Emily Dickinson（艾米莉·狄金森，1830-1886）是在死后受到更多关注的美国女诗人。在她的这首题为Success Is Counted Sweetest的诗中，她并没有具体说什么是成功，只是说什么人在什么时候最能理解成功的含义，其中所用的强烈对比给读者留下非常深刻的印象。

一、原诗与译稿 

二、原诗词汇与句型难点解析以及翻译理据

1、  第二段最后一行结尾处并没有标点符号，所以第二段和第三段实际上是一个有比较对象（so…as…）的长句，第二段和第三段不能各自独立成章。长句如下：

Not one of all the purple Host who took the Flag today can tell the definition so clear of Victory as he defeated -- dying --on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph burst agonized and clear!

这个长句可以由如下短句扩展而来：

Not one of the purple Host can tell the definition of victory so clear as he who is defeated and dying.

2、  第二段第一行的否定句式如何理解仍然存疑。Not one of them与No one of them是否有区别呢？笔者认为是有的，后者表达的是绝对否定。

3、   第二段第一行the purple Host意为军队，而第二行took the flag是夺旗的意思，即purple Host (army) and took the Flag (captured the flag, signifying victory)。[http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Success.html]

4、  第三段第二行 on whose forbidden ear的forbidden一词作形容词解，意为excluded from use or mention（"forbidden fruit"），所以原句大意为：最不应该派上用场的耳朵（偏偏充塞着对方高奏的凯歌）。

三、其他译者译文选录

请关注“猎人的诗情画意(独一无二诗歌翻译专门博客/频繁更新全部原创）”发表的题为《成功最甜蜜》的译文。http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=880201&PostID=16423001&idWriter=0&Key=0

另：蒲隆译文

从未取得成功的人们，
认为成功最为甜蜜。
欲品味玉液琼浆
只有你迫切急需。

紫袍裹身的诸公
如今执掌着大旗
谁也说不清楚
胜利的确切含义

他——奄奄一息的败将——
耳朵已经颓唐
忽又迸发出遥远的凯歌
如此痛苦而嘹亮！*

——————————————

* [美]狄金森（Dickinson, E.）：狄金森诗选。蒲隆译。上海：上海译文出版社，2010.10, pp. 4-5

四、关于原诗及其作者

艾米莉·狄金森（Emily Dickinson，1830-1886）这位美国女诗人近年来在汉语诗歌界的名气越来越大。上海译文出版社2010年10月出版了蒲隆翻译的《狄金森诗选》。该书封底写道：这个选本选诗600首，是艾米莉·狄金森诗选中一个相当周全的选本，“可以说是国内迄今为止最全面、最权威的艾米莉·狄金森诗选”。当然，严格地说，上海译文出版社出版的这部《狄金森诗选》并非英文原文意义上的Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson，而是多个汉语译本中的一个而已。（对这个汉语译本，黄福海先生在自己的博克里曾做过评论，题为：译诗与传承——评蒲隆译《狄金森诗选》兼谈当下的译诗。）

英文维基百科有很详细的关于这位美国女诗人的介绍。其中关于她生平和写作风格的介绍颇为值得关注。摘录如下：

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Structure and syntax

The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed". Dickinson avoids pentameter, opting more generally for trimeter, tetrameter and, less often, dimeter. Sometimes her use of these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant rhyme. In some of her poems, she varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one, two and four, while only using tetrameter for line three.

Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also use the common meter, employing alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Familiar examples of such songs are " Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Amazing Grace'".

Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song-forms but also with psalms and riddles, citing the following example: "Who is the East? / The Yellow Man / Who may be Purple if he can / That carries the Sun. / Who is the West? / The Purple Man / Who may be Yellow if He can / That lets Him out again."

Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" by Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation (line lengths and line breaks). Following the publication of one of the few poems that appeared in her lifetime – "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", published as "The Snake" in the Republican – Dickinson complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a full stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the entire poem.

As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you"; Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy" of the encounter; and The Republican's punctuation renders "her lines more commonplace". With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson's structures and syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are "aesthetically based". Although Johnson's landmark 1955 edition of poems was relatively unaltered from the original, later scholars critiqued it for deviating from the style and layout of Dickinson's manuscripts. Meaningful distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing arrangements of text on the page. Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin also used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson]