Sonnets 1: Little Desiring Machines

Sonnets - Part 1 - Little Desiring Machines

十四行诗 -- 第一部分 -- 小小的欲望机器

One of the things I most value about the sonnets, I think they gave us the vocabulary and even the syntax by which we still try to imagine what it means to desire another individual, what it means to experience the satiation of that desire, and how we cope with that phenomenon.

十四行诗中的词汇，甚至句法结构，都向我们展现了恋上某个人意味着什么，陷入这样的爱恋意味着什么，以及我们该如何应对这样的情形。但时至今日，我们依旧无法完全厘清这些词句的真正含义。而我认为，这恰恰就是十四行诗最大的魅力所在。

So I find these poems just incredible documents of a brilliant writer working in an incredibly tight form, but using it to describe desires that extend well beyond his time and well beyond his being. So that becomes part of the challenge too, is you get these 154 poems, each of which has a slightly different spin on what it means to desire one person, what it might mean to desire two people, what it might mean to be desired by two people, and what it means to write, knowing that time ravages everything, but also knowing that if you keep being read, something survives -- and the kind of remarkable faith that every time we read these poems is, again, justified, rewards us, and fulfills that prophetic goal of these poems.

在我看来，这一首首精妙绝伦的诗歌是一位才华横溢的诗人用极为严谨的结构书写的杰作。莎士比亚运用这种结构，描摹出了超越自身时代和自我的爱恋与欲望。欣赏这154首诗歌的部分挑战在于，这里的每一首诗歌对于爱恋一个人的意义，爱恋两个人的意义，以及同时被两个人爱恋的意义的态度都有些许不同。同时，对于创作写作，这些诗歌也秉持着细微不同的态度。诗人明白时间会湮灭一切，但同时他也清楚地知道，只要不断有人阅读自己的诗歌，那一定有一些东西可以跨越时光而留存下来。我们每一次阅读这些诗歌，这种非凡的信仰就会被证实，它回报我们，让我们看到了诗歌中的预言最终变成了现实。

I'm Mike Schoenfeldt. I'm the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

我是麦克·舍恩菲尔德，是密歇根大学-安娜堡分校的约翰·诺特英语文学教授。

 In this course, we’re discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets: a sequence of 154 poems written in a strict form conventionally associated with love. But what “love” means becomes quite unconventional in Shakespeare’s hands. In this first episode, we’ll discuss Shakespeare’s career as a poet, the form and the history of the sonnet, and the structure and themes of Shakespeare’s own sequence. In the next episode, we’ll delve more deeply into the themes, problems, and “characters” in his sonnets; and in the final episode we’ll analyze four sonnets that show the sequence’s range of emotion and tone, and share reading strategies to help you discover the poetic techniques and insights in every one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

在此次的系列节目中，我们将探讨莎士比亚的十四行组诗，这个系列由154首诗歌组成，诗歌结构遵循严谨的传统，以歌颂爱情为主。但在莎士比亚的笔下，“爱情”的内涵却 “颠覆了传统”。在第一集节目中，我们将回顾莎士比亚的诗歌创作生涯，探讨十四行诗的结构和发展历史，以及莎士比亚十四行组诗的独特结构和主题。下集节目，我们将深入挖掘诗歌的主旨大意、所探讨的问题以及诗中的“人物角色”。在第三集中，我们将分析四首代表性诗篇，带领听众朋友们领略十四行诗的情感和基调。同时，我们还会分享一些赏析诗歌的技巧，帮助大家发掘莎士比亚每一首十四行诗的创作技巧以及主旨大意。

Read the poems out loud. Shakespeare was known for his “fine filed phrase.” And these are some of the smoothest and most gorgeous -- in fact, it even can be hard to understand how complicated they are, because they're so smooth. His smoothness belies the complexity just brilliantly. It took me about 15 years to fully realize that their smoothness hides something.

