Howl ---Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical *,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror
through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada &
Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront
boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks
of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of
wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of
brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate
Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State
out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of
hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on
the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in
Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no
broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand- father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis- ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown
rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard
to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and
ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their
dark skin passing out incom- prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums * and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild
cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts,
who let themselves be *ed in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering
their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond
& * angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed
shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual
golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can- dle and fell off
the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt
and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared
to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and * in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings &
especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up
out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open
to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of
the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates
of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of
gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their
heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where
they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up
clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of
sinis- ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the
ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas- saic, leaped on
negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic
European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or
Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find
out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver
& brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul
illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in
their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific
to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung
jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of
the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in- stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho- therapy
occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the
wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock- ing and rolling in
the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night- mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at
4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur- nished room emptied down to the last
piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing
but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the
catalog the meter & the vibrat- ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the
soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel- ligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his * and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come
after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of
America's * mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to
the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose
buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless
Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the
cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the
specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cock*er in Moloch! Lacklove and
manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me
out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral
nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which
exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De- spairs! Ten years'
animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the
roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of
the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against
the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from
the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas
of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs
all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse O skinny legions run
outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
对于我浅薄的阅读经验来说，《HOWL》无疑是一种全面的颠覆。因为我从来没有在一种正式的文学范本中看到这么多对性、吸毒、荒诞体验的肯定。
对于有着强大惯性的平庸日常而言，《HOWL》更是一种异质的声音：充满了愤怒、轻蔑、反叛和——癫狂！
我不得不应用这样一种体制的称谓对《HOWL》进行介定：垮掉！但我同时感到了这个词的无力。
鲁迅先生说：“当我沉默的时候，我觉得充实；我将开口，同时感到空虚。”
《HOWL》给予我的震憾恰恰如此！
《HOWL》的开篇这样写道：
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical *,
dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn look-
ing for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly con-
nection to the starring dynamo in the
machinery of night ……
《HOWL》发表之初，在美国得到的更多是谴责。批评者认为《HOWL》是一个淫荡和不道德的作品。认为诗中描叙地“the best minds of my generation”不过是一群吸毒者、毒贩子、窃贼、酒鬼、滥交者、*者等社会渣滓；而GINSBERG的诗歌实际是吸毒产生幻觉发出的呓语，充其量是一种疯狂的自白。对于诗中的反叛精神，批评者则认为是企图以吸毒、滥交、*、流浪、犯罪来取代和谐的社会轶序和优良的传统道德观。
就像一枚金币的正面和反面，在《HOWL》对主流、社会、文化和体制的反对上，当时的赞同者也和反对者达成了惊人的共识。赞同者认为GINSBERG是一个“城市惠特曼”（urban whitman），诗中描写的性欲、吸毒、酗酒、闹事等等“劣迹”不仅是用反传统、反价值的方式向压抑人性、*自由的社会提出最强烈的抗议，也是用一种“新的身体语言”来唤醒“全体美国人民的潜意识”。
后来《HOWL》因此获罪，出版商和GINSBERG都被起诉。虽然最终被判定无罪，GINSBERG也因此一举成名。但时至今日，《HOWL》仍逃脱不了被人奉为意识形态斗争工具的命运！
而《HOWL》对存在的追问、焦虑；对所谓价值的否定，疑惑；对个人生存体验的肯定和认同却鲜有人提及甚至被逐渐遗忘！
也许日后功成名就的GINSBERG也在各种光环的掩映下逐渐失去了做为一个伟大诗人的部分勇气吧！一直以来，我总以为无论是GINSBERG后来的《加利福尼亚超市》还是他的诗集《kaddish and other poems》、《Empty mirror》等等都无法超越《HOWL》。
《加利福尼亚超市》虽然在形式上与《HOWL》有相似之处，但在语言的张力以及内容的震憾性上，似乎比《HOWL》弱很多。尽管有评论认为Gingsberg在《加利福尼亚超市》中表达了对美国自惠特曼时代以来物质极大丰裕和精神极度贫穷的悲叹，但我觉得《加利福利亚超市》在一系列感叹和疑问的形式下，比之《HOWL》少了不知多少才情和迷狂！
也许《哀悼祈祷文》是GINSBERG后期唯一可以接近《HOWL》天才绝唱的诗歌吧。我手头关于GINSBERG的评论资料中有这么一段话：《哀悼祈祷文》是“一个痛苦的呐喊，一个回忆的呼喊，一个爱的呼唤，也许是垮掉派最优秀的诗作”。虽然最后一句让人恶心，但也确实部分的道出了《哀悼祈祷文》之所以优秀的原因。
但只有《HOWL》真正让GINSBERG成为了那个狂放的、大胆的、不羁的GINSBERG！
在《HOWL》的序言中，这个天才而迷狂的GINSBERG写道：
“抓紧你们的裙子，女士们，我们开始下地狱啦。”
多年以来，这句话被反复引用，并一再被注解为：GINSBERG在诗中描写的地狱就是美国。
一个富含巨大张力的象征从此肢解，变得实际而功利。整个《HOWL》也开始被噩梦般的误读：存在的焦虑不见了，对价值的否定不见了；对生和死的追问反思，对个人极致体验的肯定认同统统化归为一个平淡而实用的目标，即对一种邪恶社会体制的嘲讽。
不知道GINSBERG有没有看过萨特的话剧《间隔》，并在其中受到启发，创造了自己的隐喻？：三个死去的人被打入地狱，但这个地狱与神话中描绘的全不一样，只是一个出不去的房间。这三个人，一个男人是报社记者、胆小鬼加尔森，两个女人分别是*者伊内丝，**、杀婴犯艾丝黛尔。他们无法避免互相冲突，互相折磨，发现自己总处在他人的注视之下，他人就是地狱。
当他在《HOWL》中真实记录了自己以及凯鲁亚特、巴勒斯、沆克、卡萨迪、所罗门的生活，并悲叹他这“一代人的精英”，却“被一种疯狂毁灭”，沦为流浪汉、瘾君子、边缘人和“垮掉的一代”时，不知道他心中的愤怒和轻蔑是否也和地狱一样无可比拟地深？
当molock凶神无所不在时，年轻的GINSBERG是否也充满了绝望呢？
也许一切都是猜测。因为真正的诗就是不能确切可指的。当我在第三节读到这样的诗句：
Carl Solomon! I’m wish you in Rackland
Where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
Where you must fell very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
Where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
Where you’re murdered your twelve secretaries
……
GINSBERG 对所有叛逆斗士/牺牲者/献祭者的爱意和怜惜通过给Carl Solomon的这些语感像冰雹一样密集的诗句一下子击中了我。
也许凯鲁亚克（Jack kerouac）才是知悉青年GINSBERG伟大心灵的第一人。当1955年旅居墨西哥的凯鲁亚克收到GINSBERG寄来的长诗将此诗题名“howl”时，也许他已深深感到诗中所表达的所有思想与情感全都发自人类的心灵深处。
让我们简单回顾一下Allen Ginsberg不凡的生平：
ALLEN GINSBERG，出生于新泽西州的诺瓦克市佩特逊镇。父亲路易.金斯堡是一位中学英语教师，也是当地小有名气的诗人；母亲诺米.莱维.金斯堡曾是美**员和激进左翼组织的成员，还在金斯堡的孩提时代，就因美国政府对*人的残酷*得了精神恐惧症，住进精神病院，直至去世。母亲的不幸遭遇在金斯堡幼小的心灵里留下了巨大的创伤，并极大地影响着他后来的生活与创作。
1943年金斯堡进入纽约哥伦比亚大学，在莱昂内尔.屈林等著名文学教授影响下开始对文学发生浓厚兴趣。1945年金斯堡应征入伍，但很快因第二次世界大战结束而退伍，并重回哥伦比亚大学，同时开始练习写作。1947年1月金斯堡结识了尼尔.卡萨迪，一位对“垮掉的一代”产生重要影响的人物。两人随即发生*关系；不久他又认识了毒贩子赫伯特.沆克，从此麻烦不断。1949年4月22日沆克因涉嫌偷盗而被捕入狱，并判刑五年。金斯堡也因窝赃同谋一同被捕，后以精神障碍为由进哥伦比亚精神病院治疗。在精神病院他结识了同为病人的卡尔.所罗门。在金斯堡眼里，所罗门是一个“疯圣”，其怪诞的行为表达了对理性社会的反叛和对人类苦难的洞察。1955年10月金斯堡在旧金山的“六号美术馆”举办了一次诗歌朗诵会，并在会上朗诵了《HOWL》一诗。第二年，旧金山的“城市之光”出版社发表了诗集《Howl and Other poems》，金斯堡一举成名。
也许《HOWL》的题献者Carl Solomon只不过是Ginsberg心中所有洞察人类生存苦难的反叛者——包括Ginsberg本人——的缩影吧！
Ginsberg因《HOWL》而伟大，《HOWL》也因如此真实地表达了细微个体生命的真实存在以及为不屈的灵魂提供了一个有意义地出口而不朽，从而影响了一个时代！
在拙文的结尾，我其实更愿意用《HOWL》序言中的那句话做个了结：“抓紧你们的裙子，女士们，我们开始下地狱啦！”
BD720P国语
