Most people who love and often read poetry have experienced that when reading the poems of ancient poets, especially foreign poets, there will always be a sense of separation. Perhaps because the lives of the ancients and foreigners were very different from those of today's people, although the subject matter and themes dealt with by poets may be the same in ancient times, today's readers will also feel the barrier to reading because of the strange famous objects in the poems, the heterogeneous experiential content, and the changed literary issues. Admittedly, this literary acceptance effect is also related to the historical changes in language (there is also the problem of the translator's choice of language style in translated poetry) and the renewal of people's perception of beauty. The language and aesthetic style of the past era, because of the time and space distance, have now become objects of observation, and we can resonate with them, but it is often difficult to be directly moved by the poet's verses. The presence of a sense of separation in reading does not mean that the value of the excellent poets and classic works of ancient times has weakened or decreased over time, but that in the face of these poets and poems, the reader can better understand and accept them only with the help of relevant knowledge and after understanding the corresponding context.
Paintings left by Emily Brontë.
Neglected poet Emily
There is a type of poet who can break through this sense of separation between time and space and language and culture, and harvest today's readers with the direct impact of their poetry. Most of these poets have the following characteristics: in addition to possessing outstanding emotional concentration and intensity, abundant imagination, and eager expression of the beauty of nature, the most important thing is that sometimes he/she has a spiritual vision like divine help. Because of the shortness of his poetic career and the extraordinary achievements of poetry, people will describe such poets with genius and originality.
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) is such a poet, and we can glimpse the poetic world of the "Brontë Sisters" who have long been famous for their novel Wuthering Heights, but whose poetic title is also immortal, composed of her powerful soul, rich spirit and sincere verses.
The "Brontë sisters" known to posterity in the history of English literature refer to the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, in fact, their parents had a total of 6 children, the eldest two sisters died at the age of 10 and 9, and their brother Brandwell (Charlotte's brother, Emily's brother) and the three sisters, showed literary talent and ambition at a young age. Since Brontë was home in Haworth, West Redding, Yorkshire, far from the big city, and belonged to a remote village, it was difficult to reach the literary circles of the time, and it was difficult for women to write at that time, it was difficult to be widely accepted, so it was not surprising that this dramatic scene that had happened to the "Brontë Sisters": in May 1846, a selected poem entitled "The Collected Poems of Kohler, Ellis, Acton Bell" was published, and later, "Jane Eyre" signed by Kohler Bell, "Wuthering Heights", Acton Bell's Agnes Gray and The Tenant at Wildfield House were also published. Because of the popularity of "Jane Eyre" after its publication, the first edition was republished two months later, and then someone posed as Kohler Bell and advertised another new book. At the same time, it is also rumored that the three Bell brothers are actually one. In July 1848, Charlotte and Anne had to rush to London to meet with the publisher, George Smith, to clarify the true identities of the three Bells as brontë sisters.
The personalities of the three Brontë sisters are different, from consciously devoting themselves to writing, longing and planning to publish the written works, to putting them into action and submitting for publication, how much psychological construction to go through in between, today's readers may hardly imagine. Of the three sisters, Emily had the strongest personality, and for a time her poetry writing was carried out quietly, only telling her sister Anne. When her sister Charlotte stumbles upon Emily's poetry manuscript, Emily feels her privacy being violated, and a heated argument breaks out between the two sisters, with Emily saying that she doesn't want to publish her own poem. But Charlotte was struck by the power of Emily's poems: "They are not at all like ordinary boudoir poems, but concise, concise, strong, and sincere." In my ears, these poems have a particularly intimate phonological beauty—they are rough, melancholy, sublime." It took Charlotte hours to explain that she didn't mean it, and it took a few days for Emily to change her mind, believing that her poems were worth publishing.
Emily and Anne died in December 1848 and May 1849, respectively, and Charlotte became the literary face of the Three Sisters. In a reminiscence essay for the reprinting of the two sisters' novels, Charlotte recalls the three men's original motivations for choosing pseudonyms to publish poems and novels: "On the one hand, they were reluctant to disclose their female identity, and at the same time, out of cautious concern, they were reluctant to adopt names that were known to be men at a glance. For, "although we know that our writing and thinking do not have the usual 'daughterly' temperament", "we have a general impression that people often look at women writers with prejudice; critics sometimes use gender as a weapon of punishment, and sometimes use it as a reason for touting — and praise is certainly not true praise".
