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But it would be very difficult to imitate the early Auden, 'this lunar beauty / has no history, / Is complete and early…'" This, I am sure of it now, is the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard that afternoon in 1981.
但是模仿早期的奧登就很難了。‘此月之美，無始無終，初始即已成……’”這一句，我敢肯定，正是1981年那個下午斯彭德寫在黑板上的那行詩。
Poor Stephen Spender, poor Robert Oppenheimer, each limited, if not relegated, to the category of the merely very good, and each inevitably saddened by his knowledge of what was truly superior. "Being a minor poet is like being a minor royalty," Spender wrote in his journals, "and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that." As for Oppenheimer, I recall Isidor Rabi once telling me that "if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he [Oppenheimer] would have been a much greater physicist. I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focused."
可憐的斯蒂芬·斯彭德，可憐的羅伯特·奧本海默，都被局限在或歸類到僅僅不錯之列，而他們又清楚地知道什么叫作出類拔萃，這就使他們不可避免地感到悲哀。“做個不太著名的詩人如同做個不太重要的王族中人，”斯彭德在日記中寫道，“任何人，正如瑪格利特公主的侍衛女官有一次給我解釋的那樣，做成那種角色都不會髙興的。”至于奧本海默，我記得埃斯德·拉比曾經跟我說：“如果他研究的是猶太教法典和希伯來語，而不是梵語的話，他(奧本海默)或許會成為更偉大的物理學家。我從未遇見過比他更聰明的人。但要想更具獨創性、更有深度，人還是要更專注于某個領域才行。”
As Spender says, W. H. Auden's poetry cannot be imitated, any more than Paul Dirac's physics can be. That is what great poetry and great physics have in common: Both are swept along by the tide of unanticipated genius as it rushes past the merely very good.
正如斯彭德所說，W.H.奧登的詩無法模仿，保羅·狄拉克的物理學更無法模仿。那才是偉大的詩歌與偉大的物理學的共同之處：都是隨著無法預見的天才們掀起的浪潮狂掃而來，而同時把僅僅不錯的人沖刷殆盡。
