Bob Dylan

Opinion

Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Nobel’s Door

Elliot Landy/Redferns — Getty Images

Bob Dylan at a photo session for the "Nashville Skyline" album cover, at Woodstock, N.Y., in 1968.

By BILL WYMAN

Published: September 28, 2013

THIS year’s Nobel Prize in Literature should be announced in early October, and over on the tony British betting site Ladbrokes, Haruki Murakami of Japan, riding the waves of acclaim for his fantastical novel “1Q84,” is the favorite. Other well-known names — Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates — are bandied about, but Mr. Murakami is unique: among perennial Nobel front-runners, it would be difficult to find a writer more influenced by the popular music and culture born of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

The Quotable Bob Dylan

Using excerpts from Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Bill Wyman explains why the musician deserves literary praise.

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (294) »

That fact prompts a pressing question: why isn’t the most vital of the artistic catalysts of those upheavals himself a front-runner for the prize? I’m referring of course to Bob Dylan, a fierce and uncompromising poet whose writing, 50 years on, still crackles with relevance. Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience. His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.

I’m not the first to suggest it, but it’s time to take the idea seriously. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously, and Mr. Dylan, now in his 70s, has battled heart disease. Alfred Nobel’s will decreed that the prize should go to a writer with “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Why hasn’t Bob Dylan received one?

Given his medium (songwriting) and profession (rock star), Mr. Dylan may have some strikes against him:

Bob Dylan is not in the mold of the sober creator of “great literature.” He most certainly is not — but consider: in 1997, the literature prize went to Dario Fo, the incorrigible and profane Italian playwright, at whose selection the Roman Catholic Church in particular was amusingly aghast. The vast majority of literature prize recipients are world titans (Mario Vargas Llosa, Günter Grass) or less-well-known but established candidates (Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, the late Seamus Heaney of Ireland), with a relatively obscure recipient every so often (like Elfriede Jelinek of Austria nine years ago), just to keep us all on our toes. It has been too long since the Swedish Academy has honored a mind like Mr. Fo’s.

Mr. Dylan just writes pop lyrics. Actually, Mr. Dylan writes, full stop. Why discount what has been written because of where it ends up? Those who would use the word “pop” as a cudgel or tool of exclusion do so at their peril. Dickens and Twain, Hugo and Shakespeare and Euripides — all soaked up the acclaim of their day. Alfred Hitchcock, whose work at its height met critical condescension, would have some useful thoughts on the subject as well.

Still — his doggerel verses are not literature. In the 1950s in America, rock was a mongrel music, created out of the cultures of the downtrodden — people who built their lives around the blues, folk, gospel or country. Electric guitars got involved, and then some leers and hip thrusts. A new postwar generation of youth took notice, and a cultural revolution was born.

Mr. Dylan added literature. He was first, of course, a singer of folky loquacity, and a serious student of the music’s antediluvian influences: what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” To this he wedded the yawp of the Beats and the austere intellectualism of the Symbolists. Drugs didn’t hurt, and passing but pungent imagery shows that Mr. Dylan had absorbed the Bible as well.

That disruptive mélange gave us the imagery and power of songs like “Chimes of Freedom” and “Desolation Row,” of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Visions of Johanna,” among scores of others. He has displayed a mastery of everything from the political jeremiad (“It’s Alright, Ma [I’m Only Bleeding])” to the romantic epic (“Tangled Up in Blue”), and lines like “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” show his way with the lancing aperçu. Mr. Dylan is neither a saint nor a moralist. Epic anger and personal petulance erupt out of his lyrics. But so do tender mercies, extravagant and deep love, self-castigation and what turns out to have been no little wisdom.

Pop lyrics are corrupted by the writer’s desire for popular acclaim. In fact, the record is clear that — whatever ambition lay in his breast — his is a personality, and his art is of a nature, that makes it difficult to chase popular approval or sanction. Mr. Dylan is no Solzhenitsyn, but he is a figure who genuinely challenges the established order.

He was surely the first pop artist to tell his audience things it didn’t want to hear. In 1963, from the dais at a civil rights dinner, he looked with some contempt at the well-dressed crowd and said, “My friends don’t wear suits.” The drama surrounding his lurch into electric music is perhaps overstated; “Like a Rolling Stone” was a huge hit. What’s really radical about the song is its derisive look at his privileged listeners. Mr. Dylan reveled in the comeuppance he saw on the horizon: “You said you’d never compromise” and now “... you stare into the vacuum of his eyes / And ask him do you want to make a deal?”

