们想把欧洲的诗歌形式引入美国，让美国人熟悉它，并用这种形式创造自己的诗歌。

Zachary Davis: These poets didn’t want to invent a new global culture for America. They were comfortable with the literary traditions of old, and they were comfortable in their New England surroundings—surroundings that were isolated, scholarly, and overwhelmingly populated by people who looked like them.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这些诗人不想创造出全新的美式全球文化。他们很习惯固有的文学传统，也很习惯新英格兰的氛围，那里是与世隔绝的学术象牙塔，周围人都和他们很像。

Elisa New: They had no idea about what it was like to live in a city like New York, a city that was increasingly connected to the rest of the world by shipping, by commerce. A city that was becoming a real destination for immigrants around the world, that was becoming a financial center. And so what Whitman saw and what he found poetic form to represent was an America that really was teeming, and that really was diverse.

埃莉莎·纽：他们不知道住在纽约是什么感觉。纽约借由航运和贸易，与世界其他地区日益紧密相连，成为全世界移民的目的地，也正变成金融中心。所以惠特曼看到的以及他的诗歌形式所代表的，是一个蓬勃发展、多样丰富的美国，这点和“炉边诗人”截然不同。

Elisa New: So Whitman understood that America was going to be a place where as you moved around your world, you might see in any one day a thousand different people who came from different places who were strangers to you. And the anonymity of a city and the stimulation of a city and the cut-up quality to the perceptual experiences you have in a city where one second you're seeing this and the next second you're seeing that. And these things don't necessarily connect, the almost cinematic jerkiness of your experience, where stimulations are just flooding you and creating new rhythms for you. Whitman understood that world. And he began to write in a form that encompassed that world.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼意识到美国正变成这样一个国家：你在周围走一圈，任何一天你都能看到成千上万个来自不同地区的陌生人。你淹没在人群中，接受着城市带给你的新鲜刺激，体验着城市里全新的事物。上一秒你刚看到这个，下一秒你又看到了那个。这些东西不一定有什么关联，像是电影画面一样切来切去，带给你源源不断的刺激，让你沉溺其中，为你创造出新节奏。惠特曼意识到了这一切，于是开创了新的诗歌形式来展现这个新世界。

What’s Whitman's view of the self?

惠特曼如何看待“自我”？

Zachary Davis: So if Whitman is capturing some of these changes in American life, particularly around the wild growth of a city like New York, some of that change might be a rising sense of individualism, a sense of the possibility, an agency of every kind of person. The famous line “I celebrate myself.” Could you take us through what is Whitman's view of the self and how does it relate to this new frontier that's emerging?

扎卡里·戴维斯：所以说惠特曼捕捉到了美国人生活中的这些变化，尤其是纽约这种城市的飞速发展。另外还有一些变化，比如人们的个人意识越来越强，觉得一切皆有可能，每类人都有自己的能动性。惠特曼有句著名的诗句叫“我赞美我自己”。您可以给我们讲讲惠特曼对人们自我的看法，以及这些看法和当时出现的崭新、前卫的社会变化之间的联系吗？

Elisa New: I think many readers are really irritated, annoyed and offended by the largeness of the Whitmanian self that self that says, I celebrate myself and what I assume you shall assume and everything belonging to me as good belongs to you. And even in his gestures of reciprocity and equality, some readers hear a brag and a kind of obnoxious presumption.

埃莉莎·纽：我觉得许多读者都对惠特曼的自我赞颂感到恼火与不适，因为惠特曼说：“我赞美我自己，歌唱我自己，我承担的你也将承担，因为属于我的每一个原子也同样属于你。”甚至很多读者觉得他这种互惠与平等只是惺惺作态，实际上是在吹牛，妄自尊大，觉得他实在让人讨厌。

Zachary Davis: It's like they worry he veers into narcissism or Instagram, Twitter style self-celebration.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他们似乎担心他会变得自恋，或者是像如今Instagram和Twitter上的有些人那样顾影自怜。

Elisa New: Yes. And Whitman's person now, his own personality, I think tends in that direction. And we—there's certainly moments throughout his great poem, “Song of Myself,” where, you know, he'll say the scent of these armpits is finer than any prayer that you really, really? That said. I believe that Whitman's understanding of the self is actually so humble and so different from the Instagram look-at-me idea.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。我觉得惠特曼自己的性格有这方面的倾向。他在自己著名的诗《自我之歌》里面写道：“这些腋窝里的气味是比祈祷更美的芳香。”真的吗？他确实这么说了。不过我相信跟Instagram上那种希望所有人都来看自己的心态比起来，惠特曼对自我的认知还是要谦逊很多，也截然不同。

