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1、【国外英文文学】Ballads in Blue China and Verses and TranslationsBallads in Blue China and Verses and Translationsby Andrew LangIntroductionBALLADES IN BLUE CHINA. Ballade of Theocritus Ballade of Cleopatras Needle Ballade of Roulette Ballade of Sleep Ballade of the Midnight Forest Ballade of the Tweed Ball
2、ade of the Book-hunter Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera Ballade of the Summer Term Ballade of the Muse Ballade against the Jesuits Ballade of Dead Cities Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf Double Ballade of Primitive Man Ballade of Autumn Ballade of True Wisdom Ballade of Worldly Wealth Ballade of Li
3、fe Ballade of Blue China Ballade of Dead Ladies Villons Ballade of Good Counsel Ballade of the Bookworm Valentine in form of Ballade Ballade of Old Plays Ballade of his Books Ballade of the Dream Ballade of the Southern Cross Ballade of Aucassin Ballade Amoureuse Ballade of Queen Anne Ballade of Bli
4、nd Love Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre DizainVERSES AND TRANSLATIONS. A Portrait of 1783 The Moons Minion In Ithaca Homer The Burial of Moliere Bion Spring Before the Snow Villanelle Natural Theology The Odyssey Ideal The Fairys Gift Benedetta Ramus Partant pour la Scribie St. Andrews Bay Woma
5、n and the WeedRondeaux, BALLADES,Chansons dizains, propos menus,Compte moy quils sont devenuz:Se faict il plus rien de nouveau?CLEMENT MAROT, Dialogue de deuxAmoureux.I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrilyset down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.A W
6、inters Tale, Act iv. sc. 3.INTRODUCTIONThirty years have passed, like a watch in the night, since the earlier of the two sets of verses here reprinted, Ballades in Blue China, was published. At first there were but twenty-two Ballades; ten more were added later. They appeared in a little white vellu
7、m wrapper, with a little blue Chinese singer copied from a porcelain jar; and the frontispiece was a little design by an etcher now famous.Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.The ballade was an old French form o
8、f verse, in France revived by Theodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce these pleasant old French nugae, while an anonymous auth
9、or let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade, and his translations of two of Villons ballades into modern thieves slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr.
10、Swinburne wrote a serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not wholly serious, of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written
11、as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke and the numbers came; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, impr
12、ovised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg. Still people keep on writing sonnets
13、, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets-among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be m
14、ade immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (The Odyssey); it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold.On the other hand, no man since Francois Villon has been immortalised
15、by a single ballade-Mais ou sont les neiges dantan?To speak in any detail about these poor ballades would be to indite a part of an autobiography. Looking back at the little book, what memories it stirs in one to whomFate has done this wrong, That I should write too much and live too long.The Ballad
16、e of the Tweed, and the Rhymes a la Mode, were dedicated to the dearest of kinsmen, a cricketer and angler. The Ballade of Roulette was inscribed to R. R., a gallant veteran of the Indian Mutiny, a leader of Light Horse, whose father was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a Borderer, in wh
17、ose defeats on the green field of Roulette I often shared, long, long ago.So many have gone into the world of light that it is a happiness to think of him to whom The Ballade of Golf was dedicated, and to remember that he is still capable of scoring his double century at cricket, and of lifting the
18、ball high over the trees beyond the boundaries of a great cricket-field. Perhaps Mr. Leslie Balfour- Melville will pardon me for mentioning his name, linked as it is with so many common memories. One is taken and another left.A different sort of memory attaches itself to A Ballade of Dead Cities. It
19、 was written in a Theocritean amoebean way, in competition with Mr. Edmund Gosse; he need not be ashamed of the circumstance, for another shepherd, who was umpire, awarded the prize (two kids just severed from their dams) to his victorious muse.The Ballade of the Midnight Forest, the Ballade of the
20、Huntress Artemis, was translated from Theodore de Banville, whose beautiful poem came so near the Greek, that when the late Provost of Oriel translated a part of its English shadow into Greek hexameters, you might suppose, as you read, that they were part of a lost Homeric Hymn.I never wrote a doubl
21、e ballade, and stanzas four and five of the Double Ballade of Primitive Man were contributed by the learned doyen of Anthropology, Mr. E. B. Tylor, author of Primitive Culture.A tout seigneur tout honneur!In Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre, the Windburg is a hill in Teviotdale. A Portrait of 17
22、83 was written on a French engraving after Morland, and Benedetta Ramus was addressed to a mezzotint (an artists proof, very rare). It is after Romney and is My Beauty, as Charles Lamb said (once, unluckily, to a Scot) of an engraving, after Lionardo, of some fair dead lady.The sonnet, Natural Theol
23、ogy, is the germ of what the author has since written, in The Making of Religion, on the long neglected fact that many of the lowest savages known share the belief in a benevolent All Father and Judge of men.Concerning verses in Rhymes a la Mode, visitors to St. Andrews may be warned not to visit St
24、. Leonards Chapel, described in the second stanza of Almae Matres. In the writers youth, and even in middle age,He loitered idly where the tall Fresh-budded mountain-ashes blow Within its desecrated wall.The once beautiful ruins carpeted with grass and wild flowers have been doubly desecrated by per
25、sons, academic persons, having authority and a plentiful lack of taste. The slim mountain-ashes, fair as the young palm-tree that Odysseus saw beside the shrine of Apollo in Delos, have been cut down by the academic persons to whom power is given. The grass and flowers have been rooted up. Hideous l
26、ittle wooden fences enclose the grave slabs: a roof of a massive kind has been dumped down on the old walls, and the windows, once so graceful in their airy lines, have been glazed in a horrible manner, while the ugly iron gate precludes entrance to a shrine which is now a black and dismal dungeon.O