The prejudice against this criticism of women who write has not completely disappeared so far. The neglect of Emily Brontë's poetic achievements is probably not unrelated to this. In addition to Charlotte's great admiration for Emily's poetry, in the history of British literature in the 20th century, critics Herbert Reed, novelists Virginia Woolf, and Somerset Maugham have clearly affirmed Emily's poetic achievements. Reed called Emily "the pride of the wasteland", believing that her reproduction and insight into nature trumped that of the Romantic laureate poet-laureate Wordsworth, calling her poems "fresh in style, timeless in meaning, sonorous in rhythm, and the elite of the poetry of female poets in the English poetry garden" and "to the universal form of thought that only first-rate poets have". Woolf speculates that Emily's poetry "will live longer than her novels" and that Emily's talent "is the rarest of all talents." In his analysis of Wuthering Heights, Maugham mentions that only by reading Emily's poems can people better understand the "emotional experience of alleviating intense pain" presented in her novels, and he is surprised by the mysticism in Emily's poems and convinced that Emily must have loved someone deeply when she was young, although we have no way of examining who this person is.
"Roaring in the Wilderness", by Emily Brontë, translated by Ling Yue and Liang Jiaying, edition: Yazhong Culture | Beijing United Publishing Company, July 2021
Intense self-inner discernment
The Wilderness Roar: Selected Poems of Emily Brontë is divided into three series, the first series of 21 poems is the poems of Emily in the collection of pseudonymous poems of the Three Sisters published in May 1846, which should be selected by Emily herself and should be representative. If the sense of reading diaphragm mentioned at the beginning of this article also exists more or less in Emily Brontë, then for Chinese readers, it may mean that the core themes of her poetry are mostly related to faith, stemming from the brontë sisters' family (their father was a priest) and the era of life.
But I don't think Emily is writing religious poetry or writing about secular life in terms of religious context and stories, and poets like George Herbert and John Dunn, even if religious elements appear frequently in Emily's poems, she is translating them into more universal themes of faith and spiritual exploration, including meditations on life, death, faith, pain, redemption, and hope. Of course, from the overall point of view of Emily's 193 surviving poems, most of her poems are related to the love, friendship, affection, war, heroic figures, lonely wanderings, and observation and praise of nature in secular life. From the perspective of craftsmanship, Emily is good at personifying the objects conveyed by her poetry, whether it is natural things or abstract ideas, and expanding the inner space of poetry through the form of dialogue and debate with them. To put it another way, the poet uses a method of self-division to create a tension between imagination and contemplation.
For example, in Faith and Despair, the poet conceives of a father-daughter conversation on a winter night, exploring how the pain of the deceased's thoughts and love, intertwined with the thoughts and love of the living, can be calmed by "pious hope." The controversy between the prophet and the philosopher in the poem "The Philosopher", the plea of the living to the dying in "A Scene of Death", the lyrical protagonist suddenly enters the first-person monologue by asking the question of "you" entering the prime of the year, expressing how to face the unjust fate of the soul with great courage, these poems all appear character or self-characterization, it can be said that Emily Brontë, like her contemporary, the English poet Robert Browning, used a large number of dramatic monologues in lyric poetry. Although in the history of literature or poetry, Robert Browning is often considered one of the pioneers and representatives of the dramatic monologue technique. The use of this technique sometimes appears in quotation passages within Emily's poems, and some are hidden between the lines, like the fierce self-discernment unfolding within the poet.
"The Prisoner (a Fragment)" and "Self-Interrogation" are the poems in which this dramatic monologue is brought to life. If "Self-Interrogation" is only the self-questioning and self-justification of the lyrical protagonist, then "The Prisoner" sets up the role of the prisoner for the lyrical protagonist, both the dialogue between the body and the prisoner's soul, and the participation of the soul of the jailer and his master. A spiritual drama is performed on the multi-character stage, shaping the poet's process of self-maturity and spiritual growth. In this sense, the prisoner is a symbol. In this poem, Emily also uses the mouth of a prisoner to tell her unique spiritual experience: "The wind carries a gentle tone, the stars, a gentle fire, / The illusion rises, changes, and kills me with longing"; "Then the invisible begins to appear; ignoring its true disclosure; / My external perception fades, and my inner feelings are: / Its wings are almost free - its home, its port is discovered, / Measuring the chasm, it possesses, and bravely makes the last leap". This ability to see illusions has appeared several times in Emily's life, as recorded in this poem. Thus, in The Gamebreaker: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, author Lindell Gordon calls Emily Brontë a "visionary."