Elisa New: What Whitman says of a self is that a self is made of everything that came before, of everything that's pouring in from the outside world at any moment. There is an impermanence, a porousness, and insubstantiality, really, about the Whitmanian self that by the end of the poem “Song of Myself,” he writes, “I effuse myself in lacy jags,” which is to say I'm like water. I'm like foam spreading on a river. I'm dissipating.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼提到自我，其实是在说自我是由过往的一切，由每时每刻外界涌入的一切构成的。惠特曼所说的自我是稍纵即逝、千疮百孔且脆弱的。在《自我之歌》的结尾，惠特曼写道：“我把我的肉体融化在花边状的裂缝中。”他是说自己就像水一样。我像泡沫一样在河面上漫开，渐渐消散。

Elisa New: And I think the most radical and powerful and moving thing about the Whitmanian self is that it, it actually doesn't really have boundaries. If you look for a core of interior solidity in the Whitmanian self, you don't find it. Instead, the self is a place of exchange, is a place where the world is constantly educating it. Whitman’s the first poet I've ever read who in every line is kind of reminding us that we're shedding skin cells. Right? Or that the air that we breathe came from a wind far away.

埃莉莎·纽：我认为惠特曼式自我最前卫、最强大、最动人的地方在于，它不受任何限制，没有界限。如果你想寻找惠特曼式自我的内核，那你肯定找不到。相反，自我可以容纳自我交流，容纳世界带给自己源源不断的教育成果。惠特曼是我读过的诗人里，第一个每行每句都在提醒我们皮肤细胞正在脱落的人，也是第一个提醒我们呼吸的空气来自远方吹来的风的人。

Elisa New: And so that notion of selfhood as influenced by and constituted by the outer world rather than in the way we talk about it, rather than full of its own individuality, I think is the most exciting thing about Whitman. I don't think Whitman is really much of an individualist, even though he writes a poem called “Song of Myself.”

埃莉莎·纽：他认为自我受外界影响，由外界构成，而不是像我们如今说的那样，全部由我们自身组成。我觉得这才是惠特曼令人欣赏兴奋的地方。我觉得即便惠特曼写了这首《自我之歌》，他也并不是真正的个人主义者。

Zachary Davis: In another place he writes, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在这首诗的另一部分，他写道：“因为属于我的每一个原子，也同样属于你。”

Elisa New: Exactly.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。

Zachary Davis: Seem to suggest this kind of radical material equality among all of us. We're all bits of space.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这似乎暗示着人们在生理层面本质上是平等的，都是由空间单位组成的。

Elisa New: One of the ways he does that in the poetry is to write lines that have a sort of atomic quality. So that one gets a little bright shard of experience. And often that shard is exactly adjacent to another shard of experience. And these are allowed to educate us about one another.

埃莉莎·纽：他在诗中表达这一思想的方式之一，就是写一些跟原子有关的诗句。每个人都有一小块经历，而且这一块常常和别人的那一块挨着。他用这个来比喻人与人的相互关系。

Elisa New: And my very favorite two lines in Whitman that demonstrate this, they’re from part 15 of “Song of Myself.” And here they are, “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft. The carpenter dresses his plank, his fore-plane whistles its wild ascending lisp.”

埃莉莎·纽：我最喜欢的惠特曼的这两句诗，摘自《自我之歌》中的第15首。这两句是这样的：“风琴台上柔和的女低音在歌唱，木匠在修饰着厚木板，刨子的铁舌发出咻咻的声音。”

Elisa New: So Whitman is giving us an image and invoking the sound of an opera singer or a choir singer in a some sort of elevated space of culture, the pure, and this contralto is pure. And then right next to that contralto, “the carpenter dresses his plank, his for plane whistles its wild ascending lisp.” And these two kinds of music, the music of high art and the music of the carpenter’s labor where the tongue of wood that is released from the carpenter’s fore-plane, there's an analogy suggested between that tongue and the tongue of the contralto singing in the organ loft, and the technique of putting those two little bits, little shards together and letting them exchange atoms. He's going to bring them into a fundamental equality by pointing out the finest details of sameness.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼描述了一个场景，先是提到了歌剧歌唱者或是合唱团的歌唱者这种高雅的艺术文化是纯洁的，女低音歌唱者是纯洁的。紧接着女低音歌唱者，他又提到了“木匠在修饰着厚木板，刨子的铁舌发出咻咻的声音”。这两种音乐，一个是阳春白雪，一个是木匠劳动时刨子的铁舌贴着木板发出的声音。女歌唱家的歌喉和刨子的声音之间形成了类比，惠特曼用了小小的技巧让这两小块经历挨在一起，让它们互换彼此的原子。他想要通过指出这二者精妙细微的相似之处，来告诉读者二者本质上是平等的。

