Elliot (1888-1965).
The esoteric and obscure "Wasteland" and the easy-to-understand "Nostalgia" have great differences in style, but they are all very famous poems. The authors of the two famous poems, T.S. Eliot and Yu Guangzhong, both enjoyed great fame, although the scope of the fame varied: Ai was famous all over the world, and Yu was famous mainly in the Chinese circles. In the twentieth century, Ai was the most important poet of English literature, at least one of the most important poets; Yu was the most important poet of Chinese literature, at least one of the most important poets. I have long been interested in comparing the two, and it was not until May 2021 that I made an attempt at a lecture at Southwest University in Chongqing. 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Wasteland and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Nostalgia. The numbers 100 and 50 are so neat and rare that they seem to be calling out to me that it's time to write a good article. However, the matter is large, and although it is in the heart, the discussion here is still only a preliminary theory.
Evaluation of Elliot and Afterglow
Eliot (1888-1965) was born in the United States and became a British citizen in 1927; he was a two-country, two-country, british and American literary history gave him a prominent position. His long poem "Wasteland", published a hundred years ago, shocked the literary world and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. In addition to poetry, his works include literary criticism and poetic drama. He received all sorts of top-notch reviews in his lifetime, such as calling him "the most outstanding poet of that era" and "the greatest poet of England"; some even compared him with Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, etc.; saying that his fame was "the age of Elliot", and this era will continue. His influence spans the literary community around the world, including the Chinese literary community. In Taiwan in the 1960s, when poets heard that Eliot or his modernist poets in Europe and the United States were sneezing, their counterparts on Treasure Island rushed to take cold medicine. In the 1980s, many people in Shenzhou who wrote poetry and talked about poetry wore their trouser pipes and talked about it. The Chinese translation of the famous poem "Wasteland" is not afraid of its difficult and obscure translators, and there are many Chinese translations of the famous text "Tradition and Personal Talent".
Born in Nanjing, Yu Guangzhong (1928-2017) lived in Taiwan the longest time as an adult, followed by Hong Kong, and has visited the mainland dozens of times since the 1990s to engage in literary activities. His writings include poetry, essays, commentaries, and translations. His poems are most recited by "Nostalgia", and his prose is "Getaway", "Listen to the Cold Rain", etc., as well as on "Chinese Westernization". Yu Guangzhong's reputation was already revered during his lifetime, and he was highly praised by mourners at the time of his death. Evaluations include: "The most outstanding and stylish essayist"; "Writing poetry with the right hand and writing with the left hand, the achievements are no different for a while"; "he is a singles champion who is unique in poetry on both sides of the strait"; "a rare all-round literary genius whose achievements are roughly like Su Shi of the Song Dynasty"; "a great poet, a great essayist, and a great translator like Mr. Yu who has studied Chinese and Western and is proficient in painting and music, can be said to be unprecedented and unprecedented", and so on.
From youth to "Hua Nian", I, a long-term reader, think that his name is also "in the light" and "in the light": Yu really shines on Chinese literature. There are all the good things that are quoted here, and the literary circles also have some "bad words" about him: either to belittle his works or to rebuke him as a person. The latter is mainly related to the controversy over Taiwanese vernacular literature in the 1970s. To be fair, the relevant comments written by Yu Guangzhong are quite deliberate, but it is unfortunate that the accusers may maliciously smear him or misunderstand him. Regarding Eliot, in addition to singing praises and praises, there are also many attacks, such as his "anti-Semitic" prejudice and ambiguous attitude toward fascism. This article does not discuss in detail all kinds of things other than the works of the two men.
Yu Guangzhong (1928-2017).
Elliot's Literary Criticism
This article compares the achievements of Eliot and Yu Guang's Chinese, focusing on poetry. Let's start with the literary criticism of the duo. Eliot's famous theories of literature are found in his articles such as Tradition and Personal Talent and Hammoret and His Problems. He advocated that poets should have a "sense of history" and that they should understand tradition in order to innovate with their own talents. He believed that poetry should be written in figurative language and not allow emotions to flood, so he used the term objective correlative (translated as "objective correlation", which I translate as "image") and later became a classic term in modern literary theory. Eliot and his followers of modernism, who developed these concepts, together with the "demonstration" of the tricky technique of The Wasteland, were taken together as the guideline for writing poetry and criticism, and their influence spread around the world.
