Elliott (1888-1965)
In the mid-1960s, I first read Eliot's name in Literary Review magazine. At that time, I was a "black cub", hiding behind the curtains, reading with trepidation about such a Western modernist poet; outside the window, the dark red sky stretched like a high fever, and the sound of celebration and criticism of gongs and drums shot straight into the sky. In those days, Chinese readers could not read any of his poems. The line of Eliot's poem quoted in that review surprised me therefore. My primary and secondary school textbooks are all about literature in the service of politics, and I don't know how many times I have read a collection of poems called "The Ballad of the Red Flag". I can't help but wonder how readers outside will react when they read Eliot's poems. There seemed to be a gap in the "Great Wall" that surrounded me, revealing a miserable white sky, "like a patient on ether and lying on the operating table."
After 1976, when China's reform and opening up began, I was admitted to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a master's degree. Among the compulsory textbooks at that time was still a history of British and American literature compiled by Soviet scholars, and the discussion of Eliot resembled an echo from the Literary Review. Fortunately, my mentor, Mr. Bian Zhilin, himself translated Elliot in the 1930s and agreed to the title of my master's thesis: "Personalization and Impersonalization in Eliot's Early Poems." As an appendix to my dissertation, I simultaneously began to translate his poems, which I then expanded into a collection of poetry translations, The Four Quartets, published by Lijiang Publishing House in 1985, which included all of his important poems.
The translated book of poems unexpectedly became a bestseller, and was quickly reprinted five or six times after its first edition. I was very surprised to read that a pair of young lovers had made special arrangements to put a copy of the "Four Quartets" on the dowry in the yellow fish cart, and it was paraded through the streets of Shanghai. This is said to be fashionable and modernist. However, "The Four Quartets" became popular overnight, first of all because at the beginning of the opening, Chinese readers became strongly interested in modernist works that had not been exposed to before, and at the same time, there were some factors of yin and yang, which reminded people of the mixture of modernity and fashion that he wrote in "Nancy's Cousin", paradoxical and paradoxical.
Not to mention Eliot's influence on The modernist poets of the 1930s and 1940s, much research has been done on this. For some young poets of the 1980s, Eliot's poetry also helped them, in the unprecedented wave of reform and opening up, to find their own expression and sensibility different from previous poetry - the label of obscure poetry may be too simple, can only be said to be conventional. Interestingly, as early as the article "The Metaphysical Poet", Eliot said: "When the poet's mind is perfectly equipped for his work, it is constantly merging different experiences in poetry... Poets living in modern civilization can therefore only be obscure and incomprehensible. The emergence of obscure poetry in China is not difficult to understand, although by Eliot's standards, the obscurity of these "distant" poets is far from enough.
For me, the study and reflection in the process of writing that master's thesis made me see a new horizon in poetics. In the poetry writing and poetry theory of that period in China, the word "personalization" was derogatory, and almost no mention could be mentioned, and "impersonalization" could not be talked about at all. In Eliot's theory of poetic criticism, personalization and impersonalization do not actually constitute contradictions, but rather constitute a tension in modernist poetry. Separating the people in life from the creative mind, and transforming the personal experience into impersonal, so that the poem can speak to all readers, so that they can find common, universal meaning and feeling in the poetic mood.
In 1988, I received the Ford Foundation Award for a one-year visiting study at Washington University in St. Louis. This is the city where Elliot was born, and it is also the university founded by his grandfather, where I plan to do research, collect materials, and prepare to write a critical biography of Elliott when I return home. However, life was not satisfactory, and many unexpected factors came together, so I had to stay at this university to study for a Doctor of Comparative Literature, and then I began to write novels in English.
