Posted this on Facebook a few days ago.
Post by Edmund Yeo.
(So I will post it here too, but with amendments. And links to previous blog posts related to these books. To help me remember.)
Watching sports is, among other things, a special way of experiencing time. Sport is like music or fiction or film in that, for a predetermined duration, it asks you to give it control over your emotions, to feel what it makes you feel. Unlike (most) forms of art, though, a game has no foreordained plan or plot or intention. The rules of a game impose a certain kind of order, but it’s different from the order of an artwork. A movie knows where it wants to take you; no one can say in advance where a game will go. All of its beauty, ugliness, boredom, and excitement, all of its rage and sadness emerge spontaneously out of the players’ competing desires to win. For however long the clock runs, your feelings are at the mercy of chance. This happens and then this happens and then this happens. You’re experiencing, in a contained and intensified way, something like the everyday movement of life.
我們甚至失去了黃昏
詩/聶魯達 譯/李宗榮
我們甚至失去了黃昏的顏色。
當藍色的夜墜落在世界時,
沒人看見我們手牽著手。
從我的窗戶中我已經看見
在遙遠的山頂上落日的祭典。
有時候一片太陽
在我的雙掌間如硬幣燃燒。
在你熟知的我的哀傷中
我憶及了你,靈魂肅斂。
彼時,你在哪裡呢?
那裡還有些什麼人?
說些什麼?
為什麼當我哀傷且感覺到你遠離時,
全部的愛會突如其然的來臨呢?
暮色中如常發生的,
書本掉落了下來,
我的披肩像受傷的小狗踡躺在腳邊。
總是如此,
朝暮色抹去雕像的方向
你總是藉黃昏隱沒。
Clenched Soul
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.