导论 Introduction

Robert Burns is arguably the world's best-loved poet and songwriter. With statues of the poet in cities and towns throughout Britain, in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and an annual international celebration of Burns' Night on his birthday, 25 January, his influence reaches far beyond his native Scotland. While it reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, as Burns' Clubs and other societies for Scottish expatriates spread, via emigration and settlement, throughout the British colonies and beyond, it still survives today. Most English-speakers may only know a verse or two of “Auld Lang Syne”, traditionally sung at midnight on New Year's Eve, and perhaps some of his second most famous song, “A Red, Red Rose”, but they still know Robert Burns' name and reputation. In Scotland itself, Burns is a vital part of the representation of Scottishness to the rest of the world. His birthplace and several other locations associated with his life and works are preserved as visitor centres and museums. His image adorns mugs, T-shirts, shortbread tins, and all the paraphernalia associated with “tartanry”, or a clichéd version of Scottishness. Yet his work also continues to be read, to be taught to schoolchildren and students, to attract academic study, and to influence contemporary poets, novelists, singers and songwriters. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, and in particular in relation to recent debates about Scottish independence and the September 2014 independence referendum, Robert Burns' place in Scotland and the wider world is very much a live and sometimes controversial issue.

Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway in Ayrshire, a coastal region in south-west Scotland, the eldest child of William Burns, gardener and tenant farmer, and his wife Agnes Broun; he died 37 years later in Dumfries, in the neighbouring region of Dumfries and Galloway. Other than short periods of travelling and visiting the city, his life was spent in what by our standards is a small geographical area, and he never left the borders of Scotland. He was emphatically and in his own estimation a local poet, writing in his commonplace book in August 1785 that despite the many attractions of Ayrshire:

We have never had one Scotch Poet of any eminence, to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes on Aire. And the heathy, mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy, but, Alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and education.

Here we see Burns imagining what he was about to achieve, in his book of poems published a year later: putting Ayrshire definitively on the map as a subject for literature. When he wrote that he felt himself “unequal” to the task, this is in part false modesty. By this date his poetry was highly esteemed in local circles and he knew his own worth. He was, however, legitimately concerned about his lack of education compared to the poets he admired, such as the highly educated Londoner Alexander Pope, or the Scottish poet and his near-contemporary Robert Fergusson, who died in poverty but had been educated at the prestigious University of St Andrew. Burns' formal schooling, in contrast, had been extremely limited. As the eldest son of a tenant farmer, on farms that were scarcely profitable, he was helping out with hard manual labour in the field and on the farm from the age of 10. Throughout his life, even when literary success gave him other options, Burns worked extremely hard, was always short of money, and struggled to support his family. He understood the difficulty of combining poetry and labour in a way that few previous poets had.

The influential vision of Burns as a “Heaven-taught ploughman”, however, in the famous words of an early review, is more complicated than it might seem. In the late eighteenth century, ideas of “natural” genius and divinely inspired poetry were very fashionable, as what we now call the emergence of Romantic movement in English literature. Burns recognized that the “peasant poet” was a marketable category. By presenting himself as the untaught, rustic farmer, using homely Scots in his poetry and wearing his farmer's boots to exclusive Edinburgh gatherings, he ensured that he and his works seemed exotic and exciting to the higher-class literary readers whose patronage was necessary for success. In fact, Burns' class position was more ambiguous than it might seem. As a tenant farmer, like his father before him, he was not a landowner, but he was an employer of servants rather than a servant himself. He worked the land alongside men and boys whose wages he paid. And although his days were generally filled with hard work, he managed to find the leisure time for a considerable amount of reading and self-education. William Burns had actively promoted the education of his sons, in hiring a tutor, John Murdoch, who stayed in touch with the young Burns and helped to shape his literary tastes, in buying books—expensive luxury goods in this period—to school his sons himself, and in sending them for further instruction whenever they could be spared from farm work. By the time Burns was a teenager he had read erratically but widely and memorized substantial parts of his favourite authors, could write very well in standard English, knew enough French to read French literature, and had learnt practical skills such as surveying and mathematics. A poem such as “Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux”, for instance, indicates his literary sophistication. “Ruisseaux” is a double pun on his surname: it can be translated as “streams” (a “burn” in Scots is a small stream), but is also a reference to the French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially famous in this period for his theories about “natural” education. Burns can assume that the small circle of readers for this unpublished poem will understand and appreciate such references.

The young Burns, then, was a literary-minded and highly intelligent young man who enjoyed the company of his peers: men who were lawyers, teachers, clerks and farmers like himself. In 1777, when he was 18, his father moved the family to a farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton. Here Burns came into contact with enough like-minded young men to form a debating (and drinking) society, the Bachelor's Club. Burns also joined the Freemasons, which gave him access to another all-male society involving men of varying social class. His father's legal and financial troubles in disputes with his landlord and his increasing ill health, however, made this a difficult period, and it seems that Burns went through a period of intense depression and self-doubt, probably related to anxiety about his future career, in the early 1780s.