The protagonist of the so-called "one peck and one drink", the protagonist of the series of novels of Inspector Chen, has become an upright but bookish police officer, stumbling and insisting on moving forward in order to assert the fairness and justice in his mind; in one case after another, he often quotes Eliot's poetry lines, which makes his detective work add a complex human and emotional perspective. (By the way, the original name of "Wasteland" was "He Plays a Cop in a Different Voice"; Elliott himself has said that he particularly liked inspector Maigray novels by the French writer Georges Simonon.) The case of the fourth novel in Inspector Chen's series made him feel the "disgusting" of a personal but existential feeling, so he wrote a poem imitating Eliot's dramatic inner monologue of "Prufolk's love song". “...... My bow tie is tightly fastened, / my crocodile shoes are shiny. /(But they'll think, 'How yellow is he!'" I quote Shakespeare, Mavre, Dorne, / How would they react? / In a word, I can't say for sure. /(But they say privately, 'He has a heavy accent!') In the fourteenth novel in the series, Chen is relieved of his post as inspector, but still refuses to give up his efforts to continue his investigation; he writes a novel about the murder of The Fish Mystery as a cover for his continued work in private. It's also somewhat like Elliott wrote in Burning Norton, "Like a still Chinese vase / always moving in stillness." At the same time, the superposition of ancient Chinese and modern detectives is precisely under the influence of Eliot, juxtaposing and contrasting the past and the present, thus contributing to the multi-dimensional presentation of the poetic realm.
For more than two decades, I have had the opportunity to participate in literary festivals and book promotions, sign-outs, and interact with readers speaking a variety of different languages around the world. The question is often asked: "Why is Elliot still so important to Inspector Chen and to today's global readers?" ”
A French reader with champagne and a bilingual version of Eliot's poems in English and French read the lines in two languages in a makeshift tent set up at the Saint-Malo Literary Festival, exploring the possibility of merging different linguistic sensibilities into the poems and translations. The editor-in-chief of the Norwegian publishing house repeatedly pondered with me how the inherent musicality of Elliot's poetry made the cabaret "Cat" a great success (and sighed for me to clap the table, and the opportunity to buy Elliot St. Louis's house actually passed me by). A Dutch director (Chris Teerink) flew to St. Louis in the middle of last year to interview me about his Elliot documentary. One of the questions he asked was how to translate and deal with the frequent intertextual dictionaries in the "wasteland"? As an explanation, I mentioned that the intertextual use of classical Chinese poetry is more practical, sometimes even line by line. In poetry translation, it is precisely to take into account the aesthetic process of acceptance and understanding of the reader of the target language text, and through the perceptual fusion of different languages, so that the translated poems read as well as poems. The Dutch director agreed that Eliot's work incorporated sensibilities from different languages of poetry, sometimes even directly embedding other languages into the poems, and the Dutch director was very much in favor of showing this during filming and continuing to explore them together.
Readers and critics will naturally come up with their own answers about the meaning of Eliot's poetry from different angles, but many people in Elliot's "wasteland" have not yet been able to get out of it. "There is no water here, only rocks/rocks, no water, only a sand road/winding up in the mountains..." For my own part, Eliot's reply at the Nobel Prize banquet has always brought indispensable inspiration to my writing, translation, and research.
"When language constitutes an obstacle, poetry itself gives us a reason to try to overcome it. Appreciating and reading poetry that belongs to another language means the process of appreciating and understanding the people who speak that language. We cannot have gained this understanding of the meaning of the term 'European poetry' by other means, and the same is true of 'poetry' all over the world. ”
Perhaps the essay does not read much like the long writings of Elliot's experts, but at least it is a testimony: from the point of view of an author who translates and writes his own poems—under Elliott's influence, initially in Chinese and then in English—confirms why we read Elliott today. The significance of his poetry is still there, even more so, for chinese readers, but also for readers around the world.
(2022 coincides with the centenary of Elliott's creation of "The Wasteland," and various commemorative events have been arranged in many countries.) My friend Karen, who wants to publish a collectible edition of Selected Poems of Elliot, wants me, as a Translator/Scholar of Chinese descent, to talk about Eliot's influence on Chinese readers and global readers. This is something I can't push away, I can only do it. When translating this short article into Chinese, some changes were made, even rewritten. ）
Author: Qiu Xiaolong
Editors: Andy, Qian Yutong
Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.