《历史系男生》是一部剧情喜剧同性电影，讲述了一群高智商男生的故事。故事发生在二十世纪八十年代的英国北部男子中学，八个高中生正积极筹备着牛津和剑桥大学的招生考试。
这几个男生性格各异，有万人迷、自视甚高的Dakin（多米尼克•库珀Dominic Cooper饰），有四肢发达头脑不简单的Rudge（拉塞尔•托维Russell Tovey饰）等。他们对课本和知识有着自己独特的解读。
教他们文学的是个肥胖、教学方法奇特的怪老头Hector（理查德•格雷弗斯Richard Griffiths饰），他主张让学生通过课本获得情绪上的共鸣和享受，而不仅仅是为了升学而读书。与他教学模式相反的是学校新聘请的老师Tom（斯蒂芬•坎贝尔•莫尔Stephen Campbell Moore饰），他的目标是帮助这些孩子尽可能考上牛津或剑桥。
两种老师的教学模式各有千秋，究竟孰优孰劣，或许并没有一个标准答案。电影通过幽默的剧情展现了这些男生们的成长历程，同时也探讨了教育的多样性和个性化的重要性。
考据癖如我找了找片中提到的诗歌。
原诗在前，网上能找到的中文译本放在后面。这几首里我最喜欢是《鼓手霍奇》。
[No.1] 眠歌- []Lullaby
By W.H.Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
摇篮曲
薛舟 译
放下你沉睡的头，我的爱，
在我背叛的臂弯里：
时间和热病烧掉了
个体的美丽，从
沉思的孩子身上，坟墓
证明那孩子的短命：
但在破晓之前，先让仅存的生者
躺在我的臂弯，
平凡、有罪，对我来说
却是彻底的美丽。
爱人们的灵魂和肉体没有界限：
当他们躺在
惯常的陶醉中那
被施以魔法的宽容的斜坡，
铭记下维纳斯送来
超自然的同情心、
以及普遍的爱和希望的幻象；
当一个抽象的顿悟
从冰河与岩石中
唤醒隐士世俗的狂热。
确定性，和忠诚
在午夜钟声的敲打中走开
像一个铃铛在颤动
时髦的疯子提高了
他们书生气的烦人的喊叫：
损失掉的每一法寻都要被偿还。
所有恐怖的纸牌的预言都要得到兑现。
但不是从这个夜晚
也不是一声耳语，一个想法
不是一个吻，更不是错过的一瞥。
美、午夜、幻象都将死去：
就让黎明的风吹着
轻柔地环绕你做梦的头
这样受欢迎的一天显示出
眼睛和搏动的心脏或许在祝福，
发现我们平凡的世界已经足够；
干燥的正午你已经被喂饱
被一种不经意的力量，
凌辱之夜允许你通过
在每一对世间爱人的注视下。
[No.2] 美术馆- []Musée des Beaux Arts
By W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
美术馆
查良铮 译
关于苦难他们总是很清楚的，
这些古典画家：他们多么深知它在
人心中的地位，深知痛苦会产生，
当别人在吃，在开窗，或正作着无聊的散步的时候；
深知当老年人热烈地、虔敬地等候
神异的降生时，总会有些孩子
并不特别想要他出现，而却在
树林边沿的池塘上溜着冰。
他们从不忘记：
即使悲惨的殉道也终归会完结
在一个角落，乱糟糟的地方，
在那里狗继续过着狗的生涯，而迫害者的马
把无知的臀部在树上摩擦。
在勃鲁盖尔的《伊卡鲁斯》里，比如说；
一切是多么安闲地从那桩灾难转过脸：
农夫或许听到了堕水的声音和那绝望的呼喊，
但对于他，那不是了不得的失败；
太阳依旧照着白腿落进绿波里；
那华贵而精巧的船必曾看见
一件怪事，从天上掉下一个男孩，
但它有某地要去，仍静静地航行。
美术馆
余光中 译
说到苦难，他们从未看错，
古代那些大师：他们深切体认
苦难在人世的地位；当苦难降临，
别人总是在进食或开窗或仅仅默然走过；
当长者正虔诚地、热烈地等，
等奇迹降临，总有孩子们
不特别期待它发生，正巧
在林边的池塘上溜冰：
大师们从不忘记
即使可怖的殉道也必须在一隅
独自进行，在杂乱的一隅
一任狗照常过狗的日子，酷吏的马匹
向一颗树干摩擦无辜的后臀。
例如布鲁果的《伊卡瑞斯》，众人
都悠然不顾那劫难，那农夫可能
听见了水波溅洒，呼救无望，
但是不当它是惨重的牺牲；阳光灿照，
不会不照见白净的双腿没入碧湛
的海波；那豪华优雅的海舟必然看见
一幕奇景，一童子自天而降，
却有路要赶，仍安详地向前航行。
ABOUT THE POEM:
meaning:
The basic premise of the poem is response to tragedy, or as the song goes Obla Di, Obla Da, Life Goes On. The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel, which the poem is basically about. Generalizing at first, and then going into specifics the poem theme is the apathy with which humans view individual suffering.
