书名：Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs 莱昂纳德·科恩：诗歌与歌词
作者：Leonard Cohen莱昂纳德·科恩
出版社名称：Everyman’s Library
出版时间：2011
语种：英文
ISBN：9780307595836
商品尺寸：11.2 x 1.8 x 16.5 cm
包装：精装
页数：256

莱昂纳德·科恩是伟大的诗人，也是伟大的歌手，从没有人怀疑过。他的诗即歌、歌即诗。他愿意耗费五年十年的时间只为静静等待一首歌、一行句子、一字一语的完成。也由于这样追求完美的诗心，使得他的作品字字经过雕琢，而充满启示性、神谕性，深深影响后来许多音乐人与文人骚客。
所谓“诗歌不分家”，诗既为一种有韵律感的文体，自然容易与歌相辅相成，然而放眼歌坛之中，称得上诗人的却寥寥可数，柯恩就是其中一位。有人称他为“摇滚乐界的拜伦”，一颗总在深思的老灵魂，一缕总在爱恋的孤独男声，一个不爱穿牛仔裤的老嬉皮，他的歌与诗，看似平淡质朴却十分耐嚼。
柯恩有着辨识度极高、“仿佛来自地下道”的低沉嗓音，有如历经沧桑的老朽凄诉着岁月的陈年往事。他的音乐真诚、简单、直接而感人肺腑，其文字、音节、旋律、意境都保有诗般的美丽与隽永。他多愁善感、情感丰沛，歌曲背后总有一段段难以忘怀的故事，关于青春，也关于浪漫，并且总是带有些许难以排遣的悲伤。
2016诺贝尔文学奖得主鲍勃•迪伦曾说过：“如果我必须当一分钟其他人，那个人很可能就是科恩。” 
作为赋予摇滚乐以灵魂的旗帜般的人物，迪伦不仅深深影响了列侬、麦卡特尼等人，也影响了世界各地众多的拥趸，甚至有人说他“改变了世界”。

Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs《莱昂纳德·科恩：诗歌与歌词》这本诗集精选了他五十年来有影响力的作品，包括：Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on the Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat和I’m Your Man等传奇歌曲，以及 Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers和Death of a Lady’s Man等诗歌。

A magnificent selection of song lyrics and poems from across the storied career of one of the most daring and affecting poet-songwriters in the world.

In the more than half century since his first book of poems was published, Leonard Cohen has evolved into an international cult figure who transcends genres and generations. This anthology contains a cross section of his five decades of influential work, including such legendary songs as “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and “I’m Your Man” and searingly memorable poems from his many acclaimed poetry collections, including Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady’s Man. Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.

莱昂纳德·科恩（Leonard Cohen，1934年9月21日—2016年11月7日），来自加拿大小城蒙特利尔，英国文学专业，当代伟大的诗人、歌者，传奇性地集诗人、作家、歌手、画家、僧人于一身。有“摇滚乐界拜伦”之美誉。身为当今摇滚界首屈一指的元老级人物之一，是全球亿万乐迷顶礼膜拜的教父式人物。莱昂纳德·科恩早年以诗歌和小说在文坛成名，小说《美丽失落者》被评论家誉为60年代的经典之作。很偶然的机缘进入到了民谣领域，在Judy Collins的帮助下，他的诗作配上简单的和弦，开始了游吟生涯。莱昂纳德·科恩的嗓音具有犹太拉比一般不可置疑的魔力，不经意间把人们带回时间深处的记忆，直接面对灵魂细微的颤动，沉溺于美丽的遐想之中。莱昂纳德·科恩先后出版了《莱昂纳德·科恩之歌》和《来自一个房间的歌》等专辑。

Leonard Cohen’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He has published two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, and eleven books of poetry, most recently Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, Book of Longing,and Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs. He has to date released fourteen studio albums, the most recent of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. Mr. Cohen died in 2016.

From the Foreword by Robert Faggen

Leonard Cohen has for more than five decades never ceased to surprise us. Ever new, he has eroded an artificial boundary between poetry and song, an achievement that is not merely old but ancient — as ancient as Solomon of Songs of Songs or David the Psalmist; as old as the French troubadours whose ballads of courtly love and songs on metaphysical as well as vulgar and humorous themes proved an important foundation of modern poetry; and as old and mystical as St John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul or St Teresa of Avila, whose mystical transformations of love poetry are beacons of religious verse.

Cohen is the poet who wrote, in “The News You Really Hate,” “You fucking whore, I thought you were really interested in music. I thought your heart was somewhat sorrowful” and later transformed and compressed the sentiment into the line “But you don’t really care for music, do you?” — a great dramatic gesture and a stunning hilarious rhyme (one of hundreds in Cohen’s work) to “Hallelujah,” his remarkable mid-rash on epic agonies of Samson and David.  The sacred and the profane, the holy and the broken, the personal and the universal comingle in Cohen’s poetry as he struggles, baffled, toward the light. Between the “Nameless and the Name” (“Love Itself”) nothing can be unified before it is broken, nothing created or granted “where death is forgotten, and the new thing grin” (“All My Life”).

A native of Montreal, Cohen was born into a Jewish family rich in its tradition. But the French Catholic world of Montreal also became part of his life:

We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. . . . The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. (“Montreal”)

A rebel student at McGill University of modernist poets R. F. Scott, A. M. Klein, and, most particularly, Irving Layton, Cohen went on to live in Hydra, New York, Tennessee, Mumbai, and, of course, Los Angeles, among the monks of Mt Baldy’s Zen Center, and in the freakish world of Singapore’s Bugis Sreet. Blake, Lorca, Yeats, Wildes, Auden, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, Ramesh Balsekar, and Joshu Roshi occupy perhaps the most important seats in his pantheon of poets and seers. If his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, reveals the juxtaposition of Judeo-Christian and Eastern thought in his world, he continues to play with them twelve books later in The Book of Longing. For Cohen poetry and song can go places and explore contradictions lost to theology. Surprise and reversal play nimbly and often in the poems. His razor wit and irony are no less evident than his ability to make the personal and seemingly surreal widely comprehensible:

The Lord is such a monkey 
He’s such a woman too
Such a place of nothing
Such a face of you

May E crash into your temple
And look out thru’ your eyes
And make you fall in love
With everybody you despise 
    (“The Drunk is Gender-Free”)

His poetry beguiles us; its elegance and energy encompass so much well-wrought complexity. In the prayer “If It Be Your Will,” it is hard not to be stunned by a stanza that builds from a parallel but disturbing conditional line to three joyous exhortations and then falls to an enjambed line with a terrifying vision of suffering:

If it be your will,
if there is a choice,
let the rivers fill,
let the hills rejoice.

Let your mercy spill
on all these burning hearts in hell
if it be your will
to make us well.

No less remarkable are the lines in the next stanza, “in our rags of light, / all dressed to kill.” These lines, like so many in Cohen, are searingly bright with the clarity of madness. They heal and tear asunder and heal again. And they keep us listening.