MR. DYLAN spent the rest of his career rejecting his audience’s expectations. He dropped out of sight at the height of his fame; the cover story was a motorcycle accident, but as his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One,” makes clear, he really just wanted to raise his kids in peace, away from the hippies who harried his family. After going electric, he went country. In the late 1970s, as the New Wave era crested, the singer, raised a Jew, declared himself a Christian — and not the warm and fuzzy sort, either. What sort of pop artist works so diligently to systematically undermine his own popularity?

By his own account, Mr. Dylan spent the 1980s in a bit of a fog, but revivified himself in the last years of that decade and went back on the road. Now 25 years into his so-called “Never Ending Tour,” Mr. Dylan continues to perform in relatively modest venues with an unprepossessing backing combo, growling out chestnuts from his vast catalog and new songs as well. His recent albums “Time Out of Mind” (1997), “Love and Theft” (2001) and “Modern Times” (2006) all won best album in the annual poll at “The Village Voice” of the nation’s rock critics — a remarkable achievement for a 1960s holdover in an era of hip-hop and ever-more-effete rock.

If the academy doesn’t recognize Bob Dylan — a bard who embodied the most significant cultural upheaval of the second half of the last century — it will squander its best chance to honor a pop poet. What other songwriter would remotely qualify? Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen? Perhaps. Randy Newman? Chuck D? (In truth, the only other pop artist with work as timeless as Mr. Dylan’s is Chuck Berry — but that’s an argument for another day.) With his superstar peers either silent or content to collect the big bucks playing ingratiating stadium shows, this artist, iconoclastic and still vital, demands that we take the product of his muse on his own terms, and refuses to go so gently.

Bill Wyman is a freelance writer on the arts and former arts editor at NPR and Salon.

Opinion

The Quotable Bob Dylan

By BILL WYMAN

Published: September 28, 2013

Bob Dylan, a fierce and uncompromising poet whose writing, for 50 years and counting, still crackles with relevance, should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Following these excerpts from songs written by Bob Dylan, I offer my views on why the lyrics deserve literary praise.

Related in Opinion

• Opinion: Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Nobel’s Door (September 29, 2013)

Song: “Chimes of Freedom”

Album: Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964

Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed

An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting

Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones

Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail

For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale

An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

(Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music)

This work finds in nature’s most powerful forces a voice for the world’s luckless and persecuted. The words are at once as ringing as those of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty and as elegant and compressed as Biblical verses. Note the fourth line with just a few words, Mr. Dylan manages effortlessly to limn the two great political tragedies of our time — those of forced displacement and the totalitarian prison.

Song: “Tangled Up In Blue”

Album: Blood on the Tracks, 1974

Associated Press

Bob Dylan in 1965.

Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burnin’ coal

Pourin’ off of every page

Like it was written in my soul

(Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music)

The centerpiece of this sprawling love song is this intimate meeting between two souls who meet, separate, meet and separate again. Their connection over these mysterious verses is palpable; Mr. Dylan’s closing vow to find her again is one of the most joyous and emotional moments in his oeuvre.

Song: “Desolation Row”

Album: Highway 61 Revisited, 1965

Now you would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row

(Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music)

This song is a not-so-funhouse ride through the dark caravan of rock-star fame — “desolation row,” in Mr. Dylan’s words. Literary references, from “Hamlet” to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” abound. Note how this passage, buried deep in the song, could be used today to describe Mr. Dylan.

Song: “Visions of Johanna”

Album: Blonde On Blonde, 1966

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

(Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music)

This set of fever-dream verses, a surrealistic tour de force, contain some of Mr. Dylan’s most evocative images. The cinematic settings, sex, and sensory overload have kept the song one of the singer’s densest and most mysterious works—but we never find out who Johanna or Louise is.

Song: “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

Album: Bringing It All Back Home, 1965

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Make everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It’s easy to see without looking too far

That not much is really sacred

(Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music)

The title of this unbridled rant suggests that it comes from the mouth of a fallen soldier bitter at his country’s futile efforts in the Vietnam War. Mr. Dylan targets just about everything in American life in the song, from politics to consumerism to the media.

Bill Wyman is a freelance writer on the arts and former arts editor at NPR and Salon.

"Musée des Beaux Arts" (W. H. Auden 1938)文化背景說明 (Wikipedia)

也許七八年前我的朋友問我"Wikipedia v 大英百科"
我說如果有些很專門的項目 而大英也有的話.   譬如說某大文學家生平.  大英可能較為深入
不過Wikipedia 的廣度和逐漸深入以及多語言方式  都是大英無法比的.....

