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But it would be very difficult to imitate the early Auden, 'this lunar beauty / has no history, / Is complete and early…'" This, I am sure of it now, is the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard that afternoon in 1981.
但是模仿早期的奥登就很难了。‘此月之美，无始无终，初始即已成……’”这一句，我敢肯定，正是1981年那个下午斯彭德写在黑板上的那行诗。
Poor Stephen Spender, poor Robert Oppenheimer, each limited, if not relegated, to the category of the merely very good, and each inevitably saddened by his knowledge of what was truly superior. "Being a minor poet is like being a minor royalty," Spender wrote in his journals, "and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that." As for Oppenheimer, I recall Isidor Rabi once telling me that "if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he [Oppenheimer] would have been a much greater physicist. I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focused."
可怜的斯蒂芬·斯彭德，可怜的罗伯特·奥本海默，都被局限在或归类到仅仅不错之列，而他们又清楚地知道什么叫作出类拔萃，这就使他们不可避免地感到悲哀。“做个不太著名的诗人如同做个不太重要的王族中人，”斯彭德在日记中写道，“任何人，正如玛格利特公主的侍卫女官有一次给我解释的那样，做成那种角色都不会髙兴的。”至于奥本海默，我记得埃斯德·拉比曾经跟我说：“如果他研究的是犹太教法典和希伯来语，而不是梵语的话，他(奥本海默)或许会成为更伟大的物理学家。我从未遇见过比他更聪明的人。但要想更具独创性、更有深度，人还是要更专注于某个领域才行。”
As Spender says, W. H. Auden's poetry cannot be imitated, any more than Paul Dirac's physics can be. That is what great poetry and great physics have in common: Both are swept along by the tide of unanticipated genius as it rushes past the merely very good.
正如斯彭德所说，W.H.奥登的诗无法模仿，保罗·狄拉克的物理学更无法模仿。那才是伟大的诗歌与伟大的物理学的共同之处：都是随着无法预见的天才们掀起的浪潮狂扫而来，而同时把仅仅不错的人冲刷殆尽。