读诗的时候要把诗歌大声朗读出来。莎士比亚可是因为他那“排列精巧的短语”而闻名于世的呢。那些可都是最流畅、最华丽恢宏诗句。实际上，正是由于这些诗句非常流畅连贯，以致于人们往往会忽略它们的复杂性。诗句的流畅性巧妙地掩盖了它们的复杂性。我也是花了15年的时间，才充分认识到这些隐藏在流畅性背后的内容。

A sonnet is a poem with 14 lines, with a particular rhythm and strict rhyme scheme.

十四行诗都由十四句诗行组成，韵律独特，押韵结构限制严格。

Petrarch was the one who popularized the idea of sonnets. He wrote 366 poems for a woman named Laura. He gave the Italian Renaissance and then belatedly early modern England a kind of vocabulary for articulating inner agony brilliantly. So the thing about Petrarch, the thing that becomes the sort of standard Petrarchan trope, is how much I'm suffering because of my unrequited desire for this distant lady whose love ennobles me.

十四行诗这个概念是由彼特拉克普及推广的。他为一位名叫劳拉的女子创作了366首诗歌，为意大利文艺复兴，以及之后的早期现代英国表达内心愁苦提供了丰富的词汇。彼特拉克运用那被称作为“彼特拉克式奇喻”表达了诗人对一位贵族女性的单恋，诗人吟咏说：她未曾回应我的爱，这令我愁苦万分，要知道只有她的爱才能让我变得高尚。

The sonnet is very slow to make it to England. It's really not until Sir Thomas Wyatt is an ambassador for Henry VIII that he goes to Italy, sees all the brilliant poetry going on there, and brings it back, kind of anglicizes the sonnet. In England in the 1590s, for all kinds of complicated reasons, including the fact that Elizabeth is on the throne and liked to be addressed in flirtatious, pseudo-erotic terminology, the sonnet takes off. Anyone who's worth his mettle are writing sonnet sequences. The first great English sonnet sequence is by Sir Phillip Sidney, his “Astrophil and Stella,” and then Spenser's Amoretti, “little love poems,” comes out after that. Just the whole 1590s are preoccupied almost by the form of the sonnet sequence. There's something about courtship of a distant female that played so brilliantly in the Elizabethan court. It was a way of showing your verbal dexterity and a kind of constancy and faithfulness.

十四行诗这形式花了很长的时间才慢慢传入英国。当初托马斯·怀亚特爵士作为亨利八世的使臣出访意大利，他在意大利看到了这些优美动人的诗篇，于是便把它们带回了英国，并在一定程度上将其英国化。16世纪90年代的英国，存在各种复杂因素，刺激着十四行诗快速发展。例如当时在位的君主伊丽莎白一世女王，就十分热衷于那些挑逗卖弄的语言。于是，努力想讨女王欢心的诗人便开始了十四行组诗的创作之路。英国最早的著名十四行组诗是菲利普·锡德尼爵士的《爱星者和星星》，以及之后斯宾塞的《小爱神》和《爱情小诗》等十四行诗也相继出现。整个16世界90年代，十四行组诗在诗歌创作上占据着主导地位。在伊丽莎白时代的宫廷中，这种展现对贵族女性的追求的诗歌形式被演绎得淋漓尽致。通过这种诗歌形式，诗人能非常好地表现出自己机敏的言语和忠贞坚持的态度。

Sonnets exalted the love object, praising the beloved in highly idealized terms. The English sonnet carried over this idealizing tendency. But it also slightly altered the Italian sonnet form.

十四行诗歌颂爱情这一主题，以高度理想化的语言颂扬被爱的对象。英国式的十四行诗延续了这一理想化的趋势。但同时，也对意大利式的十四行诗结构作出了些许的修改。

The Italian sonnet ABBA ABBA CDECDE is kind of the standard form. You can do it in Italian very easily. Shakespeare, I think very wisely, uses a form that the Earl of Surrey had, which was ABABCDCDEFEFGG and Surrey had also with Wyatt, perhaps even linking back to Chaucer, figured that the line length in English that is most gratifying to ears is the iambic pentameter -- ta TA ta TA, ta TA, ta TA, ta TA -- it just, we feel good when we hear something falling into that. And we enjoy also hearing variations on that, once that norm has been set up.

