mending wall翻译及赏析.doc

Something there is that doesnt love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under itAnd spills the upper boulders in the sun,And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.The work of hunters is another thing: 5 I have come after them and made repairWhere they have left not one stone on a stone,But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10 But at spring mending-time we find them there.I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;And on a day we meet to walk the lineAnd set the wall between us once again.We keep the wall between us as we go. 15 To each the boulders that have fallen to each.And some are loaves and some so nearly ballsWe have to use a spell to make them balance:“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20 Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,One on a side. It comes to little more:There where it is we do not need the wall:He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get across 25 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:“Why do they make good neighbors? Isnt it 30 Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.Before I built a wall Id ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offense.Something there is that doesnt love a wall, 35 That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,But its not elves exactly, and Id ratherHe said it for himself. I see him there,Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40 He moves in darkness as it seems to me,Not of woods only and the shade of trees.He will not go behind his fathers saying,And he likes having thought of it so wellHe says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45 有一点什么，它大概是不喜欢墙，它使得墙脚下的冻地涨得隆起，大白天的把墙头石块弄得纷纷落：使得墙裂了缝，二人并肩都走得过。士绅们行猎时又是另一番糟蹋：他们要掀开每块石头上的石头，我总是跟在他们后面去修补，但是他们要把兔子从隐处赶出来，讨好那群汪汪叫的狗。我说的墙缝是怎么生的，谁也没看见，谁也没听见但是到了春季补墙时，就看见在那里。我通知了住在山那边的邻居；有一天我们约会好，巡视地界一番，在我们两家之间再把墙重新砌起。我们走的时候，中间隔着一垛墙。我们走的时候，中间隔着一垛培。落在各边的石头，由各自去料理。有些是长块的，有些几乎圆得像球需要一点魔术才能把它们放稳当：“老实呆在那里，等我们转过身再落下！”我们搬弄石头把手指都磨粗了。啊！这不过又是一种户外游戏，一个人站在一边。此外没有多少用处：在墙那地方，我们根本不需要墙：他那边全是松树，我这边是苹果园。我的苹果树永远也不会踱过去吃掉他松树下的松球，我对他说。他只是说：“好篱笆造出好邻家。”春天在我心里作祟，我在悬想能不能把一个念头注入他的脑里：“为什么好篱笆造出好邻家？是否指着有牛的人家？可是我们此地又没有牛。我在造墙之前先要弄个清楚，圈进来的是什么，圈出去的是什么，并且我可能开罪的是些什么人家，有一点什么，它不喜欢墙，它要推倒它。”我可以对他说这是“鬼”。但严格说也不是鬼我想这事还是由他自己决定吧。我看见他在那里搬一块石头，两手紧抓着石头的上端，像一个旧石器时代的武装的野蛮人。我觉得他是在黑暗中摸索，这黑暗不仅是来自深林与树荫。他不肯探究他父亲传给他的格言他想到这句格言，便如此的喜欢，于是再说一遍，“好篱笆造出好邻家”。SummaryA stone wall separates the speakers property from his neighbors. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be keptthere are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.FormBlank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verses characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing, stone, mean, line, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a pieceno fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversationaland this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel. CommentaryI have a friend who, as a young girl, had to memorize this poem as punishment for some now-forgotten misbehavior. Forced memorization is never pleasant; still, this is a fine poem for recital. “Mending Wall” is sonorous, homey, wryarch, evenyet serene; it is steeped in levels of meaning implied by its well-wrought metaphoric suggestions. These implications inspire numerous interpretations and make definitive readings suspect. Here are but a few things to think about as you reread the poem. The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is arresting: two men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit. Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their task Sisyphean. Sisyphus, you may recall, is the figure in Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. These men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or sprites, or the frost and thaw of natures invisible hand, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless. But, as we so often see when we look closely at Frosts best poems, what begins in folksy straightforwardness ends in complex ambiguity. The speaker would have us believe that there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on building superfluous walls (with clichs as their justification) and those who would dispense with this practicewall-builders and wall-breakers. But are these impulses so easily separable? And what does the poem really say about the necessity of boundaries?The speaker may scorn his neighbors obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere “where there are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the act of making a wall. This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists and transports a boulder. Well, wall-building is ancient and enduringthe building of the first walls, both literal and figurative, marked the very foundation of society. Unless you are an absolute anarchist and do not mind livestock munching your lettuce, you probably recognize the need for literal boundaries. Figuratively, rules and laws are walls; justice is the process of wall-mending. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of other individuals rights. And it demonstrates another benefit of community; for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor. Wall-building is social, both in the sense of “societal” and “sociable.” What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement can, thus, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture. Perhaps the speaker does believe that good fences make good neighbors for again, it is he who initiates the wall-mending.Of course, a little bit of mutual trust, communication, and goodwill would seem to achieve the same purpose between well-disposed neighborsat least where there are no cows. And the poem says it twice: “something there is that does not love a wall.” There is some intent and value in wall-breaking, and there is some powerful tendency toward this destruction. Can it be simply that wall-breaking creates the conditions that facilitate wall-building? Are the groundswells a call to community- buildingnatures