Du Fu's poetry is a miracle
▲Ah Lai (Vice Chairman of the China Writers Association)
I have recently been reading classical poetry, mainly Qiu Zhao'ao's "Detailed Notes on Du Poems" in the Qing Dynasty, but I have also referred to many other books, such as Mr. Shi Shicun's "Hundred Words of Tang Poems" in Shanghai. "Du Shi Detailed Notes" is a book I often read, and I am reading it at the moment, and every two or three years I will go back to the furnace to re-read it, often read it.
Reading a literary classic is not a short reading that kills time, nor is it a matter of immediately making up some new books in order to get some information. "Notes on Du Shi" seems to be a book that only a pedantic person can read, but I think that a writer, despite experiencing the impact of globalization and various new literary ideas, ultimately has to use Chinese language to deal with and accept all these things we experience.
After all, the time of the new cultural movement and albino is still short, and the Chinese language and writing are tangible, phonetic, and meaningful, such as four sounds, polysemanticity, etc. These language skills are not easy to master and creatively express if they do not return to the classical tradition, especially if they do not return to the classical poetry tradition. Can our narrative literature today give more consideration to the characteristics of Chinese characters, such as shape, sound, and meaning, and whether it can be imaginative and vivid enough? For example, many of our Chinese are often "silent", but I often fantasize that it is alive and is being recited. This is from a technical point of view. But most importantly, in the Chinese literary tradition from ancient times to the present, realism is still a mainstream vein.
Every author cannot write this era out of thin air, and today some grand narrative literature is playing the routine of fake big and empty, but if the writer enters from a small incision and becomes a personal narrative poem, it is really difficult to have a relationship with the times. But why did such a miracle happen to Du Fu? Du Fu's more than a thousand poems have his personal feelings, experiences and lives, but they do have a deep connection with the times at that time, and the poems he wrote were called "poetic history" by later generations. As a writer, you need to constantly think about how this happened.
Author: Alai
Editor: Jiang Chuting
Editor-in-Charge: Zhu Zifen
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.