Examining the "sense of history" and "imagery", we find that their theories are not groundbreaking. In the early 17th century, the British writer Ban Jansen praised Shakespeare, thinking that it was a pity that Shakespeare only knew a little Latin and did not understand Greek; why did he think so, because the better the classical cultivation, the greater the chance of a breakthrough in the classics after integration. In fact, fifteen hundred years ago, China's Liu Xun had already said "general change", encouraging writers to "accumulate learning to store treasures", so as to innovate; down to the modern era, Wang Meng once called for "writers to be scholarly". These are all in line with Eliot's "sense of history" statement. As for the "image of image" theory, in fact, the idea that literature is image thinking has a long history and has existed for a long time. The word itself is not entirely new to casting.
In order to oppose the indulgence of romantics such as Shelley, Eliot admired the metaphysical poet John Dorne, known for his wit; commentators exaggerated that Eliot rewrote half of the history of English literature. The famous critic Fry said that this was just a change in Eliot's taste of appreciation, and the "taste" theory dates back to Greco-Roman times. There is also Ai himself for Milton, who has been deprecated in the first high and then later, frying that this is no different from the rise and fall of the stock market. In addition, in the huge books of his critical history, Welleck said that in Eliot's theoretical articles, the semantics are often ambiguous, and the before and after statements of certain theories are also discordant. Nevertheless, with the fame of his great poet, with the great reputation of his Nobel Prize winners, and with the power of the English language, the influence of Eliot's poetry criticism is far and widespread.
Literary criticism in the afterglow
In his lifetime, Yu Guangzhong commented not only on Chinese and Western ancient and modern literature, but also on music, painting, and calligraphy, and painting took into account both Chinese and Western. His literary criticism also involves many literary categories: poetry, prose, novels, dramas, all inclusive. Yu Guangzhong had a short-term attempt at "quasi-modernism" in writing poetry, but he quickly reviewed tradition, took both Chinese and Western, and published a manifesto essay called "Goodbye, Nothingness", which was simply the opposite of Eliot and his modernist disciples. "The upper reaches of the blue ink is the Miluo River" is a famous saying that he respects Chinese tradition.
In terms of prose theory, there are "speed, density, elasticity" and "alchemy" in the afterglow, emphasizing the importance of flexible and new changes in vocabulary and syntax. He also put forward the pluralistic integration proposition of prose language: "white is the norm, the text is adapted, the slang is faxed, and the west is new" is the proposition of pluralistic integration. There are few new things under the sun, and the theory in this regard in Yuguangzhong is not completely new: Confucius has long believed that words should have literary style, and the "Wenxin Carved Dragon" emphasizes that love and collection should not be abandoned; Du Fu advocates "turning to benefit many teachers", and the "Bai Wen Slangxi" in Yuguang can be said to be the length of adopting multiple languages. What stands out in the afterglow is its actual writing. He has a profound cultivation of Chinese and Western literature and a rich imagination; the prose he writes is narrated by people, narrating and commenting on the art of travel, knowledge, interest and literary style, and the sentence creation is even longer and shorter, which is called "yu body". His works are popular and sell for money, and I once said that he wrote prose with a gold pen in a multicolored pen.
Yu Guangzhong is proficient in Both Chinese and English, Chinese to English, English to Chinese, and has achieved fruitful results. Chinese and English grammar are many different, Yu Guangzhong deeply feels that Chinese the shortcomings of English syntax in writing, believing that the Chinese people can choose the good of English syntax and follow it, and the lengthy entanglement of "vicious Westernization" must be avoided. He wrote articles criticizing the works of many famous artists since May Fourth, both poems and texts, including criticizing the "vicious Westernization" of his writing. It is naturally impossible to rewrite the history of literature, but it really wants to lower the literary history status of some writers. Yu Guangzhong's articles on "Chinese Westernization" have been published one after another since the 1960s, and they have had a wide impact. More than 10 years ago, Ma Ying purchased 200 to 300 copies of Yu's "On the Watershed" and sent them to the clerks for reference, hoping that his subordinates would clear up their pens and quit the "vicious Westernization" of the text.
