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英文诗歌赏析——Fire and Ice

(2012-11-16 12:29:41)
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诗歌

经典

赏析

分类: 文学经典

Fire and Ice

Robert Frost

 

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

英文诗歌赏析——Fire <wbr>and <wbr>Ice

火与 冰

(英) 弗罗斯特 屠 岸译

 

有人说世界将毁于烈火,
有人说毁于冰。
我对于欲望体味得够多,
所以我赞同这意见:毁于火。
但如果世界须两次沉沦,
那么对憎恨我懂得深切,
我会说,论破坏力量,冰
也同样酷烈,
足能胜任。

 

【单词注释】

1. perish: v. 毁灭,消失,,腐烂
2. destruction: n. 破坏,毁灭
3. suffice:v. 使足够



【诗文赏析】

《火与冰》(Fire and Ice)是20世纪美国著名诗人罗伯特·弗罗斯特颇受欢迎的一首抒情诗,作于1923年。在始终,弗罗斯特比较分析了火与冰这两个极具毁灭性的力量,在开头两句道出世界毁灭于火或者是冰的可能,并用火象征激情与欲望,用冰象征冷酷和仇恨。罗伯特·弗罗斯特的诗多以田园生活为题材,语言朴实无华,但却处处蕴涵着人生的真谛。

 

【英文赏析】

"Fire and Ice" is one of Robert Frost's most popular poems, published in December 1920 in Harper's Magazine[1] and in 1923 in his Pulitzer-prize winning book New Hampshire. It discusses the end of the world, likening the elemental force of fire with the emotion of desire, and ice with hate. It is one of Frost's best-known and most anthologized poems.[2]

Inspiration

According to one of Frost's biographers, "Fire and Ice" was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell, the traitors, are submerged, while in a fiery hell, up to their necks in ice: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass ... right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice."[3]

In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice".[2] Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asks him how the world will end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing "Fire and Ice" in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning.[4]

[Style and structure

It is written in a single 9-line stanza, which greatly narrows in the last two lines. The poem's meter is an irregular mix of iambic tetrameter and dimeter, and the rhyme scheme (which is ABAABCBCB) also follows no regular pattern.

 Critiques

Marveled at for its compactness, "Fire and Ice" signaled for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, [and] form". Its casual tone masks the serious question it poses to the reader.[5]

 

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