Scholar's biography
Shi Yucun (1905-2003), formerly known as Shi Depu, a native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, was a writer, translator and educator, and was a professor in the Department of Chinese at East China Normal University. He has made outstanding achievements in the fields of literary creation, classical literature research, gold and stone inscription research, and foreign literature translation, and is the author of "One Hundred Words of Tang Poetry", "Essay on Lexicology", "Beishan Talks on Art", etc.
Shi Yucun is studious and has the reputation of learning to open the "four windows". The east window refers to the study of Chinese literature, history and oriental culture, the south window refers to literary creation, the west window refers to the translation and research of foreign literature, and the north window refers to the study of gold and stone inscriptions and calligraphy cultural relics.
If you want to be creative, you must really love literature
Shi Yucun is one of the main writers of the "New Sensation School" in the history of modern Chinese literature, and is known for writing psychoanalytic novels. From 1926 to 1930, he and Dai Wangshu, Liu Naou and other "young people with no publishing experience", in order to develop their "literary and artistic careers", he successively founded four magazines, "Yingluo", "Literary Workshop", "Trackless Train" and "New Literature and Art", as well as three bookstores: First Line Bookstore, Shuimo Bookstore and Donghua Bookstore. During this period, he personally wrote a number of novels, including "Shangyuan Lantern" and "Chasing", and started his literary career.
In his early years, Shi Yucun accumulated rich editing experience and established a clear direction for his literary development. After 1929, he began to study and introduce Marxist literary and artistic theories, and also began to contact Lu Xun, and then published the "Scientific Art Theory Series" together. At this stage, Shi Yucun respected Lu Xun's artistic appreciation very much, and also appreciated his articles. In November 1932, Shi Yucun's "Modern" opened a special column for Lu Xun's "Five Stresses in Beiping". In February 1933, because he was "reluctant to be stifled by Lu Xun's extraordinary masterpiece", Shi Yucun took the risk of publishing an article commemorating the five martyrs of the Left Union in "Modern Times", "For the Remembrance of Forgetting", which other editorial departments did not dare to publish at that time. Shi Yucun often wrote letters to Lu Xun to ask for drafts, and even though the two later started a "pen war" over new and old literary issues, they still published many important articles by Lu Xun.
Shi Yucun once talked about the literary career he loved in the article "Love of Literature", and he criticized the phenomenon of writers blindly creating and living on old fame, and came to the following conclusions: First, the affection for literature is only a small factor in becoming a good creator; second, the love of literature should become the driving force for improving literary accomplishment. He pointed out that if the majority of young people can provide the country and society with the specialized skills they have learned, and maintain their love of literature well, and use it to appreciate and judge the literary works of others, so that the literary publishing industry can gradually raise its standards, this is the most perfect attitude towards literature. If a young man tries to abuse his love of literature, thinking that having such superficial feelings is tantamount to having a credible creative ability, he abandons the specialized skills he should learn and engages in writing, and often ends up in failure. He advocated that if you love literature, you don't necessarily have to be creative, and in order to do it, you must really be able to love literature.
The "Three Stages" of Scholarship
Shi Yucun believes that the management of education requires a process. He mentioned in his article "What 'Learning' I Governed": "No one will study a discipline as soon as he gets started, and there must be a process of gradually moving towards research work." Shi Yucun divides this process into three stages: the first stage is accumulation. I became interested in a certain science, and I looked for books on this subject to read one by one, and became familiar with all aspects of this knowledge. The second stage is "Getting Started". In the course of reading and thinking more broadly, questions are bound to arise. If you have a problem, you have to solve it yourself. The third stage is to do the research. "When you get started, you can't stop trying to figure out everything you can't figure out. Shi Yucun's theory of "three stages" and Wang Guowei's theory of "three realms of learning" have the same effect, and together they express the true meaning of learning.
In the 60s of the 20th century, he suddenly found that there are many problems worth studying in lexicology, but there are very few contemporary words and word theories, so he began to engage in related research, read a lot of word collections, and delved into academic methods. He clothed himself in sand and picked gold, and copied the preface and examples in the books of the ages. "In the evening, at home, read the words. In the past four or five years, the collection of words of the past dynasties, whether it is a selection or a separate collection, has been read at hand, and some notes have been written at any time. For this way, I think I can say that I have started. These notes are concise and concise, integrating research and understanding. At that time, the lyrics before the Song Dynasty were the weak link in the study of words, and Shi Yucun used his deep roots to fill in the white for the study of Tang words and five pronouns, and compiled the accumulated notes into articles. For example, "Reading Li Bai's Notes" questions the pseudo-works with a widely quoted commentary, and seeks the standard of truth from philology, which provides direct research materials for the study of words. For another example, "Reading Wen Feiqing's Notes" and "Reading Feng Yansi's Notes" connect the words of multiple lyricists, analyze the inheritance and rheology of styles, and present the subtle twists and turns contained in them with their unique appreciation, which can be described as new insights. As the literary critic Xu Zhongyu said, "Mr. Yu Cun has a wide range of knowledge", "the old style poems, classical Chinese, and small research are all well-founded and reasonable, and they are frank and perfunctory, and the words are fresh and handsome, with poetic charm, just like his person".