"Spiritual Vision" in Emily's Poems
This mystical spiritual vision meant that she could see supernatural reality that the mortal eye could not see, just as the poet and painter William Blake also possessed this temperament. Emily Brontë gave a whole new meaning to the real society in which she lived, and the critic David Cecil argued that "these momentary illusions are the philosophical basis on which she describes life." The term "philosophical foundations" sounds a bit abstract, but it is more appropriate to replace it with "way of looking at things", under the illusionary experience, Emily Brontë divides the universe under the control of the Creator into living and inanimate, spiritual and material, although the two are opposites, but they are the embodiment of living spiritual elements. This directly forms a series of contradictory images in Emily's literature, especially in poetry, including: the stormy and tranquil nature and spiritual world; the imprisoned body and mind and the space of freedom; the pain of life brought about by the despair of death and the tranquility of the human heart given by the hope of piety. These elements are opposed and unified in the experience of life, and Emily's thoughts mature and her spiritual realm is broadened. Take the first paragraph of "High up, Ou Heather Fluttering in the Wind" as an example——
High up, Heather fluttered in the wind Midnight, moonlight, bright twinkling stars Darkness and glory mingle happily The earth rises to reach heaven and heaven descends Release the human soul from its gloomy dungeon
This poem can be seen as the poet's feeling of being in the wilderness of the night, the original opposing imagery elements "darkness" and "glory" blend at this moment, and the distant "earth" and "heaven" are close to each other, this magnificent landscape makes people experience an unprecedented freedom and liberation, echoing and approaching the divinity and sublimity of nature. If we compare it with the similar poems of ancient Chinese poets, we can find the differences in the way the traditional cultures of the East and the West perceive the natural and humanistic worlds. The same works of ascension, such as the Tang Dynasty Chen Ziang's "Dengyouzhou Tai Song", starting from the contrast of "not seeing the ancients before / not seeing the comers later", followed by "thinking of the heavens and the earth / alone but weeping", expressing a kind of lonely and hesitant sigh that people are in the universe.
"From the carefree sunshine of childhood / Illusions are nourished by a passionate imagination" ("I Sit Alone, Summer"), in this early poem Emily Brontë understands the relationship between her illusory experience and poetry. When we talk about poets, imagination seems to be a regular yardstick for measuring whether a poet is competent. Imagination is linked to the poet's originality, the intrinsic richness of the poetic world, and the mastery and subtlety of the poet's craftsmanship. Emily's imagination enables her to see the illusion of the moment, which we certainly do not have to see as a symptom of superstition or mental illness, but as a poet with a profound spiritual experience. Therefore, in the history of world poetry, there are also people who divide poets who can see illusions into a special category.
Another important part of Emily Brontë's poetry is that she constructed an imaginary kingdom called Gundar in poetic form, which is included in the second and third series of The Roar of the Wild. The extant "Gondal Poems" are incomplete, and can also be written as lyric poems and narrative poems separately, so that they are generally mixed with other poems in various Emily Brontë poetry anthologies and poetry collections. The origins of Gundal's poems date back to the childhood of the Brontë sisters, whose father, Mr. Brontë, allegedly gave his son Branwell a set of twelve soldiers' toy boxes, which inspired the children to write an adventure "script" together. The children let the soldiers live on different lands, which in turn belonged to one child. They write stories based on fictional characters from fictional lands, write magazines, create "bed-play" plays, and rehearse them at home. This playful creation persisted only to Emily and Anne, especially Emily, and Gundar's poems are a direct product of the games she derived from childhood adventure plays. Emily's Gundar is a small island in the North Pacific Ocean, the environment and climate are very similar to the High Marshes of Yorkshire, cold, foggy, stormy, and ruled by Queen Augusta, who is tough, cold and tender. "The Moon Shines at Midnight", "The Night of the Storm Has Passed", "The Climax of the Battle Is Over", "Lord Elber, on Mount Elber", "A Terrible Light Suddenly Extinguishes", "Augusta to Alfred" are all representative passages. This article cannot enumerate them all, but the careful reader can judge which texts also belong to The Gondal Psalms by the scenes depicted in the poems, the tone of the speaker, and the details of the relevant famous objects. The Howling of the Wild, interspersed with Emily's Gondal poems in her large number of realistic lyrical works, can also subtly help readers to conceive of the richness and complexity of Emily Brontë's poetic world.
How to bridge the barriers of 19th-century poetry
"Roaring in the Wilderness" is not the first translation of Emily Brontë's poetry in Chinese, but it is the best translation to date, because one of the translators, Ling Yue, is also a poet. Poets' translation of poetry does not seem to be a new topic, and the average reader tends to think that the poet's good sense of language can make him/her more poetic when dealing with the translation, which is not outrageous, but the responsibility and advantage of the poet's translator are not only reflected in the language ability, but also their empathy and recognition of the complete life of the object of translation, another poet, and the attachment to poetry that always expects its current vitality. The typical characteristics of poets' translated poems are often reflected in: the overall sense of freshness of speech, no expression, the unity of sound and rhyme presented according to specific poems, and the rich inner rhythm; pay attention to the stage of the translated poet's creation, sensitive to the change and continuity of his style; in order to resurrect the life of the translated poems, he is not only familiar with each poem and all the poems written by the poet, but also has the ability to find the appropriate literary historical positioning for it. The poet's translation of poetry reflects the translator's conscious sense of creative transformation. Taken together, the poet's translated poems are always selected and accepted by the keen reader.
