Dylan Thomas, the genius poet of Wales, glided like a dazzling shooting star through the incomparably dark skies of the first half of the twentieth century.
Reading his poems is always exciting and dangerous. Those poems are not so much like flying machines that can freely travel between any virtual reality realm as they are magic furnaces—they can melt creation and the end of the world, the birth and destruction of all things, with faith and nothingness, life and death, love and desire, dreams and illusions, feelings and imagination, reflections and intoxication, and create eternal moments belonging to finite individuals between despair and hope.
Don't Walk Meekly into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas, Translated by Coast, Edition: Yazhong Culture | Beijing United Publishing Company, November 2021
Open the senses and imagination
In the poetry of Dylan Thomas, perhaps what is most needed is to be able to abandon the habits and intellectual stereotypes of rational analysis and fully open up the senses and imagination, only in this way can we withstand the wind in the storm of his images. Experiencing his poems through the Chinese translation is inevitably separated by several layers, and this issue can be seen from the extensive annotations made by the translator. But even so, dylan Thomas's poem itself does not become faintly blurred— but like a super typhoon, even if it weakens into a strong tropical storm after several twists and turns, it is still powerful enough to arrive.
Even in his poems in a soothing tone, there is a hint of the tranquility before the storm, when everything seems to be in silence waiting for the storm in a state of complete openness. This feeling is particularly evident in the 102-line Prologue at the beginning of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, which was also the last poem written by Dylan Thomas a year before his death (1952), placing it at the forefront of the 91-poem collection he compiled by his own hands, as if to seal the final seal on the work in which he devoted his life:
"At this moment the day falls with the wind / God hastens the demise of summer, / In the gushing flesh-colored sun, / In the house that shakes in my sea, / On the birdsong and fruits, foam, / Flutes, fins and feathers / Winding dangerous rocks, / By the roots of the trees dancing in the woods, / On the beach where starfish floats, / With the fisherwomen the seagulls, / Bagpipers, light boats and sails, / The crows there are black, pull up / The fishermen of the clouds, kneeling / The nets under the setting sun, / The flocks of geese that are about to fall into the sky, / The children who are playing, the herons and the shells ,/ Speaking of the Seven Oceans, / Eternal Waters, Far Away / The City-State of Nine Days and Nine Nights / The Towers Around, / Like the Wind of Faith Falling, / My Song, Under the Fragile Peace, / Dedicated to You Strangers..."
In this Prologue, Dylan Thomas shows pessimism and apprehension about the fate of mankind, and also sees the return to his hometown of Wales as a kind of opportunity to receive soul salvation — not only the origin of his life, the starting point of his entry into the world, the soul's home after the end of his life, but also the Noah's Ark that carries his spirit, sailing towards a promising future in the flood-like calamity. Among the surviving things on the ark are these poems, and it is precisely because of their existence that there will be "my ark singing in the sun." Perhaps, it is in this sense that we can understand why he failed to complete the final Elegy, for for him, even if he had a premonition of the last moment, he still had to raise his spirits to meet the flood of flowers in full bloom, rather than lamenting in vain.
Oil painting in the image of Dylan Thomas. Cherry Pickles, 1950.
The intoxication and demise of the approximate burning
On the surface, throughout the Poetry Collection, this exuberant state seems to be one after another. Even the images that are constantly entangled with the broken earth, the religion of the Source, the desires of the living force, the heavy flesh, the love and the coldness, and so on, do not lose their momentum. But inside, in fact, there are always shadows of doubt, hesitation, and contradiction hidden in the depths. The implications revealed in some of the poems make one realize that Dylan Thomas is not always completely open, and that in his tired moments when he feels that he cannot fly high, he will also make such a voice: "Should I open the door or stay alone / Stay until the day of death", "Hand, are you holding grapes or poison?" When he is extremely disappointed in the whole world, he will also say "I long to stay away", because he hears "the hissing of invalid lies / and the continuous cry of horror, / Falling into the deep sea with the day over the hills , / The ancient sound of fear grows stronger", and in a world full of lies and conventions, "I don't care about death either." ”
Sometimes, when I think of his life of honesty and purity, which came to an abrupt end at the age of thirty-nine, and recall the complex and contradictory meanings implied in the exuberant momentum of the multitude of images, I feel that no matter how rich and complex his experience in this world, in fact, he is always an Icarus-like teenager in his bones. His wings are poetry, and what binds them is his exuberant vitality. All his life he had been soaring as hard as he could in a near-burning state, flying towards his sun. In fact, I guess he may have realized very early on that this constant state of exuberance—constantly smelting his spirit, flesh, desires, contemplation, and imagination into the transformation of the world's eternal changes, constantly erupting into dazzling fireworks—could not last long, and would prematurely exhaust his life energy. But what he wants is not long-term, but the extreme--the ultimate release of life, the ultimate poetry! Even in the face of death, he must make the strongest voice: "Don't walk into that good night meekly, /... It should burn and roar:/ Rage, rage against the demise of the light. ”
He believed that life and death would coincide at the same point, just as the birth and death of all things in the world are essentially boundless, and there are overlapping points at any time and place, and what he wants is for all the energy of life to fully bloom and transform into the most wonderful and powerful imagery, and to derive another world full of vitality in his poetry to accommodate the crisis-ridden real world filled with the atmosphere of the end times. He wants to interpret the creation and destruction of the world from macroscopic to microscopic in countless ways, to show the echo and interweaving of the cycle of birth and death of all the lives in it, and he wants to witness all of this, with shocking discovery and intoxication.
