Patti Smith’s achingly beautiful new book, “M Train,” is a kaleidoscopic¹ ballad² about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance. Losing her husband, the guitarist Fred (Sonic) Smith, to heart failure in 1994 at the age of 45. Losing her brother, Todd, a month later to a stroke. Losing her early New York friend and roommate, Robert Mapplethorpe, to AIDS in 1989. Her book is about moving from a time when her children were little and “the things I touched were living” (“my husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee”) to a time when she increasingly began to capture and memorialize moments from her life in photos and words — to create, as an artist, talismanic³ souvenirs of the past. Of which this book is one.

帕蒂·史密斯(Patti Smith)凄美动人的新书《M列车》(M Train)如同一曲千变万化的歌谣，吟唱随时间、际遇与环境所失去的一切。1994年，她的丈夫，吉他手弗莱德·“音速”·史密斯(Fred [Sonic] Smith)年仅45岁就死于心脏病。一个月后，她的兄弟托德(Todd)又死于中风。她早年在纽约的朋友与室友罗伯特·梅普尔索普(Robert Mapplethorpe)则在1989年死于艾滋病。这本书是关于她人生阶段的转变——曾几何时，她的孩子们年纪还小，“我所触碰的一切都还是活生生的”（“丈夫的手指、一朵蒲公英、削瘦的膝盖”）；如今，她开始更多地捕捉和缅怀自己曾在照片和文字中记载的生活，以艺术家的身份，为旧日时光创作出护身符式的纪念品。这本书也是其中的一件。

Musician, poet and photographer, Ms. Smith, 68, is remarkably⁴ attuned⁵ to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial⁶. Like her famous black-and-white Polaroid photos (some of which are scattered⁷ throughout the book), the chapters of “M Train” are magic lantern slides, jumping, free-associatively, between the present and the past, and from subject to subject. She captures a passing mood (melancholia she can turn in her hand “as if it were a small planet,” impossibly blue) as deftly⁸ as she conjures⁹ her cat Cairo (“an Abyssinian runt with a coat the color of the pyramids”) or a childhood memory (“a skate key on a cherished lace from the shoe of a 12-year-old boy”) or a sad, post-Sandy Christmas in the Rockaways. (“Styrofoam snowmen and waterlogged sofas were draped in tinsel.”)

身兼音乐家、诗人和摄影师的史密斯今年68岁，她极擅长将声音与文字的魔力结合起来，她的文笔既充满抒情色彩，又充满画面感。正如她那些著名的黑白宝丽来照片（书中就有一些），《M列车》的章节就像一帧帧神奇的幻灯，在过去与现在，乃至不同主题之间自由自在地连接，不住跳跃闪回。无论是一种转瞬即逝的情绪（她在手中把玩自己的忧郁，“仿佛它是一个小行星”，异常忧伤）；名叫“开罗”的猫咪（“一只阿比尼西亚猫，小家伙的皮毛有如金字塔的颜色”）；一段童年回忆（“那个12岁男孩鞋子上用珍藏的蕾丝系着的滑轮鞋扣”）；亦或是桑迪飓风之后在罗卡韦度过的忧伤圣诞（“金箔包裹着泡沫塑料雪人和浸水的沙发”），在她笔下都有如信手拈来。

Whereas Ms. Smith’s haunting 2010 memoir¹⁰, “Just Kids,” centered on her early years in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s and her friendship with Mr. Mapplethorpe, this volume is more peripatetic¹¹, chronicling her peregrinations around the world and into the recesses¹² of her imagination, though always returning to her home base in Manhattan. Its unities¹³ are not of time and place, but the landscape of Ms. Smith’s own mind — her dreams, her memories, her preoccupation with certain artists (Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Sylvia Plath), books (“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “After Nature,” “2666”) and television shows (“The Killing,” “Law & Order,” “CSI: Miami”).

