Charles Tomlinson - The Snow Fences 汉译

They are fencing the upland against

the drifts this wind, those clouds

would bury it under: brow and bone

know already that leveling zero

as you go, an aching skeleton,

in the breathtaking rareness of winter air.

 

Walking here, what do you see?

Little more, through wind-teased eyes,

than a black, iron tree

and, there, another, a straggle

of low and broken wall between, grass

sapped of its greenness, day going.

 

The farms are few: spread

as wide, perhaps, as when

the Saxons who found them, chose

these airy and woodless spaces

and froze here before they fed

the unsuperseded burial ground.

 

Ahead, the church’s dead-white

limewash will dazzle the mind

as, dazed, you enter to escape:

despite the stillness here, the chill

of wash-light scarcely seems seems

less penetrant than the hill-top wind.

 

Between the graves, you find

a beheaded pigeon, the blood and grain

trailed from its bitten crop, as alien to all

the day’s pallor as the raw

wounds of the earth, turned above

a fresh solitary burial.

 

A plaque of staining metal

distinguishes this grave among

an anonymity whose stones

the frosts have scaled, thrusting under

as if they grudged the ground

its ill-kept memorials.

 

The bitter darkness drives you

back valleywards, and again you bend

joint and tendon to encounter

the wind’s force and leave behind

the nameless stones, the snow-shrouds

of a waste: they are fencing

the upland against those years, those clouds.

 

                                                               1966