In 1785, after the death of their father, Robert and his brother Gilbert rented and worked on the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, a lively small town. In the succeeding two years, Burns experienced the most turbulent period of his life. His first child was born to a farm servant at Lochlea, Elizabeth Paton, in May 1785. By this time he met his future wife Jean Armour in Mauchline, and by early 1786 she was pregnant with twins and Burns was being pursued by the church authorities for fornication and by her angry father, opposed to his daughter's possible marriage to a young man with a very doubtful reputation. Disillusioned with Jean, Burns also became involved with “Highland Mary” (Margaret Campbell) in the spring of 1786. Throughout spring, summer, and autumn of that year, he seriously considered emigration to Jamaica (possibly with Campbell, who died unexpectedly in October 1786) to take up a post on the sugar plantations, repeatedly stating that he had booked passage on a ship, and then failing to take it up. It is not surprising that he was interested in fleeing his tangled affairs. His life, however, was about to change dramatically. For during the same brief period, from summer 1785 to summer 1786, he had written an astonishing series of poems in the Scots language, including many of his most admired works, and on 31 July 1786,Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published by a local printer at Kilmarnock.

The poems and songs included inPoems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect are self-conscious, playful, political and very aware of their relationships to literary tradition. Burns chose to open the collection with “The Twa Dogs”, a dialect poem in which two animals reflect upon the habits of their respective masters, a working man and a member of the upper classes. As the first poem in the collection, it immediately highlights Burns' politics in his satirical take on upper-class attitudes and his defence of working men and women. Caesar, the higher-class dog, marvels that:

Lord man, our gentry care as little

For delvers, ditchers, an' sic cattle;

They gang as saucy by poor folk,

As I wad by a stinkan brock.

By comparing working men to “cattle”, and to a “stinkan brock” (a badger), Caesar highlights the unfeeling brutality of the upper classes to whom workers are no more than animals. This opening poem also highlights Burns' superb use of Scots. He was fluent in two languages, Scots dialect and standard English, switching with ease between the two to prove a point. In “The Twa Dogs”, for example, the lower-class Luath speaks in stronger dialect than his better-bred companion. By following this initial salvo with two poems celebrating Scotch whisky and lamenting English laws and taxes on it, and then by following this with a highly satirical account of a religious gathering in Ayrshire, “The Holy Fair”, Burns declared himself as an outspoken, liberal man of the world, and a Scotsman unafraid of criticizing the British government and the Church and determined to expose hypocrisy and tyranny wherever he found them.

When Caesar suggests that the gentry view the poor as cattle, the implication is that they are seen as naturally less intelligent and able than the upper classes. This is the attitude that Burns most strongly satirizes. His poems repeatedly make the case that oppression is man-made: social relations are constructed rather than being part of a natural order determined by God. This is also the theme of Burns' other characteristic deployments of creatures and flowers to satirize and comment on human attitudes, most notably in his famous “To a Mouse”, but also in “To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church”, “To a Mountain-Daisy” and in one of his earliest poems, “Poor Mailie's Elegy”. Through his comments on small creatures and flowers usually ignored by the humans above them, Burns draws attention to differing kinds of inequality, and presents his readers with a new perspective on the world. Like the fashionable young woman in “To a Louse”, giving herself airs without realizing that a small verminous creature is making its way to the top of her best Sunday hat, Burns' readers need “to see oursels as others see us”, a power which his poetry helps to provide.

Above all,Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect is a collection about poetry itself, and about Burns' status as a labouring-class poet. In one of the most ambitious poems in the collection, “A Vision”, the scene opens with the poet, after a busy day in the fields, regretting his wasted time spent on poetry:

All in this mottie, misty clime,

I backward mus'd on wasted time,

How I had spent my youthfu' prime,

An' done nae-thing,

But stringing blethers up in rhyme

For fools to sing. (lines 19-24)

As he despairs, however, a woman enters, and Burns recognizes her as “some SCOTTISH MUSE”, in fact a Muse local to Ayrshire, Coila. In a characteristic move, rather than being awestruck by this visitation, Burns is struck instead by his visitor's attractive legs, “Sae straught, sae taper, tight and clean” (l.65). This “native Muse” lectures Burns on the Scottish literary tradition and on his future as a rustic, local bard, encouraging him to persevere despite his lowliness:

“Yet all beneath th'unrivall'd Rose,

The lowly Daisy sweetly blows;

Tho' large the forest's Monarch throws

His army shade,

Yet green the juicy Hawthorn grows,

A down the glade.” (lines 205-210)

Her words here repeat the standard eighteenth and nineteenth-century view of the labouring class poet, who should be modest, humble, and valuable within given limitations. But the readers, aware of Burns' lustful gaze at Coila earlier in the poem, might wonder about the extent to which he necessarily agrees with (or is paying attention to) this rousing speech. “The Vision” is both a bold claim for Burns' status as the anointed inheritor of a Scottish tradition—shown in the characteristic form of the traditional “habbie stanza” (with aaabab rhymes and two short lines on the b rhymes) here—and a slightly sardonic take on tradition. As in many of Burns' best poems, “The Vision” is simultaneously sincere and tongue-in-cheek.

Burns' collection was an instant success, and its reputation quickly spread beyond those who were already personally familiar with Burns and might have encountered his poems through local manuscript circulation. By November 1786 Burns was already planning a second, expanded edition, which was published in Edinburgh in spring 1787 with over 1300 individual subscribers. Plans of emigrating were shelved as Burns enjoyed his new-found literary reputation. He visited Edinburgh for the first time and attracted new, higher-class patrons, friends and acquaintances, including many of the best-known figures of his day. He toured parts of Scotland and began his famous correspondence with “Clarinda”, Mrs Agnes McLehose (typically of Burns, professing his undying love to a higher-class woman while also engaged in a sexual affair with her servant), and he renewed his involvement with Jean Armour (and others). In April 1788, shortly after Jean had given birth to a second set of short-lived twins fathered by Burns, he and Jean married. Seemingly ready to settle down, Burns moved his new family to a farm at Ellisland in Dumfriesshire and, helped by his patrons, began a new career as an Exciseman, a government employee collecting taxes on goods and policing smuggling along the coast.