2010年，史密斯那本令人难忘的回忆录《只是孩子》(Just Kids)主要是关于20世纪60年代末到70年代她在纽约度过的早年岁月，以及她与梅普尔索普的友情，而这本书更像是漫游，记录她周游世界的经历，以及在自己幻想中的休憩，不过到最后她总会回到曼哈顿的家中。它并未串联起时间与地点，而是连接起她心中的一处处风景：她的梦境、她的回忆，乃至她对某些东西的迷恋——诸如艺术家让·热内(Jean Genet)、威廉·S·巴勒斯(William S. Burroughs)、西尔维娅·普拉斯(Sylvia Plath)；还有《奇鸟行状录》、《追随自然》(After Nature)、《2666》等书籍，以及《谋杀》(The Killing)、《法律与秩序》(Law & Order)、《犯罪现场调查：迈阿密》(CSI: Miami)等电视剧。

As in a poem or a song, leitmotifs occur again and again: a chair (her father’s, the novelist Roberto Bola漀’s, an ornate white plastic one glimpsed in Tangier), a cafe (in Greenwich Village, in the Rockaways, in Berlin), the many, many cups of coffee consumed by the author at home and everywhere she traveled.

正如在诗歌或歌曲之中一样，在她的书里，某些主调也会一再重现，比如椅子（她父亲的椅子、小说家罗贝托·波拉尼奥[Roberto Bola漀崀萀椅子、她在丹吉尔瞥见的一把华丽的白色塑料椅子）；咖啡屋（格林威治村的咖啡屋、罗卡韦的咖啡屋与柏林的咖啡屋），还有她在家里和到处旅行时用掉的无数咖啡杯。

Many of Ms. Smith’s trips are quixotic to say the least. She and Fred journeyed to St.-Laurent-du-Maroni, a small border town in northwest French Guiana so that she could visit the ruins of a French prison colony — because Genet had once written about the place with reverence¹⁴, and she wanted to retrieve¹⁵ some stones from the site and deliver them to him.

史密斯的许多旅行都如同堂吉诃德式的冒险。一次，她和弗莱德到法属圭亚那西北部的边境小镇马罗尼河畔圣洛朗区旅行，只为探访法国殖民者监狱的废墟。这是因为让·热内曾经满怀敬畏地描写过这个地方，她想从这里带回几块石头送给他。

As a member of the Continental¹⁶ Drift Club — an obscure society dedicated¹⁷ to Alfred Wegener, an explorer who pioneered the theory of continental drift — she traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland, for a meeting, and stayed on to photograph the table used in the 1972 chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. A meeting was arranged with Mr. Fischer and after she stood up to one of his obscene tirades¹⁸ — “I can be just as repellent as you, only about different subjects,” she recalls saying — they end up spending several hours singing Buddy¹⁹ Holly²⁰ songs and other tracks together, much to the surprise of his bodyguard²¹.

她还是“大陆漂移俱乐部”的成员，这个鲜为人知的社团是为了向探险家与“大陆漂移学说之父”阿尔弗雷德·魏格纳(Alfred Wegener)致敬，她到冰岛的雷克雅未克参加社团会议，在那里拍下了鲍比·菲舍尔(Bobby Fischer)与鲍里斯·斯帕斯基(Boris Spassky)象棋比赛时用的桌子。后来她还在那儿同菲舍尔见了面，他对她发表了一番颇为淫秽的长篇大论，她也只能忍着——她记得自己当时说，“我可以像你一样令人讨厌，不过是以不同的话题”——后来他们一起唱巴迪·霍利(Buddy Holly)和其他人的歌，一连唱了好几个小时，他的保镖都惊呆了。

There is something faintly surreal or dreamlike about many of Ms. Smith’s adventures. She and Fred are taken into police custody²² during their trip to French Guiana, after officers pull over their hired driver — who resembles an extra in the Jamaican film “The Harder They Come,” wearing “aviator²³ sunglasses, cocked cap and a leopard-print shirt” — and discover a man curled up in the trunk of his car. She takes Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” with her on a trip to Mexico City to give a speech about the painter Frida Kahlo and finds herself “looking forward to Mexican food, but the hotel menu was dominated by Japanese fare.”

