Every April, many people quote the beginning of Elliot's classic poem "The Wasteland" on social platforms: "April is the cruelest month" – the year 2022 is the centenary of the "Wasteland".
The Wasteland is a masterpiece by the English poet Eliot, whose publication has been hailed as "a milestone in Western modernist poetry". In October 1922, Wasteland was first published in the inaugural issue of the quarterly Standard, edited by Elliot himself, and at the end of the same year, a single edition was published in the United States, and Elliott added more than fifty notes to the monograph.
In April, The Paper interviewed several Chinese poets, many of whom were critics, writers, scholars, translators, and editors of literary journals, on the history of the reception of Wasteland in China, its influence on Chinese poets, and its relevance to the present.
This article is an exclusive interview with the surging news reporter by the poet and young critic Zhang Dinghao on "Wasteland".
Zhang Dinghao
【Dialogue】
The Paper: When did you first read "Wasteland" and how did you feel at that time?
Zhang Dinghao: I actually forgot a little, maybe after the age of twenty-five, during graduate school in Fudan. Because I read the translation, I don't seem to have any special feelings. What attracted me to me and influenced me was mainly his poetic theory, because there would be less lost things in prose translation than poetry translation.
Later I would occasionally reread it, drawing a sentence or two from it. For example, "Under the brownish-yellow fog on winter mornings, / A group of people flow across London Bridge, oh, so much / I didn't expect death to destroy so much" (translated by Char Liangzheng), I have a poem about seeing the flow of people going to work next to the viaduct in the morning, "so many figures flowing under the bridge, / seeping into the tall buildings along the way, in the winter wind", which is an allusion to the words "Wasteland". Of course, the poem "Wasteland" also has a source, that is, "Divine Comedy", and Elliot admits that Dante has the greatest influence on him. I also love the Divine Comedy. But overall, the mood of Wasteland is a bit of a barrier to me, and of course that belongs to Elliot as a young man. I'd be a little more intimate with The Quartet than I would be with Wasteland, a more determined and hardened Eliot.
The Paper: Which of Elliott's poems influenced you?
Zhang Dinghao: Many years ago, I read T.S. Eliot's "Andrew Marwell" and was deeply moved by a passage at the beginning, "Marvel's grave does not need roses, rue or laurel to decorate, there is no unjust case to be rehabilitated; on his question, if it still needs to be considered, it is only for our own benefit." This is also the principle of "ancient scholars for themselves", but it is more modern and can be directly put into practice in writing. Andrew Marwell was a seventeenth-century man who lived in China roughly equivalent to the late Ming Dynasty, a veritable classical poet, but in Eliot's writing, the classical poet of three hundred years ago was no longer a mummy lying in a coffin for exploration or appreciation, he resurrected and examined our writing, transcending the fragmentation of languages and cultures, and he hoped that we would still be able to feel the full experience of the human heart, so that as an elderly colleague, he may be able to help us who are still writing poetry today. In this way, in the chaotic war of "everything lost its center" at the beginning of the last century, Eliot established a certain revival of classicism in a fighter's posture.
We must make it clear that the "classical" that Eliot spoke of has its own specific conceptual orientation, and the opposite concept is "romantic" rather than "now", and this "classical" is precisely capable of acting on the "present". Eliot has repeatedly elaborated on what is classical in his essays, arguing that classical is "the product of a mature mind" that derives from a complete historical consciousness that frees the poet from the narrow time and space of the "here and now" and, in a humble gesture, into a grander order.
Specific to the way the article is written, the classification comparison and judgment facing the past is a common means used by Eliot in the criticism of the article, then the effect it produces is a panoramic grand vision and an immersive sense of the scene, like being led by an archangel to fly over the long sky.
The Four Quartets
The Paper: Does it feel in The Wasteland that Elliot wants to revive some kind of classicism?
Zhang Dinghao: When I first read "Wasteland", I did not feel this way, because this poem has been described by literary history as a work of the beginning of modernity, and when it is read, it will not be associated with classicism at all, and this will not be understood until I read his own poetry in the future.