27、h, be that roof as lead to lead Above the dull Restorers head, A Minstrels malison is said!Notes explanatory are added to the Rhymes, and their information, however valuable, need not here be repeated.A BALLADE OF XXXII BALLADES.Friend, when you bear a care-dulled eye, And brow perplexed with things
28、 of weight, And fain would bid some charm untie The bonds that hold you all too strait, Behold a solace to your fate, Wrapped in this covers china blue; These ballades fresh and delicate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two!The mind, unwearied, longs to fly And commune with the wise and great; But that
29、same ether, rare and high, Which glorifies its worthy mate, To breath forspent is disparate: Laughing and light and airy-new These come to tickle the dull pate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.Most welcome then, when you and I, Forestalling days for mirth too late, To quips and cranks and fantasy So
30、me choice half-hour dedicate, They weave their dance with measured rate Of rhymes enlinked in order due, Till frowns relax and cares abate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.ENVOY.Princes, of toys that please your state Quainter are surely none to view Than these which pass with tripping gait, This da
31、inty troop of Thirty-two.F. P.TO AUSTIN DOBSON. Un Livre est un ami qui change-quelquefois. 1880. 1888BALLADE TO THEOCRITUS, IN WINTER. Greek text which cannot be reproduced Id. viii. 56.Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London, and the bustling street, For still, by the Sicilian shore, T
32、he murmur of the Muse is sweet. Still, still, the suns of summer greet The mountain-grave of Helike, And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.What though they worship Pan no more, That guarded once the shepherds seat, They chatter of their rustic lore, They watch the
33、 wind among the wheat: Cicalas chirp, the young lambs bleat, Where whispers pine to cypress tree; They count the waves that idly beat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.Theocritus! thou canst restore The pleasant years, and over-fleet; With thee we live as men of yore, We rest where running waters m
34、eet: And then we turn unwilling feet And seek the world-so must it be - WE may not linger in the heat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!ENVOY.Master,-when rain, and snow, and sleet And northern winds are wild, to thee We come, we rest in thy retreat, Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!BALLADE OF CL
35、EOPATRAS NEEDLE.Ye giant shades of RA and TUM, Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument in London mist!Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb That o
36、nce were read of him that ran When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum Wild music of the Bull began; When through the chanting priestly clan Walkd Ramses, and the high sun kissd This stone, with blessing scored and ban - This monument in London mist.The stone endures though gods be numb; Though human
37、effort, plot, and plan Be sifted, drifted, like the sum Of sands in wastes Arabian. What king may deem him more than man, What priest says Faith can Time resist While THIS endures to mark their span - This monument in London mist?ENVOY.Prince, the stones shade on your divan Falls; it is longer than
38、ye wist: It preaches, as Times gnomon can, This monument in London mist!BALLADE OF ROULETTE. TO R. R.This life-one was thinking to-day, In the midst of a medley of fancies - Is a game, and the board where we play Green earth with her poppies and pansies. Let manque be faded romances, Be passe remors
39、e and regret; Hearts dance with the wheel as it dances - The wheel of Dame Fortunes roulette.The lover will stake as he may His heart on his Peggies and Nancies; The girl has her beauty to lay; The saint has his prayers and his trances; The poet bets endless expanses In Dreamland; the scamp has his
40、debt: How they gaze at the wheel as it glances - The wheel of Dame Fortunes roulette!The Kaiser will stake his array Of sabres, of Krupps, and of lances; An Englishman punts with his pay, And glory the jeton of France is; Your artists, or Whistlers or Vances, Have voices or colours to bet; Will you
41、moan that its motion askance is - The wheel of Dame Fortunes roulette?ENVOY.The prize that the pleasure enhances? The prize is-at last to forget The changes, the chops, and the chances - The wheel of Dame Fortunes roulette.BALLADE OF SLEEP.The hours are passing slow, I hear their weary tread Clang f
42、rom the tower, and go Back to their kinsfolk dead. Sleep! deaths twin brother dread! Why dost thou scorn me so? The winds voice overhead Long wakeful here I know, And music from the steep Where waters fall and flow. Wilt thou not hear sue, Sleep?All sounds that might bestow Rest on the feverd bed, A
43、ll slumbrous sounds and low Are mingled here and wed, And bring no drowsihed. Shy dreams flit to and fro With shadowy hair dispread; With wistful eyes that glow, And silent robes that sweep. Thou wilt not hear me; no? Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep?What cause hast thou to show Of sacrifice unsped? Of
44、all thy slaves below I most have laboured With service sung and said; Have culld such buds as blow, Soft poppies white and red, Where thy still gardens grow, And Lethes waters weep. Why, then, art thou my foe? Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep?ENVOY.Prince, ere the dark be shred By golden shafts, ere now
45、 And long the shadows creep: Lord of the wand of lead, Soft-footed as the snow, Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep!BALLADE OF THE MIDNIGHT FOREST. AFTER THEODORE DE BANVILLE.Still sing the mocking fairies, as of old, Beneath the shade of thorn and holly-tree; The west wind breathes upon them, pure and col
46、d, And wolves still dread Diana roaming free In secret woodland with her company. Tis thought the peasants hovels know her rite When now the wolds are bathed in silver light, And first the moonrise breaks the dusky grey, Then down the dells, with blown soft hair and bright, And through the dim wood
47、Dian threads her way.With water-weeds twined in their locks of gold The strange cold forest-fairies dance in glee, Sylphs over-timorous and over-bold Haunt the dark hollows where the dwarf may be, The wild red dwarf, the nixies enemy; Then mid their mirth, and laughter, and affright, The sudden Goddess enters, tall and white, With one long sigh for summers passd away; The swift feet tear the ivy nets outright And through the dim wood Dian threads her way.She gleans her silvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that fle