Armand Garnet Ruffo – Earth Mother, 1966

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing English-Chinese Edition January 2023

Earth Mother, 1966, poems by Armand Garnet Ruffo.

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Earth Mother, 1966

He’s still using muted earth tones:
Brown, green, beige, a little red.
Unlike the work from his later technicolour period,
This one comes right out of the land,
As though he’s taken a hunting knife
and slit himself open,
and when it’s finished it frightens him.

Put your ear to the canvas, and you will hear the rising water.

What you see is a canoe afloat with passengers.
Nanaboozho – or maybe the artist trying to save himself-
a moose, a beaver, a bird, an otter
and, of course, a tiny muskrat,
who does what the others cannot
and dives to the bottom of the great lake
and brings up a tiny morsel of soil
the Creator uses to remake the world.

All these characters, because they are characters
in the grand scheme of the story,
however, pale to the thing they are floating on:
a monstrous fanged creature,
razor teeth, serpent eyes, forked tongue,
hackles, claws, fins, a hungry belly
stuffed with human flesh and spirit.

Is this the Mother Earth we dare trample on?

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大地之母，1966年

他仍在使用柔和的大地色系:
棕色、绿色、米色和一点红色。
不像后来他的技术色系的作品,
这幅作品直接从土地里挖出来,
犹如他手拿一把猎刀
割开了自我，
完成时，自己也吓了一跳。

把耳朵贴在画布上，你就会听到水在上涨。

你看到一艘载着乘客的独木舟漂浮，
Nanaboozho—也许艺术家试图拯救自己–
一匹驼鹿、一个海狸、一只鸟、一条水獭
当然，还有一尾小麝鼠，
它完成了无人能及的任务
潜入大湖的底部
带上来一小块泥土
造物主用它来重塑世界。

所有这些角色，尽管他们是
在宏伟计划的故事里的，
但是与他们所漂浮之物一比，就黯然失色：
一座可怕的獠牙生物，有着
剃刀牙，蟒蛇眼，叉形舌，
毛骨悚然，尖爪多鳍以及塞满了
人的肉身和精气的饥饿的肚皮。

这就是我们敢于践踏的地球母亲吗？

注： Nanabozho是奥吉布韦族的诡计多端的人物和文化英雄.

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Indian Jesus Christ

Once again he is the blessed child
in the midst of adoration, exaltation:
Our Father Who Art in Heaven.
As his knees grind into the wood floor
and a throbbing ache moves up his legs
and drips off his upper lip,
into his cupped hands.

Staring up to the stained-glass Christ
above the priest and altar
he tries to focus on the one ray of light
filtering through halo and flame
like the divine spirit Himself
so that he might rise up to the rafters
and beyond into cool heaven.

The prayer for salvation never comes to pass.
Christ and his legion of angels
never once lift the roof off the chapel,
carry him in a chorus of hallelujahs.
Morrisseau is left to find his own wings
and he does, painting his own remembering,
his hands bursting into holy acrylic pain.

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印度安耶稣基督

再次他成为受祝福的孩子
在崇拜中，在高举中:
我们在天上的父。
当他膝盖跪进木地板里，
一阵悸动的痛移至双腿，
酒液从他上嘴唇滴下
滴到他捧着的手心。

仰望着牧师和祭坛
上方的彩色琉璃基督，
他试着专注于
透过光环和火花的那一束光——
就像圣灵本身，
以便能升到屋檐之上
美好的天堂。

基督和他的天使军团
从没来兑现他救赎的祈祷，
从未掀开过礼拜堂的屋顶
在哈利路亚合唱中升起他——
莫里索被留下寻找自己的羽翼
而他做到了，绘出自己的铭记，
双手迸发出丙烯酸圣洁之痛。

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Chinese translation © Anna Yin/© Armand Garnet Ruffo

阿曼德·加内特·鲁弗是加拿大当代原居民文学和原居民文学学术的主要贡献者。著有《灰猫头鹰：阿奇-贝莱尼之谜》（1996/ 2021）《诺瓦尔-莫里索：人变雷霆鸟》 (2014), 《雷霆鸟诗集》 (2015) and 《条约#系列》 (2019)。两次入围总督文学奖，他荣获许多奖项， 包括2017年金斯顿市的首届市长艺术奖，2020年拉特纳作家信托诗歌奖。他目前是加拿大皇后大学的原居民文学国家学者。

Armand Garnet Ruffo is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications include Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney (1996/ 2021); Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird (2014), The Thunderbird Poems (2015) and Treaty# (2019). A two-time finalist for Governor General’s Literary Awards, he is the recipient of numerous awards. In 2017, he was awarded the inaugural Mayor’s Arts Award from the City of Kingston, and in 2020, he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. He is currently the Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Literatures at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.