In August 1921, Guo Moruo's poetry collection "Goddess" came out, which triggered a revolutionary shock in the poetry world. Represented by "Phoenix Nirvana" and "Tengu", the unprecedented agitation conveys the spirit of the "May Fourth" period to eliminate the old and innovate.
Readers familiar with Western poetry can easily find the important influence of the American poet Whitman on Guo Moruo.
However, when careful readers read this collection of poems, they will surely feel another kind of rhyme in several other quiet and peaceful exquisite poems - "The New Moon and the White Clouds", "Herons", "Spring Sorrows", "Singing Cicadas", "Late Steps"... These poems are arranged after the poetry collection. Some readers, even critics, think that those unrestrained and rough poems are the early attempts of the author's passionate youth, and these quiet and peaceful small poems should be the result of the poet's fading passion and gradually diluted after the maturity of his skills. While there is considerable truth in this consideration, it is not.
Guo Moruo first learned about Tagore's poetry
In September 1914, Guo Moruo studied hard for half a year and was admitted to the preparatory department of the first high school in Tokyo, Japan. At the time, he was living with a relative in his third year of undergraduate life. One day, the student brought back from the school a few pages of mimeographed English extracurricular readings, and Guo Moruo took a look at several short poems from the Indian poet Tagore's "New Moon Collection": "The Baby's Road", "The Thief of Sleep", "Clouds and Waves", "On the Shore"... At first reading, Guo Moruo was extremely surprised. For this is something he had never seen before: "The first is the ease of understanding of poetry; the second is the prose style of poetry; the third is the freshness and timelessness of poetry." "It was a poem without rhyme, but mostly two or three verses of confrontation, and the freshness and ease surprised me, and made me twenty years younger in one leap!"
As a result, Guo Moruo formed an inexplicable relationship with Tagore's poetry, and he began to look around for Tagore's poetry to read. At that time, shortly after Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature, his poems were very popular in Japan, and his collections of works were not easy to buy in Tokyo. When Guo Moruo read the entire edition of the New Moon Collection, it was already a year later when he was promoted to Okayama High School as an undergraduate: "I got his "New Moon Collection", and when I saw the elegant binding and a few pages of silent illustrations, the happiness in my heart was really like a child getting a pictorial. ”
In the autumn of 1916, Guo Moruo suddenly found Tagore's "Jitanjali", "Gardener's Collection", "Lover's Gift" and other poems in the Okayama Library. After reading it, in his own words: "It is as if I have probed my 'life of life', my 'fountain of life'." When reading, for fear of being disturbed, Guo Moruo found a very dark reading room, sat in the corner of the wall, and held a book and recited silently on the wall. In such a special situation, Guo Moruo even shed tears of gratitude because of excitement. He immersed himself in such an idyllic atmosphere for a long time, from two or three o'clock in the afternoon to the time when the lights were lit. Such reading and feeling made Guo Moruo deeply influenced by Tagore in his thoughts and art.
Two worlds apart
During this time, Guo Moruo was in love with a Japanese woman Anna (real name Sato Tomiko). Tagore's influence and the collision of love made Guo Moruo's desire to create strongly stimulated. He successively wrote "The New Moon and the White Clouds", "The Temptation of Death", "Parting", "Venus", and several shepherd songs in "Shepherd's Lament", most of which were written for Anna. For example, this song "Late Step":
Pine forest! How do you be so fresh!
I have lived with you for half a year,
I've never seen it before
This sand road is so flat!
Two carriages pulling goods passed in front of me,
One of the two tired coachmen was singing.
What was in their empty car?
The tide of the sea responded: Peace! placid!
The pan-loving thoughts in the poems, the delicate and fresh style, clearly show tagore's profound influence.
Around 1917, because he liked it, Guo Moruo successively translated many of Tagore's poems. In the second half of the year, his child with Anna is about to come out. In this way, relying solely on Guo Moruo's limited official fees for studying abroad is obviously unable to support the needs of the family. He selected and translated parts from the "New Moon Collection", "Jitanjali", and "Gardener's Collection" and compiled it into a "Selected Poems of Tagore", which was annotated in Chinese and English, and sent to China for publication, hoping to exchange some remuneration for subsidies for family use, but the result was counterproductive.
At that time, Chinese mainland, and the number of people who knew Tagore was very limited; more importantly, who was "Guo Moruo"? Less known. His poems, which are either singing and unrestrained, or quiet and diluted, did not meet with the Chinese people until a few years later, thus shaking the poetry world and winning widespread fame. Therefore, he wrote to the famous Commercial Press at that time, asking for the sale of "Selected Poems of Tagore", which was returned by the museum; and then turned to the Zhonghua Bookstore, but was also rejected... Guo Moruo, who is in the sensitive stage of youth and suffers from the double torment of life and spirit, can be imagined as a blow.
This result caused Guo Moruo's different reaction. He suddenly thought that he and Tagore were not the same kind of people: Tagore was a noble saint, and he was a mediocre. The distance between these two worlds made him feel that his love for Tagore was "arrogant". It is unimaginable that the oppression of reality can lead to such a great change in people's spirits. But this is exactly what happened: "My spiritual connection with Tagore has since been hit. ”
Things in the world may sometimes change a lot because of some seemingly accidental factors. This can be clearly seen in Guo Moruo's shift in vision of Tagore.