After all, Emily Brontë lived in England in the first half of the 19th century, coupled with the frequent use of faith-related concepts in her poetry, today's Chinese translators can not bypass the poet's unique life era and commonly used words, Ling Yue and Liang Jiaying in translating Emily Brontë's poetry, with rhythmic and clear modern Chinese, focusing on the colloquialism of expression, the unity of poetic tone, beautiful and concise aesthetic style, these all accurately reflect Emily Brontë's spiritual temperament. It also does an excellent job of removing the sense of separation that poetry from different languages, cultures, and histories brings to today's readers.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, translated by Yang Wei, edition: Yilin Press, March 2006
Subtle stage changes in The Roar of the Wild
Emily Brontë's poetry is largely focused on her 18-28 years of age, and we select her early and late "Is it sunny or cloudy?" from The Roar of the Wild. (July 12, 1836, said to be Emily's first surviving poem) and Prisoner (a fragment) (October 9, 1845) shows the translators Ling Yue and Liang Jiaying's awareness and subtle presentation of the stylistic changes before and after Emily Brontë's poetry.
The "lady" (she) that appears in the previous poem should be the lyrical protagonist (or the poet himself) of the poem, and the use of "lady" and "she" to refer to reflects the poet's self-observation perspective, which is an observation of the poet's subject's fate. The poet uses the change of weather of the day as a metaphor for the possible fate of her life, if it is a summer morning when the sun warms the earth, then "her days will be spent like a pleasant dream, in a sweet tranquility", but if she encounters a cloudy day, a shadow extinguishes the sunshine and calls for rain, "her days will be spent like a sad story, in worry, tears and pain", or if the breeze of freedom blows away the clouds, and the sun and rain dominate nature, then "her days will be spent in the light of glory, Travel through the silent desert of this world". This is a simple, fresh and beautiful work, the young poet seems to believe that her life depends on the natural environmental conditions, depending on the quality of luck, and the poet is full of hope. By the time of the poem The Prisoner, the poet's mind has matured, and the sense of captivity of life, the will to desire freedom, the higher yearning of the soul, all make her feel the pain of her life, even "the most painful thing is surveillance— to aggravate the unbearable pain", but the poet does not try to avoid it, "I do not want to lose any sting, I do not want to reduce any torture; / The more the pain is tormented, God will bless it sooner; / Put on the robe of hell's fire, or shine with the light of heaven, / If it is only a sign of death, the sight is sacred!" The consciousness of bearing and accepting suffering makes the poet fearless about misfortune and death, beyond the attention of personal destiny, and hopes to seek spiritual transcendence from within himself.
If you say, "Is it sunny or cloudy?" The optimism of "Prisoner" embodies a romantic spiritual dynamic, then the self-division, confrontation and not tragic commitment in "Prisoner" flashes the pessimistic color of modernism. No wonder later researchers, when emphasizing the importance of Emily's poetry, reminded us that Emily was a pioneer of modernist poetry. The more pertinent judgment comes from the British critic Terry Eagleton, who, in his book The Brontë Sisters, The Myth of Power, argues that "the Brontë Sisters can be called late Romantic writers" and "transitional figures".
Intense personal emotions, magnificent nature, and even mysterious instantaneous illusions, these factors are necessarily inspired by the power of imagination, as Emily said when she mentions that she can see the illusion, all because of the "nourishment of the warm imagination". In the poem entitled "To the Imagination", Emily calls "imagination" "my true friend", because of it, she is no longer alone, she can overcome the "dangers, sins and dark lies" of the outside world, so that she can double the cherishing of the inner world, can "keep a piece of brightness", even if "the sad truth of nature" will "trample and trample on" dreams "new, fantasy flowers", but the visions she has seen help her confirm the "truth" of that world, and with gratitude for "imagination", the poet understands her responsibility. At the same time, it is also the function of poetry: "more affirmation of the consolation of human care, / sweeter hope, when hope is disappointed". It is "Imagination", the poet's "true friend", as a messenger, that brings us the immortal poems of Emily Brontë.
The author | Zhou Zhan
Editor| Gong Zhaohua
Proofreading | Xue Jingning