"I’m nobody! Who are you?"
----Emily Dickinson
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
译文:
我是无名之辈,你是谁?
你,也是,无名之辈?
这就有了我们一对!可是别声张!
你知道,他们会大肆张扬!
做个,显要人物,好不无聊!
像个青蛙,向仰慕你的泥沼——
在整个六月,把个人的姓名
聒噪——何等招摇!
Emily Dickinson
赏析:
The poem’s first stanza tells how the speaker meets a fellow "nobody" — a friend. Together, the two nobodies can enjoy each other’s company and their shared anonymity.
Anne Shirley, the heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables book series, knows what it is like to be an outsider and to have a special friend. Her best friend and kindred spirit is Diana Barry.As a pair, they aren’t really nobodies anymore. That’s why the speaker says, "Don’t tell! / They ’d banish us, you know." She understands that once you have another "nobody" at your side, you aren’t really a "nobody" anymore. And she doesn’t want to be banished or kicked out from what she sees as a society of nobodies.
She’s comfortable there.
In the second stanza, the tone of the poem changes. The speaker sounds confident. Perhaps it is her discovery that there are other people like her — other "nobodies"-- that makes her feels strongly that being a "somebody" isn’t such a great idea.
She realizes that having a friend who understands you and accepts you as you are is more important than being admired by a lot of people or being in the "in" crowd.