Elisa New: And of course, he's also going to venture, very frequently into social critique so that where relationships are unequal, he will allow us to see them, too. He will allow us to see slaves picking cotton in a field, picking to the rhythm and to the orders of an overseer on a horse. And then in a next line, he will take us to a ballroom where the dance of the celebrants is called also by someone on a sort of elevated dais. And so we're allowed to think about all sorts of similarities and ironies. And so Whitman's instrument of juxtaposition is also an instrument of social critique.

埃莉莎·纽：当然他还常常大胆批判社会，向我们揭示人类关系的不平等之处。他向我们展示了在田里采摘棉花的奴隶，他们照着节奏和监工的吆喝去采摘，监工骑着马对他们发号施令。到了下一行，惠特曼带我们来到了一个舞厅，里面人们的舞步也都跟着台上一个人的吆喝声走。由此我们可以看到一些相似之处和一些讽刺之处。惠特曼用这种类比来表达对社会的批判。

How did Whitman  see beauty in common stuff?

惠特曼如何从寻常事物中发掘美？

Zachary Davis: And just thinking about what did make America so different than Europe, well, it was, in a sense, a rejection of aristocracy, which is partly a rejection of the idea that there are some people better than others. And that democratic intuition seems to lead to an orientation towards the world which looks for the wonder in the common and in the lowly, and thinking about what Whitman does in his poetry is helps us see that wonder and that beauty in the common stuff.

扎卡里·戴维斯：想想是什么让美国如此不同于欧洲。从某种意义上讲，是因为美国没有建立贵族制，因此也没有“有的人天生高人一等”这种观念。这种民主思想似乎引导着人们在普通、低微的事物中发掘奇迹。惠特曼的诗正是要引导我们在寻常事物中看到奇妙之处、看到美。

Elisa New: Absolutely. I mean, what stuff is more common than grass? Right? What stuff is lowlier than grass? And to say if you're looking for me, look under your boots soles. That is to say, I am with those trodden underneath, and we all return to the earth. I mean, there are many ways in which Whitman is going to remind us of our equality. Grass is such a fascinating image for that. Because when you think about grass, I mean, yeah, one blade might be a little higher than another, but it's kind of accidental and not important. And the aggregate in grass is more important than any one blade. And there's a kind of “epluribus unum” thing going on as Whitman tries to figure out how do you celebrate the mass, how do you celebrate the whole polity, the whole body politic, and attend to the details.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。我想还有什么能比小草更普通呢？对吧。还有什么能比小草更低微呢？假如你要找小草，往鞋底下看看就可以了。我们和那些被踩在脚下的小草一样，最终都会葬身于泥土中。惠特曼用了许多方式来提醒读者人人平等，小草就是一个很迷人的意象。一想到小草，你就会想到某片叶子可能会比另一片高一点，但这都是随机的，而且也高不到哪儿去。一整棵小草比单独一片叶子要重要得多。惠特曼在赞美民众、赞美整个美国以及国家政体等种种细节时，流露出了“合一为众”的思想。

Elisa New: I was just thinking about the way he'll pick out details like he'll write of a clean haired Yankee girl. How extraordinary it is the way this poet can individualize. She's a Yankee girl. That's almost a stereotype. And then he gives you that little detail of clean haired. And she becomes a portrait and a genre study, whom we can actually see.

埃莉莎·纽：我在想他是如何挑选细节去描写的，比如他会写一个干干净净的美国姑娘。把描写对象具象化成某个人，这种手法多不同寻常呀。她是个美国姑娘，这种印象都固定下来了。然后他会继续写写细节，写她清爽的头发等等。她变成了一副肖像、一种类型研究，能被我们看到。

Elisa New: And so there's a, there are problems of sort of scale that Whitman, I think, helps us to think about. But at the same time,that attentiveness to every face and the way this poet is training us both to experience what it is to live in a crowd, what it is to live in a nation, what it is to be part of something much bigger than you are.