可舉一例: "Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is a poem written by W.H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium with Christopher Isherwood.<sup>[1]

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_des_Beaux_Arts_%28poem%29
它幫助讀者了解許多文化背景之說明</sup>

The Holy Longing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

姑且將此首英譯詩當成"英國文學"......
它與梁永安先生在老年之書頁323-24 的翻譯
在分段上和意思上有所不同...... (梁先生的是第2首)

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

• The Holy Longing
  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Translated from the German by Robert Bly
• Poetry at Amazon.com

****http://www.wind-of-change.co.uk/GoethetheHolyLonging.htm

The Holy Longing

by Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,

Because the massman will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

What longs to be burned to death.

Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,

In the calm water of love nights,

A strange feeling comes over you

When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught

In the obsession with darkness,

And a desire for higher lovemaking

Sweeps you forward.

Distance does not make you falter

Now, arriving in magic, flying

And finally insane for the light,

You are the butterfly, and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced this:

To die, and so to grow,

You are only a troubled guest

On the dark earth.

note. Goethe does not mince his words in the last verse

The Moth

The Whole point of Light

The point along the way

That guides the moth unto it's death --

And life in Thee.

It's wings are spread, it flutters by

In confusion sweet

It turns away in darkest fear

And turns again in fright.

And so without choice it seems

It is drawn unto My Light

Ever closer, ever still, the centre of the flame.

Then all at once a sizzle and a snap

And low --

The moth is but part of the flame

That liveth in it's heart.

Now it flies in silent (k)night

But --still --within this world!

Human Beings

To Be or not to Be?

Therein the answer lies -----

The question is -- Which? --

You choose!

But in choosing, --- think of Being ---

Not just human --- being!

It is useful to ponder the question-- which? -- which gives forth to the Soul the answer presented in the first line.

In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden

Auden 這首名詩 In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden 其實也不難懂. 請特別注意它的標點符號 尤其冒號和分號. 這些是原作者的思想

它是有漢譯的. 不過如果這都讀不懂. 漢文可能更不容易懂.....
concupiscence, moiety,

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

  by W. H. Auden

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
     to the critique of a whole epoch
   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
     who knew it was never enough but
   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
     so many plausible young futures
   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
     of problems like relatives gathered
   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
     and shades that still waited to enter
   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
     to go back to the earth in London,
   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
     who think they can be cured by killing
   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
     all he did was to remember
   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
     like a poetry lesson till sooner
   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
     how rich life had been and how silly,
   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
     a set mask of rectitude or an 
   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
     the fall of princes, the collapse of
   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
     of State be broken and prevented
   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
     to the stinking fosse where the injured
   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
     clung to his utterance and features,
   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
     to us he is no more a person
   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
     the proud can still be proud but find it
   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
     and extends, till the tired in even
   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
     some hearth where freedom is excluded,
   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 
     so many long-forgotten objects
   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
     little noises we dared not laugh at,
   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
     the unequal moieties fractured
   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 
the smaller possesses but can only use
     for arid disputes, would give back to
   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 
   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543#sthash.DqljstP9.dpuf

In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

  by W. H. Auden

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
     to the critique of a whole epoch
   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
     who knew it was never enough but
   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
     so many plausible young futures
   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
     of problems like relatives gathered
   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
     and shades that still waited to enter
   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
     to go back to the earth in London,
   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
     who think they can be cured by killing
   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
     all he did was to remember
   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
     like a poetry lesson till sooner
   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
     how rich life had been and how silly,
   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
     a set mask of rectitude or an 
   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
     the fall of princes, the collapse of
   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
     of State be broken and prevented
   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
     to the stinking fosse where the injured
   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
     clung to his utterance and features,
   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
     to us he is no more a person
   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
     the proud can still be proud but find it
   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
     and extends, till the tired in even
   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
     some hearth where freedom is excluded,
   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 
     so many long-forgotten objects
   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
     little noises we dared not laugh at,
   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
     the unequal moieties fractured
   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 
the smaller possesses but can only use
     for arid disputes, would give back to
   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 
   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543#sthash.LEqgHqO0.dpuf

 
In Memory of Sigmund Freud- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543‎In Memory of Sigmund Freud. by W. H. Auden.


In Memory of Sigmund Freud - Modernism Lab Essays
modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/.../In_Memory_of_Sigmund_Freud‎W.H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939) reflects on the similarities between psychoanalysis and the work of the poet and attempts to adapt the ...

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

by Sam Alexander
W.H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939) reflects on the similarities between psychoanalysis and the work of the poet and attempts to adapt the traditional elegy to a world in which violent and impersonal death on a massive scale had become an inescapable reality. Freud died, in fact, in the same month in which Hitler invaded Poland, and the poem that Auden wrote in response to this atrocity already suggests the psychoanalytic inheritance of a poet who differed from his modernist forebears in his readiness to use Freud’s ideas without irony. In the famous final stanza of "September 1, 1939," the poet claims that we are all composed “Of Eros and of dust.”^[1]

W.H. Auden in 1939. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1113173.