Most importantly for Burns' later poetic career, it was during his visit to Edinburgh that Burns made the acquaintance of James Johnson, who solicited him to collect songs for his anthology, theScots Musical Museum. Burns had always been interested in Scottish song. His mother was a notable singer, and part of his attraction to his wife Jean was her sweet voice. Working as a collector and contributor for Johnson and then George Thomson, over 120 of his songs were published in theScots Musical Museum (issued 1787-1803) and in George Thomson'sSelect Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793-1846). As was standard in this period, Burns did not simply record lyrics and tunes provided by others. He also improved existing songs and produced new lyrics for old tunes, shaping the tradition as much as preserving it, and contributing significantly to the popularity of Scottish song in this period. Most of the songs attributed to Burns are a hybrid combination of familiar tunes and lyrics, known through oral circulation, and new lyrics added by Burns himself. In many cases, moreover, Burns deliberately chose to represent a new song that he had composed himself as part of an older tradition.

The majority of Burns' songs deal with love and courtship, with relationships between men and women. Romantic love and sexual desire had loomed large in Burns' life and his poetry, and he celebrated both as natural impulses, irrespective of what the Church and state might say about them. Alongside his published songs run the more explicitly sexual versions of these songs and others, unpublished in Burns' lifetime but circulated among his male friends and drinking companions. Love and sex, in Burns' versions of Scottish folk songs, promise moments of profound happiness and a refuge and escape from the hardships of working life. In his famous song to the tune “Corn rigs are bonie”, the speaker spends one night with his lover in the cornfield, and concludes, looking back:

But a' the pleasures ere I saw

Tho' three times doubled fairly

That happy night was worth them a'

Amang the rigs o'barley.

As is characteristic of Burns' songs, this combines pleasure in a familiar pastoral scene (the field after harvest) with the joys of love. While many of Burns' poems beautifully lament the sorrows of love, such as “Ye banks and braes of bonnie Doon” and “Ae fond kiss”, they unite in this celebration of love and sexuality as the best that life has to offer.

Burns knew, however, that in the highly religious and largely conservative society of late eighteenth-century Scotland, such celebrations came with a price. He also knew that the price was often paid by women. In his own romantic entanglements and especially in his poems and letters, Burns represented himself as a “rake”, charming and attractive, but unlikely to keep his promises to women and extremely unlikely to remain faithful to one. In “The Rantin' Dog, the Daddie O't”, for instance, a female speaker seems to wish for “Rob”, the “rantin' dog” of the poem, to acknowledge himself as the father of her child:

O wha my babie-clouts will buy?

O wha will tent me when I cry?

Wha will kiss me where I lie?

The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.

The poem moves from a need for financial support (to buy clothes for the baby) to a desire for emotional support. What it does not express, however, is any regret for a presumably illegitimate pregnancy, even though sex outside marriage was considered a sin by the Church and could easily lead (as it had in Jean Armour's case) to estrangement from family and community. In a period in which women, by any measure, suffered from acute legal and social discrimination in relation to questions of sexuality, marriage and childbearing, it is interesting that Burns' lyrics spoken from a female perspective tend to show women as knowing and active participants in the business of love. The speaker of “I'm O'er Young to Marry Yet” presents herself as too young and naive for sex, “And lying in a man's bed, / I'm fley'd it make me eerie, Sir.” The listener assumes that the young girl is resisting the advances of a more experienced man. But in the final stanza, she suggests “But if ye come this gate again, / I'll aulder be gin simmer, Sir,” showing that her position is carefully calculated and, in part, conscious flirtation. Burns' women are not shy about their desires. In one of his most famous lyrics, “O Whistle An' I'll Come To Ye, My Lad”, the female speaker is determined and proactive, boldly inviting her lover to visit her and directing a clandestine courtship:

But warily tent when ye come to court e,

And come nae unless the back-yett be a-jee;

Syne up the back-stile, and let naebody see,

And come as ye were na comin' to me.

Women generally emerge well as the speakers (or singers) of Burns' songs: they are faithful, loyal, and determined, as well as being desirable, and their voices are highly valued.

If love is the main subject of Burns' songs, it is important to note that love and politics often go together, as female speakers celebrate Jacobite heroes in “Charlie is my Darling” and elsewhere. The Jacobite movement, which sought to return the Catholic Stuart kings (particularly the “Young Pretender”, Charles James Stuart) to the throne, and lost decisively in the disastrous battle of Culloden in 1745, was predominately a Scottish movement and had been particularly strongly supported by the Highlands. By the 1790s, nostalgia for the Jacobite cause could supply a means to indicate dissatisfaction with the current political establishment and an attitude generally supportive of revolutionary change. In presenting songs he had written or substantively altered as traditional Jacobite songs, anonymously authored, Burns could express political sentiments that would have been seen as dangerously radical if they related to present-day events. The poems “Highland Laddie” and “Highland Harry”, for instance, both present female speakers whose Highland lovers are fighting or about to fight for the Jacobite cause, “for freedom and my King.” In “Highland Harry”, the speaker concludes:

O, were some villains hangit high,

And ilka body had their ain,

Then I might see the joyfu' sight,

My Highland Harry back again!