标准的意大利式十四行诗采用一二二一/一二二一/三四五三四五的押韵格式。这种押韵格式用意大利语很容易表现出来。莎士比亚十分机智地运用了萨里伯爵所使用的那种押韵格式：一二一二/三四三四/五六五六/七七。萨里、怀亚特，甚至更早之前的乔叟都发现，在英语中，如果诗行采取五步抑扬格“哒哒、哒哒、哒哒、哒哒、哒哒”的形式，也就是每两个词中，前一个词轻读，后一个词重读，这样是最为优美动听的。这样的轻重音结构会给予我们极佳的听觉享受。同时，一旦确定了标准结构，我们还希望听到一些变化。

You can hear this rhyme scheme and meter in Sonnet 17, which describes the beloved as being more beautiful than future readers of the poem will believe, and urges the beloved to pass on this beauty by having a child.

这样的韵律和格律，我们可以在十四行诗第17首中听到。这首诗歌刻画了一位被爱之人后世读者们无法想象的美貌，它还敦促这位被爱之人繁衍子嗣，将这种美一代代传递下去。

Who will believe my verse in time to come

有谁/能相信/我在将来/会有一番/歌唱,

If it were filled with your most high deserts?

歌声中/充盈着/你至高的美德/溢满诗章?

Though yet/ heaven knows/ it is /but as/ a tom

尽管到如今/天知道/这是/也只不过是/一座坟场,

Which hides/ your life/ and shows/ not half/ your parts.

这里埋葬着/你的性命/无法让/这样的你/德行张扬。

If I/ could write/ the beauty/ of /your eyes

如果我/能描摹/来自你/那美丽/且流盼的眼眶,

And/ in/ fresh numbers/ number/ all/ your graces,

把你的/千娇百媚/织入/我的/诗行,

The age/ to come/ would say/“This poet lies;

未来的/时代/会说：/“这位诗人/撒谎--

Such/ heavenly touches/ ne’er touched/ earthly faces.”

这样的/天工/之笔/从未/描过/尘世的/面庞。”

So /should /my papers/, yellowed with/ their age,

于是/我的诗稿/带着岁月的熏黄,

Be scorned/, like old men of/ less truth/ than tongue,

将受到嘲弄，像嘲弄饶舌的老头一样。

And/ your/ true rights/ be termed/ a poet’s rage

你应得的礼赞/被看作是/诗人的狂想,

And stretchèd meter/ of an / antique/ song.

或看作一首古曲的虚饰夸张:

But were/ some child/ of yours/ alive/ that time,

但/如果那时候/你有子孙健在,

You should/ live twice/—in it/ and in/ my rhyme.

你就双倍活于他身/和我的诗行。

All but two of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets follow this very regular pattern. This is striking, given that one of his favorite things to do as a playwright was to alter the genres and plots he worked with. We might wonder what drew him to keep returning to this form over and over again.

莎士比亚154首十四行诗中，只有两首没有严格遵守传统的常规结构。这一点很令人吃惊，要知道，莎士比亚在进行戏剧创作的时候，可是最喜欢更改戏剧流派和情节的。我们很好奇，究竟是什么让他一次又一次地在写诗的时候严格遵循这种固定结构呢？

I think he did find the challenge of 14 lines to be something that he just -- “How many times can I, in this tight little box, do something different and brilliant and edgy and meaningful?” They're little desiring machines, little thinking machines. And I would say just as a reader, even when I don't fully understand a poem, when I have heard that ABABCDCDEFEF GG, right, you've gotten a problem stated, and you've worked through it, and then you get a kind of closure or a turning. When that couplet comes on, it feels so satisfying, the kind of closure. So I think that form, let him do something that even the stage didn't let him do. Now it is true, until very late in his dramatic career, when his character field heightened emotion, they tend to turn to rhyme. For Shakespeare, that was a way of heightening the circumstance. So I think the poetry that he writes outside of the theater helps enhance the poetry he writes inside the theater. There is something for Shakespeare about the binding up of poetry that I think really attracted him to this form and let him sort of flex a certain kind of muscle that could only be used sporadically on the stage.