On the other hand, Eliot, whose literary criticism collection has published many books, does not see that he has the kind of music and painting commentaries in Yuguang, let alone Yu's American prose that records people's narrative travels. Articles such as "Chinese Westernization" in Yu Guangzhong have practical significance (or the broad meaning of "Jing bang ji shi") are also missing. Eliot wrote several poems, namely "Murder in the Cathedral", "Family Reunion", "Cocktail Party" and so on. Yu Guangzhong did not write poetry or general plays, but translated four comedies, including Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, each with a commentary and a discussion of the gains and losses of translation. Yu Guangzhong also translated The Old Man and the Sea and the Biography of Van Gogh; the number of Chinese-English translations of the poems was considerable, adding up to four or five collections.
Yu Guangzhong's poetry collection "Nostalgia"
Elliot's poems
From the publication of "Pruvrock's Love Song" in 1915 to his "Four Quartets" in 1944, Eliot wrote about one hundred and seventy poems in nearly thirty years. Poems are long and short, individual poems and groups of poems, and if the total number of poems is calculated, it is about 5,000 lines. Among ancient and modern Chinese and foreign poets, Eliot was not prolific. "Pu" was well received as soon as it came out, and in 1922, "Wasteland" attracted much attention and various reviews surged in; in 1944, four years after the publication of "Four Quartets", he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The above three songs can be said to be the most famous. In addition, famous poems selected in various anthologies include "Portrait of a Lady", "Overture", "Empty Man", "Ash Wednesday" and so on.
"Pu" set the tone for Eliot's early poems, and by the time "Wasteland" appeared, he used poetry as a variety of "weapons" for "literary warfare". The appearance of "Ash Wednesday" in 1930 was the beginning of the later period of Eliot's poetry, and since then the religious meaning has become more intense. The poems of "Pu" and "Wasteland" involve almost all the behavior and thoughts of the characters, which are melancholy, painful, cowardly, and nihilistic, or vulgar and aging. "Poetry can complain", tragedy can cause pity and terror in the viewer, and purify his emotions; Eliot's poems have their own characteristics and have their "utility". Ai's famous sentences can be used as a microcosm of "poetry can complain", such as "Dusk crawls and stretches with the sky behind his back, like a patient anesthetized on the operating table", such as "April is the most cruel month" in "Wasteland", in which words such as "dusk", "patient", "anesthesia" and "cruelty" convey such emotions. Pu's sentence "I measure my life with a coffee spoon" is helpless and famous; the Elliott obituary published by Time magazine in 1965 quoted this famous sentence.
Many critics have studied the ideology of poems such as "The Wasteland" and praised them, thinking that Eliot reflects the loss and nothingness of Europe and its culture after the First World War, and that Aishi reflects the times. Researchers investigate Ai's life and find that in 1915 the poet was saddened by the death of a close friend of the same sex; in the same year, after marrying a newly acquainted woman, the fish and water were unhappy, and the husband and wife were not harmonious. This has a lot to do with the famous philosopher Russell, a third party. There is a lot of "gossip" in this regard, and even the Chinese scholar Xia Zhiqing once wrote a long article describing it, which began with two sentences: "Centaurs and beasts gallop in love fields, and the acacia tree withers in the wasteland." "The centaur beast refers to Russell. The desolation of "The Wasteland", the withering, the "Cruelty of April", the "Only Stones Have No Water", the "Tonight I Am Nervous", and so on, turned out to be most related to Eliot's painful marriage. According to this poem, it is difficult for the reader to read directly about the European war.