Printed in 1790, in a revolutionary period when the British government was deeply paranoid about events in France, the wish that “ilka body had their ain” sounds suspiciously like a plea for equal rights. Burns' Jacobite songs are ambiguous about whether the villainy described is safely located in the past. They are also radical to some degree simply in their sympathetic portrayal of Highlanders, who had been subject to deeply negative stereotyping in the late nineteenth century; one of Burns' unpublished poems, “Epistle to the President of the Highland Society”, was a fierce defence of the Highlanders' rights.

These song collections increasingly occupied Burns' poetic impulse in his years in Dumfries, though he also produced enough new poems and original songs for a revised 2 volume edition ofPoems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1793. The late 1780s and 1790s, as Burns coped with a rapidly growing family (four legitimate and at least two illegitimate children), an unprofitable farm, and a demanding new job, were difficult but exciting times. Burns eagerly followed news about the French Revolution of 1789 and its consequences. Given that he worked in a government position, he had to be careful about expressing political opinions, but his broad sympathy for the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity shine through in letters and writings from this period. In the early 1790s, he was confident enough of his rising career in the Excise to give up farming and move to the town of Dumfries. As he progressed in the Excise, however, his health declined. During 1795 he fell seriously ill, never fully recovering, and in July 1796 he died, probably of rheumatic fever.

Burns' life was relatively short. It was, however, packed with drama in his many friendships and courtships, and lived in the knowledge that the last decades of the eighteenth century were exciting and turbulent times in Europe, America and the wider world. Far from being a remote or isolated region, Burns' part of Scotland was linked through trade and commerce to the wider world and heavily invested in international affairs. Better than any other writer of his period, Burns represents this negotiation between a local and global Scotland, between seemingly petty provincial matters and wider literary, philosophical and political concerns, between old and new.

Both poems and songs display his great gift at moving seamlessly between satire and sincerity, cynicism and heartfelt emotion, trenchant social commentary and idealism. In the brilliant combinations of lyric and tune in his songs, and the use of memorable and familiar verse forms in his poems, many of his poems and songs quickly became staples of the Scottish literary and folksong tradition. From the moment of his death, Burns became a canonical writer, and biographical and literary interest in his life and works only continued to grow in the succeeding century.

Burns' use of Scots, and indeed, his involvement in collecting and preserving the musical traditions of Scotland, indicated his national loyalty. By choosing particular kinds of language, rather than the standard English of some of his other poems and songs, he could declare his pride in Scottish identity and promote the language spoken by working people. Poems such as the famous “Scots Wha Hae” have been widely adopted, after Burns' death, as the ultimate statements of Scottish nationalism. This misrepresents the case: nationalism in the twentieth and twenty-first century sense was not available to Burns. Love and respect for his native land, for its natural beauty, its history and culture, are, however, characteristic of all his poems. He never allows the reader or listener to forget that he is a distinctively Scottish poet. Yet while his songs speak of and about Scotland, usually in Scots, their themes of love and loss, of memory and nostalgia, give them a wider appeal. It is to be hoped that the extensive translations presented here, many for the first time in Chinese, will broaden this appeal still more, and find a new and expanded audience for Burns' songs in China.

Professor Kirstie Blair

University of Stirling

October 2015

Selected bibliography

Burns, R. (1985).The Letters of Robert Burns. J. De Lancey Ferguson & G. Ross Roy (eds.), 2nd edn, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Burns, R. (2014). Selected Poems and Songs. In Robert P. Irvine. (ed.).Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carruthers, G. (2006).Robert Burns. Writers and Their Work. Tavistock: Northcote House.

Crawford, R. (ed.). (1997).Robert Burns and Cultural Authority. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Crawford, R. (2009).The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape.

Simpson, K. (ed.). (1997).Love and Liberty: Robert Burns, a Bicentenary Celebration. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.

罗伯特·彭斯是世界上无可争议的最受读者喜爱的诗人和歌词作家。彭斯的雕像遍布英国的城市和乡村，在美国、加拿大、澳大利亚、新西兰也塑有彭斯的雕像；一年一度的彭斯之夜在每年的1月25日，即彭斯诞辰日当天举办，而其影响力远远超出诗人的家乡苏格兰。彭斯俱乐部，还有其他一些苏格兰社会团体（苏格兰侨民通过移民定居将此类社交团体传入几乎整个英国殖民地地区），虽达到顶峰时期是在19世纪，但至今仍旧存在。大多数英语国家的人即使只了解一两首像《过去的好时光》（通常在圣诞夜演唱），或《一朵红红的玫瑰》这样耳熟能详的歌曲，但他们仍然知道罗伯特·彭斯和他的盛誉。在苏格兰，对全世界而言，彭斯本身就是代表苏格兰身份的至关重要的一部分。诗人出生地和其他几个与诗人生活或作品创作相关的场所都留存下来，现作为游客中心和博物馆供游人参观。和印有“格子花呢”的所有物品一样，印有彭斯像的装饰杯、T恤、酥饼罐，都成为苏格兰的传统标志。直到现在，他的作品仍旧被人们传颂，作为教材入选中小学课本，吸引学术界纷纷对其进行研究，影响了众多当代诗人、小说家、歌手和词曲作家。事实上，在21世纪，尤其是最近有关苏格兰独立的争论和2014年9月独立公投事件上，罗伯特·彭斯在苏格兰以及全世界的地位问题成为很热门甚至是有争议的话题。