埃莉莎·纽：所以我觉得惠特曼可以引导我们思考一些宏大的问题。与此同时，他还教会我们要关注每个人，让我们体验生活在群体中、生活在民族国家中是什么感觉，去体验身为某个宏大事物的一部分是什么感觉。

Zachary Davis: So he’s grappling with pluralism.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他在设法应对多元化。

Elisa New: Exactly. But in grappling with pluralism, he doesn't want to lose his sense of the particular in the individual and in a way training our eye and our sensibilities so that we feel the largeness of pluralism and the inspiration of that. And at the same time, allowing us to see those details. He's doing that too.

埃莉莎·纽：对，他在设法应对多元化。但他也不想失去作为个体的那种特殊感，所以他要教会我们观察，教会我们感知，让我们感受到多元化的广博内涵和给我们带来的灵感。同时他还让我们关注那些细节。他自己也身体力行。

Zachary Davis: Well, and both plurality, among other people who we encounter in the streets, but even a plurality within the famous line, “I contain multitudes.” Is he alluding to a belief that none of us are unified, that we are fragmented?

扎卡里·戴维斯：惠特曼所说的多元不仅仅指我们在街上遇到各种各样的人，还指他诗里写的“我包罗万象”。他是否在暗示我们，没有人是和谐统一的，所有人都是支离破碎的呢？

Elisa New: Whitman is absolutely pointing to a vision of the self as disunified, as mixed-up, as blind to itself often.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼绝对认为，自我是不统一的、混杂的，人们往往是看不清自我的。

Elisa New: Much more than other poets, he will write about sleep and all sorts of things happen when you're sleeping that you didn't know about in your waking life, and he will often use dream tableaux in order to take us into the unruliness of the psyche beyond where we understand ourselves. And that a lack of self-understanding or an incompleteness of agency might be empowering as well. We tend to think everyone should know themselves. We should have identities that are stable, and we should feel our own agency. This poet is telling us that that is sort of an illusion. We don't really have agency. Where are we headed? Dying, right? We are not fundamentally in control.

埃莉莎·纽：跟其他诗人相比，他的很多诗都有关睡眠以及入睡时发生、醒来却一无所知的事。他经常描写睡眠，来把我们带进自己那个所知甚少、不受拘束的内心世界。缺乏自我了解或是能动性不够不一定会让我们无法主宰自己。我们往往认为所有人都应该了解自己，我们应当有稳定的身份，感受到自己的能动性。而惠特曼告诉我们这只是错觉，我们其实没有能动性。我们要走向何处？走向死亡，是吗？从根本上说我们不受自己主观控制。

Zachary Davis: Well, he strikes me as a great poet of the body, and partly I think it tracks with his other interests of the ordinary.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这位伟大的诗人打动我的一点是，他关注人们的躯体，我觉得这可能出自它对寻常事物的关心。

Elisa New: Uh-huh.

埃莉莎·纽：是的。

Zachary Davis: Because what's more ordinary than our flawed, broken, smelly bodies. And I think what he does is he moves the poetic gaze from the soul and from the transcendent to the material to the imminent.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们的身体有缺陷、有伤口甚至有气味，还有什么能比这更普通呢？我觉得惠特曼所做的是将诗歌的关注点由灵魂、超常的事物，转向物质世界与当下的现实。

Elisa New: Yeah.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。

Zachary Davis: And says, yes, our bodies are imperfect, but they’re glorious too. And they might be temporary. But what wonder we can accomplish in this life.

扎卡里·戴维斯：对，我们的身体确实不完美，但它们也值得歌颂。它们或许不能永存，但我们这辈子又能创造什么奇迹。

Elisa New: Absolutely, I mean, he does actually raise the stakes a little bit above that, Zach. In as early as what became part five of “Song of Myself,” he has body and soul on a lawn making love. And they're making love—it's very clear that there is sexual congress going on between the body and the soul. And he says, there, I believe in you, my soul. But the other I am must not be abased to you. And so why don't we just have body and soul? Let's unite them by having them frolic on the lawn. And that soul is embodied is I think that the point you're making and I agree with it entirely.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。我觉得惠特曼确实有点前卫。早在《自我之歌》的第五首中，他就描写了肉体与灵魂在草地上耳鬓厮磨，显然肉体与灵魂在进行某种交流。他还写道：“我相信你，我的灵魂，其余部分的我不可因你自视卑下。”所以我们为什么要把肉体与灵魂分开呢？不如让他们在草地上嬉闹，让他们融为一体。肉体与灵魂之间的交缠，我觉得这正是你刚刚提到的点，我也完全赞同。

