Stephen Spender - The Express 汉译

After the first powerful, plain manifesto<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

The black statement of positions, without more fuss

But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

Without bowing and with restrained unconcern

She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,

The gasworks, and at last the heavy page

Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.

Beyond the town, there lies the open country

Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,

The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.

It is now she begins to sing – at first quite low

Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness –

The song of her whistle screaming at curves,

Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.

And always light, aerial, underneath,

Retreats the elate metre of her wheels.

Steaming through metal landscape on her lanes,

She plunges new eras of white happiness,

Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves

And parallels clean like trajectories from guns.

At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,

Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night

Where only a low stream-line brightness

Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is light.

Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced,

Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough

Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

                                                                      1933