1795年，彭斯出生于艾尔郡的阿洛韦，位于苏格兰西南部的沿海地区。彭斯是家中长子。他的父亲威廉·彭斯是一名园艺工、佃农。他的母亲是艾格尼丝·布龙。37年后彭斯在邻近敦夫里斯郡和加洛韦的地方去世。除了短暂的旅行和游历城市外，他的生活在我们看来就是围绕在一个小的区域内，从未离开过苏格兰。彭斯认为并且强调自己就是一名本土诗人，在1785年8月他的一本摘录簿中，他写道，尽管艾尔郡有许多景点：

我们从未有过一名卓越的苏格兰诗人来描写欧文河两岸肥沃的土壤、浪漫的林地和幽静的亚耳河。健美的高山和蜿蜒的杜恩河足以和泰河、福思河和埃特里克的粗花呢相媲美。若这是一种疾病，我愿意来治疗它。但是，唉！我真是难以胜任这工作。我不是什么天才，也没受过良好的教育。

在这里我们看到彭斯想象他即将实现自己的梦想，他的诗集一年之后将出版：艾尔郡定会成为一个文学的主题。他说他觉得自己“难以胜任”这项任务，这未免有些过于谦虚了。当时彭斯的诗歌在当地人中很受追捧，他深知自己的价值。然而，与彭斯自己崇拜的那些受过高等教育的诗人相比，彭斯的担忧也有情可原，如伦敦诗人亚历山大·蒲柏，或者是同代人苏格兰诗人罗伯特·弗格森，后者虽一直在贫困中挣扎，却在著名的圣安德鲁大学接受过教育。相比之下，彭斯在正规学校受到的教育微乎其微。彭斯家的农场几乎挣不到什么钱，作为一个佃农的长子，他从10岁开始就在农场劳作以补贴家用。虽然文学上的成就给了彭斯除务农外的其他选择，但诗人总是缺钱并要供养家庭，他不得不十分努力地工作。他深知一边作诗一边务农的艰难，而之前几乎没有诗人像他这样。

然而，在有关彭斯的早期著名评论中将其打造成颇有影响力的“天赋异禀的农夫”形象，还是颇费心思的。在18世纪末，“自然”天才和那些由灵感而发创作的诗歌很受欢迎，我们称之为英国浪漫主义运动开始出现。彭斯意识到“农民诗人”将会很有市场。他将自己塑造成一个未接受过正规教育的淳朴农民形象，在其诗歌中使用苏格兰方言，穿具有爱丁堡特色的农靴。他深信，彭斯其人和其诗歌的独具特色，一定会吸引上层的读者，而他们的资助对于彭斯的成功十分必要。实际上，彭斯的阶级地位很模糊。和他父亲一样，虽是佃农，没有土地，却雇佣着几个佣人。虽然彭斯和其他人一样在田里劳作，他却是雇主，支付给佣人工资。尽管每日都要辛苦工作，他仍然能找出空暇时间大量阅读和自学充电。威廉·彭斯积极鼓励儿子接受教育，他聘请了一位家庭教师——约翰·默多克，默多克一直和年轻的彭斯有联系，也为塑造彭斯的文学品味起了重要作用。威廉·彭斯还购买了很多书籍——这在当时是十分昂贵的奢侈品——用来教他的儿子们，除农忙时间外，还把他们送出去学习。在彭斯十几岁的时候，虽只是在闲暇时读书学习，其阅读却十分广泛，能背诵很多他喜欢的作者的代表作品，能书写标准的英语，会法语并能读懂法国的文学作品，还学到了一些实用技能，如测量学和数学。例如，在彭斯的《罗伯特·卢梭挽歌》这首诗中，他的文学功底可见一斑。“Ruisseaux”一词作为姓氏一语双关：可以翻译成“溪流”（“burn”在苏格兰语中就是小溪流的意思），也可指法国作家、哲学家让-雅克·卢梭，卢梭的“自然”教育理论在当时十分有名。彭斯认为这首诗未发表前只有一小部分读者可以理解欣赏其所蕴含的寓意。

年轻时的彭斯很有文学头脑并且十分聪明，他喜欢和同龄的男青年在一起，比如律师、教师、职员还有和他一样的农民。1777年，彭斯18岁，父亲将家搬到了洛河里（Lochlea）的农场，位于塔博尔顿附近。在这里彭斯结识了很多志同道合的年轻人，他们一起创办了辩论（饮酒）社团——单身俱乐部。彭斯还加入了共济会，这使他有机会接触到另外一个男性社团——这里的年轻人来自社会的各个阶层。然而，18世纪80年代早期可谓是彭斯的困难时期。他父亲与出租给他们土地的人产生法律和财务纠纷，他自己身体也每况愈下。这一切让彭斯经历着抑郁和自我怀疑，他甚至一度对自己的将来感到焦虑。