The Freud elegy begins, “When there are so many we shall have to mourn…,” and the first four stanzas confront the difficulty of writing an elegy in an age of mass death.^[2] As he does in his elegy to William Butler Yeats (“You were silly like us”), Auden makes the very commonness of Freud’s life and death into a reason to praise him. Like those others who “were doing us some good,” Freud’s desire was only to do more work, but this was not to be: “his wish was denied him,” as Auden puts it, using wordplay to pit Freud’s earliest explanation of dreams as wish-fulfillments against the reality of death that he confronted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Like his fellow doers of good, Freud “closed his eyes / upon that last picture, common to us all, / of problems like relatives gathered” (13-15). Like the word "wish" in the preceding lines, this analogy has deeper resonance given the subject of the elegy. Most of the problems that Freud tried to solve involved relatives and their role in the psychic lives of his patients: the vehicle here hints at the tenor.


In these lines as elsewhere in the poem, a deliberately simple style—the conversational syllabic meter inspired by the experiments of Marianne Moore^[3] —belies nuances that demand interpretation, much as the manifest content of a dream, for Freud, both hints at and disguises its latent meaning. And Auden may well have intended this comparison or something like it. Reading carefully through The Interpretation of Dreams, as Auden clearly has, one cannot help being struck with Freud’s admiration for the poetic artifice of the dream-work: its ability to condense meaning, to pun, to yoke ideas with the finesse of a metaphysical poet. As Auden points out near the end of the Freud elegy, the aim of analysis is to transfer this poetic power, which the superego (stemming from childhood, the “smaller” part of life) uses only for evasive purposes of disguise and self-punishment, to the “larger” adult ego:

… He would unite
the unequal moieties…
would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother’s richness and feeling… (94-97)

The analogy between poetry and psychoanalysis as liberators of “wit” is the central theme of the poem, and it emerges most explicitly when Auden compares the analytical method of telling “the unhappy Present to recite the Past” to a “poetry lesson” (34-35). Also telling in this regard are the metaphors Auden uses to describe the remnants of the past that form the content of this recitation—the “problems” which we have already seen compared to relatives, and which are subsequently called “the fauna of the night," and then “shades that … waited to enter / the bright circle of his recognition” (18, 19-20). The image of fauna entering a "circle of recognition" recalls Yeats’s circus animals. More explicitly, in calling these animals "shades," Auden represents the heroic recovery of the past with a motif dear to the modernists, especially Ezra Pound: the nekyia, or descent to the underworld, that Pound links in the first Canto to his own descent into literary tradition. There is a specific echo of Canto I (in which the revived Tiresias’s first words are “Stand from the fosse”)^[4] in a stanza that ostensibly links Freud to Dante:

… he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
to the stinking fosse where the injured
lead the ugly life of the rejected …

This conception of the poet’s task as one of recovering the past through a descent to a nocturnal underworld also echoes the end of Auden’s Yeats elegy, in which he commands (in a gentle parody of “Under Ben Bulben”), “Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night"-- and again (more faintly) Yeats's own "Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in which the move from abstract forms to real suffering is also represented as a descent: “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” And the comparison of repressed wishes to the shades of the underworld is particularly appropriate in an elegy on Freud, who used the very same analogy in The Interpretation of Dreams,  writing that repressed wishes "are not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades in the Odyssey, which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had tasted blood."^[5]

Sigmund Freud and dog in his study, by Hilda Doolittle. Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Bibliographic Record Number: 39002035067041.

Auden views Freud both as a liberator of unconscious memories and as politically liberating, but he makes clear that the social work of psychoanalysis, like poetry, must proceed at the level of the individual. It is interesting that like D.H. Lawrence, who also engaged directly with Freud, Auden was deeply troubled by the loss of individual identity and the ascendancy of large-scale epistemologies like statistics (as a poem like “The Unknown Citizen” makes clear). But unlike Lawrence, who faulted psychoanalysis for obscuring the irreducible difference of each individual in a general theory of psychic development (see Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious), Auden saw Freud as standing with the poets against  such homogenizing forms of knowledge. If Freud had succeeded, he writes, “the Generalised Life / would become impossible” (49-50). The social power of psychoanalysis for Auden seems paradoxically to lie in its self-restriction to the world of the individual (this is a particular version of Freud, a point to which I will return below). He makes this point in a 1934 essay entitled “Psychology and Art Today”: 

The task of psychology, or art for that matter, is not to tell people how to behave, but by drawing their attention to what the impersonal unconscious is trying to tell them, and by increasing their knowledge of good and evil, to render them better able to choose, to become increasingly morally responsible for their destiny. For this reason psychology is opposed to all generalizations. You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his immediate and particular needs may draw his own conclusions.^[6]

The case can certainly be made that Freud’s oeuvre should be read as a series of parables, and Auden seems to point to one, the game of fort-da described in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when he refers in the Freud elegy to “games we had thought we must drop as we grew up, / little noises we dared not laugh at…” (85-86). In this poem and in the essay written three years earlier, Auden advances a theory of Freud’s work as an instructive mythology. He sets aside any notion of a general psychology that could explain human history, or of a normative developmental narrative that should be prescribed for the child to achieve a “correct” sexual organization.