我想莎士比亚确实也感受到了用14行诗句进行诗歌创作的艰巨，他一定想过“在这个紧凑的狭小盒子里，我可以创造出多少与众不同、光彩夺目、扣人心弦又充满意义的内容呢？”这些是小小的欲望机器，这些小小的思考机器。作为读者，即便我不能完全领悟诗歌内涵，但只要我听到了一二一二/三四三四/五六五六/七七这样的韵律节奏，我就会有这样的脑图：好的，现在你陈述了一个问题，接着你把问题解决了，最后你要收尾或者转折了。当押韵的对句出现时，人们都听得很满足，知道故事接近尾声了。我认为，这种诗歌结构，让莎士比亚可以创造出在舞台上无法实现的内容。事实上，莎士比亚在戏剧生涯晚期，他所创作的戏剧角色在表现激昂澎湃的情绪时，往往会选择使用押韵结构。对于莎士比亚而言，押韵可以增强戏剧的紧张情绪。他在戏剧创作之外所创作的那些诗歌，促进了他戏剧中的诗歌的发展。诗歌结构的约束深深吸引了莎士比亚，这种约束让他展现出了只能在舞台上偶尔显露的实力。

Today, Shakespeare is most well known for his plays. But in his own lifetime, he was more famous for his poems, specifically his long narrative poems Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. Part of what made those poems so popular was their sensuality and representation of desire.

如今，莎士比亚最出名的是戏剧。但在莎士比亚在世时，其实是诗歌更为有名，尤其是《鲁克丽丝失贞记》和《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》这两首叙事长诗。它们之所以大受欢迎，部分原因在于诗歌中所展现的肉欲和爱欲。

When Shakespeare died, we often forget that he was probably best known for his Ovidian erotic poem, Venus and Adonis,an amazing poem, just suffused with eroticism. I mean, even the trees are dripping with sensuality, and the beasts, and it's the story of a lusty goddess, Venus, who wants to make love to an adolescent young man. It's an incredibly popular poem, twenty additions by the time of Shakespeare's death. We have stories, it may or may not be relevant, but Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates hiding the poems under their pillows for private pleasures. It's a wildly, luscious lubricious erotic, there's, you know, there’s beautiful male bodies, beautiful female bodies, something for everyone, and I think that was one reason for its popularity.

莎士比亚去世后，我们常常忽略他曾经最出名的作品也许是《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》，这是一首奥维德式的情色诗篇，很精彩，诗中充满了情色描写，你甚至都会觉得诗中的树木都充溢着肉欲的气息，还有那些野兽，故事的女主角，那健硕的维纳斯，都是散发着情欲。故事中，维纳斯渴望和一位青年男子发生关系。这首诗歌深受当时人们的喜爱，到在莎士比亚去世前，它已经有了20多种补充。关于这首诗，我们听过各种各样的故事，不过这些传言故事也不一定都有意义。例如有传言说牛津大学和剑桥大学的一些在校大学生们会把这首诗藏在枕头底下，偷偷地阅读，用作私下的取乐。诗中有很多情色描写，有对男性美好躯体的描写，有对女性美好躯体的刻画，所有人都从中能找到喜欢的内容，这也是这首诗深受喜爱的原因之一。

The first sonnet we heard, number 17, doesn’t specify the gender of its addressee. So when the speaker says, “If I could write the beauty of your eyes,” he could be addressing a woman or a man. The addressee is generally identified as a young man because the neighboring poems are addressed to a young man -- though Professor Schoenfeldt cautions that we shouldn’t read too much into the sequence of the poems because we don’t know if Shakespeare intended to publish the sonnets in the order they appeared. The speaker is generally referred to as a “he”; the speaker of a sonnet sequence was conventionally gendered male, and sonnets such as number 42 represent the speaker as a man caught in a “love triangle” between a male friend and a female lover. How far we can identify the male speaker with the male Shakespeare is a question that has long teased and intrigued readers, as we’ll discuss.