1785年，彭斯的父亲威廉·彭斯去世。于是彭斯和他的弟弟吉尔伯特搬到莫斯吉尔农场并在那里劳动，附近是莫克林，一个热闹的小镇。在随后的两年中，彭斯经历了他一生中最动荡的时期。1785年5月，彭斯的第一个孩子（由其佣人伊丽莎白·佩顿所生）在洛河里农场出生。而与此同时，他遇到了未来的妻子琴·阿莫尔（Jean Armour）。1786年年初，琴怀了孕并且怀的是一对双胞胎，而彭斯却以淫乱的名义遭到教会和琴的父亲强烈谴责，琴的父亲也极力反对女儿嫁给一个名誉不清不白的人。自知与琴的感情无望，1786年春，彭斯选择和“高原玛丽”（坎贝尔·玛格丽特）在一起。当年的春季到秋季，彭斯曾十分慎重地打算移民到牙买加（很可能打算与坎贝尔一同移民，然而在1786年10月坎贝尔突然去世），去当地一个糖种植园就职。彭斯曾反复说过自己已经预订了一艘船，最后却没有去。彭斯想摆脱这纠缠混乱的感情生活，故他有移民的打算也并不奇怪。然而，他的生活在那时发生了极大的转变。从1785年夏天到1786年夏天这一较短的时期内，彭斯用苏格兰方言写出了一系列令人惊叹的诗歌，包括许多极富欣赏性的作品。1786年7月31日，彭斯的《苏格兰方言诗集》在基尔马诺克由一个当地印刷商出版。

《苏格兰方言诗集》中的诗和歌都是诗人真实感情的流露，诙谐幽默，有自己的政治立场并延续了文学传统。彭斯将《两只狗》选作开篇诗歌。这首苏格兰方言诗描写了两只狗分别对自己主人——一个劳动人民和一个贵族成员——行为习惯的反思。作为诗集的开篇之作，它显然表达了彭斯的政治立场，即对上流社会的讽刺和对劳动人民的辩护。凯撒，一条生活在上流社会的狗，赞叹道：

天啊，老爷们才不关心

这些掘土挖沟的畜生，

看见了啐一口抬头走过，

就跟我瞅见路边的蜗牛田螺。

通过将劳动人民比作“畜生”“蜗牛、田螺”，凯撒展示了贵族社会对普通民众的残酷、冷漠和无情，视之为动物草芥。彭斯精通两种语言，能在苏格兰方言和标准英语之间自如转换来证明点什么。比如，在《两只狗》中，相比出身贵族的“凯撒”，穷人家的狗“乐斯”说的是苏格兰方言。随后的两首诗，一首庆祝苏格兰的威士忌节；另一首感叹英国的法律和税收制度。下面一首是讽刺诗《神圣的集市》，用来讽刺艾尔郡的宗教集会。彭斯称自己是世上敢说敢当的、直率坦荡的自由人。他不惧怕英国政府和教会，决心披露他们的虚伪和暴政。

凯撒说那些贵族名流视穷人为“畜生”时，这意味着那些贵族认为穷人天生愚笨。对这种观点，彭斯进行了强烈的讽刺和反对。他在诗中反复强调，压迫是人为的：社会关系的构建应遵循上帝造物的自然秩序。彭斯的悯物诗中也常出现类似的主题，用来讽刺人的态度，如他著名的《致老鼠》，再如《致虱子，在教堂里看到一位女士帽子上的一个虱子有感》和《致山菊花》，以及彭斯早期作品《可怜梅莉的挽歌》。通过对人们常常忽视的小生物的描写，彭斯关注到了物种的不平等性，从而带给读者一个观察世界的新视角。正如在《致虱子》中，时髦女郎丝毫没注意到有一只小虱子正在往自己的礼拜日帽子顶部爬去。彭斯想让读者们“像旁人那样将自己看清”。他的诗正是赋予了这样的力量。

总之，《苏格兰方言诗集》就是为了作诗而作的诗集，也凸显了彭斯作为劳动阶级诗人的地位。诗集中最能表达出彭斯雄心壮志的其中一首就是《幻象》，在田里忙碌了一天之后，诗人后悔将时间都花在作诗上：

潮湿、薄雾的气候笼罩着一切，

我必须回忆虚度的时光，

我是怎样耗费美好的青春，

什么也不想做，

只想把胡诌串成清脆的韵律，

让愚人们歌唱。（第19行到24行）

正当彭斯绝望之时，一位女性出现，彭斯将她称为“苏格兰的缪斯”，一个属于艾尔郡的本地缪斯柯依拉。彭斯对她的到访并未感到意外，倒是被柯依拉秀美的双腿吸引，“多么纤直、多么协调、紧致和清爽”。这位“本地的缪斯”给彭斯讲苏格兰的文学传统，设计他的未来使他成为一名纯朴的本地吟游诗人，并鼓励他即使身份低微也要坚持不懈：

“但，在你无与伦比的玫瑰丛下，

谦卑的雏菊散发出阵阵清香；

虽然森林的统治者

在暗中壮大他的部队，

但绿色多汁的山楂树

在沼泽地中郁郁葱葱地生长。”（第205行到210行）

她一遍遍地重复着18、19世纪对劳动阶级诗人的看法，认为诗人应当谦虚、谦逊、有一定价值。但在诗中，读者却发现彭斯在凝视柯依拉时充满欲望的眼神，或许怀疑彭斯是否真的同意（或真的认真听了）她这激情的演说。《幻象》一诗是彭斯作为苏格兰传统的继承人对其定位的大胆宣扬——可以从诗歌的形式特点，即从传统“哈比诗节（habbie stanza）”看出，前6行依照aaabab押韵，最后2行较短，押b韵——一首基于苏格兰传统的轻讽刺诗。就像彭斯其他许多优秀的作品一样，《幻象》一诗既情感真挚又有半开玩笑的成分。