The technique of Eliot's poetry, winning with "innovation". I found that he had two "weapons" to conquer academic critics: a sword and a drill. Narrative texts involve time and space, and Eliot is best at swinging a sword, cutting off all the bonds of narrative time-space transformation in the poem, resulting in scenes of different time and space becoming disconnected "broken chapters", and "Wasteland" is destroyed by the sword. Eliot advocated the dramatization of poetry, in which the characters in his poems wore "masks" (persona), which he removed and replaced one by one with a sharp sword, and the characters changed back and forth, as if using the Sichuan "face-changing" method. Although "changing faces" is frequent in "Wasteland", so are later poems such as "Ash Wednesday". Who is Virgin, Lady, Mary, Mother in Saint, one character, several characters? Readers can only play guessing, can only play hide-and-seek. Therefore, it is the strategy of Eliot's poetry, the so-called strategy of the "New School of Criticism". Another "weapon" is the drill. Poetry is often used in classics, and there are differences between raw and mature; Eliot's "Wasteland" uses many strange allusions, and the poems are also mixed with a variety of foreign languages, which is simply drilled into the horns of Western culture. The sword method and the drill method were weakened to a certain extent in later poems, but they were not replaced.
Later poetic religions and philosophies intensified, and the group poem "Quartet" was more entangled in the concepts of past and present, life and death, temporary and eternal. In his early years, Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and the poet "applied what he learned" and wrote mysterious and mysterious. When "The Quartet of Four" was published, Elliot was already famous all over the world, and many commentators "liked" it; but there were also many criticisms: George Orville, who was famous for his titles such as "1984", "roared" at it.
In fact, since the beginning of "Wasteland", the praise and bad reviews have been polarized. The praisers are omitted above, not redundant. Many well-known literary figures have said that they can't understand "Wasteland", calling it "a colorful kaleidoscopic mess" and questioning that "it has a complete structure"; Amy Lowell pointed out that "it is a piece of tripe". Eliot-style "innovation" made him a master of poetry and influenced a group of modernists who are still not afraid or ignore or do not understand the "broken", "drilling" and "difficult" of "grandmaster", but "facing difficulties" to analyze. Eliot is still famous and scolded to this day.
The controversy over the benevolence and derogation of Eliot's poetry is indisputable: his poems are narrow in subject matter, for example, the editor of the famous anthology Of Norton's English Literature writes: "As a poet, his subject matter is limited; the world is full of experiences, and he lacks interest (only in the extremes of the saints and sinners)." "Eliot's narrowness contrasts sharply with the expanse in the afterglow.
"Wasteland" book shadow.
Poetry in the afterglow
Yu Guangzhong has published 1,450 poems, and the diverse themes are difficult to properly classify, which can be reluctantly divided into: love and affection, such as "Waiting for You, in the Rain", "Pearl Necklace", "Mother's Difficult Day"; small and big me, such as "When I Die", "If There Is War in the Distance", "Nostalgia", "Cheer Halley"; ancient and modern characters, such as "Looking for Li Bai" and "Gobachev"; literature and art, such as "White Jade Bitter Melon", "Sunflowers"; mountains and rivers, such as "Kending Nineteen Songs", "Ask the Sea"; political society, such as "Comfort a Failed Candidate", "Stone Age" Plants and animals, such as "Sun Roll Call" and "Fire Golden Girl"; environmental protection, such as "Complaint against a Chimney", "Shell Sand"; and so on.
The poems in the afterglow sense the times and life, he has letters and hopes to have love, life experiences have sorrow and joy, there are sorrows and joys about the feelings of the country and the nation, there are needles and ironies and inspirations and praises for social affairs; the style is elegant such as Song Ci, and the masculinity is near epic; together, it generally reflects a positive and abundant life of cherishing blessings and gratitude. In the 1960s, when modernism was in full swing in Taiwan's poetry scene, but it was the dark wind of the moon, the afterglow was sacrificed in the "Goodbye, Nothingness" text. His poems express thoughts and feelings that are very different from Elliot's.
Yu Guangzhong is familiar with the two literary traditions of China and Britain, knows that poetry is the thinking of images, and that writing poetry has its own rules and techniques; knows how to inherit and innovate, and walks the road of poetry creation; its poems are clear and not shallow, readable but not obscure, and have both passages and sentences. Admirers, such as Liushahe, love his poetry very much, and set up altars to teach his poetry such as spreading the gospel of poetry; saying that his poems are readable and decipherable, and what can be said means that his poems can allow critics to tell their wonderful and wonderful art in detail. The forms of new poetry in the afterglow are both grammatical and free bodies, and the free bodies are the mainstays. I think he created a new poetic style of "half free and half lattice", and said that the achievement of his creation style is similar to the tang Dynasty Du Fuzhi's establishment of the rhythmic poetry style.