Poetry Origin: Characters and Chants
Dylan Thomas excelled at creating a variety of multi-layered circular structures from the inside out, from form to imagery. Like in that Prologue, there are not only 51 lines each of the upper and lower ques, but also symmetrical rhymes from both ends to the center (the first and last lines rhyme, the first line and the penultimate line rhyme, and so on, up to lines 51 and 52 rhyme). In Visions and Prayers, he takes the symmetrical form to the extreme, "The original poem consists of 12 verses and 17 lines, two sets of six metaphysical figurative poems; one set of altar shapes (or diamonds, wombs, teardrops, diamonds), and another set of chalice shapes (or winged wings, hourglasses, shuttle boxes, crosses, axes, and wine jugs). And when we look at the poem at the end of the book, Dylan Thomas's unfinished manuscript Of Elegy, we read that "rest in peace and fall into dust, in the benevolent earth/ Death is the darkest righteousness, blind and unfortunate." / If they cannot rest in peace, but only seek to be born again and return to the world", they will feel that this collection of poems also has a circular structure as a whole. This unfinished poem means that the author has exhausted his last life energy, and it also means that this collection of poems is the final crystallization of his life, the eternal existence he constructs in words.
"The beginning is the word, the word / from the solid base of light, / abstract all the empty letters; / from the obscure base of the breath / The words emerge, translating to the heart / The first characters of life and death."
This line of poetry from "The Beginning" is the one that best reflects the roots of his creation in his dazzling language storm. Man's "words" are a response to "too early words." For the birth of the world, it is "too early to speak"; for the existence of man, "originally it is a word". If words ultimately fail to "translate to the heart/the first characters of life and death," then even "emerging" is doomed to be swallowed up by the "void." Whether it is the first word or the first word, the ultimate recipient can only be a person. The world begins to exist only when "words" reach the heart, "the first characters of life and death" that "translate to the heart." As for "words", Dylan Thomas once described his initial discovery this way:
"I should say that I wrote poetry because of my love of words. Some of the earliest poems I remember reading were nursery rhymes, and before I could read nursery rhymes myself, I preferred words in nursery rhymes, just words, and it didn't matter what those words represented, symbolized, or meant; what mattered was that I heard the sounds of these words for the first time, from the lips of distant, unknown adults living in my world. Words, as far as I am concerned, are like the notes conveyed by the bells, the music of the instruments, the sound of the wind, the sound of the rain, the sound of the waves, the creaking of the milk truck, the sound of the road coming from the pebbles, the sound of branches banging on the window ledge, perhaps like the miraculous discovery of hearing by a born deaf. ”
This is the source code for his poetry. He used this as his initial starting point, facing the disaster-stricken modern world in a real and spiritual wandering, like a priest and like a sacrifice. He overlooks everything, constantly rediscovering and experiencing all phenomena, "beginning with the destruction of the soul, miracles bouncing up and leaping back, / Images stacked on top of each other, my metal apparitions / Forcibly crossing the bluebell flower, / The human being whose leaves and bronze roots, life and death, / I am under the fusion of roses and male kinetic energy, / Create this double miracle." He used the power of the soul and the desire of the flesh as an accelerant to continuously inject into the process of life and death of all things, constantly doing the most complex and simple smelting, exploring the cycle of life and death, as well as the limits of life and destiny. To this end, he will use all the energy conducive to stimulating this flame, and even at the cost of his life, he will stimulate the most intense flame of light, creating a miracle that belongs to him. Even in the last moments of his life, in the depths of his soul he would continue to chant:
"I, with colorful imagery, stride up two levels, / Forge a bronze orator under the mineral deposits of mankind / Cast my soul into metal..."
The author | Zhao Song
Edit | Miyako
Proofreading | Xue Jingning