彭斯的诗集迅速获得了成功。很快彭斯变得十分有名，其声誉迅速蔓延，名声远远超出熟悉彭斯或当地读过他书稿的那些人。到1786年11月，彭斯计划补充再版。1787年春，爱丁堡再版，仅订户购书就有1300本。彭斯将他移民的计划搁置，享受着文学声誉带给他的新的快乐。他第一次去了爱丁堡，吸引了不少上层社会的资助者，并结识了很多朋友，包括一些当时的名人。他游览了苏格兰的几个地方，并和“克拉琳达”——艾格尼丝·麦克尔霍斯夫人（这是彭斯一贯的行为，信誓旦旦地对一个贵族女性表达爱意的同时还和她的仆人有染）在一起，还与旧爱琴·阿莫尔（还有几位女性）复合。1788年4月，在琴生下彭斯的一对双胞胎（后夭折）不久后，两人结婚。看起来彭斯要决心定居下来，他将家搬到了敦弗里斯郡位于埃利斯兰的一座农场，并在资助者的出资下，做了一名政府的收税员，负责征收商品税和收缴沿岸走私商品。

在彭斯创作生涯的后期，一个很重要的事件就是他结识了詹姆斯·约翰逊。约翰逊邀请彭斯为其《苏格兰音乐博览》收集歌曲。彭斯对苏格兰歌曲很有兴趣。他的母亲是一位著名歌手，而妻子琴之所以能吸引彭斯也是因为她甜美的嗓音。彭斯先后为约翰逊和乔治·汤姆森收集歌曲，超过120首歌曲发表在《苏格兰音乐博览》（1787年至1803年发行）和乔治·汤姆森的《苏格兰原创曲调精选集》（1793年至1846年发行）。彭斯并非只是简单地记录歌词和曲调。为保证歌曲标准地道，他对已有的歌曲做了改编，为旧的曲调填写新词，塑造并保留传统，对当时苏格兰歌曲的普及做出了极大贡献。大部分歌曲都是彭斯将人们口口相传的曲调配上自己作的新词。此外，彭斯有意将自己创作的新曲当成古老的传统歌曲。

彭斯的绝大部分歌曲都是有关爱情、求爱或是男女关系的。浪漫的爱情和性爱的欲望充斥在彭斯的生活和他的诗歌中。彭斯大胆地表达着他天性的冲动，丝毫不顾忌政府和教会或许对此有微词。彭斯这些歌曲发表后，这些歌曲的语言直白的低俗版本虽在彭斯在世时没有出版，却在彭斯的男性朋友和酒友间传播开来。在彭斯版的苏格兰歌谣中，爱和性是极大的快乐，是对繁重工作的暂时逃离。在他著名的歌曲《麦垄很可爱》中，诗人和他所爱的人在麦田共度良宵，后诗人回顾说：

我经历过所有快乐，

加在一起几倍还多，

但那一夜胜过这一切，

麦垄之间多么亲热。

将熟悉的田园风光（收获后的田地）和爱情的喜悦相结合是彭斯诗歌的一大特色。彭斯的另一些诗歌是感怀爱情的忧伤，如在《美丽的杜恩河岸和山坡》和《爱之吻》中，宣扬爱和性，将其视为生活所赐的最美时刻。

然而，彭斯知道，在18世纪末宗教盛行和十分保守的苏格兰，这样的大胆示爱是要付出代价的。他也深知，这代价往往由女性来承担。在诗人自己的感情纠葛中，尤其在他的诗歌和信件中，彭斯将自己称为“放荡的男人”，迷人、有魅力，但却不能信守诺言，更不可能只忠于一个女性。例如，在《孩子他爹，你这高嗓门的老东西》中，女主人公希望“罗布”——“咆哮的老狗”承认自己是孩子的父亲：

呵，谁给我的孩子买衣服？

呵，我哭泣时谁哄我不哭？

我躺着时谁来亲吻我？

孩子他爹，你这高嗓门的老东西！

这首诗从需要财物帮助（给宝宝买衣服）到渴望情感关怀。然而，即使是婚外性行为被教堂认为是罪恶的，彭斯也没有在诗歌中表达对于使女人未婚先孕的悔恨。婚外性行为极易导致女性（琴·阿莫尔就是一例）被家庭和社会疏远。当时的女性，无论从任何角度上说，只要是与性、婚姻和生育相关，都遭到了法律和社会的严重歧视。有趣的是，在彭斯的诗歌中，他从女性的角度出发，试图表明女性在爱情行为中是知情者并且积极参与。在《我还不到出嫁的年龄》一诗中，女主人公说自己太年轻天真，不敢做荒唐事，“躺在男人的床上，/ 让我心生恐惧，先生”。读者会认为这个年轻的女孩是在拒绝一个经验丰富的男人的亲昵行为。但在最后一节中，她却暗示“先生，等你夏天再过我家门，/ 我长大一岁成大人”，这说明她对自己的状况是了解的，或者说这就是一种故意的调情。彭斯笔下的女性从不畏惧表达自己爱的欲望。在他著名的《哥吹口哨妹就来》一诗中，这位女性意志坚决，积极主动，大胆邀请意中人去她的住所，并指导小伙子私自幽会：