There is, of course, a good deal of "generalization" in Freud, and there is more than a little prescriptivism. Auden, who  had complained in a 1929 journal entry that “[t]he trouble with Freud is that he accepts conventional morality as if it were the only one,"^[7] was clearly aware of this side of Freud's work; however, part of what makes Auden's mode of elegy distinctive is the honesty with which he acknowledges and forgives the faults of his subject. Thus he addresses Yeats with what might seem in isolation to be a back-handed compliment: “…your gift survived it all: / The parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself."^[8] The lines in which Auden recognizes and excuses Freud’s faults have become famous in their own right:

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
clung to his utterance and features,
it was a protective coloration

for one who’d lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives … (61-69).

These lines reflect not only Auden’s generosity, but also the tempered and realistic attitude about the political potential of intellectual discourse that he would later say had been missing in “September 1, 1939” (which he called “incurably dishonest”).^[9] Freud’s work—like poetry in the Yeats elegy—both does and does not “make things happen.” It can create a"climate" conducive to change, but not change itself, and despite this indirect social impact, it remains rigorously individual in its orientation. One has the sense that the "absurd" Freud for Auden is the Freud of cultural psychology, the Freud of the highly speculative works culminating in Moses and Monotheism.


The tension between the individual and the social marks the final stanza of the poem, which deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved;
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. (110-114)

One rational voice is dumb: here we are in the world of the individual, the single reasonable man who was able to liberate the repressed "impulses" of each patient through persistent recitation and analysis of the past. In allowing Eros a role in mourning Freud, however, I think Auden nods to Freud's importance for understanding human civilization as a whole. Eros is responsible for the most basic kind of community, Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents, because it instigates the formation of families. Later, however, civilization works to censor the sexual expression of Eros in order to submit it to the process of sublimation by which it comes to be used for higher ends (the building of cities): “[L]ove comes into opposition to the interests of civilization [and] civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions."^[10]


While Freud distinguishes two historically separated relationships between civilization and love-- alliance and antagonism-- Auden splits love itself in two. On the one hand, there is Eros, the sublimated love responsible for the great cultural achievements (the building of cities). While the intuitive antithesis to Eros would be Thanatos, the death instinct that Freud claims startin in 1920 is the second great drive, Auden uses the end of his poem to draw a different distinction. To Eros he opposes what I take to be its antecedent: "anarchic Aphrodite," the polymorphously perverse libido that the earlier Freud of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1907) had treated as basic rather than aberrant (had treated, in fact, as the source of all mature love) in a destabilization of normative sexuality that would have appealed to Auden. These final lines, then, do more than make a useful distinction in terminology. They extract from Freud's work a kind of psychology that can accommodate both human civilization—significantly, one based on Eros rather than on aggression, a product of the death drive—and the anarchic complexity of individual sexuality.

1. ↑ This theory of two primary instincts, love and death, which both struggle with and reinforce one another, is the most important of Freud’s theories for Auden. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had concluded that because it seeks quiescence, the dissipation of libidinal tension, the pleasure principle that dominates in sexual life ultimately serves the death drive. The similarity and proximity of love and death, one of the great topoi of Western literature, surfaces throughout Auden’s work. Even in the early ballad “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the clocks warn an infatuated lover, “Time watches from the shadow / And coughs when you would kiss” (27-28). Similar in this regard is Auden’s “Lullaby” (1937) which begins jarringly “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm…” Faithlessness serves metonymically here to remind us of the mortality that has resulted from original sin.
2. ↑ All references to "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" are to W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage, 1991), pp. 273-276.
3. ↑ For a brief discussion of meter in this poem in relation to Moore, see John Hollander, The Work of Poetry (Columbia UP, 1997), p. 255.
4. ↑ The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), p. 4, l. 62.
5. ↑ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 282.
6. ↑ In The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, vol 1.: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton UP, 1988), p. 103.
7. ↑ Quoted in John Fuller, W.H. Auden, A Commentary (Princeton UP, 1998), p. 294.
8. ↑ See stanza 2 of the Yeats elegy in the Collected Poems.
9. ↑ Fuller, p. 292.
10. ↑ Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Norton, 1960), p. 58. Freud’s attitude to these restrictions is complex. He writes at one point that communities are “perfectly justified” in circumscribing the sexual life of children, since it is this external repression that (in the latency period) helps the process of sublimation to which he attributes human civilization. At the same time, however, he warns against “going to the length of actually disavowing” sexuality, and he makes clear, in a striking passage that would have appealed to Auden, the social dangers of overly strict sexual mores: “The requirement …. That there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice.” (60)