The poems in the afterglow are endlessly spoken by readers and critics everywhere. Love poems such as writing lotus pondside little lovers, step "Red lotus after the rain ... From Jiang Baishi's words, there is rhyme... Come on", its elegant mood has captivated many young readers. His "Pearl Necklace" is soft and lyrical, using dewdrops, raindrops, and rosaries to summarize the loving life of husband and wife, which has caused a group of female listeners to complain about their husbands because of this poem, saying that on the wedding anniversary, their wealth and gifts jewelry are "slightly inferior". In the face of air pollution, the big chimney that cursed the factory in the afterglow was "a big smoker with a deep addiction... Treat the whole city/as if it were a soot saucer that you owned.". The poet's life is inseparable from the country and the nation, and "Nostalgia" and "Folk Song" are popular among the population; writing about Halley's Comet, which "comes" to the earth once every seventy-six years, the afterglow thinks of the country, and the high-spirited expression "The will of the nation is always forward / Toward the hot sun, just like you." The first three lines of "When I Die" "When I die, bury me, between the Yangtze River and the Yellow River/ between the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, pillow my head, white hair covered with black soil / In China, the most beautiful and motherly country", full of confidence and pride.
Poems with rich allusions to this event, such as "Xiang Death" and "Comfort to a Failed Candidate", have ups and downs, and can only be hastily named here. At this moment when intellectuals are "sleepless and worried about war", I will briefly describe his "If There Is War in the Distance". Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the poem briefly depicts scenes of war and anti-war demonstrations, and skillfully satirizes the cruel war with joyful sex; the ego's soul and the big self are intertwined, and the atmosphere advances layer by layer, deeply expressing the sense of sadness and helplessness of intellectuals. Here to cite it as an example, there is another reason. A reader thinks that the "Nostalgia", which has always been popular, is not artistic enough, and when he accidentally read "If There Is War in the Distance", he immediately greatly improved his evaluation of The Afterglow.
Elliot is narrow-minded and broad in the afterglow
"Nostalgia" has the feeling of home and country, and it is easy to recite, but it does not represent the rich content and high poetry of the poems in the afterglow. "Wasteland" can not only summarize the connotation of Eliot's poetry, but also reflect the extreme of his "poetry". "Nostalgia" is a skit, like "a small stamp", the reader and it smooth mail; other poems, whether short or long, can also "mail" with the reader; "Wasteland" is a long poem, showing the great wasteland, on which the strange stones are vicious, and the reader is difficult and difficult to walk. The fame of the two great poets in Eliot and Yu Guangzhong, one belongs to the whole earth, and the other belongs to the Chinese circle, and the disparity is as large as the length of "Wasteland" and the small length of "Nostalgia". However, the literary achievements of the two men can be compared a lot. The previous article has been compared with literary criticism, and prose, poetry, and translation have also been slightly unevenly discussed.
No matter how revered, Eliot's "innovative" rough and tortuous poetic path, the reader follows only difficult. The "sword" I mentioned above can be interpreted separately: the "sword" (and "drill") dances out of the new school, and this sword has a double blade; another blade outside the Li school greatly stabs the buddha-figure's poems, making the poems obscure and fragmented. Whether Eliot's poetry belongs to the bitter bard school is unknown, and the trickery of his technique has led readers to become "hard reading school". Professors and graduate students who have so far obeyed modernism and believe that works are difficult to understand are only great possibilities, after painstakingly studying Aishi, after being tossed, have discoveries, solve difficult problems, and naturally have a sense of gain and fun. Readers with the ability to appreciate new poems in general, reading poems that are "readable and understandable" in the afterglow, reading them in a precarious position, reading them comfortably, and finding that their poems are clear and readable, and the rich works are poetic and outstanding, which will be pleasant to read and enjoy. No matter how great the international fame and influence, in the context of speech, Eliot can be described as narrow-minded, and the afterglow is obviously broad.
Huang Weiliang