Why I Love Leonard Cohen（Ahmed Rashid）翻译

                
                
At Cambridge University in the 1960s, we marched against the Vietnam War to the songs of Bob Dylan, but romanced young ladies to the poetry and songs of Leonard Cohen. Together, the poetry of Dylan and Cohen was the epitome of good taste—demanding political commitment, spiritual yearning, romantic obsession, and a great deal of intense discussion.
在1960年代的剑桥大学，我们通过鲍勃迪伦的歌曲反对越南战争，但用科恩的诗和歌曲追求年轻女士。总之，迪伦和科恩的诗歌是好品味的缩影——包含要求政党承诺、精神上的渴望、浪漫的痴迷、和大量的激烈讨论。
I was introduced to Leonard Cohen’s music by a friend the day I arrived at Cambridge in September 1968. I immediately went out and bought his first long-playing record, The Songs of Leonard Cohen. Then I listened to him obsessively, every night for three years—always waiting for the next album like a child. Yet I never saw him perform live until this fall, forty-four years later.
在1968年9月那天，当我到达剑桥，我被一个朋友介绍接触到科恩的音乐。我立刻出去买回他第一张密纹唱盘专辑，《 The Songs of Leonard Cohen》。那时我着迷地听着他的歌，三年中每晚总是等待下一张专辑像等待一个孩子（出生）。然而我从没见过他现场演出直到44年之后这个秋天。
Cohen, now seventy-eight, has just finished a European tour and begun a thirty-five city American tour—a coup considering that American audiences have been on the whole less appreciative of his work than their European counterparts. The performance I saw in Madrid was heart-rending, pure euphoria and exultation. He played for four hours and the Spanish audience would not let him go. At the end he skipped off the stage like a young man. His latest album, Old Ideas, reached number one on the charts in eleven countries, from Belgium to Poland to Canada. Many of his most ardent fans do not speak English but learn the words of his songs nevertheless.
科恩，现今78岁，刚完成了欧洲巡演开始了35个美国城市的巡演——一个出人意料的考虑：美国听众欣赏他作品的人数总体较少对比他欧洲的歌迷。在马德里我看的表演令人心碎、纯粹的陶醉和心喜。他演出了4个小时后西班牙的听众也没让他走。最后他从舞台溜走像个年轻人一样。他最新的专辑《Old Ideas》，在11个国家达到排行榜第一名，从比利时到波兰到加拿大。许多他最忠实的歌迷不会说英语，但学会他歌曲的歌词就会说了。
Cohen has a special affinity for Spain. Last year, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, Spain’s top intellectual prize, and at the ceremony he explained how a Spanish flamenco guitarist in Montreal gave him his first guitar at age fifteen and taught him how to play. His first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1954, when he was just twenty years old, and was inspired by Frederico García Lorca, who was killed in the Spanish civil war. The book was republished on its fiftieth anniversary and is a continuing point of reference for Cohen fans:
科恩有特别的吸引力对于西班牙，去年，他被授予阿斯图里亚斯王子艺术奖，西班牙顶级知识分子的荣誉，在仪式上他解释了一个西班牙弗拉门戈吉他手如何在蒙特利尔给了他第一把吉它并教他怎样弹奏。他的第一本诗集《Let Us Compare Mythologies》出版于1954年，当他还是20岁时，受到费德里科・加西亚・洛尔迦的激发了灵感，这位被谋杀在西班牙内战的人。这本书再版在他得50周年，对于科恩的歌迷来说是一个连续的参考：
Then let us compare mythologies
I have learned my elaborate lie
Of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns
And how my fathers nailed him
Like a bat against a barn
To greet the autumn and the late hungry ravens
At a hollow yellow sign.
那么，让我们比较神话。
我已学会精心设计关于
翱翔越过破坏荆棘的谎言
我的父辈如何钉牢他
像一个蝙蝠靠着畜棚
去迎接秋天和迟来饥饿的乌鸦
就像一个空黄色的符号。
The opportunity finally to meet Cohen and indulge in a long conversation with him before the show revealed a man who is humble and deeply in touch with the world. We talked about not only his music and his band but the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, growing old, why he has deliberately avoided becoming a rock celebrity, and the variety of religions and spiritual paths he has embraced over the course of his life.
最后的机会去见科恩并沉浸于与他长时间对话之前，演出透露一个谦逊和深刻的人与世界保持着联系。我们谈论的不仅是的他音乐和他的乐队还有在阿富汗和叙利亚的战争，
越成长，为什么他刻意地避免成为一个摇滚明星，各种宗教和精神道路他已经亲身经历了这些人生历程。
Cohen did not become a singer until he was thirty, although he was a poet by the time he was twenty. In recent years, Cohen has applied his mournful, rasping voice, his tearful endings and dramatic pauses, to more complex musical compositions with female voices and multiple instruments, especially strings—songs that the early Cohen troubadour with his single guitar might not have even recognized as his own.
