Ýìèëè Äèêèíñîí
189
Òàêàÿ ìåëî÷ü, ÷òîáû îïëàêàòü -
Ñòîëü êîðîòêàÿ, ÷òîá âîçäûõàòü -
À âñ¸ æ - ðóõëÿäè - â òàêîì îáú¸ìå
Íàì, äåâàì ñ ìóæàìè, óìèðàòü!
Ïåðåâîä ñ àíãëèéñêîãî Ñåðãåé Ëóçàí
Îðèãèíàë
189
It's such a little thing to weep –
So short a thing to sigh –
And yet – by Trades – the size of these
We men and women die!
Poem 189 F220 ‘It’s such a little thing to weep’
‘Trades’ may have the last meaning given in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
namely ‘stuff, goods, materials, commodities, especially for use in bartering with
savages.’
Weeping and sighing are such little and short things, but they are how we deal
with death – and how we die.
F220 (1861) 189
While some folks’ lives may be full of derring-do and heroic deeds or noble self sacrifice that achieves great ends, most of us live, as Thoreau (Dickinson’s contemporary who died a year after this was poem was written) wrote in Walden, “lives of quiet desperation.” Shakespeare had MacBeth say upon learning of his wife’s death:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,;
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,;
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Here, the poet measures lifetimes by such “little” and “short” things as weeping and sighing. These are the “Trades” – or trade goods – that mark the passage of our days. And then we die! Happy thought! Although the poet might have chosen happier words such as “laugh” or “smile,” and we know that Dickinson was apt to laugh and smile (in addition to tears and sighs), she was not out of tune with the literary conventions of her time where women were considered the dainty sex, sentimental and liable to swoon or faint at any small shock – let alone weep or sigh.
Another of Dickinson’s contemporaries, Walt Whitman, sounded the polar opposite tone as he celebrated himself and all things wild and manly and strong. He was as far from Puritan Amherst as could be:
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
The poem is a simply ballad-style quatrain
Posted by Susan Kornfeld at 12:03 AM