Auden wrote that In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.
The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and exraordinary ones, although extraordinary events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his descriptions. Life goes on while a miraculous birth occurs , but also while the disaster of Icarus's death happens.
background info:
For those cultural barbarians who don't know the story of Icarus, here it is, in condensed form. Icarus was a Greek mythological figure, also known as the son of Daedalus (famous for the Labyrinth of Crete). Now Icarus and his dad were stuck in Crete, because the King of Crete wouldn't let them leave. Daedalus made some wings for the both of them and gave his son instruction on how to fly (not too close to the sea, the water will soak the wings, and not too close to the sky, the sun will melt them). Icarus, however, appeared to be obstinate and did fly to close to the sun. This caused the wax that held his wings to his body to melt. Icarus crashed into the sea and died.
hints:
Some have even claimed to find hints of Auden's eventual reconversion to Christiantiy in the poem. Richard Johnson, author of Man's Place: An Essay on Auden , believes there is a touch of Christian awareness in the poem, especially the timeline. The reader of the poem is placed in front of the Breughel painting in a museum, and at the same time is expected to project those images and truths to the world outside. There is also a sort of continuity through the poem as you read it and are allowed to see what the poet means. This allows a reader to become aware of his human position.
The poem first discusses a miraculous birth , and at the end the tragedy of a death. The theme in the poem is human suffering. If you add these things together, and stir really well you might even get some hints at religion, mainly at Christianity
Also, the poem suggest a religious acceptance of suffering (example: eating your morning breakfast while watching coverage of a serious trainwreck on CNN). Religious acceptance basically means coming to terms with the ways of the world.
[No.3] 西罗普郡少年- []A SHROPSHIRE LAD
XXXI. On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble...
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms as English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
A.E.Housman简介：
Alfred Edward Housman was born in a village in rural Shropshire, England in 1859. As a student at Oxford, he distinguished himself as a promising scholar of classics, though crises of a personal nature caused him to fail his final exams. Housman was determined to overcome this failing. When not working at the British Patent office Housman wrote scholarly articles, and published many of them to very high regard from those in academic circles. He was invited to teach at the University of London as a professor of Latin, and soon stepped up to Cambridge University, to retire to the life of a shy academic. He published only two volumes of poetry --A Shropshire Lad in 1898 and Last Poems in 1922 -- yet these were instantly and enormously popular. However successful he was, the tone of his poems remained that of the Latin poets he admired: that life is short and often, inexplicably, comes to a bad end.
另外，八十多年前郁达夫也曾提到过A Shropshire Lad：
啊呵，去年六月在灯火繁华的上海市外，在车马喧嚷的黄浦江边，我一边念着Housman的A Shropshire Lad里的
Come you home a hero
Or come not home at all，
The lads you leave will mind You
Till Ludlow tower shall fall
几句清诗， 一边呆呆的看着江中黝黑混浊的流水，曾经发了几多的叹声，滴了几多的眼泪。你若知道我那时候的绝望的情怀，我想你去年的那几封微有怨意的信也不至于发给我了。——啊，我想起了，你是不懂英文的，这几句诗我顺便替你译出吧。
“汝当衣锦归，
否则永莫回，
令汝别后之儿童
望到拉德罗塔毁。”
摘自：《茑萝行》（原载一九二三年五月一日《创造季刊》第二卷第一号，据《达夫短篇小说集》上册）
[No.4] 鼓手霍奇- []Drummer Hodge
by Thomas Hardy
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.
鼓手霍奇
托玛斯·哈代
吕志鲁译
鼓手霍奇被扔进坑里掩埋，
正如找到时那样，没有棺材：
他的坟地是南非的一座小山，
把周围的平原稍稍撕开；
这坟墓上空的每个夜晚，
异国的星座在西边摆开。
刚从威塞克斯老家来到这里，
年轻的鼓手霍奇弄不明白，
灌木丛丛，沃土扬尘，
广阔干旱的高原意义何在？
昏暗的黑夜茫茫一片，
闪烁的星座好生奇怪。
正是这无名平原的一角，
霍奇将要长眠，永不离开；
他将长成一棵南方的大树，
带着北方质朴的头脑、胸怀，
任凭星星闪烁陌生的眼睛，
把他的命运永远主宰。
[No.5] 不言的渴望- [] Leaves of Grass
289. The Untold Want
By Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
THE untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
