Text/Yangcheng Evening News all-media reporter Sun Lei
Photo/Courtesy of respondent
Baudelaire was born on 9 April 1821 at 13 Rue d'Autefiy in Paris. Having lived in a lifetime of uncertainty, he discovered a new aesthetic that belonged to modern people.
If we see the various contemporary poetic currents that began to emerge in the 1970s as a watershed, the era of "modernity" or, more precisely, "modernism", pioneered by Baudelaire, lasted exactly 100 years. During this hundred years, Baudelaire influenced one literary scholar after another.
The Commercial Press launched baudelaire's biography, created by Claude Pishua and Jean Ziegler, and translated by Dong Qiang, head of the French Department at Peking University, which aroused strong repercussions among readers. (For more news, please pay attention to Yangcheng Pie pai.ycwb.com)
Is there still a market for modern aesthetics opened by Baudelaire in China today? What exactly are we reading when we read Baudelaire today? In the face of a strong realist trend, has modernist literature declined? With these questions, the Yangcheng Evening News reporter interviewed Dong Qiang ——
1. Classic writers who can withstand repeated reading and interpretation
Yangcheng Evening News: You have been studying in France for more than ten years, can you feel the spiritual temperament or material memory of Baudelaire staying in this country?
Dong Qiang: I have lived in France for 12 years, about 10 years have been living in the central district of Paris, although the living conditions are simple, but surrounded by the former residences of some celebrities, as soon as you go out is the birthplace of the famous musician Saint-Saën, and two streets away is Baudelaire's former home - Rue Ottfiy in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.
Baudelaire left a lot of traces in Paris, because Baudelaire lived in a fixed place for life, never had his own house, and rented a house. He squandered all the money his biological father had left behind, and then hid his debts like Balzac, so he spent many places in Paris. Walking the streets of Paris, you will suddenly see a sign that says this place Baudelaire once lived.
More is the spiritual imprint he left behind. When you think of Paris, it's hard not to think of Baudelaire. One is that many of his poems deal with Paris, such as The Flower of Evil, which makes Baudelaire the earliest singer of modern Paris.
Yangcheng Evening News: Are Baudelaire's literary and artistic achievements highly evaluated in France? In particular, what was the evaluation of his "Flower of Evil" at that time?
Dong Qiang: Before Baudelaire's death, people did not have a very high evaluation of his poetry and art, and many people knew him more because of his different personality, and even because he had a lawsuit. After his death, the young French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, including some of the most important masters of later Symbolism, regarded Baudelaire as the supreme spiritual leader.
By the end of the 19th century, Baudelaire's fame had reached a peak, and he was recognized as the most important first modern poet. After the 20th century, Benjamin and others did a lot of research and promotion of Baudelaire in the West. At that time, a large number of Chinese students studied in France, Li Jinfa, Liang Zongdai and others highly respected Baudelaire, which played a relatively large role in the dissemination and promotion of Baudelaire in China, and the poetry of Dai Wangshu and others was also deeply influenced by symbolism.
Yangcheng Evening News: In addition to symbolism, Baudelaire's poetry also has a strong spirit of social criticism and realistic observation, but later Chinese symbolist poetry and modernist poetry seem to rarely see this critical spirit?
Dong Qiang: In fact, Baudelaire did not see himself as a representative of symbolism before his death, more romanticism, at that time, Hugo and other great writers were romantic, Baudelaire was regarded as the last person of Romanticism and the first person of modernism.
At the same time, Baudelaire has a very keen sense of reality and modernity, the loneliness of the budding modern people, and the moments of encounters on the street, etc., he can capture, so he is considered the originator of modernity.
But the young people who later recognized Baudelaire's artistic achievements, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Maramé, etc., all emphasized Baudelaire's symbolic, mysterious side, and promoted this to the extreme, ignoring Baudelaire's concern for reality. So when Li Jinfa's generation came to France, they thought that French poetry should be like this, similar to art for art's sake, a bit of a lack of reality.
Later, when Sartre and others read Baudelaire again, they saw the criticality of Baudelaire. Therefore, a classic writer can withstand repeated reading and interpretation, and different times and different readers can dig out different aspects.
2. Break the Chinese's understanding of poetry
Yangcheng Evening News: What period was Baudelaire the hottest and most widely spread in China?
Dong Qiang: There are mainly two eras, one is the 20s and 30s of the last century, represented by Li Jinfa, Liang Zongdai and others, including many young writers in Shanghai who are more interested in urban writing and sensory creation; the second is the 1980s, when Baudelaire has brought an existential aura, Guo Hongan translated Camus's "The Outsider" and Baudelaire's "Flower of Evil".
Guo Hongan has also written many research articles on Baudelaire, and the interpretation of Baudelaire at this time already has a thinking about people and thinking about our environment.
Yangcheng Evening News: What is Baudelaire's biggest influence on Chinese writers?
Dong Qiang: It has the greatest influence on symbolism and modernism. Both Liang Zongdai and Li Jinfa see this symbolism, because China originally has a strong symbolic tradition and likes to use metaphors and metaphors to express them.
However, Baudelaire's symbolism and modernity broke Chinese's understanding of poetry, which originally had to be good and beautiful, but "The Flower of Evil" made us realize that poetry can also write evil and ugly, which was unprecedented for Chinese poets at that time and was shocking.
To some extent, Baudelaire's influence on China has always carried a certain avant-garde spirit, subverting and at the same time not excluding the Chinese poets' re-understanding of antiquity; but Baudelaire's realistic side has not been well inherited in China.
