Wenhui Reading launched the audio reading column "Mu Nan Has a Book Sound", selecting Chinese and foreign famous classics and pan Xiaonan (Mu Nan Jun) original works, using text and audio, to share the wisdom and sunshine of human civilization with readers, and absorb the spiritual rain and dew of philosophers and masters.
Read a good book, make a group of good friends, come on, welcome! Today, let's read Zhou Guoping's translation of the Translator's <尼采诗集>Preface (excerpt).
Audio text source: Nietzsche's Collected Poems (translated by Zhou Guoping, published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in July 2017)
Reader: Mu Nanjun
1
One day in the mid-19th century, on a major road in eastern Germany, a village priest took his five-year-old son from the city of Lüzn back to the nearby village. The small village of Leken, surrounded by green trees, was on the side of the road, and the father and son could already see the mossy spires of the village church and hear the melodious Easter bells. Soon after, the priest died of illness. In the sensitive mind of the child, the bell echoed endlessly, often flying to his father's grave with his worries.
A year later, my brother died again. The death of relatives one after another has caused the child to prematurely lose the innocence of childhood and begin to be full of doubts about life. He likes to hide in the temples of nature and meditate in the face of clouds or thunder and lightning. The beauty and mystery of nature nurtured in his heart the desire to write poetry. In the year he was ten years old, his poetry was first hairy, and he wrote 50 poems, of course, some imitations. In middle school, his little book was full of poems. There is a poem about a wanderer who sleeps on the ruins of an ancient city, dreams of the city's former glory and final doom, and wakes up to realize the brevity of happiness on earth. His juvenile work, the tone is so sad:
When the bells echo slowly,
I couldn't help but think quietly:
We're all rolling
Run to the eternal hometown...
- "When the Bells Echo"
Poetry is sad, but writing poetry is joyful, even if it is written sad poetry. He discovered the joy of life from writing poetry. He dreamed of writing small books of poetry for himself to read. From his childhood to his student days, from his college career to his foreign wanderings, he wrote poetry non-stop, but only published a small part of it before his death. After his death, although he was well known and unknown to everyone, it was not because of his poetry. Speaking of Nietzsche, people know him as a philosopher, and he is a controversial philosopher, with honor and disgrace. It seems that people's opinions about his philosophy have covered up his philosophy, and his philosophy has covered up his poetry. But his poetry, after all, occupies an important page in the history of German literature.
2
Nietzsche was born in Leucen on 15 October 1844 and died in Weimar on 25 August 1900. He was a philosopher, but philosophy was never his profession. When he was a university student in Leipzig, he studied classical linguistics and had a superb study of ancient Greek literature. From the age of 24, he was recruited as a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland for ten years. At the age of 34, he resigned from his teaching position due to illness and lived on the valley coast of southern Europe until he had a mental illness ten years later and was taken back to his hometown from his lodgings. Ten years of wandering was the most fruitful period of his spiritual creation. Most of his philosophical writings, such as The Science of Happiness, Zarathustra, The Other Side of Good and Evil, The Twilight of idols, and most of his excellent poems, are his wandering sensations. Unlike the academic philosophers, he hated the life of the study and opposed the structural system. He himself said that he preferred to think in the open, in the valley and on the seashore, in the road under his feet as if in a place of deep contemplation. As he walked, jumped, and climbed in nature, his thoughts came at him like the wind, and he wrote them down in his notebook. Therefore, most of his philosophical works are written in aphorisms and aphorisms, full of metaphors and symbols, and integrate philosophy and poetry.
Nietzsche
Modern Germany is an era of philosophers and poets, and many great poets, such as Goethe, Schiller, Wilhelm Schlegel, Novaris, and Heine, are also philosophical. However, the great philosophers who wrote poetry and achieved success were probably Nietzsche. Philosophy and poetry are both difficult things, and in the same person, logic and muses seem incompatible, often interfering with each other, conflicting with each other, and even losing both. Schiller lamented the annoyance caused by the interference of imagination and abstract thinking, and Goethe also criticized Schiller for being too intoxicated with abstract philosophical ideas and damaging the image of poetry. But this conflict is not evident in Nietzsche, perhaps precisely because his philosophy is no longer a philosophy of abstract thinking, but a poetic philosophy, and his poetry is a philosophical poetry, so that the two themselves have an inherent consistency.