The Paper: Earlier you said that "The Quartet" is a little more intimate than "Wasteland", that is a more determined and hardened Elliott. How is "The Tempered Elliot" different from Elliot when he wrote Wasteland? Where are the specific representations after "quenching"?
Zhang Dinghao: Behind "Wasteland" is an unfortunate marriage that was hastily formed when I was young. He did not love his wife Vivian, and when she realized this, she began to roast his conscience with her own sickness and attachment, and he tolerated such a burning both gently and darkly until the heart became hard and desolate. And it was born in this state of mind, in Elliot's own words, "from time to time to cut himself into small pieces to see which fragments can sprout", and in the words of his biographer Gordon, "the most crucial part of Elliott's life's work is how to transform the maddening state of mind into a universal dramatic conflict". This is the self-salvation of the artist alone.
The "Four Quartets" was born from the comfort and purification of love after middle age. In this masterpiece, each line of poetry is like life, self-sufficient, with both the hardships it can tell and the unspeakable, and this multiplicity of hardships forges the lines of poetry like fire, and also forges people, until these lines of poetry become light and infinite, like dry winds, like the sound of thunder, they stay above the passing river, they are dust and ash stirred up on a vat of rose petals, or remain in an insoluble glue state, like most of the true life of the universe that shakes in the silent place. And his secret lover, Emily Hale, stands behind this immortal poem, silently sharing the core of his creation, the "center of light."
Lindell Gordon,"The Biography of T. S. Elliot"
The Paper: But "Wasteland" still has an impact on you, and on your generation of Chinese poets?
Zhang Dinghao: It's hard for me to answer, I haven't observed it. All I can say is that for me, these translated poems have influenced me with specific sentences, specific fragments. Maybe this one this time, that next time. Or rather, a tone of voice. But on the whole, Wasteland is unmimeable, and the results of imitation will be terrible. What can be learned is to think about how Eliot can very boldly draw some solid imagery and pictures, and even sounds, from various sources.
The Paper: Why is it imitable? Where is its "immedibility" compared to other classic poems of China and the West?
Zhang Dinghao: Every classic poem is immediacy. Behind "The Wasteland" is not only the universal anachronism he feels, but also his own personal emotional experience, which is the starting point of any lyric poem.
Elliott photographed in 1933 Visual China Infographic
The Paper: In April this year, many people began to quote "April is the most cruel month" . What do you think of the relationship between this poem and the present? When we commemorate Elliot, when we commemorate Wasteland, what are we commemorating?
Zhang Dinghao: Probably the vast majority of people have only read the beginning of "Wasteland". I also wrote a long poem in April, in which several sentences are also in dialogue with this famous opening, "In April, the spring rains unusually calm us, / Make us abandon memories and desires, and focus on / The growing nutrients in the depths of the refrigerator." ”
I don't think that the current Chinese mood can find explanation and comfort from "The Wasteland", but as a poet, we can learn Eliot's writing method, accumulate the emotions of the times we feel, rather than venting, and return to the depths of tradition with this accumulated emotion - for us, tradition is not only Chinese tradition, but also Western tradition; not only classical tradition, but also the tradition of the twentieth century that has just passed, find a suitable mask for this emotion, and use the mask to tell the truth.
When we commemorate Eliot, I feel that we are commemorating a poet's ability to take everything in the world together, which is especially important in times of chaos, and to revisit his teachings on "tradition and individual talent" and to make ourselves intermediaries in bonding the past and the future in an age when the individual is becoming less and less important.
The Paper: What is Elliot's ability to "accumulate the emotions of the times he feels"? Do you think that unrecognized realities and experiences are superficial, and that the accumulated emotions of the times can truly capture and effectively face the reality of the world?
Zhang Dinghao: Lyric poetry is not a catharsis, but to digest and process emotions, and can also be put into communication, and these require time and patience. There is no reality that is absolutely objective and evenly distributed among everyone, and if so, there is no need for any communication; at the same time, there is no experience that is completely subjective and cannot be shared with others, and if so, there can be no communication. The poet takes the experience he has gained from this era back to history, tradition and all things, and with the help of analogy, transforms individual experience into universal experience, and extracts the reality beyond the specific era from the reality he feels.