Ye Shaoweng(Chinese: 叶沙翁; pinyin: Yàī sì ìлng He left more than 50 poems in his lifetime, the most famous of which is called "Garden Tour is Not Worth It". This is a seven-sentence poem, the full text of which is as follows:
You should pity the teeth to print the moss, and the small buckle wood door will not be opened for a long time.
The spring color of the garden could not be closed, and a red apricot branch came out of the wall.
Readers who are familiar with the "Thousand Family Poems" must be familiar with this poem, especially the third and fourth sentences of this poem, which are very famous and very well sung.
However, nowadays, whenever the Chinese people hear these two poems, or just hear the words "red apricot out of the wall", there will always be some "peach events" in their minds. So in the end, it is inevitable to "smile in the heart", but this is definitely not the original intention of the poet Ye Shaoweng.
"Visiting the Garden" is ostensibly a garden poem, but in fact it is also a "no encounter poem" rich in simple philosophy. "A branch of red apricots out of the wall" is famous because the three or four sentences of this poem are written "show" with "hidden", which is very literary tension and full of philosophy.
The reason why the poem "A red apricot comes out of the wall" is "misinterpreted" is precisely because the imagery in the poem is "hidden", which can be brought into different scenes at will. Therefore, feng Menglong, the famous "eight dukes" of the Ming Dynasty, was given the convenience of "distorting" it.
First, "The Garden Is Not Worth It" is a "poem that does not meet"
In fact, in the "Small Collection of Rivers and Lakes" published in the Southern Song Dynasty, Ye Shaoweng's "Garden Is Not Worth it" has some small differences from today's popular version, and its text is as follows:
It should be suspected that the teeth are printed on the platform, and the ten buckles of firewood are nine times not open.
From the early version of "Garden Is Not Worth It", it is not difficult for us to see that this poem, while writing "full of spring colors in the garden", actually wrote two characters.
One is the poet himself who wants to visit the garden, and the other is the owner of the garden. Although the owner of the garden never appeared, the first sentence of the poem, "Should be suspected", wrote his attitude.
The reason why the owner does not open the door is because he does not like, even hate, the wooden shoes of tourists, which will leave tooth marks on the moss on the ground. So no matter how tourists knock on the door, the owner of the garden deliberately does not open the door.
So, what does this thing illustrate? That is to say, the owner of the garden mentioned in this poem may be a hermit with a high and arrogant personality, who does not want to be disturbed by visitors. The author went to visit, but ate a closed door.
As we mentioned earlier, this poem is both a "garden poem" and a "poem of not encountering". However, Ye Shaoweng's "no encounter poem" is not like Qiu Wei's "Searching for the Hermit of the Western Mountains", monk Jiaoran's "Looking for Lu Hong gradually does not meet" or Jia Dao's "The Hermit Does Not Meet".
Other poets write that they do not meet friends, basically like the small story of "Why See Dai" in "The New Language of the World", across the firewood, looking at the empty garden to develop an association, in order to express the author's own "come with pleasure, happy to return" free.
It is only the last two sentences of Ye Shaoweng's "Visiting the Garden Is Not Worth It", but it expresses another layer of meaning. He seemed to be telling the owner of the garden: The spring colors of this garden overflow the wall, is it that you can close it if you want to? Believe it or not, the red apricot is out of the wall.
The poem describing the spring color with "red apricot out of the wall" is not written by Ye Shaoweng alone. At his contemporaries, or some time earlier than him, Lu You and Zhang Liangchen had written similar sentences, but they were not as rich in literary tension as his three sentences.
Because when Ye Shaoweng described the spring color, the first sentence first wrote a "close", and the last sentence wrote a "out". One is to prevent the spring color from overflowing the wall, and the other is to break through the strong resistance and have to expose the wall.
In this way, it is inevitable to make people wonder what problem Ye Shaoweng wanted to explain when he wrote this poem? He was going to visit the owner of this garden, which must have something to do with the spring color of this garden.
The owner of the garden does not open the door, should be worried that if the garden gate is opened, the spring color in the garden will slip out. Only in this way can the first and second sentences of the poem be connected with the meaning of the third and fourth sentences.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the word "should be suspected" in the later poetry collection was changed to "should be pity". Because if the first sentence is "should be suspected", it is equivalent to emphasizing the reason why the owner does not open the door.
It is to prevent tourists from leaving footprints on the platform, which is contrary to the meaning that is wanted to be expressed later. Changing it to "should be pitiful" weakens the impression of Cangtai staying behind, and can make the "spring color in the garden can't be closed" in the following article more prominent.
As for "ten buckles of firewood and nine do not open", it is changed to "small buckles of firewood are not opened for a long time", it is possible that the author of the revised version judged that Ye Shaoweng and the owner were friends, and thought that "ten buckles and nine opens" was illogical, so it was revised.
Because the third and fourth sentences of the poem obviously have a reasoning meaning. And the object of reasoning is likely to be the owner of the garden. If Ye Shaoweng and the master were completely unfamiliar, then he would lose his position of reasoning.
The owner of the garden has a lonely and arrogant personality, and is usually afraid of being disturbed by laymen, so when someone comes to lock the door, it will "open nine out of ten". But Ye Shaoweng is not a layman, why doesn't Ye Shaoweng open it when he comes? Because Ye Shaoweng is a "small buckle firewood", the knocking is a little light.
Second, "a red apricot out of the wall" was "misinterpreted" as early as the Ming Dynasty
Nowadays, a small number of people not only do not understand ancient poetry very well, but also like to deliberately "misinterpret" the poems of the ancients to ridicule others and achieve the effect of entertainment.
But "distorting" ancient poetry is not the patent of modern people. The first person to misinterpret the poem "A red apricot comes out of the wall" was the "novelists" of the Ming Dynasty, including Feng Menglong.
And the more "hateful" thing is that we now "misinterpret" ancient poems, mostly because we can't read them and take them for granted. But these ancient "novelists" read it and deliberately "distorted it."
We all know that Feng Menglong was a famous short story writer in the Ming Dynasty, but what everyone doesn't know is that he is actually a bookseller. He not only likes to collect ancient passages and adapt them into novels, but also especially likes to collect ancient folk mountain songs, collect them into volumes, and publish them to make money.
Feng Menglong compiled a book at that time, called "Oleander Thimble Thousand Poetry Mountain Song", which contains a "oleander" time tune, the full text is as follows:
Miss Wind Flow out of the dresser, red jacket red dress red embroidered shoes. On the back garden of the moon, lovers can come. There was no trace, so I had to unfold the ladder. Little Sister, three inches and three points of bow shoes, stepped on the flower ladder and stretched out her head to see, it was clear that "a red apricot came out of the wall."
The story told in this tune is actually born from the "West Chamber", Cui Yingying jumping off the wall will be Zhang Sheng's drama. Since then, "a red apricot out of the wall" and "red apricot out of the wall" have become synonymous with unfaithful marriage.
epilogue
Feng Menglong and a group of old and unorthodox Ming Dynasty novelists had to "drop the book bag" when writing these "fragrant" novels. As a result, you can't "original" famous sentences, so you can only be lazy.
Then he quoted the famous sentences of Ye Shaoweng, a poet of the Southern Song Dynasty, and as a result, the two very philosophical sentences became simple and rude "peach jokes".
Therefore, "a red apricot out of the wall" is distorted with bias and back, and it is really not strange to the heads of these modern people. At best, modern people should be responsible for not understanding Du Mu's "parking and sitting on the night of the maple forest", and have produced a series of strange associations.