科恩没有成为一位歌手直到他30岁之时，尽管他曾是名诗人的时候他二十岁时，近些年，科恩用他的悲伤，粗糙的嗓音，他满含泪水的收场和戏剧性的终端，伴随着女生伴唱和并联的乐器的复杂的音乐作品，尤其弦乐器——早期的民谣歌手科恩带着他单独的吉它可能已不会被认出就是他自己。
A Canadian Jew descended from rabbis, Cohen infuses his music with his enduring interest in religion. He reads Jewish scriptures but is also a master of Zen Buddhism of the Rinzai school; his closest friend and mentor is the 105-year-old California-based Japanese Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Going through a bad spell in the 1990s, Cohen spent five years in a Zen monastery outside Los Angeles. For a time he gave up music; he returned to it partly out of necessity, after discovering that his manager had run off with all his money. He later spent several years studying with a Hindu mystic, Ramesh Balsekar, in Mumbai. He is also extremely knowledgeable about Islam and, in particular, Sufism, the most spiritual branch of Islam. Some of the Sufi whirling dervishes in Turkey have even danced to his songs.
一个来自犹太教拉比的后裔——科恩在他的音乐中注入了持久的关于宗教的关心。他阅读犹太圣经但也是位临济宗禅宗的大师；他的密友和导师是105岁位于加利福尼亚的日本人佐佐木禅师。经历了一个糟糕的90年代，科恩花了5年在洛杉矶郊外的禅寺。一段时间他放弃了音乐；在发现他的经纪人卷跑他所有的钱后，出于需要他一定程度上重返音乐。他以后花了数年在孟买跟随拉玛虚•巴尔谢卡学习印度神秘主义宗教。他也非常了解伊斯兰，特别是苏菲派——最属灵的伊斯兰教分支。一些苏菲教人在土耳其听着他的歌甚至跳起了回旋舞。
But Cohen is best known for his sad, evocative love poems, which, turned into songs, have immortalized beautiful, sexy, intelligent, neurotic women, as did with Suzanne on his first album:
但科恩最为人所知的是他得忧愁，唤起爱情的诗篇，永恒的美丽、性、智慧、焦虑的女人，这些已变成为歌曲，如他为苏姗做的第一张专辑：
Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
现在苏姗牵着你的手
她领着你走向河边
她穿着来自救世军柜台
用羽毛装点的碎旧衣服
阳光如蜜倾泻而下
落在我们的海港女士身上
她指着你看那
垃圾和花朵之间
海藻中有英雄
清晨里有孩子
他们探身出去为了爱
他们永远将这样倾斜
He has had an extraordinary and complicated love life but has always seemed to treat his lovers, his musical collaborators, and everyone else around him with grace, warmth, manners, and respect. Sylvie Simmons has just published a biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, which unearths much detail about his life and beliefs. About the flamenco teacher in Montreal who, after meeting Cohen in a park, gave him his first guitar lessons, and later committed suicide, Simmons quotes Cohen as saying, “I knew nothing about the man, why he came to Montreal, why he appeared in that tennis court, why he took his life….. But it was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs, and all of my music.”
他拥有一个特别且复杂的感情生活但总是以优雅、热情、礼貌、尊重对待他的恋人、他的音乐合作者和其他在他身边的所有人。西尔维•西蒙斯刚出版的一本传记《 I’m Your Man--科恩的生命》，它挖掘很多关于他得生活和信仰的细节。关于在蒙特利尔那位弗拉门戈老师，在公园遇见科恩后，给他上了第一堂吉他课，后来自杀身亡，西蒙斯引用科恩的话，”我不了解这个男人，他为什么来蒙特利尔，为什么出现在网球场，为什么他把他的生命......但它是那些六个和弦，那吉他样式一直是我所有歌曲的基础包括我所有音乐。“
One of his most celebrated girlfriends was the mysterious Marianne of the song “So Long, Marianne.” Simmons tells us more about her. She was Marianne Ihlen, a former Norwegian model who ran away to the Greek island of Hydra with a Norwegian writer who soon after left her and their son. She became Leonard’s muse for many years, appearing in the background of a haunting photo on the back cover of Songs from a Room, his second album.
