战斗并等待＃1：Zbigniew Herbert

曾暗自喜欢、激赏波兰诗人Zbigniew Herbert，在国内读过不多的几首中译（包括一首意味深长而又信手拈来的唱和之作——赠与米沃什，使人不禁联想他们不同的人生历程），也震动于Seamus Heaney对他的评论。但西方主流文学界对他的接受似乎有着相当不同的语境：冷战、后冷战的逻辑和具有统一色彩的“完整欧洲”（而非被铁幕分割）的文明叙事总是若隐若现。最近我个人的重读，因为这语境转换，总是提不起以前的兴致。Herbert本身有相当一批哲学思考和反讽都极为浓厚的作品，但波兰语，据我猜测，似乎有一种低吟的质地，不仅是沉思，更不乏克制的抒情。抄录一首英译，并非他的代表作。

Rains in Autumn

When my older brother
came back from the war
he had a little silver star on his forehead
and under the star
an abyss

a splinter of shrapnel
hit him at Verdun
or perhaps at Grunwald
(he didn't remember the details)
he talked a lot
in many languages
but most of all he liked
the language of history

until losing breath
he called to his dead comrades under the ground
Roland Jones Hannibal

he shouted
that this is the last crusade
soon Carthage will fall
and then sobing confessed
that Napoleon doesn't like him

we watched
him become paler
his senses abandoned him
slowly he was turning into a monument

into musical shells of ears
entered a stone forest

the skin of his face
was fastened
with two blind dry
buttons of eyes

all he had left
was touch

what stories
he told with his hands
in the right he had romances
in the left soldier's memories

they took my brother
and carried him out of town

he returns now every autumn
thin and quiet
he doesn't want to enter the house
he knocks at the window for me to come out

we walk on the streets
and he tells me
unbelievable tales
touching my face
with blind fingers of weeping

片断＃6

Q Sahlins对Vernant的总结很好，摘抄于此：Vernant in fact begins by comparing Athenian royal traditions with the divine kings of Scythian legend. In repeated quarrells over the succession, the Athenian princes eventuanlly divide between them the functions -- priestly, military and economic -- that were characteristically united in Indo-European kingships of the heroic age. So commences the idea of politics as the mutual accommodation of differences, whose more democratic fomr will be achieved in the polis. But in contrast to the Athennian princes, the divinely favored grandson of the Scythian Zeus is alone accorded royal power by his older brothers, as he alone is able to carry off the prototypical golden objects emblematic of the Dumezilian three functions: the libation cup, the war ax, and the plow... Here the sovereign is classically presented, "as a person above and beyond the various functional classes that made up society, since he represented them all; and since all equally found in him the virtues by which they defined themselves, he no longer belong to anyone of them." At once encompassing and transcending the society, the divine king is able to mediate its relations to the cosmos -- which thus also respondes, in its own natural order, to his soveeign powers.
In the polis, however, an organization constituted by its self-awareness as a human community, the arche (sovereign power) "came to be everybody's business" (women and slaves, as usual, excepted). Rotating the authority among the several groups of citizens thus making domination and submission alternating sides of the same relationships, rendering its decisions by public debate among equals in the public square, hence as open cavenants openly arrived at, so elevating speeck to preeminece over all other instruments of power, speech that was no longer the compelling ritual word pronounced from on high but an argument to be judged as persuasive in the light of wisdom and knowledge verifiable by all as something called truth, the polis, by these and many other means, subjected social action to the collective will and made men conscious of their history as human history. (The Anthropology of History, p. 33-4)