"The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intesity."
“优秀的人们信心尽失，
坏蛋们则充满了炽烈的狂热。”
Those two lines of Yeats for me sum up the matter as it stands today when the very currency of belief seems debased. I was brought up in the Christian church. Later I believed for a while that communism offered the best hope for this world. I acknowledge the need for belief, but I cannot forget how through the ages great faiths have been vitiated by fanaticism and dogmatism, by intolerance and cruelty, by the intellectual dishonesty, the folly, the crankiness or the opportunism of their adherents.
对我来说，叶芝的这两行诗概括了今天的现实，信仰的货币似乎已经贬值了。我是在基督教的熏陶下长大的。后来有一段时间我相信共产主义给这个世界带来了最大的希望。我承认信仰的必要性，但我无法忘记历代的伟大信仰是如何因其拥护者的狂热、教条、褊狭、残忍、学术欺诈、愚蠢、偏执或机会主义而遭到损害的。
Have I no faith at all, then? Faith is the thing at the core of you, the sediment that’s left when hopes and illusions are drained away. The thing for which you make any sacrifice because without it you would be nothing - a mere walking shadow. I know what my own core is. I would in the last resort sacrifice any human relationship, any way of living to the search for truth which produces my poem. I know there are heavy odds against any poem I write surviving after my death. I realize that writing poetry may seem the most preposterously useless thing a man can be doing today. Yet it is just at such times of crisis that each man discovers or rediscovers what he values most. My poet’s instinct to make something comes out most strongly then, enabling me to use fear, doubt, even despair as creative stimuli. In doing so, I feel my kinship with humanity, with the common man who carries on doing his job till the bomb falls or the sea closes over him. Carries on because of his belief, however inarticulate, that this is the best thing he can do. But the poet is luckier than the layman, for his job is always a vacation. Indeed, it’s so like a religious vacation that he may feel little need for a religious faith, but because it is always trying to get past the trivial and the transient or to reveal these as images of the essential and the permanent, poetry is at least a kind of spiritual activity.
那么，难道我就没有信仰吗？信仰存在于你的心灵深处，当希望和幻想渐渐枯竭，沉淀下来的就是信仰。为了它，你甘愿做出任何牺牲，因为没有它，你的存在就毫无意义——你只不过是一个会行走的影子。我知道我的内心深处有什么。在别无选择的情况下，我愿意牺牲任何人际关系、任何生活方式去寻找使我能创作诗歌的真理。我知道很有可能我写的每一首诗在我死后都不能流传。我也明白诗歌创作在今天或许是一个人所能做的最荒谬、最无用的事情。然而，正是在这样的危难之时，每一个人才能发现或重新发现他最珍视的东西。于是我那诗人渴望创作的本能在胸中涌动，使我能让恐惧、怀疑，甚至绝望激发自己创作。在诗歌创作中，我觉得我和人类，和平凡的人紧密相连，他们坚守着自己的岗位，直到炸弹落下或是海浪席卷而来将他们淹没。坚守是因为他相信这是他最能做的事情，尽管这信仰难以用语言传达。但诗人比普通人幸运，因为他的工作始终是他的天职。他就像肩负着一种宗教使命一样，或许并不需要有宗教信仰，但因为诗歌或是不涉及琐事和瞬息即逝的事物，或是将它们作为本质和永恒的意象，诗歌至少是一种精神活动。
Men need a religious belief to make sense out of life. I wish I had such a belief myself, but any creed of mine would be honeycombed with confusions and reservations. Yet when I write a poem I am trying to make sense out of life. And just now and then my experience composes and transmutes itself into a poem which tells me something I didn’t know I knew. So for me the compulsion of poetry is the sign of a belief, not the less real for being unformulated ... a belief that men must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best he can. And that I shall do these things best through the practice of poetry.
人需要有一种宗教信仰使他的生活有意义。我希望我也能有这样的信仰，但我的任何信念总会充满困惑和保留看法。然而，我写诗就是努力发掘生活的意义。偶尔，我用诗歌表现自己的经历和感受，从中也明白了我不曾意识到自己已经懂得的道理。因此，对我来说，诗歌创作的冲动表现出来的，不是因为不系统而不太真实的东西……而是一种信仰，那就是，人必须享受生活，探索生活的真谛，提高生活的品质。人可各尽其能，而我则通过写诗尽善尽美地完成我的使命。
实习生：李帅男