The selected poems of Tagore, which cost Guo Moruo a lot of painstaking efforts, were finally lost on the way to and fro, so that in the "Collection of Poems translated by Moruo", which later gathered his translated works, not a single poem of Tagore was included, which is too regrettable. However, in Guo Moruo's article, we can occasionally read his translation of Tagore's poems, and here is an excerpt to glimpse the leopard. In February 1920, Guo Moruo wrote a "Treatise on the Three Poems". The article discusses the inner rhythm of poetry as follows: "The inner rhythm appeals to the heart and not to the ear. Tagore has verses that best illustrate this point.
Please keep the secret of your heart, my friend!
Please tell me, just say it to me, quietly.
You smile so euphemistically, please whisper softly, my heart can hear, not my ears. - The Gardener's Collection, Song 42
This rhythm is so subtle that those who have not attained the mysteries of poetry simply cannot understand it. This means that it is the 'spirit of music', but it cannot be said that it is music. Music is already tangible, and inner law is invisible communication. ”
The third verse of one of his poems, "On shore," also goes straight to Tagore: "My A-He/ with some children/Playing in the sand." / I read one of Tagore's poems, / I also went to play with them. /Whew! How can I be a pure child? ”
Later, these poems influenced by Tagore were successively published in the "Learning Lights" column of the "Current Affairs New Newspaper", which greatly stimulated Guo Moruo's enthusiasm. Soon after, however, he read the great American poet Whitman's Blade of Grass. The style of getting rid of all old forms and contents, the majestic and grand atmosphere, is very much in tune with the spirit of the youth during the "May Fourth" period. Under the influence of Whitman, coupled with the eager urging of Zong Baihua, the editor of "Learning Lamp", Guo Moruo's poetry volcano was led to "eruption". In the three or four months from 1919 to the turn of 1920, Guo Moruo created the best poems of his life: "Standing on the Edge of the Earth", "The Earth, My Mother", "Ode to the Bandits", "Morning Peace", "Phoenix Nirvana", "Heart Lamp", "Coal in the Furnace", "The Lesson of the Giant Cannon"... They also gave birth to the collection of poems, the foundation and peak work of Romantic poetry in the history of New Chinese Literature, "Goddess".
From the above process, it can be seen that Guo Moruo was first deeply influenced by Tagore, and his fame depended on a number of poems influenced by Whitman. The needs of the times and the creation are often not as suitable as people subjectively imagine, but it intentionally or unintentionally affects the direction of the poet's creation. After that, the factors reflected in Guo Moruo's poems that reflected Tagore's influence have become very thin. Not only that, with the development of the times, Guo Moruo had a lot of dissatisfaction with this poet who gave himself many near -nirvana" happiness.
In 1941, Guo Moruo was in Chongqing
The change of the artist's creative path
In 1924, the great poet Tagore was invited to visit China. Before visiting China, many domestic newspapers and periodicals made a lot of publicity for this purpose: either translating their poems, or issuing "special numbers" to create a momentum... At this time, Guo Moruo, regardless of his reputation and status in the literary world, was not comparable to that of previous years, and the turning point in his thinking was also expected.
Earlier, in October 1923, Guo Moruo wrote an article entitled "I See Tagore's Coming to China", expressing his views on the poet's visit to China. In the article, Guo Moruo expressed dissatisfaction with the domestic lively invitation to cultural celebrities Dewey and Russell to speak in China. He thought that the average Chinese did not study the ideas of these celebrities carefully, and that inviting them was nothing more than a manifestation of vanity. In his opinion, this lively and lively event was like performing a "god meeting" again and again; and when he was ready to invite Tagore to visit China, in his opinion, it was just another "god meeting".
Tagore (first from right in the second row) at Tsinghua University in 1924
At this time, Guo Moruo thought: "His (Tagore's) thought is a kind of pantheistic thought, and he just put the traditional spirit of India in a western-style dress. "At a time when the West is too dynamic and loses its origins, Mr. Tagore's forest philosophy can be a blessing for them." But we have long indulged in the dead and silent peoples of the East, and our agent for reviving the dead is not here but there. ”
Regarding Tagore's propaganda, Guo Moruo believed that it was unnecessary in China at that time: "All the reality of Brahman, my dignity, and the gospel of love can only be used as morphine and coconut wine of the propertied class; the proletarian people have to shed the blood and sweat of a lifetime." Unprincipled, non-violent propaganda is the greatest poison of our time. We can see that at this time, Guo Moruo has consciously adhered to the materialist view of history, and stood at the bottom to observe, analyze things and apply various ideological trends, and did not give up the conscious position shift because he was very fond of Tagore. Guo Moruo's article, perhaps the influence of literary colleagues, is unknown, but the change in his thinking is obvious, although the time has only been in the past few years.
The path of human existence and the path of artists' creation are sometimes changing. This change is sometimes conscious, sometimes involuntarily, driven by the trend of the times. Guo Moruo's previous great infatuation with Tagore, after only a few years, he re-recognized his thoughts, criticism can be slightly proved; today we record Guo Moruo's early journey, but also provide a case of knowing people and poets. When we analyze and comprehend the evolution of a person's thought or poetic art, we sometimes have simple patterns. But the actual human development is extremely complex, and it is inextricably linked to the times and even many accidental factors.