Zachary Davis: Because it seems like the belief in a soul, the Christian soul, encourages you to think of the self as unified because the soul is in charge and the soul is sort of, you know, heavenly in some way. Bodies, though, have appetites, have desires, have histories. And so you can see—

扎卡里·戴维斯：因为似乎如果你信仰基督教中所说的灵魂，你就会相信自我是统一的。灵魂掌管一切，灵魂在某种程度上属于天堂；而肉体有欲望、有追求、沾染着往事的痕迹。

Elisa New: And die. Bodies die.Yeah. Bodies become other bodies. Bodies become Grass. Bodies become dirt. And so there's nothing unified about that. Right? Bodies are—bodies tell the story that we are impermanent, and the soul lives on. But it's in the grass, right? Your soul now becomes part of the grass and the sky. And you are not in Whitman's cosmos preserved in this little—

埃莉莎·纽：肉体还会死亡，死后肉体成为其他形态，变成春草与春泥。所以这样看没有什么是统一的，对吧？肉体向我们展现了什么叫短暂，而灵魂居住其中。不过在这草地上，你的灵魂也随肉体融入了春草与蓝天，在惠特曼的世界观里你不会永生。

Zachary Davis: You're not an eternal flower. You're in impermanent piece of grass.

扎卡里·戴维斯：你不是永生的花朵，只是在这片暂时存在的草地上。

Elisa New: You are, you are not an eternal flower.

埃莉莎·纽：你不是永生的花朵。

How did Whitman change America？

惠特曼如何改变了美国？

Zachary Davis: Let's move now to impact. So I'd like you to tell me how did Whitman change American letters, American arts and American society. Obviously, he was not incredibly popular in his own time. His reputation has grown, but now he's a towering figure. So I'd like to understand a little bit how that happened.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们来谈谈惠特曼的影响吧。我想听您讲讲惠特曼如何改变了美国文学艺术乃至整个美国社会。显然惠特曼在当时并没有很大的名气，但他的声望却与日俱增，如今成了文学史上的一座丰碑。我想知道这种变化是如何产生的。

Elisa New: Whitman is immensely inspiring to other poets. Whitman authorizes poets to believe that, their howling, in the case of Allen Ginsberg or their kind of prophetic energies that converge on rage in the case of a poet like Martina Aspada, or even their physical candor in the case of a poet like Sharon Olds, Whitman says to artists, go big, go big. Believe that art is transformative. Believe in a cultural vanguard, even if I Whitman didn't quite get to be that Vanguard figure. Art is required for our striving toward a more perfect union. And so I think that there is an inheritance that is larger than influence. There's an inheritance that comes from Whitman that is about the crucial role that art plays in transforming how we see the world.

埃莉莎·纽：惠特曼激励了别的诗人，鼓励他们探索宏大的主题，比如艾伦·金斯伯格的《嚎叫》、马丁娜·阿帕达那种带着几分怒火的预言和莎伦·奥尔兹对肉体的描写。他让他们相信艺术就是要颠覆，让他们相信文化先锋的力量，尽管惠特曼自己并没打算当什么先锋。如果要力求达到完美融合，艺术便必不可少。我觉得与其说是惠特曼的影响，不如说是对他思想的传承，那就是相信艺术可以改变我们看待世界的方式，而且起着关键作用。

Zachary Davis: One poet who Whitman influenced was Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was a core member of the Beat generation of poets who were active in the mid-20th century. This was a conservative time in the United States that valued a traditional and narrow image of masculinity and the nuclear family. That certainly wasn’t the image projected by an outspokenly gay poet like Ginsberg.

扎卡里·戴维斯：其中一位受惠特曼影响的诗人就是艾伦·金斯伯格，他是“垮掉的一代”诗人中极为重要的一位。“垮掉的一代”活跃于20世纪中叶的美国文坛。当时美国社会还很保守，人们重视传统，推崇狭义的男子气概和家庭至上观念。金斯伯格这种出柜的同性恋诗人当然不符合这一形象。

Elisa New: Ginsberg was authorized by Whitman to say, no, our feelings, our feelings matter, our pain matters, and we are larger than our jobs. Right. We are also those whom we love. I think in the case of Ginsburg, in a way that said, let us not forget that part of ourselves that makes us most human.

埃莉莎·纽：金斯伯格受惠特曼鼓舞，觉得我们的情感、我们的痛苦很重要，我们自身远比我们的工作重要，我们为自己所爱。我觉得金斯伯格可能是在表达，不要忘记我们身上的人性。

Elisa New: So one kind of really important impact that Whitman had was imagining a large enough role for the poet that we'd be needed.

