The splendor behind the plain words
○ Li Zhen
I have been engaged in the study and criticism of modern poetry for more than 30 years, and I have always been somewhat resistant to the use of classical poetry to write, and I have always thought that ancient poetry has been played with by the ancients, to the extent that it has become ripe. Moreover, the classical poetry belongs only to the ancients, not to the present. Today's people should write about the feelings of contemporary people, the current situation and experience, and express them in the living language of today's people. However, when a friend transferred two collections of poems by the female poet Su Yan, "Su Yan" and "Su Yu", it unexpectedly touched me and made me have to reconsider the problem of writing ancient poetry today.
It can be seen that the female poet Suyan is completely untainted by some of the current poetic abuses, immersed in her own classical feelings and poetic life, to perceive and experience the mountains and rivers of Qinling Mountains, flowers, birds, grasses and insects, spring, summer, autumn and winter, and can use skillful Chinese to express them accurately and wonderfully. According to my superficial understanding of Su Yan, she is an economics professor at a well-known university, her studies have nothing to do with poetry, and she has no intention of becoming a poet, and the reason why she writes is completely out of love for poetry and nature, out of the true perception and poetic feelings of nature and humanities in her heart, which can be described as natural.
"Su Yan" and "Su Yu" are composed of poems and images that write about the natural landscape of the Qinling Mountains and the humanistic feelings that complement them. This reminds me of Wang Wei, who wrote poetry, painted, played the piano, and participated in Zen in Qinling River more than 1,200 years ago. Although Su Yan and Wang Wei have differences between the past and the present, the difference between men and women, but the Qinling mountains and rivers they face are probably the same, and the two perspectives of poetry and painting they practice are also very similar, and their pursuit of the poetic composition of "painting in poetry, poetry in painting" is also the same. The difference is that Wang Wei draws with a pen and Su Yan takes pictures with a camera; Wang Wei's poems have buddha nature and Zen meaning, but in Su Yan's poems, there are many human feelings. I don't know if Su Yan read Wang Wei's poems intensively, but the similarity is amazing! But I don't think Su Yan is suspected of imitating Wang Wei. First, because Suyan is a modern person after all, its perception method and poetic connotation are no longer the same as Wang Wei's; then, Suyan' expression as a modern person has overflowed with classical grammatical norms, so there are prose poems after each ancient poem in "Suyan" and free poems in "Suyu".
At this point, I think that whether a person is a poet or not is not whether he deliberately writes poetry, not how many poems he writes, nor in what language he writes poetry, but whether he lives in a poetic way. Some people have written poetry all their lives, but it is difficult to say that he is a poet, and some people may not have written poetry all their lives, but they live in a poetic way, he is a poet. Su Yan did not study literature, nor did she work for writers' associations or literary research institutes, and in universities, she taught economics that was somewhat opposed to the mechanism of poetry. But she had poetry in her heart, and lived, perceived, and spoke in the way of poetry, and did not intend to become a poet, nor did she need to sell fame and reputation, but concentrated on it and wrote such pure and exquisite poetry.
Based on this, I can think that as long as a person lives in a poetic way, perceives and speaks, it does not matter whether he writes poetry in the classical way or in the modern way. I can also abandon the stereotype of writing ancient poetry today's people.
After abandoning Chen Jian, I went to read and listen to Su Yan's poems in depth, and unexpectedly found that Su Yan's poems gave me another important enlightenment, that is, in her perceptions and speeches, consciously or unconsciously explored a certain possibility of the transformation of Chinese poetry writing from classical to modern.
The pictographic nature of Chinese characters and Chinese, as well as spatial perception and way of speaking, give them innate poetic qualities. This poetic quality should be consistent between classical and modern poetry. It is only because of the difference between ancient and modern spoken language that many visions are displayed. Su Yan's two collections of poems, one is an ancient poem and the other is a modern poem. However, its language method is consistent, and the poet uses two different spoken language forms to fully exert the pictographic essence of Chinese characters and Chinese, as well as spatial perception and speaking methods. It should be added that poetry, whether classical or modern, is colloquial.
So every poetic revolution is a return from the over-formatted, rigid written language to the spoken language. The best, most expressive and vital poems in classical poetry were written by poets in the colloquial language of the time, as well as modern poetry. In Suyan, the poet shows the spatial perception and way of speaking in Chinese with his familiarity with ancient poetry and imitates the spoken language of the ancients.
For example, in the sentence "Accidental birds fly over and cross the half-lake blue" in "Suyan Flying Birds Break the Clear Lake", a curve of the bird flying over the Clear Lake was written by the poet as "scratching through...". What is broken is not the "clear lake" reached by the inertia of thinking, but the "blue", and it is not the "blue" of the entire "clear lake", but the "half lake blue". This is a typical Chinese way of spatial perception and speech. It contains a series of images connected by the synaesthesia group, which completely breaks the linear thinking inertia of language and constructs a spatial picture that breaks the plane perception. This is precisely the aesthetic way of space composed of Chinese poetry. And this way is inherited from the words of the modern people's human feelings. Such as this song "Window Sill":
Flowers have bloomed here / Elegant window, beautiful outside the window / / Summer sparrows have wandered here, / Happy in the window, smiled outside the window / / Autumn leaves have swung here / Warmed the window, dyed outside the window / / Winter snow has been cut here / Far from the window, close to the window / / And now ... / Father's wine bottle clings to the moss / Remember the window, empty window.
Here, the wonders of the Chinese language are fully displayed, a small window sill that people are accustomed to, which is strung together by the poet with spring flowers, summer finches, autumn leaves, and winter snow, and finally through the "father's bottle" into the thought of the father, and through the "window" and "outside the window", and with the clever use and subtle changes of a group of words such as elegance, beauty, joy, laughter, warmth, dyeing, far, near, memory, and emptiness, expressing the "window sill" leaving the poet with different memories of the four seasons and the deep attachment to his father. Although this way of writing uses the spoken language of modern people, it is in line with the grasp of Chinese characteristics in the spoken language of the ancients. From this, I saw the similarities between ancient poetry and new poetry, and saw the huge space and infinite possibilities for the transformation of classical Chinese poetry into modern Chinese poetry.
SuYan and his poems, from personal names to poem titles, are based on "su". From this, we can see the simplicity and humility of the poet, but what I see in the poem is the brilliance of the poet's heart, the brilliance of the Chinese language behind the poet's gentle and quiet plain words.
Image source: Network
This article is from the A07 edition of Culture and Art Newspaper on January 28, 2022
Welcome to subscribe to the 2022 Culture and Art Newspaper
Responsible for the | Zhao Yuebing
Review | Liang Feiyan
If you like this article, please share it in the circle of friends
For more information, please follow us
-- END --
▼