罗伯特·勃莱曾被认为是“过去二十五年中美国诗歌的主要力量”之一。一九五八年他创办《五十年代》杂志（后来依次改为《六十年代》、《七十年代》、《八十年代》），成为反学院派的一个集合点。他战后定居于明尼苏达州的一个农场，主要靠诗歌朗诵和翻译谋生，迄今已出版了十多部诗集（其中《身体周围的光》首获美国全国图书奖），三十多本译诗集，其中包括我国古代大诗人陶渊明和白居易的作品。
勃莱是美国六、七十年代“新超现实主义”（又称为“深度意象诗派”）的主要推动者和代表性诗人。他力图摆脱理性和学院派传统的钳制，通过引进中国古典诗、拉美诗歌和欧洲超现实主义诗歌而给美国诗坛带来新的活力。他在执意地“寻找美国的诗神”。其诗在对自然和内心世界的深入中别开生面、富有灵性。评论家称他的诗为“奔流在中西部大平原下层深部的、突然长出来的树干和鲜花”。
这里所选的《从两个世界爱一个女人》是勃莱的最新作品，它由五十首诗组成。出版后引起诗界纷纭的评论。有不少论者认为它显示了美国诗歌新的趋向。
Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota to parents of Norwegian stock. Following graduation from Madison High School in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard University, joining the later famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.
Beginning in 1954, Bly took two years at the University of Iowa at the Iowa Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1952 he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives, but the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson. Bly determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States. The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and also published essays on American poets (as well as insults to those deemed deserving).
During this time, Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children. His first marriage was to award winning short story novelist Carol Bly. They had four children, including Mary J. Bly, a Literature Professor at Fordham University and also a best-selling novelist. Bly and Carol divorced in 1979; he has been married to the former Ruth Ray since 1980. He has a stepdaughter from his marriage to Ruth Bly. A stepson from the marriage died in a pedestrian-train incident while he attended private college in Minnesota. Suicide was suspected but never confirmed.
Career
Bly's early collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962, and its plain, imagistic style had considerable influence on American verse of the next two decades. The following year, he published "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry", an essay in which he made a case against the influences of Eliot, Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, in favour of the more direct work of writers such as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and went on to lead much of the opposition to that war among writers. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: __Select__ed Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.During the sixties he was of great help to the Bengali Hungryalist poets who faced anti-establishment trial at Kolkata,India.
Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men, an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. The book is credited with starting the Mythopoetic Men's Movement in the United States. Bly frequently conducts workshops for men with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, as well as workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He has taught at the annual "Great Mother Conference" since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Bly was the University of Minnesota Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000. He has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages as Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners).
In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Bly's archive which contains more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright, Donald Hall and James Dickey. The archive will be housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.
In February, 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate.
Bibliography
Poetry
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005)
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001)
Eating the Honey of Words: New and __Select__ed Poems (1999)
Snowbanks North of the House (1999)
Morning Poems (1997)
Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994)
What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems (1992)
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)
__Select__ed Poems (1986)
Mirabai Versions (1984)
The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979)
This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977)
Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1974)
Jumping Out of Bed (1973)
Sleepers Joining Hands (1973)
The Light Around the Body (1967)- won National Book Award
The Lion's Tail and Eyes (1962)
Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)
Anthologies
The Best American Poetry (1999)
The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures, Ecco Press (1995)
The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: __Select__ed Poems of William Stafford (1993)
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992)
News of the Universe (1980)
Leaping Poetry (1975)
A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1967)
Translations
Peer Gynt (verse play) - by Henrik Ibsen - currently running at The Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, MN - (2008)
The Winged Energy of Delight: __Select__ed Translations, HarperCollins (2004)
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, Graywolf Press (2001)
The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: __Select__ed Poems of Ghalib, (with Sunil Dutta, 1999)
Lorca and Jiménez: __Select__ed Poems, Beacon Press (1997)
Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly & Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge (1990)
Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge (1987)
Machado's Times Alone: __Select__ed Poems (1983)
Eight Stages of Translation (1983)
The Kabir Book (1977)
Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets — Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (1975)
Neruda and Vallejo: __Select__ed Poems (1971)
Hunger (novel) — by Knut Hamsun (1967)
Nonfiction
Remembering James Wright (2005)
The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (co-authored with Marion Woodman), Henry Holt & Co (November 1998) ISBN 0-8050-5777-3
The Sibling Society, Addison-Wesley (1996)
The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul (1994)
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1991)
Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) ISBN 0-201-51720-5
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, (with William Booth, 1988)
Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980)
Footnotes
^ Johnsen, Bill (June 2004). The Natural World is a Spiritual House. Colloquium on Violence and Religion Annual Conference 2004. Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary. Retrieved on 2007-04-30.
^ Gioia, Mason, Schoerke (editors) Twentieth-Century American Poetics, page 260
^ "A Poet Laureate for Minnesota", The New York Times, 2008-03-01. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.