Vladimir Nabokov in Cambridge History of American Literature Vol. 7

如果你大約看得懂此影片 又稍微懂得Nabokov作品

BBC HD 2010 57:44 
Vladimir Nabokov: Life and Lolita - BBC Documentary 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnvvBL6set4

那麼剑桥美国文学史（第七卷）：散文作品1940-1990年Vladimir Nabokov: Life ...介紹的Nabokov 就很有價值的.

剑桥美国文学史（第七卷）：散文作品1940-1990年

Bat by D. H. Lawrence

Bat

By D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

 

At evening, sitting on this terrace,

When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara

Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing

Brown hills surrounding ...

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio

A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,

Against the current of obscure Arno ...

Look up, and you see things flying

Between the day and the night;

Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches

Where light pushes through;

A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.

A dip to the water.

And you think:

"The swallows are flying so late!"

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping

Yet missing the pure loop ...

A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight

And serrated wings against the sky,

Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,

And falling back.

Never swallows!

Bats!

The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats

By the Ponte Vecchio ...

Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp

As the bats swoop overhead!

Flying madly.

Pipistrello!

Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.

Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;

And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags

And grinning in their sleep.

Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

 一些史地的注解.

 http://hcplace.blogspot.tw/2008/12/florence.html

pipistrello Italian-English

…bat…

Christopher Isherwood 1904-86

Christopher Isherwood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood‎

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was a British novelist. Contents. 1 Early life and work; 2 Life in the United States ...

Don Bachardy Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American ...	Goodbye to Berlin Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 short novel by Christopher Isherwood ...
More results from wikipedia.org »

這篇在 Christopher Isherwood 作品中沒有特別地位. 不過因為有卞先生的翻譯讀過罷了.
他和W. H. Auden 合著的訪戰爭中的中國一書據說很好. 1970年代還有修改版......




紫羅蘭姑娘  Prater Violet   衣修午德  C. Isherwood

這翻譯本從1980的工人出版社
到2000的 卞之琳譯文集上冊

現在很容易找到
衣修午德親口告訴卞之琳 書中角色導演之本尊為 Berthold Viertel
衣修午德 推薦的歸 可能是 Back Wikipedia article "Henry Green"

主要作者	Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-
書名/作者	Prater violet : a novel / by Christopher Isherwood
出版項	Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2001
版本項	1st University of Minnesota Press ed

	Originally published: New York : Random House, c1945
	國科會補助人文及社會科學研究圖書計畫 (2768332)

紫羅蘭姑娘

• 作者：（英）克里斯托弗‧衣修午德 著
• 出版社：安徽教育出版社
• 出版日期：2007年04月01日

《紫羅蘭姑娘》是英國著名作家克里斯托弗 衣修午德的作品，是西歐現代主義文學的名家佳作，卞之琳先生將之翻譯，為中國讀者提供認識西歐文學的資料。《紫 羅蘭姑娘》這一個書名多少是一種假裝，正如紫羅蘭成了賣花女的名字。名為一事，故事為另一事。一個表演風流的維也納的小歌劇，由一位奧國藝術家導演，在英 國拍影片，就在奧國納粹發難登台的那些最風流的日子。片子行將采用原戲的名稱——《紫羅蘭姑娘》。

卞之琳 （1910-2000.12.4）中國著名詩人、翻譯家、文學研究家。曾用筆名季陵,祖籍江蘇溧水，1910年生于江蘇海門。1933年畢業于北平 北京大學英文系，曾任北京大學西語系教授(1949-1952)。卞之琳一生翻譯了大量世界名著，譯著包括《莎士比亞悲劇四種》、《窄門》、《浪子回家 集》、《紫羅蘭姑娘》、《英國詩選》等。此外，他還創作了《雕蟲紀歷1933—1958》、《十年詩草1930-1939》等詩作，以及《莎士比亞悲劇論 痕》、《布萊希特戲劇印象記》等一批重要著作。2000年１月，卞之琳獲得了首屆“中國詩人獎──終生成就獎”。