Yangcheng Evening News: How to understand the modern literature pioneered by Baudelaire?
Dong Qiang: From Baudelaire to Joyce to Kafka, these founders of true modernism actually explored their feelings in their daily lives, and then wrote them in a relatively novel way, which shocked the literary world: it turned out that literature can still be written like this, and the feelings of being a modern person are originally like this.
Reading classical works is like going to a concert hall to listen to a symphony, which can take us to a beautiful place, but this beauty is detached from my personal experience, can let me be educated and sublimated, but has nothing to do with my experience.
Modern literature is completely different, one of the characteristics of modern literature is that the author and the reader are equally important, modern literature is forcing you to see a new thing, usually there is a challenge, the reader needs more input, and the deeper you understand the text, the richer the meaning of the work itself.
3, purely take the Western road is duckweed without roots
Yangcheng Evening News: The 1980s were also the golden age of Chinese literary creation, and a large number of outstanding writers emerged, including Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Ge Fei and others.
Dong Qiang: This is certain, at that time, China ushered in the wave of foreign literature, and Chinese writers absorbed a large number of literary ideas and theories from the West, including Baudelaire's modernity and the magical reality of Latin America. These new ideas stimulated the young writers of the time, because the original Chinese was a relatively simple realist creative thinking, and then attracted by the richness of the literature that poured into the West.
But this attraction is not pure imitation of foreign writers' writing, but more of a stimulus, creating an atmosphere for young writers to dare to innovate and explore new ways and forms of literature.
Yangcheng Evening News: The writer Remnant Xue once said that the study of the West at that time was shallow, so it led to the lack of follow-up, especially at that time, a group of avant-garde writers later turned to the embrace of reality.
Dong Qiang: Remnant Xue's creative ideas are relatively unique, and there is even a little bit of surrealism. Because she is more influenced by the West, it seems to her that other people may not know the West as comprehensively and deeply as she does, but I think we should look at this problem dialectically.
At that time, the influence of the West on young Chinese writers was more important than an atmosphere, and the collision of the two cultures stimulated their creation. But after the collision of ideas, everyone must go their own way, and every writer has his own creative direction. If you take the path of the West purely, it is also a duckweed without roots.
If a country only has translated works, it means that the country's creative ability is actually relatively weak; but if a country has no translations or few, it means that the country's culture is still relatively closed. The two should strike some sort of balance in order to usher in a true cultural flourish.
4. The modernity that Baudelaire opened up is not obsolete
Yangcheng Evening News: In your opinion, does Baudelaire still have its significance and influence on the development and creation of Chinese literature today?
Dong Qiang: This must also be divided into two aspects, on the one hand, we must admit that now the creation of literature in the world has encountered a certain crisis, because we have entered a new era of images, the Internet era, and even the so-called metaverse era, which is destroying people's long-term habits of reading and expressing words, so it is difficult to deeply experience the subtle art of literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the importance of writing is incomparable today.
On the other hand, if there is still a certain expectation and trust in literature, the modernity opened by Baudelaire is certainly not outdated. Whether it is the form of creation, the broadening of the subject matter or the observation of reality, you will find that the modern literary tradition opened by Baudelaire has not declined, and we still need to draw experience and strength from such sources.
Yangcheng Evening News: If you draw on this experience and strength today, what will be the different focus compared with the past?
Dong Qiang: The first is a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding, not only symbolic and modern, but also to see the reality of Baudelaire. More importantly, Baudelaire still has a lot of room to explore the feelings of people's hearts in the city, and there are still relatively few literary works such as poetry and novels in China.
You will find that the things written by poets with some fame are basically praising love and nature, even if it involves urban life, there is no special in-depth excavation, including the creations of Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa and others, most of them are still rural themes, and "Waste Capital" is not real urban literature, more like a novel in which traditional literati intellectuals encounter spiritual crises.
At present, whether it is Beijing or Shanghai, whether it is poetry or novels, there are few works that make people feel particularly shocked, and perhaps Wang Anyi's Shanghai is a special case, which is actually worthy of our reflection.
5, in the end, it still depends on whether a good work can be produced
Yangcheng Evening News: How can we create good urban literature?
Dong Qiang: Literature has no prescription and no menu. And we can't expect masterpieces to emerge in any era, and literary critics can only say that they beat the side drum and try to add some fertilizer to the soil, hoping to see more prosperous creations. Like us doing translations and introducing foreign literature, we also have this expectation.
Literature is plainly a personal experience and emotion, Baudelaire is the first to regard literature as a personal experience of things, this is very important, we have not emphasized this point enough, literature is more of a feeling you feel from the heart, is a personal thing.
Yangcheng Evening News: At present, many literary and art critics advocate the construction of China's own discourse system, which cannot always be swirled around in Western theory.
Dong Qiang: Understandable. But whether it is to study the West or to find your own discourse system, in the end, it is still necessary to see whether you can produce good works. I think that at least Chinese modern and contemporary literature proves that the generation of young people at that time wrote good works stimulated by Western literary ideas, which is an indisputable fact.
On the other hand, it is impossible to return to a pure tradition now, because the current environment has changed a lot, and both our daily life and our spiritual life have a complex intertwining and even overlap with the West. Of course, at present, literature is facing crises and challenges, and as a person in a historical and cultural tradition, you need to face your own cultural heritage and draw nourishment from it.
Source | Yangcheng Evening News Yangcheng Pie
Editor-in-charge | Wu Xiaopan
Edit | Sun Lei