我们刚才听的十四行诗第17首并没有明确指出诗中被追求对象的究竟是男还是女。“如果我能描摹你流盼的美目”这句诗的对象既可能是女性，但也可能是男性。不过，人们一般都倾向于认为这首诗歌颂的对象是一名年轻男性，因为它前后的诗篇都是写给一位年轻男性的。不过，舍恩菲尔德教授也提醒我们不要过分解读莎士比亚十四行组诗的顺序，毕竟我们也无法确定诗篇最终的呈现顺序是否是莎士比亚刻意为之。我们一般会把诗歌的讲述者看作是一位男性。传统上十四行组诗的讲述者都是男性，第42首就讲述了一位男性讲述者与一位男性友人和一位女性情人之间的“三角恋”。这位男性讲述者究竟是不是莎士比亚本人？他们之间究竟有多少关联？这些问题一直以来都为读者们所津津乐道，稍后我们对此也会展开讨论。

Shakespeare’s sonnets were published in 1609, in a volume that also included a longer poem called “A Lover’s Complaint.” The volume has its own intriguing mystery in the dedication, which reads: “To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr W.H. All happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T.T.” T.T. refers to the printer, Thomas Thorpe. But who is Mr. W.H.? Critics have speculated about this for centuries.

1609年，莎士比亚的十四行组诗，与一首较长的诗歌《恋女的怨诉》集合成册出版。诗集的献词也有透着耐人寻味的神秘意味。献词这样写道：“献给下面刊行的十四行诗的促成者W.H.先生。祝他享有幸运，并希望我们的永生的诗人所预示的不朽得以实现。对他怀着好意，并断然予以出版的T.T.”T.T.指的是诗集出版商--托马斯·索普。但是，W.H.先生是谁呢？几个世纪以来，评论家们一直在猜测这个问题。

If one wanted to create a literary mystery deliberately, one could not do better than the production of this volume. Normally, the poet would, as Shakespeare had done for both Venus and Adonis and for Lucrece, one would dedicate it to some Lord, very overtly -- there it was the Earl of Southampton, a brilliant and beautiful young man who may get into the poems, we have no idea. But instead we hear about a mysterious Mr. W.H. If it were H.W., if it were a dyslexic type setter, it could be the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, starting with a W, we don't know for sure. It could be one of the dedicatees of the First Folio, William Herbert is one of the two dedicatees. He could be WH, but he's an Earl, his status is too high to be addressed as Mr. W.H.

在刻意营造文学谜题方面，莎士比亚的这本诗集是无法逾越的存在。一般来说，诗人在献词中会公开表示诗作要献给某位勋爵。莎士比亚在《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》和《鲁克丽丝失贞记》的献词中就是这样做的。人们怀疑莎士比亚的这本诗集是献给年轻貌美又聪颖智慧的南安普敦伯爵的。但真相究竟如何，没人能说得清。我们从来没有听说过神秘某位的W.H.先生。不过，如果是H.W.先生，如果作者是故意倒着写这名字的话，那这个人就很有可能是南安普敦伯爵--亨利·沃里斯利了，他的姓以字母W开头，不过我们没有十足的证据证明这一点。此外，这本诗集的献词对象还有可能是第一对开本中那两位献词对象中的一位--威廉·赫伯特伯爵。他名字的缩写正是W.H.，但他是一位伯爵，地位十分崇高，称他为W.H.先生并不合适。

I'm not sure that many people, even of Shakespeare's contemporaries, knew exactly who Mr. W.H. is. It's very possible that it was designed to generate the kind of prurient excitement. Who is this, who, you know, who could it be?