史密斯的冒险故事中总有种淡淡的超现实气息或梦幻色彩。她和弗莱德去法属圭亚那时，警察拦下了他们雇来的司机，那家伙有点像牙买加犯罪电影《不速之客》(The Harder They Come)里的人，“戴着飞行员目镜、三角帽，穿着件豹纹衬衫”，警察发现他的车厢里还蜷着一个男人，于是把她和弗莱德也一并拘捕起来。她去墨西哥城做一次关于画家弗里达·卡洛(Frida Kahlo)的演讲时，随身戴着村上春树的《奇鸟行状录》，她“本来盼着能吃到墨西哥菜，却发现酒店菜单上全是日本料理。”

During her travels, Ms. Smith makes pilgrimages to the graves of writers she admires: Brecht, Plath, Rimbaud, Genet. The ghosts of such artists haunt these pages, as do the spirits of her beloved husband and brother. And a dark melody of loss threads its way through this volume. Her favorite coat — lost. Her favorite Murakami book — left in an airport bathroom. Her favorite camera — left on a beach. Her favorite neighborhood cafe — closed. Ms. Smith buys a tiny house near Rockaway Beach, Queens, and while it somehow survives Hurricane Sandy, she witnesses the myriad²⁴ losses of her neighbors — the boardwalk turned to splinters, a friend’s cafe gone, hundreds of homes burned to the ground or flooded.

旅行岁月里，史密斯还去过不少自己敬仰的作家墓前朝圣：布莱希特、普拉斯、兰波、热内。这些艺术家们的幽魂在她字里行间萦绕不去，当然也少不了她深爱的丈夫与兄弟的魂灵。关于失去的黑暗旋律贯穿这本书的始终。她最心爱的风衣——丢了。她最喜欢的一本村上春树的书——忘在机场厕所里了。她最爱用的相机——丢在海滩上了。她家附近最好的咖啡屋——关门了。史密斯在皇后区罗卡韦海滩买下了一处小小的房子，虽然它挺过了桑迪飓风，但她也亲眼目睹了邻居们的惨重损失，人行道成了废墟、朋友的咖啡屋被冲垮、几百户人家被夷为平地，或者被大水淹没。

If “Just Kids” was about starting out as an artist and setting forth²⁵ in the world, “M Train” feels more like a look at the past through a rearview mirror. Ms. Smith writes of feeling “a longing²⁶ for the way things were.” She writes about ghosts drawing us away from the present. She writes about singing “What a Wonderful World” for Fred at his memorial service and she writes about realizing that she is now older than Fred when he died — and older than many of her departed friends.

如果说《只是孩子》是关于她作为艺术家的起点，以及她如何在这个世界上启程，《M列车》更像是通过后视镜对自己的过去做一次回望。史密斯写出了“对事物本来面目的怀念”；写出幽魂如何指引我们暂且离开当下的时光；她写到在弗莱德的追思会上为他唱起《多么美好的世界》(What a Wonderful World)；写到她发现自己已经比弗莱德去世时年长、比自己所有英年早逝的朋友去世时都要年长时的心情。

“I’m going to remember everything,” she thinks, “and then I’m going to write it all down. An aria²⁷ to a coat. A requiem²⁸ for a cafe.” An eloquent²⁹ — and a deeply moving — elegy³⁰ for what she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words.

“我要记住一切，”她想，“然后我要把它们都写下来：一首风衣的咏叹调，一支咖啡屋的安魂曲。”最终，她带来了这曲意味深长而又深切动人的哀歌，那些“失落了就难以寻回”的东西，却可以通过文字被永远铭记。