序

克里斯托弗‧衣修午德的小說《紫羅蘭姑娘》英文原本初版在 1945年10月，我的中譯本1947年2月在上海文化生活出版社出版(稍有節略的譯文1946 年先在上海《文藝復興》雜志上發表過)，距今已經三十五六年了。從前讀過這個譯本的朋友們願意重見到它，出版社借到一本讀了，也願意重印它。現在就據原文 校對修訂了一遍，交出付排。

譯本原有我寫的序文。作者對它還滿意o(他接到我寄給他看的序文英文稿後，回信說︰“如果譯文跟你的序文一樣好，那麼我就不能再求更好了”。)但是三十多年過去了，譯本新版問世，我自然有責任在書前再另外說幾句話。

20 世紀30年代到40年代變化很大，50年代以來又有了新的變化。就衣修午德說，也是如此。《紫羅蘭姑娘》出版將近10年後，才又陸續出版了小說《黃昏 的世界》(1954)、《單人》(1964)、《河畔的相會》(1967)等和三本自傳性著作。小說內容多寫同性愛和印度吠檀多宗教哲學。他自己在回憶錄 式的著作里把30年代反法西斯的進步政治動機都加以否定。但是衣修午德，在30年代和奧頓以及另外一批左傾過的同代作家一樣，因為客觀真實、歷史事實在那 里，要否定自己過去作品的意義和作用，還是不能由自己後來的主觀願望否定得了。就以《紫羅蘭姑娘》而論，盡管經過了作者多少年沉默，經過了第二次世界大 戰，它的基本精神還是和他在30年代的一致。

《紫羅蘭姑娘》基本上還是像30年代的衣修午德小說。當然，其中就有 些30年代中期以前西方知識分子還少有的幻滅感與憂郁感，他們還沒有清醒感受到的兩難 處境。尤其是其中染上了一層30年代結束以前西方很少流行的印度哲學的色彩。而這點所引起的我寫原序當時的一些反應，也就使我在序文里寫了一些“玄”話或 者廢話。但是序文的主要內容似乎還沒有什麼大錯，雖然我自己也早已不同于三十多年前的自己了。

如今我把小說正文校 讀一遍(我自己的著譯出書後向來再懶得通讀一遍，現在我還是第一次據原文校讀一全本譯書)，像過去讀過而近年來又找去重讀的一位小說藝 術家朋友一樣，還是很能欣賞其中表現的小說創作藝術。中心人物柏格曼形象鮮明、生動；他是當時中、小資產階級出身的有才華的藝術家的典型而具有個性；通過 他表現了當時具有進步傾向而未能擺脫既定身份的知識分子的典型尷尬境地。不僅中心人物，不僅也作為小說人物兼故事講述者的“衣修午德”，有點自我嘲弄的， 十分逼真，周圍人物，也都躍然紙上。衣修午德能用三筆兩筆、三言兩語，描寫出一個人物。三四十年代間曾有人說過，他在人物塑造方面是英國狄更斯以後的第一 人，寄予極大的期望(不容諱言，後來這種期望是落空了)。例如季米特洛夫的形象，在法庭上，只有幾句話，一個手勢，就活生生地“站起來”了。其他許多配角 也都被寫得聞其聲如見其人。衣修午德在全書中著墨不多就能把西方攝影場生活寫得十分酣暢，淋灕盡致，同時又從容不迫，還可以借人物發議論，抒情。文筆明 淨，一點也不拖泥帶水。

Prater Violet is Christopher Isherwood's fictional first person account of film-making. The Prater is a large park and amusement park in Vienna, a city important to characters in the novel for several reasons. Though Isherwood broke onto the literary scene as a novelist, he eventually worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. In this novel, Isherwood comments on life, art, commercialization of art, and Nazism.

Structure

Written in one continuous, expressive breath Prater Violet follows Isherwood's involvement in the creation of an eponymous film. Much of the novel records the remarks of film industry workers and Isherwood's conversations with a brilliant Austrian film director, Friedrich Bergmann. Only at the conclusion of the novel does Isherwood significantly separate his voice from dialogue to provide a deeper philosophic commentary on his frustration with life. He asks, "What makes you go on living? Why don't you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?" (154).

Plot introduction

Set in pre-World War II era England, both Nazism and filmmaking are on the rise. Characters in Prater Violet are used to personify various aspects of the enigmatic creative process. Isherwood also uses his characters to express the varying views about Hitler, mainly the alarming measure of indifference prevalent during the 1930s.