In the second half of the 19th century, Heine, the last great German romantic poet, had died, and the poetry world was depressed for a while, imitating the air. At that time, Nietzsche's poetry was unique and extraordinary, and had a major impact on the later neo-romantic poetry of Géolge, Rilke, Hesse and others.
3
Nietzsche divided his poems into two categories, one is "aphorisms", that is, philosophical poems, and the other is "songs", that is, lyric poetry. His aphorisms and poems are condensed, witty, concise and intriguing. As he himself put it: "My ambition is to say in ten sentences what others say in a book,—— to say what others have not said in a book." In order to realize this "ambition", he put a thousand hammers into the art of aphorisms. Some aphorisms and poems, just two lines, are ingeniously conceived, the language is simple, and the meaning is profound, which can be called a fine product. For example:
Hostility made of whole piece of wood
Better than glued friendship!
- "The Honest Man"
Rust is also necessary: sharpness alone is not enough!
People would rattle: "He's still too young!" ”
- "Rust"
He put an empty phrase in order to kill time
Shoot into the blue sky – unexpectedly a woman falls from the sky.
- "The Involuntary Seducer"
Don't blow yourself too far:
A small needle will make you explode.
- "Against Arrogance"
Leipzig, Germany (Leipzig, Lekken, Nietzsche's birthplace)
Nietzsche's lyric poems are also philosophical, but in a different way than aphoristic poems. He strives to use his lyric poems to fully express the basic spirit of his philosophy- the spirit of Dionysus, and pursues the style of music, dance, poetry and complete integration of body and mind in the ancient Greek Dionysian hymn, and his representative work is "Ode to Dionysus". This group of poems jumps in rhythm and rhymes freely, like dancing freely in a rugged mountain; emotions are also unrestrained, unrestrained, laughing and scolding, all of which become verses. Nietzsche himself considered Dionysus to be his best work. Both in form and content, it is indeed a very unique set of lyric poems, which best reflect Nietzsche's characteristics.
04
Nietzsche, who had been immersed in sorrow since childhood, grew up to be a philosopher, and the question of the meaning of life naturally became the central question of his philosophical thinking. Similarly, in his poetry, eternity and necessity, life and creation, ideals and longings become one of the themes of chanting. He was a pessimist all his life, but he also struggled with pessimism all his life. He loves life and is not willing to be pessimistic and depressed, so this melancholy temperament advocates a promising philosophy of life. To resist pessimism, he appealed to the ancient Greeks for help. He believes that the ancient Greeks were a people who had a deep understanding of the suffering of life, but they used art to overcome the suffering of life and still lived vigorously. The so-called art should be understood in a broad sense and refer to a way of life. On the one hand, it is an aesthetic way of life, obsessed with the appearance of the beauty of life, rather than seeking the so-called ultimate meaning in the final sense.
Where you stand, you dig deeper!
Below is the clear spring!
Let the foolish guy complain:
"Bottom line — hell!"
- "Moving Forward"
Discover beauty in life, but don't further investigate the nothingness behind beauty. Ni named this aesthetic way of life after Apollo, the sun god who brought light and beauty to all things in Greek mythology, and called it the spirit of the sun god.
Weimar, Germany (Nietzsche died in Weimar)
On the other hand, we must dare to face up to the tragedy of life, like the heroes in greek tragedy, to be a hero in the tragedy of life, not to regard personal life as too important, to live vigorously, to die vigorously. "You might as well take a risk with life, especially since good villains always have to lose it." Why cling to this piece of dirt..." Nietzsche believed that Greek tragedy originated from the dionysian sacrifice, so he named this tragic way of life after Dionysus, the god of wine, and called it the Spirit of Dionysus.
To truly experience life,
You must stand above life!
To do this, learn to climb high!
Learn to do this – look down below!
- "The Law of Life"
yes! I know where I am!
Hunger is like a flame
Blazing and exhausting yourself.
Everything I grasped turned into brilliance,
Everything I gave up turned into coal:
I will be a flame without a doubt!
- "Behold, This Man"
This spirit of looking down on one's own life from a lofty height is the spirit of burning oneself like a flame, which is the dionysian tragic view of life. It is the basic spirit that runs through Nietzsche's philosophy and poetry.
Collected Poems of Nietzsche, translated by Zhou Guoping and published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2017
Readers: Mu Nanjun, real name Pan Xiaonan, the first college student after the resumption of the college entrance examination, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Nanjing University, visiting researcher of Fudan University, anchor of Dragonfly FM, and the new book "Mu Nan Manji" is about to be published and listed.
Editor: Zhou Yiqian