他最出名的女友是那首“再会了，玛丽安”歌中的神秘玛丽安。西蒙斯告诉我们更多关于她的事，她叫玛丽安.伊伦，一位早前的挪威模特，她和一位挪威作家逃到希腊伊兹拉岛，那位挪威作家不久之后抛下她和她们的儿子。她成为了科恩的缪斯多年，一张令人难忘的照片背景出现在他的第二张专辑《 Songs from a Room》的封底。
Cohen’s songs have probably been covered by more artists than the works of any other pop singer—there are literally hundreds of versions of his songs. And he has encouraged many of his own collaborators to do independent work. His early back-up singer Jennifer Warnes brought out a wonderful album of Cohen songs called Famous Blue Raincoat. It has just been reissued on its twentieth anniversary; the musical arrangements by Roscoe Becks (who is still Cohen’s musical director) for Warnes’s stunning voice remain as fresh as they were two decades ago. Sharon Robinson has been a vocalist and a joint songwriter with Cohen since 1979. Her 2008 album Everybody Knows is a haunting, melancholic compilation of her own and Cohen’s songs. And Anjani Thomas, another collaborator and vocalist, issued her Blue Alert album in 1992, which Cohen produced himself.
科恩的歌曲可能已被更多的艺人翻唱对比其他流行歌手的作品，他的歌曲不夸张地有数百个版本。他也鼓励很多他自己的合作伙伴去做独立工作。他早年的替补歌手——珍尼弗·温拿斯带来了一张精彩的科恩的歌曲专辑叫做《 Famous Blue Raincoat》。它刚刚再新发行在它的20周年；由Roscoe Becks（他一直是科恩的音乐总监）的音乐编排为温拿斯的绝色的嗓音保持了如二十年前一样的清新感。Sharon Robinson一直是位歌手同时她自1979年也是科恩的联合的歌曲作者。2008年由她自己忧郁的编曲和科恩的歌词组成的专辑《Everybody Knows》令人难忘的。还有另一位合作者和歌手Anjani Thomas，1992年出版了她的《Blue Alert》专辑，这张专辑由科恩本人制作。
Today, as Cohen’s voice becomes still deeper and more gravelly, he uses female singers more prominently; his recent work is characterized by extensive harmonizing with two young British sisters, Hattie and Charley Webb. They, too, have their own album, Savages, and a separate musical career. No other song artist to my knowledge has promoted so many people around him to become singers and stars in their own right. It is part of Cohen’s enduring humility and eagerness to share his own success.
今天，当科恩的声音变得更深沉更沙哑，他开始更加明显地用女生歌手；他最近的工作特点是广泛地协调由两位年轻的英国姐妹的和声，Hattie and Charley Webb。她们也有了她们的专辑《Savages》，和独立的音乐事业。据我所知，没有其他的歌手促进这么多在他身边的人成为歌手和明星以他们自己的实力。这是科恩的持久的谦卑和热心分享他自己的成功的一部分。
Working as a journalist, I have taken Cohen everywhere, through long bouts covering the wars in Afghanistan and Central Asia, including during a stint with the Taliban in the 1990s. Wherever I travel, I still pack him like a sleeping pill, a beautiful ghost you can surrender to, a spiritual man for these unspiritual times, someone with whom you can shed the weight of reality, your fears and concerns.
作为一名新闻记者，我带着科恩在任何地方，穿过在阿富汗和中东长期较量覆盖的战争，包括在90年代限制塔利班时期。无论我经过哪里，我始终装着他在行李中像一片安眠药，一个你可以投降的美丽鬼魂，一个属灵的男人为了这不属灵的时代，某个人与你可以摆脱现实的重量、你的恐惧和担忧。
Above all, Cohen’s music is about love, tolerance, and beauty. These days he is preoccupied with death and his own passing, ruminations that have resulted in him often singing one of his earlier great songs, “If It Be Your Will”:
最重要的是，科恩的音乐是关于爱、宽容和美。目前他沉浸于死亡和他自己的死，沉思导致他经常唱一首他早年伟大的歌曲 ，If It Be Your Will：
If it be your will that I speak no more
And my voice be still as it was before,
I will speak no more.
I shall abide until
I am spoken for,
If it be your will.
If it be your will that a voice be true,
From this broken hill I will sing to you.
From this broken hill all your praises they shall ring.
If it be your will to let me sing.
如果这是你的意愿我不再说更多
我的声音将如它之前所是
我不再说更多
我将忍受直到
我表明
如果这是你的意愿。
如果这是你的意愿这声音是真实的
从这破碎的山上我将为你歌唱
从这破碎的山上所有你的赞美他们将敲响
如果这是你的意愿让我唱。
来自：http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/nov/15/why-i-love-leonard-cohen/
备注：
Ahmed Rashid-阿哈玛·拉希德 (Urdu:احمد رشید) (b. 1948 in Rawalpindi) is a former Muhajir-Pakistani militant, a journalist and best-selling foreign policy author of several books about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia.
《陷入混沌》(Descent into Chaos)的作者