我想很多人，即便是莎士比亚同时代的很多人，也都不知道W.H.先生的真实身份。莎士比亚很有可能是为了激发读者的肉欲感官刺激，故意创了这样一个名字。他是谁？他可能是谁？

Other well-known sonneteers did sometimes include in their poems coded references to real-life people that some readers might have recognized. And so part of the excitement about identifying “Mr. W.H.” is the idea that he might be the real-life model for the beautiful young man in the poems who is so beloved of the speaker.

其他一些十四行诗作者有时确实也会在自己的诗作中加入一些暗语，用来暗指读者们可能可以认识的某位现实人物。因此，弄清“W.H.先生”的身份之所以令大家如此感兴趣，有部分原因就在于此，因为W.H.先生很可能就是诗中那位深受讲述者喜爱的美貌年轻男子的原型。

Oscar Wilde, in the late 19th century, had imagined that in fact, because of the jokes on the word “hues”, “a man in hue, all hues in his controlling,” that the young man was actually a young boy actor named Willy Hughes that he’s writing these poems to. I mean, it's total fantasy, but it's a brilliant fantasy. I can't imagine the industry of the 19th and 20th centuries of Shakespeare studies if we didn't have that mystery to invest our own fantasies into.

20世纪晚期，奥斯卡·王尔德针对“绝世的美色，驾御着一切美色”这句诗中有关“美色”的玩笑，推测说这位W.H.先生实际上是一位名叫威力·休斯的年轻男演员。因为，他的姓“休斯”和“美色”的英文单词发音一样。这个设想很大胆，不过也很绝妙。如果没有这些神秘的内容来丰富我们的假设和猜想，我无法想象19世纪和20世纪的莎士比亚研究会是怎样一番模样。

Even today, scholars research historical figures to propose new possibilities for the identity of “Mr. W.H.”. Such research taps into a larger fantasy about gaining access to Shakespeare’s inner life. The poet William Wordsworth famously said of the sonnet, “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” There’s a tempting thought that we can uncover Shakespeare’s own relationships, his thoughts, his longings, if we can just learn to “decode” the sonnets. But should we really read the poems as autobiography?

即便是现在，学者们也在探究各类历史人物，不断提出了对W.H.先生身份的新的假设。这类探究挖掘出了更大的想象空间，让我们有机会更进一步探究莎士比亚的内心世界。英国著名诗人威廉·华兹华斯对于十四行诗就有过这样著名的评价：“通过这把钥匙/莎士比亚打开了内心”。如果我们知道如何“解读”这些十四行诗，我们就可以窥探到莎士比亚内心的爱恋、思想和渴望。这种想法很吸引人。但我们在读这些诗歌的时候，真的可以把它们当作诗人的自传来读吗？

One of my teachers at Berkeley, Steven Booth, said that Shakespeare was certainly either heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, the poetry gives us no clues to which. I’m not sure I fully agree, but it’s a great, great line.

我在伯克利大学读书时，我的老师史蒂文·博斯说，从莎士比亚的诗歌中，我们看不出他究竟是异性恋、同性恋，还是双性恋。虽然我并不完全认同他的观点，但我觉得这其实也是一种很好的思路。

It's hard for me to imagine that one would invest that much intensity and energy into something that was just a mere exercise. So part of me thinks that the poems start somewhere with an authentic set of aspirations and desires and frustrations on the part of the poet. However, this is the great role player. This is the person who, as far as we know, didn't murder anyone, but could write the interior space of a murderer better than anyone. As far as we know, he wasn't a woman, but could write brilliant female characters. So it's somewhere between role-playing and kind of the way we role play when we try to become certain versions of selves and certain imagination. There are the two poems that pun aggressively on “Will,” and part of the joke is just knowing that the poet's first name is William. So there are ways in which these poems tease us with that.