你要求爱得悄悄来，

后门不开可别来，

后院上楼莫让人见，

见了装作不是为我来！

彭斯诗歌中的女性通常是作为说话者（或歌唱者）出现的：她们忠实、忠诚、意志坚定，同时又可爱，有话语权。

如果说爱情是彭斯诗歌的主题，值得注意的是，爱情和政治往往密不可分，像一些诸如《查理我亲爱的》中，女性称赞雅各宾式的英雄。雅各宾运动试图恢复天主教斯图亚特国王（尤其是幼僭王，查理·詹姆士·斯图亚特）的统治，但在1745年卡洛登决定性战役中惨败。这主要是一场苏格兰人的运动，尤其受到了高地人民的大力支持。到18世纪90年代，人们开始怀念雅各宾时期的统治，对当时政治制度表示不满，支持发生革命。彭斯创作并改编了一些传统的雅各宾歌曲，匿名发表。彭斯可以表达自己的政治观点，但诗歌中若描写当前的政治事件，就会被认为是激进分子，这很危险。例如《高原少年》和《高原哈利》中的女性，她们爱的高地人都为雅各宾的事业而奋斗，“为了自由和我们的国王”。在《高原哈利》中，女主人公总结道：

但愿那些坏蛋被吊死，

每人都有自己的身体。

那时我见美景乐开怀，

我的高原哈利又回来。

本诗出版于1790年，在那个革命时期，英国政府对发生在法国的大革命事件极其担忧，而“每人都有自己的身体”很像是对权利平等的祈愿。彭斯的雅各宾诗歌主题都较为模糊，其中的恶性事件都发生在过去。从某种程度上说，这些诗也比较激进，表达了对高地人的同情，他们在19世纪末被深深地认为具有负面的刻板形象。在彭斯一首未发表的诗中，《写给高地政府领导人的书信》就极力为苏格兰人的权利辩护。

在敦夫里斯郡时，彭斯花费越来越多的时间热衷于搜集这些歌曲，不过，他也写了足够的新诗和一些原创歌曲，用于他的《苏格兰方言诗集》（2卷），这本书于1793年再版。18世纪80年代到90年代，对于彭斯而言生活困难但也有令人激动的时刻：他要养活成员逐渐增多的家庭（四个婚生子女，至少两个非婚生子女），农场几乎赚不到钱，税务官这份新工作极为艰辛。彭斯热切地关注1789年的法国大革命和它后续的影响。彭斯在政府部门任职，表达自己政治观点时他很谨慎，但他在此时期的书信和作品中没少表达他对自由、平等、博爱思想的赞同。18世纪90年代早期，他对自己税收官的职位颇有信心，于是不再经营农场，搬到敦夫里斯郡居住。他事业逐步顺利，但他的健康状况却每况愈下。1795年间，彭斯病了，病得很重，再没能康复，他于1796年逝世，可能死于风湿热。

彭斯的一生很短暂。然而，他的生活中充满戏剧性的友情和爱情。他洞悉对于18世纪末的欧洲、美洲乃至全世界而言既动荡不安又振奋人心这一事实。苏格兰不再是一个遥远和闭塞的地区：彭斯所在的苏格兰通过贸易和商业往来和外界紧密相连，对国际事务极为关切。彭斯比同时期其他作家做得更出色的是，他是苏格兰当地和外界联系的纽带，他将小小的地区事件和更广泛的文学、哲学、政治事件联系起来，将传统和现代结合起来。

彭斯的诗歌展示了他的创作天赋，他将讽刺与真诚、玩世不恭与真挚情感、犀利的社会评论与理想主义完美地结合起来。他写的歌曲中词和曲配合绝妙，他的诗采用的是易于记忆且人们熟悉的形式。他的很多诗和歌很快就成了苏格兰文学和民歌传统的典范。从他去世之时起，彭斯已成为一名经典作家，为他写的传记、记录他生平和作品的文学著作在他死后的下一个世纪越来越多。

事实上，彭斯使用苏格兰语、收集苏格兰民歌、保留苏格兰音乐传统，正是表明他对国家的忠诚和爱国之情。通过选用传统方言而不是标准的英语创作诗歌，彭斯宣扬了自己对苏格兰身份的自豪，并将劳动人民的语言广泛传播。彭斯逝世后，像著名的《苏格兰人》等诗已被广泛认为是苏格兰民族主义代表之作。但这是一个错误呈现：20世纪和21世纪的民族主义这种概念对彭斯并不适用。彭斯热爱并崇敬他的家乡、家乡的美景、历史和文化，这正是他全部诗歌的特征所在。他从不会让读者或听众忘记他是一个典型的苏格兰诗人。彭斯的诗用方言传唱着苏格兰，他的爱情与怅然、记忆与怀旧的主题使得诗歌具有广泛的吸引力。将彭斯诗歌译成中文，其中许多诗尚属首次汉译，真心希望彭斯吸引力能继续扩大，在中国获得更多新的读者和听众。

克斯蒂·布莱尔教授

斯特灵大学

2015年10月

（李圣轩 李正栓 汉译）