On a Child’s Death
- You shadowy armies of the dead
- Why did you take the starlike head
- The faltering feet, the little hand?
- For purple kings are in your band
- And there the hearts of poets beat;
- Why did you take the faltering feet?
- She had much need of some fair thing
- To make love spread his quiet wing
- Above the tumult of her days
- And shut out foolish blame and praise.
- She has her squirrel and her birds
- But these have no sweet human words
- And cannot call her by her name:
- Their love is but a woodland flame.
- You wealthy armies of the dead
- Why did you take the starlike head?
关于一个孩子的死
- 你们，死者的阴魂军队，
- 为什么长着星星般脑袋、
- 踉跄的脚步、小小手掌？
- 你们队伍中有绛袍君王，
- 诗人的心房在其中跳荡；
- 你们为什么要脚步踉跄？
- 她很需要用漂亮的东西
- 使爱神展开平静的翅翼
- 遮护她有生之日的动乱，
- 闭拒愚蠢的责难和夸赞。
- 她虽有她的鸟雀和松鼠，
- 但这些没有人类的蜜语，
- 不会喊她名字把她呼唤：
- 它们的爱只是林地火焰。
- 你们，死者的富裕军队，
- 为什么长着星星般脑袋？
傅浩 译
附
purple kings: 似乎是一种剑兰，不过紫色也常与皇室联系起来。
长着：原文"take"，不理解为何傅浩做此翻译，后文「星星般脑袋、踉跄的脚步、小小手掌」个人认为指死去的乔治，"take"应用「夺去」翻译。
你们为什么要脚步踉跄：同上。
维护者注——
茉德·冈与法国政客吕西安·米洛瓦的私生子乔治于1891年8月31日死于脑膜炎。叶芝当时不明真相，以为孩子是茉德·冈领养的，甚至以为是个女孩。
她有生之日的动乱：暗示茉德·冈因热衷政治活动而远离平静的个人生活。
她的鸟雀和松鼠：茉德·冈喜欢小动物，常常带着各种宠物旅行或参与公开活动。
叶芝诗集（增订本） 2018 ——
This moving lyric commemorates the death of Maud Gonne’s illegitimate child Georges, who died of illness (probably meningitis) on August 31, 1891. Although she at first led Yeats and others to think that the child was adopted and sometimes even that it was a girl, the boy Georges was born in early 1890 to Gonne and her lover, the French political journalist Lucien Millevoye. At the time of the death, Yeats still did not know that Gonne was the child’s birth mother. Her sorrow at the death and belief in occult forces led Gonne to try to reincarnate Georges’s soul through intercourse with Millevoye in the child’s burial vault, an effort that resulted in the birth of their daughter Iseult on August 6, 1894. This version, transcribed into Lady Gregory’s copy of Yeats’s Poems (1899), appears to derive from the most advanced of the three versions in the MBY 548 album and, like that one, is dated September 5, 1893.
The “tumult of her days”: suggests Gonne’s political activism, which Yeats saw as leading her away from tranquil personal love.
“her squirrel and her birds”: Gonne was fond of animals, and often appeared in public and even traveled with various of her pets.
George Bornstein—