因为，如果十四行诗只是莎士比亚的练习之作的话，他不大可能会投入如此强烈的情感和如此巨大的精力。所以我认为，这些诗歌应该是诗人在抒发真实的理想、爱欲和烦闷之情。不过我们也都知道，莎士比亚是一位善于创作人物角色的作家。据我们所知，他没有杀过人，但他对于谋杀犯内心的描写胜过其他所有人。同样，虽然他不是女性，但却写出了一个又一个生动形象的女性角色。这介于我们对某些特定自我和某些想象中形象的扮演之间。十四行诗中，有两首诗在“欲望”这个单词上做了很多一语双关的文章，我们都知道莎士比亚的名字是“威廉”，“欲望”这个词在这几首诗中的写法，与“威廉”的昵称“威尔”一模一样。诗歌用这样的方式挑逗戏弄着我们。

In As You Like It, we hear that the truest poetry is the most feigning. So the truest poetry is the most desiring, or the truest poetry is the most feigning, lying, faking, and I think somewhere in that gap is kind of the role that these poems must've played for Shakespeare.

在《皆大欢喜》中，“试金石”就曾总结说“最真实的诗是最虚妄的”。最真实的诗歌欲望最为强烈的，最真实的诗歌最虚妄、最虚伪、最具欺骗性。而在这段空缺中的某个地方，它们在一定程度上代表着莎士比亚本人。

We’ll never know exactly what connection these poems have to Shakespeare’s own personal experiences. But some people reacted negatively to the sonnets because they connected Shakespeare the man with the speaker in the poems -- a speaker who doesn’t follow the sonnet’s traditional model of romantic sexual love.

我们永远都不能无法理清这些诗歌和莎士比亚的个人经历究竟有什么样的关联。有些人对莎士比亚的十四行诗的评价很消极，他们认为莎士比亚就是诗歌中的那位讲述者，这位讲述者所讲述的完全不是传统十四行诗中的爱情和爱欲。

Both Sidney and Spenser, the two great sonneteers before him, have such clear heterosexual longings expressed in their collection. Spenser ends his sequence with a gorgeous marriage poem, the Epithalamion, and it's just a glorious celebration of a kind of heterosexual love.

莎士比亚之前，有两位著名十四行诗作者--锡德尼和斯宾塞，他们自己的作品中都明确表达了对异性的渴望。斯宾塞的组诗以一首歌颂婚姻的壮丽的诗篇《婚曲》作结尾，讴歌了异性之间的美好爱情。

For Shakespeare, the standard way of apprehending the order of the sonnets is to suggest that the first 126 poems are what we call the “young man sonnets.” And they're all about a relationship with a beautiful young man that he's encouraging to reproduce himself so that his image won't be lost. But they very quickly become concerned, on the one hand, with writing, lines, the question of a lineage and the lines of poetry get kind of fused and they become alternate and almost competing modes of achieving immortality.

在理解莎士比亚的十四行诗时，在诗篇顺序方面，标准的做法是将前126首归作“献给一位年轻男子的诗”。这126首诗讲述的都是讲述者与一位年轻貌美男子之间的友谊，同时他还鼓励这位男子繁衍后代，以延续他的美貌。但另一方面，这些诗篇很快又开始关注写作、诗行和血统问题。这些诗行在一定程度上交汇融合，在争取不朽和永生上，它们不断交替，甚至在一定程度上互相竞争。

At sonnet 127, we get a turn and it is almost as if Shakespeare stages it as a change. He says, “In the old age, black was not counted fair, / But now is black beauty’s successive heir.” So the sonnets 127 through 152 are imagined to be what we call, in a term I find hard to substitute for, but also filled with problems, the “dark lady poems,” not a phrase Shakespeare ever used himself. And then the last two poems are little Cupid poems. So that’s kind of how the standard sequence is broken up. And you can see it's kind of out of proportion. I mean, most of the poems are written probably to a beautiful young man -- not the standard erotic narrative.

