Robert Frost（罗伯特·弗罗斯特，1874-1963）在1923写的短诗Nothing Gold Can Stay虽然只有八行之长，却被视为其最佳作品之一。该诗用词貌似简单，但在修辞和音韵方面非常独到，以致对诗的解读不止一种。这首诗的翻译恰好证明了诗人的观点："Poetry is what gets lost in translation."（诗意是无法于翻译中再现的东西。）

有学者甚至这样解读这首诗：The poem's last word proclaims the momentariness of the "gold" that things like flowers and Eden, dawn and poems share. So the shortness of the poem is also expressive of its sense. (William Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. 1984) [http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gold.htm]（大意为一切“金美”的东西都是短暂的，包括鲜花、伊甸园、黎明和诗歌。本诗之短也表达这个意思。） 

一、原诗与译稿

* 在解读罗伯特·福斯特这首诗时，Alfred R. Ferguson 在On "Nothing Gold Can Stay" 一文中提出的观点值得注意：The poem begins at once in paradox: "green is gold…leaf's a flower." At once, common knowledge, precise observation, and the implications of ancient associations are brought into conflicting play. Green is the first mark of spring, the assurance of life; yet in fact the first flush of vegetation for the New England birch and the willow is not green but the haze of delicate gold. Hence green is a theory or sign of spring; gold is the fact. Gold, precious and permanent as a metal, is here not considered as a metal but as a color. Its hue is described as hard to hold, as evanescent as wealth itself……

Here is Frost's most evocative use of the felix culpa metaphor. The subsidence, the sinking, the going down is, by the logic of the poem, a blessed increase if we are to follow the cycle of flower, leaf, bud, fruit, into the full life that includes loss, grief, and change. [http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gold.htm]

二、原诗词汇与句型难点解析以及翻译理据

1、  第一行Nature's first green is gold 的gold一词很难翻译，因为罗伯特·福斯特在诗中采用了隐喻（green is gold ）而不是明喻（green is like gold）的修辞手法。Alfred R. Ferguson指出，在当地，初春嫩叶在阳光下呈现的不是绿色而是淡淡的金色的朦胧景象（not green but the haze of delicate gold）。

2、  由于在第二行Her hardest hue to hold出现hue一词，所以第一行最后一词gold就是形容词用法，表示金色，而不是金子。

3、  对于“leaf’s a flower”（叶子是花）应理解为The flower is produced by metamorphosis from leaf（鲜花是由叶子蜕变而成的）。这样就很容易理解下文的But only so an hour，因为鲜花绽开只有半个时辰，然后又回到新叶生出。

4、  Then leaf subsides to leaf是一个单独的句子，第一个leaf应当理解为“花”。诗人用“leaf ”一词描述“flower ”，就是要强调“花”的本质是“叶”，“花”不过是“叶”的一种过渡形态。

5、  So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day.这两句用逗号连接，译文不应割裂。

6、  So Eden sank to grief这一行的So不是连接词，而是副词，意为in this way，不应解释为“因此、所以”，而应当解释为“如此，这样”。另外，其中的动词sank是过去时，说明这是描述当年发生的事情，应该用过去时较好；而下一行So dawn goes down to day就应该用现在时。汉译未能把这种时态区别表达出来。

7、  首尾两行Nature's first green is gold……Nothing gold can stay相呼应。没有这种呼应，原诗就失去了原有的韵味和魅力。

8、  最后一行的stay是不及物动词，它的意思不仅仅是“停留”。根据简明牛津英语词典，stay作为不及物动词解释为：continue to be in same place or state, not depart or change; ……has come to stay, is here to stay, (colloq.) , must be regarded as permanent；可以推断stay此处应解释为“不变”或“经久不变”的意思。

9、  第一行Nature's first green is gold与最后一行Nothing gold can stay首尾相呼应，译文未能把这种呼应传神地翻译出来。

三、其他译者译文选录

诗歌翻译的问题首先是对原诗如何理解的问题，然后才是翻译技巧的问题。英语诗歌的翻译结果，在很大程度上首先取决于译者对原诗的理解。

以下两篇译文的差异反映出译者对原文的不同的理解，译文的差异不仅仅是文体的差异而已。

四、关于原诗及其作者

关于英文原诗，英文维基百科有如下专门介绍：

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is an eight-line poem by Robert Frost, written in 1923, and published in the Yale Review in October of that year. It was later published in the collection New Hampshire 1923) that earned Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In 1953, Alfred R. Ferguson wrote "perhaps no single poem more fully embodies the ambiguous balance between paradisiac good and the paradoxically more fruitful human good than 'Nothing Gold Can Stay,' a poem in which the metaphors of Eden and the Fall cohere with the idea of felix culpa." {Felix culpa is a Latin phrase that comes from the words Felix (meaning "happy," "lucky," or blessed") and Culpa (meaning "fault" or "fall"), and in the Catholic tradition is most often translated "Fortunate Fall."}

Six years later, John A. Rea, wrote about the poem's "alliterative symmetry", citing as examples the second line's "hardest - hue -hold" and the seventh's "dawn - down - day"; he also points out how the "stressed vowel nuclei also contribute strongly to the structure of the poem" since the backround diphthongs bind the lines of the poem's first quatrain together while the front rising diphthongs do the same for the last four lines.

In 1984, William H. Pritchard called the poem's "perfectly limpid, toneless assertion" an example of Frost demonstrating how "his excellence extended also to the shortest of figures", and fitting Frost's "later definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion."

In 1993, George F. Bagby wrote the poem "projects a fairly comprehensive vision of experience" in a typical but "extraordinarily compressed" example of synecdoche that "moves from a detail of vegetable growth to the history of human failure and suffering."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Gold_Can_Stay_(poem)

美国学术界对于这首诗有多种不同的解读，这些观点已经汇编成专门分析研究这首诗的网页。试举一例，来自Jeffrey Meyers：

Another brilliant, complex and resonant short poem, "Nothing Cold Can Stay," reconsiders (like several lyrics in A Boy's Will) the perennial theme of mutability. The opening line--"Nature's first green is gold"--is extremely ambiguous. It could mean either that nature's first green in the springtime has now turned to autumnal gold or that nature's first growth is golden, or precious, because it lasts such a short time, cannot hold its color and fades as soon as the leaves fall in autumn. The fall of the leaves is connected to the Fall of Man, when " Eden sank to grief." Just as the dawn inevitably "goes down" (like the leaves) to day, so the negative thought in the title--which suggests the transience of all things--is inevitably and tragically repeated in the last line of the poem.

From Robert Frost: A Biography. by Jeffrey Meyers

[http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gold.htm]