nudge toward concerted action? Or are they benevolent forces urging the demolition of traditional, small-minded boundaries? The poem does not resolve this question, and the narrator, who speaks for the groundswells but acts as a fence-builder, remains a contradiction.Many of Frosts poems can be reasonably interpreted as commenting on the creative process; “Mending Wall” is no exception. On the basic level, we can find here a discussion of the construction-disruption duality of creativity. Creation is a positive acta mending or a building. Even the most destructive-seeming creativity results in a change, the building of some new state of being: If you tear down an edifice, you create a new view for the folks living in the house across the way. Yet creation is also disruptive: If nothing else, it disrupts the status quo. Stated another way, disruption is creative: It is the impetus that leads directly, mysteriously (as with the groundswells), to creation. Does the stone wall embody this duality? In any case, there is something about “walking the line”and building it, mending it, balancing each stone with equal parts skill and spellthat evokes the mysterious and laborious act of making poetry. On a level more specific to the author, the question of boundaries and their worth is directly applicable to Frosts poetry. Barriers confine, but for some people they also encourage freedom and productivity by offering challenging frameworks within which to work. On principle, Frost did not write free verse. His creative process involved engaging poetic form (the rules, tradition, and boundariesthe wallsof the poetic world) and making it distinctly his own. By maintaining the tradition of formal poetry in unique ways, he was simultaneously a mender and breaker of walls.Interpretation of Robert Frosts “Mending Wall”ZHAO Xin-li(School of Foreign Languages, Langfang Teachers College, Langfang 065000, China)Abstract: Robert Frost is skillful at adopting symbolism and images in his poems. “Mending Wall”, one ofFrosts well-known poems, had been analyzed in different approaches, such as psychoanalytical approach, socialapproach and structural approaches, etc. By exploring the symbol and images applied in “Mending Wall”, it drawsthe conclusion that “the wall”, symbolizing convention, is set as a barrier in human communication.Key words: symbol; image; “Mending Wall”; convention1. IntroductionRobert Frost is adept at applying symbolism and images in his poetry. One aspect of Frosts theory is “hisunderstanding of symbolism and how it functions in a poem” (Parini, 1993, p. 265). He classified himself as apoet who was a synecdochist and stated that he preferred synecdoche in poetrythat figure of speech we use apart for the whole. In his poetry, one image after another is unfolded gradually. It is rather easy for readers to catchthe surface meaning of his poetry. However, the ulterior meaning, which is the value of his poetry, worths our lifetime of contemplation.In “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost depicts a commonplace occurrence that a wall separating a farmers landfrom that of his neighbors has crumbled down and awaits repairs. Such is a scene typical in Robert Frosts poems,which always take on an easy-understood appearance and is imbued with profound significance. “It would be amistake to imagine that Frost is easy to understand because he is easy to read” (Elliott, 1988, p. 944). You “beginin delight, end in wisdom.” As we may mend a stone wall, pick up apples, watch a spider, and mow the lawn in hispoems, we also acquire enlightenment and inspiration towards life. As it explores in “Mending Wall” that thewallthe symbol of conventionsometimes is set as a barrier in human communication.2. The Wall as the Symbol of ConventionThe poem starts with the crumbling down of the wall.Something there is that doesnt love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spill the upper boulder in the sun,That makes gaps even two can pass abreast.As soon as “I” find the toppling wall, “I let the neighbor know beyond the hill” and prepare to mend the wall.To the speaker, erecting a wall is a conventional concept, deeply ingrained in the mind. It is out of instinct that thespeaker acknowledges the neighbor to repair the wall together. The wall standing between the lands of twoZHAO Xin-li (1980- ), female, B.A., teaching assistant of School of Foreign Languages, Langfang Teachers College; researchfield: British and American literature.Interpretation of Robert Frosts “Mending Wall”72families has become a tradition, inherited from ancestors. “The spring mending time” each year is a regularactivity of farmers in New England, revealing the powerful predominance of tradition on peoples mind. Withoutmeditating on its rationality of existence, people observe it as a strict rule.The neighbors repetition of “Good fences make good neighbors” manifests that he is a convention upholder.Residing in the convention-dominated world, he regards the proverb as an unquestionable universal truth. When “Itry to put a notion in his head,” his mere utterance is the proverb. His response is short, full of coldness andobstinacy. He asserts it with such a blind determination towards the existence of the wall in between that aninvisible wall has been installed between them. Without pondering on whether or not there is the necessity to builda wall, he sticks to dogged rules of convention and refuses to any kind of change. To some degree, he is therepresentative of convention.The neighbors mind is also exemplified in his behavior.I see him thereBring a stone grasped firmly by the topIn each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.The shift in voice, a slowing down and steadying of rhythm, the contemplativeness previously absent, doesnot simply mime the slow actions of the neighbor. The neighbor likened to the old-stone savage, is consideredbackward and uncivilized. The image is also a hint of convention, which has been lasting ever since the primitiveage and has an irresistible dominance on peopl