Outstanding Approach to Learning: "Research and Comparison"
Shi Yucun is a lover of classical Chinese literature, and his poetic research achievements are remarkable. His "Words and Words of Beishanlou" has nearly one million words, and the first section is "nominal", that is, the definition of nouns and terms related to lexicology is examined, which is the beginning of the book and should be placed at the front of the volume. In this regard, Shi Yucun said: "My first research process is to figure out the correct meaning of many nouns and terms related to words. I found that some words, although many people have used them in articles since the Song and Yuan dynasties, reflect the phenomenon that seems to be different in everyone's understanding of the word. I used a little research to sort out dozens of lexical nouns to find the correct concept. "Shi Yucun's research on the definition of lexical terms has had a far-reaching impact on the history of lexicology.
When Shi Yucheng wrote "Hundred Words of Tang Poems", he reiterated the necessity of proofreading: "In order to verify the situation and find the correct meaning from the language and writing, I had to do some proofreading and verification work first. "A Hundred Tales of Tang Poetry" is known as a masterpiece of Chinese poetics that integrates research and appreciation, and Shi Yucun summarized the most significant feature of the book as "research and comparison". When he analyzes each poem, he lists the commentaries of the commentators of the past dynasties one by one, distinguishing right from wrong and distinguishing between truth and falsehood.
The first part of "One Hundred Words of Tang Poems" is about Wang Ji's "Wild Hope". Appreciating the artistic style of this fresh and simple Tang Dynasty five-character poem and analyzing its basic content is the general chapter of poetry appreciation. But on this basis, Shi Yucun has a stronger sense of the problem, and he wants to figure out when the poem was written. He read the poems and selected three representative viewpoints, judged the ambiguity, removed the false and kept the true, and combined with the research methods of knowing people and discussing the world, and using the will to contradict the will, he verified that the poem was written when the Sui Dynasty regime was about to die or was already dead. Based on this, he more accurately refined the theme of the poem, revealing the author's poetic aspirations: regret because of "the desire to migrate", but "long song Huai Caiwei". Shi Yucun is very familiar with the use of evidence and comparative methods, and he neither recognizes the "excerpt of sentences on poetry", nor does he agree with deliberate bitter chanting, which contributes to his poetic style: mechanism analysis, logical rigor, clear and clear, novel and smart.
Integrate and learn from each other
Shi Yucun is as famous as the famous scholar Qian Zhongshu, and is known as "South Shi and North Qian". They are compared not only because they are literary scholars and translators, but also because they are both wise men who have studied both Chinese and Western cultures, and have persistently explored to enrich Chinese culture.
Shi Yucun studied foreign literature in his early years, came into contact with symbolism and Imagist poetry, and wrote a number of lyric poems of imagery. When writing "One Hundred Words of Tang Poetry", he appreciated Li Shangyin's poems and analyzed that his creative technique was almost symbolic: "The poetry is already very hazy, and he is not willing to add an illustrative title, leaving room for the reader to feel for himself, rather than understanding." Therefore, Shi Yucun advocates exploring the poet's metaphor from the meaning of sustenance. For this kind of poem, which creates many images, he uses the method of symbolist criticism to analyze, and it does complement each other.
When translating foreign poetry, Shi Yucun is good at combining foreign poetry with the ontology of Chinese culture. He translated the Irish poet Yeats's poem "To an Isle in the water/With her would I go" as "I want to go with her / to an island in the middle of the water." The elegant translation incorporates the classical Chinese culture contained in the Book of Songs. Shi Yucun also translated the titles of Yeats's poems into "Wild Leaves on Lake Cole" and "Wood Leaves Withering", etc., "Wild Leaves" and "Wooden Leaves" are objects and scenes that appear in classical Chinese poetry.
Before modern times, the study of China and the West was carried out in a relatively independent form. Since the fall of modern times, the situation has changed, and the transition of Western learning to the East and the response of secondary schools have become the unavoidable historical background of China's academic development. In promoting cultural mutual learning, Shi Yu transcends the dualistic thinking, which can be described as "the outside is not behind the world's trend of thought, and the inside is still lost its inherent bloodline".