Robert Browning - Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 汉译

I

GR-R-R — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

What ? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?

Oh, that rose has prior claims —

Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?

Hell dry you up with its flames !

II

At the meal we sit together:

Salve tibi! I must hear

Wise talk of the kind of weather,

Sort of season, time of year:

Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely

Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:

What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?

What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?

Ill

Whew! We ’11 have our platter burnished,

Laid with care on our own shelf!

With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,

And a goblet for ourself,

Rinsed like something sacrificial

Ere’t is fit to touch our chaps —

Marked with L. for our initial!

(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

IV

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores

Squats outside the Convent bank

With Sanchicha, tellingr stories,

Steeping tresses in the tank,

Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,

— Can’t I see his dead eye glow,

Bright as’t were a Barbary corsair’s ?

(That is, if he’d let it show!)

When he finishes refection,

Knife and fork he never lays

Cross-wise, to my recollection,

As do I, in Jesu’s praise.

I the Trinity illustrate,

Drinking watered orange-pulp —

In three sips the Arian frustrate;

While he drains his at one gulp.

VI

Oh, those melons? If he’s able

We’re to have a feast! so nice!

One goes to the Abbot’s table,

All of us get each a slice.

How go on your flowers? None double?

Not one fruit-sort can you spy?

Strange! — And I, too, at such trouble,

Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

VII

There’s a great text in Galatians,

Once you trip on it, entails

Twenty-nine distinct damnations,

One sure, if another fails:

If I trip him just a-dying,

Sure of heaven as sure can be,

Spin him round and send him flying

Off to hell, a Manichee?

VIII

Or, my scrofulous French novel

On grey paper with blunt type!

Simply glance at it, you grovel

Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:

If I double down its pages

At the woeful sixteenth print,

When he gathers his greengages,

Ope a sieve and slip it in’t ?

IX

Or, there’s Satan! — one might venture

Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave

Such a flaw in the indenture

As he’d miss till, past retrieve,

Blasted lay that rose-acacia

We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine…

’St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia

Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!