埃莉莎·纽：所以惠特曼真正重要的影响是，告诉这些后来启迪了民智的诗人，他们可以发挥多么至关重要的作用

Zachary Davis: It wasn't just amusement, it was it could change culture.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这可不仅仅用作消遣，还会改变文化。

Elisa New: It could change culture. And not just poetry. But art. Art itself.

埃莉莎·纽：这会改变文化，而且不仅限于诗歌，还改变了艺术本身。

Zachary Davis: In your mind. He inspires generations of artists to be ambitious like he was.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在您看来，他激励了了几代艺术家像他一样富有雄心壮志。

Elisa New: Absolutely. And to be prophets and to be critics, I think of the best of contemporary hip hop as absolutely in the Whitmanian tradition. Right. The largeness, the loudness, the readiness to mount a public stage, to think about art and politics as naturally going together rather than, you know, art belongs over here and politics over there.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。身为预言者和批评家，我觉得当代最优秀的那些嘻哈音乐无疑继承了惠特曼的传统。它们有宏大辽阔的主题，有振聋发聩的呼唤，关注着公共议题，认为艺术和政治本一家，而不是觉得艺术和政治是两张皮，风马牛不相及。

Zachary Davis: And I hadn't really thought of this before. He seems very future oriented, which is just a deeply American orientation, because we don't have a long history to get nostalgic about and built into the myth of the country is this ongoing effort at perfection will never reach it. But will always strive to live up to the ideals. And it seems like he does that really well. He celebrates what we have, he acknowledges where we come short, but he maintains a certain kind of optimism about the promise of America.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我之前还没想到过这点。惠特曼似乎积极拥抱未来，这很美国，因为美国没有可供怀念的悠久历史，人们一直想要构建本土神话传说，但估计永远没法实现，不过美国人会努力追求理想。在这点上，惠特曼似乎做得很好。他赞美我们拥有的一切，承认我们的不足，对美国的未来信心满满。

Elisa New: Absolutely. There's a very great poem called “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and in that poem, he directs our attention to, you know, the buildings that are on the shore and also to the sparkle of the water. And he not only describes them, but he describes us 100, 150, 200 years later seeing the very same thing. And he says, just as you leaned on the rail of the ferry, I lean. And there is this intimate embrace that he draws us into where we think about ourselves as part of the past and we think about the past as part of the future in a way that's very uplifting for us as Americans.

埃莉莎·纽：没错。惠特曼有首很棒的诗叫《过布鲁克林渡口》。在诗中，他向我们展示了岸上的建筑和河里的浪花。他不仅仅描绘了这些景象，还想象了一百年后、一百五十年后、两百年后再次看到它们。他写道：“正如你们曾经倚靠在渡口的栏杆上站立一样，我倚靠在那里站立。”这种对未来的热切拥抱，让我们将自己视为过往的一部分，也将过往视为未来的一部分。这对美国人来说非常振奋人心。

Zachary Davis: Whitman continued to expand and revise Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892. The book’s first edition contains 12 poems; the final edition contains 383. With this work, Whitman succeeded in creating a new type of American poetry—a free-flowing, rhythmic, and epic work that emphasized the body of the individual and the nation.

扎卡里·戴维斯：惠特曼一直继续扩充和修订《草叶集》，直到1892年去世。这本书的第一版收录了12首诗，最终版收录了383首。惠特曼借《草叶集》成功地创造了新型的美国诗歌，形式上自由流动，富有节奏感，内容上如史诗般宏大，关注人的躯体和民族国家。

Zachary Davis: Professor New still feels the legacy of Whitman’s American vision today.

扎卡里·戴维斯：时至今日，纽教授仍然可以感受到惠特曼对美国的展望带给我们的精神财富。

Elisa New: When I go to some sort of historic site. And I think, wow. Think about who was there then. And when you in fact use just what you perceive as a bridge that you can cross into another moment. That's both enlarging and humbling. It reminds you that the world only belongs to you for a time. You may not have figured it all out, but that you are part of this continuity.

埃莉莎·纽：当我去参观历史遗址时，我会想当时这里有哪些人。其实一旦你在过往与现在之间架起一座桥梁，你就会自然而然回顾过往。你既能感受到时空的宏大，又能感受到个体的微小。这提醒着你，世界不会永久为你所有，你或许无法穷尽对这个世界的探索，但你自己会随时间一起延续。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. It was mixed and mastered by Kevin Seaman. Our intern is Neil Luczai. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！