My companion and I then had a mediocre lunch in one of the local coffee shops. There seemed to be no official lunch. I was now thoroughly out of sorts and was ready to return to New York, but she wanted very much to stay for at least part of Spender's poetry workshop, and so we did.
然后我和我的女友在當地的一家咖啡館吃了頓不人流的午餐,會議方好像沒有準備正式的午餐。此時我情緒不佳,厭煩透頂,想馬上啟程回紐約去,但是我的女友非常想多待一陣,至少等到看看部分斯彭德的詩歌講習班,所以我們留了下來。
I had never been to a poetry workshop and couldn't imagine what one would consist of. I had been to plenty of physics workshops and knew only too well what they consisted of: six physicists in a room with a blackboard shouting at one another. The room where Spender was to conduct his workshop was full, containing perhaps thirty people. One probably should not read too much into appearances, but these people—mostly women—looked to me as if they were clinging to poetry as if it were some sort of life raft. If I had had access to Spender's journals (they came out a few years later), I would have realized that he was very used to all of this. In fact, he had been earning his living since his retirement from University College in London a decade earlier by doing lectures and classes for groups like this. I would also have realized that by 1981 he was pretty tired of it, and pretty tired of being an avatar for his now dead friends—Auden, C. Day Lewis, and the rest. He had outlived them all, but was still under their shadow, especially that of Auden, whom he had first met at Oxford at about the same age and same time that Oppenheimer had met Dirac.
我從未參加過這種詩歌講習班,無法想象其中會有些什么內容。我倒是去過很多物理學講習班,因此太知道它們都做什么:六個物理學家在一個帶有黑板的房間里互相叫嚷。斯彭德要舉行詩歌講習班的房間里擠得滿滿的,容納了大約有三十個人。一個人也許不應該過于以貌取人,可是這些人大多數是女士——在我看來好像過于迷戀詩歌,視它為救命稻草一般。如果那時我能有幸接觸到斯彭德的日記的話(這些日記幾年以后才出版),我就會知道他對所有的這一切已經習以為常了。事實上,自從十年前他從倫敦的大學學院退休以后就以給這樣的人群做講座和開講習班維持生計。我還得知,1981年的時候他對此已經十分厭倦了,他也厭倦了做他如今已經過世了的朋友——奧登、C戴·劉易斯以及其他人的替身。他比他們每個人都長壽,可是仍然活在他們的陰影里,尤其是奧登,那個他在牛津初次結識的人,剛好和奧本海默遇到狄拉克是同一年齡,也是同一時期。
Spender walked in with a stack of poems written by the workshop members. He gave no opening statement, but began reading student poems. I was surprised by how awful they were. Most seemed to be lists: "sky, sex, sea, earth, red, green, blue," and so forth.
斯彭德帶著一疊講習班成員寫的詩走了進來。他沒做任何開場就開始讀起學員們的詩來。我驚訝于那些詩竟然寫得如此糟糕,大多數都像一串清單,什么“天空、性愛、海洋、大地、紅色、綠色、藍色”等等。