然而到了第127首诗时，我们发现诗歌改变了主题改变，莎士比亚的创作舞台似乎变得不一样了。第127首开篇这样写道：“在远古的时代/黑并不算秀俊，......但如今黑既成为美的继承人”。所以，我们将诗第127首至152首称作是“黑女士诗篇”，不过这个表述莎士比亚本人从未使用过，而且我也觉得这个表达本身充满了问题，但我却找不到更好的词语来替代。组诗中最后两首是小爱神丘比特诗篇。我们可以看出标准的十四行组诗被打碎成了三个部分。而且，每个部分的诗篇不成比例。大部分诗篇是献给那位美貌的年轻男子的，而没有遵循传统的对男女情欲的描写。

That departure from convention -- replacing the sonnet’s usual female love object with a beautiful young man -- was likely part of the reason that Shakespeare’s sonnets didn’t have the same popularity as his plays for several centuries after their publication.

莎士比亚偏离传统规范，用一位年轻貌美的男子替换了传统十四行诗中常见的女性对象。这在一定程度上使得十四行诗在出版后的数百年中，一直不如莎剧那么受欢迎。

The poems are received relatively poorly for the longest time. And it's really not until late 19th century, early 20th century, when people start reading these poems again, anew, and seeing in them some of the same kinds of verbal accomplishment in a very different key.

在相当长的一段时间里，这些诗歌的接受度都相对较低。差不多要到19世纪末和20世纪初，人们再次重新阅读这些诗歌时，大家才对逐渐它们重视起来，并且从一个很不一样的角度，发现这些诗歌的语言成就。

Later in the 17th century and in the 18th century, there was a lot of nervousness about these poems. People really found the male-male intimacy to be chafing against the ideals of -- I mean, it takes a long time for Shakespeare to take on the critical role in English culture that he does. And just as he's becoming England's great national poet in the late 18th century, kind of combined with the success of English colonial ventures around the globe, the male-male poems make people feel very uneasy. This is not a set of desires that have yet found their cultural place. One thing that's lovely, though, is with our belated but meaningful attention to same-sex love in earlier cultures, the sonnets are wildly celebrated today in criticism.

在17世纪和18世纪，人们对于这些诗歌有很多担忧。因为当时的人们认为，男性之间的亲密关系会危机人们所追求的那些完美理想，所以莎士比亚被人们接受，成为英国文化中的一个关键人物花了很长的时间。在18世纪末，在莎士比亚被誉为是英国了不起的国家诗人时，结合当时英国在全球范围的殖民扩张，这些歌颂男性之间情谊的诗歌让当时的人们极度不安。这类的爱欲在当时的文化中还没有立足之处。不过令人欣慰的是，虽然我们对早期文化中同性之爱的关注有些迟到，但是这些关注却是意义重大，所以到了今天，十四行诗已经收获了评论家们广泛的好评与称颂。

In our next episode, we’ll discuss the relationship between the speaker and the beautiful young man to whom so many of the sonnets are addressed, and we’ll explore how this relationship might actually have reflected parts of Shakespeare’s culture. We’ll also discuss the cultural weight behind the later sonnets’ addressing of a woman as “dark” and “black”, and the sense of self-division the speaker experiences in his desire for both of these figures.

下集节目，我们将探讨诗歌讲述者与这位美貌男青年，这位莎士比亚大部分十四行诗歌颂对象之间的关系。同时，我们还将探讨他们之间的情谊反映了哪些莎士比亚时期的现实文化。此外，我们也会探讨后面那些献给“黑女士”的十四行诗背后所蕴藏的文化影响力，以及诗歌讲述者在抒发对男青年和黑女士爱欲时的那种自我分裂。