Characters in Prater Violet

The main character, Isherwood himself, is a moderately successful author of fiction. He is a detailed observer of the filmmaking process and the gathering war. Eventually Isherwood confronts his rather passive role in life with frustration.
He finds his only consolation to be dramatic personalities in his life such as Friedrich Bergmann. Bergmann is a loquacious and hand-talking muse for Isherwood. Just as Isherwood translates Bergmann's poor English into film script, Isherwood comes to understand the true horror of Nazism through Bergmann's fear for family in Austria.
As Hitler lays the foundation for war, movie executives such as Mr. Chatsworth stress over the timely production of the film Prater Violet. Ashmeade (whom we are led to believe is Isherwood's first meaningless lover) and Dorothy (the secretary) both fade into a cast of minor characters who fail to comprehend the truth of life.
The only exception to this monochrome cast is Lawrence Dwight, the chief film editor of Imperial Bulldog Pictures. Dwight sees life as a quest for efficiency through establishing patterns. He represents Nazi ideology in life and art.

Major themes

Efficiency. Art. the Creative Process. Film-as-art. Film-as-entertainment. Nazism. Love.

Based on Isherwood's real-life film work

Prater Violet is based on Isherwood's experience as a screenwriter for the British Gaumont film Little Friend (1934), directed by Berthold Viertel and starring Nova Pilbeam. (Source: Author's diaries and memoirs)

紐約時報戲劇Prater Violet評論

THEATER REVIEW; An Isherwood Story, In His Words and Spirit

By PETER MARKS
Published: December 5, 1998, Saturday
Few novels of late have made the transition to the stage as gracefully as ''Prater Violet,'' Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical account of his exploits in the British film industry of the 1930's. In an endearing production at the Salon Theater, the director Will Pomerantz, who also adapted the book, stays true to Isherwood's spirit. The result is an evening of theater with bags of English charm.
The play, performed by six hard-working cast members assuming a total of 42 roles, could hardly be more faithful to the nimble work by Isherwood, who also wrote ''Berlin Stories,'' on which ''Cabaret'' is based. The dialogue and narration in ''Prater Violet'' are lifted virtually verbatim from the 127-page novella, a chronicle of the making of a silly movie musical in 1933 by a high-principled Austrian Jew named Friedrich Bergmann, who takes on Isherwood as a neophyte screenwriter.
The author's refined command of language and clinical powers of observation have eased Mr. Pomerantz's burden. The characters, down to the smallest bit parts, are zesty creations that fill out the genially ironic plot, one that initially seems as frivolous as the sappy talkie, also called ''Prater Violet,'' that they are filming on a back lot in London. (A prater is a town square where public festivals occur.)
But as the relationship deepens between Bergmann (Dylan Green), worried about the growing power of the Nazis, and Isherwood (Kameron Steele), worried about the well-being of his new-found friend, so does the play. What begins as rather rarefied English drollery ends as a contemplation on the meaning of companionship.
Mr. Pomerantz has a way with the period. Aided by Troy Hourie's sets and Lap-Chi Chu's lighting (and a cast that also plays stage crew), the director puts a minimum of resources to maximum advantage; the film studio, for instance, is brought to life by a few rolling flats, movie cameras and the hustle of the actors playing gaffers, editors and film stars.
The narrator for the unspectacular events of this gentle piece -- the tensest moment comes when a newspaper headline announces turmoil in far-off Vienna, where Bergmann's wife and daughter remain -- is Mr. Steele, a young actor whose unflappable gentility makes him an appealing guide. As Bergmann, Mr. Green is poignantly anxious and avuncular; there's a magnetism that goes with the bluster.
The other actors -- Frank Dowd, Laura Kachergus, John McAdams and Ashok Sinha -- do nicely by many of the myriad supporting roles. Mr. McAdams is particularly good as a nihilistic film cutter on the movie set, and it's fun to watch Ms. Kachergus quick-change her way through a dozen roles. Still, Mr. Pomerantz could have used another actor or two, because his players are simply unsuited to some of the parts. Ms. Kachergus, for example, is much too young for Isherwood's mother, and Mr. Dowd, though swell as a studio executive, is unconvincing as an old vet of a movie actor.
The play, too, drags in spots, especially in an overlong first act, but this is a minor shortcoming. ''Prater Violet,'' which runs through tomorrow, affords another enjoyable view from Isherwood's perspective.

PRATER VIOLET
Adapted and directed by Will Pomerantz; based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood; sets by Troy Hourie; lighting by Lap-Chi Chu; costumes by Mattie Ullrich; sound by Miles Green and Mr. Pomerantz. Presented by the Culture Project, in association with Difference Engine. At the Salon, 432 East 91st Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Kameron Steele (Christopher Isherwood), Dylan Green (Friedrich Bergmann), Frank Dowd, Laura Kachergus, John McAdams and Ashok Sinha (ensemble).