W. B. Yeats - The Fisherman 汉译

Although I can see him still,  

The freckled man who goes  

To a grey place on a hill  

In grey Connemara clothes  

At dawn to cast his flies,     

It’s long since I began  

To call up to the eyes  

This wise and simple man.  

All day I’d looked in the face  

What I had hoped ’twould be  

To write for my own race  

And the reality;  

The living men that I hate,   

The dead man that I loved,  

The craven man in his seat,  

The insolent unreproved,  

And no knave brought to book  

Who has won a drunken cheer,  

The witty man and his joke  

Aimed at the commonest ear, 

The clever man who cries  

The catch-cries of the clown,  

The beating down of the wise  

And great Art beaten down.  

Maybe a twelvemonth since  

Suddenly I began,  

In scorn of this audience,  

Imagining a man  

And his sun-freckled face,  

And grey Connemara cloth, 

Climbing up to a place  

Where stone is dark under froth,  

And the down turn of his wrist  

When the flies drop in the stream:  

A man who does not exist,  

A man who is but a dream;  

And cried, ‘Before I am old  

I shall have written him one  

Poem maybe as cold  

And passionate as the dawn.’