余光中·《如果远方有战争》英译

If a War is Raging Afar<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Yu Guangzhong

If a war is raging afar, shall I stop my ears

Or shall I sit up and listen in shame?

Shall I stop my nose or breathe and breathe

The smothering smoke of troubled air? Shall I hear

You gasp lust and love or shall I hear the howitzers

Howl their sermons of truth? Mottos, medals, widows,

Can these glut the greedy palate of Death?

If far away a war is frying a nation

And fleets of tanks are ploughing plots in spring,

A child is crying by its mother’s corpse

Of a dumb and blind and deaf tomorrow;

If a nun is squatting on her fiery bier

With famished flesh singeing a despair

And black limbs ecstatic round Nirvana

As a hopeless gesture of hope. If

We are in bed, and they’re in the field

Sowing peace in acres of barbed wire,

Shall I feel guilty or shall I feel glad,

Glad that I’m making not war but love,

And in my arms writhes your nakedness, not the foe’s?

If afar there rages a war, and there we are—

You a merciful angel, clad all in white

And bent over the bed, with me in bed—

Without hand or foot or eye or without sex

In a field hospital that smells of blood.

If a war O such a war is raging afar,

My love, if right there we are.