Written | hurts water
Gary Snyder (1930- ), a famous American poet, translator, representative of the "Beat School", known as the "poet laureate of deep ecology", has published more than 20 books, won many important awards such as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and was the president of the American Poets Academy. Snyder was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and his poems often had the charm of ancient Chinese poetry.
Turtle Island: Snyder's Poetry Collection, by Gary Snyder, translated by Liu Xiangyang, Yazhong Culture | Beijing United Publishing Company, January 2021
Liu Xiangyang's translation of Gary Snyder is trustworthy. As early as 2008, the 8th issue of the Tropic of Cancer paper magazine that I co-edited, I selected the Louise Glick poems translated by Liu Xiangyang last year, which won the Nobel Prize last year, based on the trust in Liu Xiangyang's translation. I have seen at least eight people translating Snyder, and Liu Xiangyang's translation of "Turtle Island", not to mention the first praise, at least it is superior, and it is naturally among the best in summary. In particular, his commentaries, in addition to the necessary plant names, place names, and personal names, point to certain ways of interpretation, pointing to the point, although they are taken from the results of some researchers: it facilitates the entry of reading- in some places suddenly solves the doubts that I have accumulated in my previous reading of Snyder, but it does not explain too much, maintaining the audience's understanding and imagination of Snyder's poetry and references. For example, note 1 of the poem "Bathing" states that "this poem and the poem 'Praying for the Great Court' should also pay attention to the characteristics of the religious sacraments in it and the tone of each poem." The poet expresses this idea explicitly (but by giving it a plural nature) through the overlapping phrase 'our body', a language that echoes the Catholic eucharist: each body becomes our body through mutual co-creation and dependence. ”
The isomorphism of the social context and the context of the individual poetry
The completion of a good poem requires the participation of the reader, and perhaps this is also the textual framework of Snyder who is deeply influenced by Eastern culture, just as he participated in Zen. The excellence of a good translation: both the study of genesis and the aesthetics of acceptance. Liu Xiangyang did it, and the difficulty and process of solving the difficulties exemplified in his less than five-hundred-word "Afterword" is admirable. The reader and the "listener" are involved in the creation of generative language through the translator – on this topic, the linguist Bakhtin transcends the closure of Saussure linguistics, arguing that poetic discourse is the expression and product of the interaction of the speaker, the listener, and the said, and that the interaction of the three constitutes a "living expression". The "context", then, naturally becomes the primary unit of poetic comprehension and analysis. In what context does Turtle Island appear?
The 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Turtle Island, is Snyder's sixth collection of poems, published in 1974 and to great fame. The collection of poems , " The concept of the biological regional view " was shown in literature for the first time , Snyder said , and was widely recognized. He also said that "Turtle Island is a statement about how the North American continent should live", and the context at that time we can fully read in "Turtle Island", such as "The Dead by the Roadside", "I Walked into a Novel Bar", "Spell on the Devil", "Frontline", "The Call of the Wilderness", "Human Flora", "Two Young Deer Who Didn't See the Light of This Spring", etc., almost every capital is the isomorphism of the social context of the time and the context of his personal poetry. The works of an outstanding poet are not only the grasp and expression of his time, but also his prophetic, warning, and critical nature, and also the pioneering and eternal characteristics of the poetic text.
The Facts:
1. 92% of Japan's three million tons of soybean imports come from the United States.
2. The U.S. accounts for 6% of the world's population: annual energy consumption accounts for 1/3 of the world's total.
3. The United States consumes 1/3 of the world's annual meat consumption.
4. The top 1/5 of the population in the United States receives 45% of their wage income and owns 77% of their total wealth. The top 1% own 20% to 30% of their personal wealth.
5. A modern country needs 13 basic industrial raw materials. By 2000 AD, the United States would rely entirely on imports except for phosphorus.
6. General Motors is bigger than the Netherlands.
(Omitted below)
10. The basic source of our food is the sun.
This "Fact" is listed in the first part of the second series of Snyder's "Turtle Island" poetry collection, "Magpie Song", which is different from most of the poems in the poetry collection, and it is also completely different from the way Snyder's poems are written as the representative poet of "natural literature" estimated by ordinary people. Facts lists 10 facts about the American era, which constitutes a very postmodern collage, and when I read it more than twenty years ago, I was impressed by Snyder's eclectic innovation. Through the list of "facts", it points to Snyder's ecological view. James Wright wrote a commentary in the 1960s in which he looked at Snyder from the poet's point of view and thought that "Snyder was a man of great unique insights." The poems he wrote are unique and very different from those written by most poets in recent years." Difference, innovation, is making the poetry ontology exist. Snyder taught us how to treat poetry.
Gary Snyder in front of the cabin in the woods, 1980s.
And these verses of his:
"On Sunday, the real estate company/four-wheeled jeep brought/the people looking for the land, the inspectors, they/ said to the land: / Open your legs // The jets make a crackling sound overhead, here it's all right; / Every beat of decay, in the heart / In the sick and greasy veins of the Country / All push the edge closer -// The bulldozers creak and move, (omitted)" (Frontline);
"It never gave a vote to mountains and rivers, / trees and animals, / a vote. / All the people left it / Myths died; even the continent became impermanent / / Turtle Island returned. / My friend loosened a piece of dry coyote dung / pulled out a ground squirrel's tooth / Punched a hole and / Hung it / on the / gold earrings around his ear. (Excerpt from "Song of Tomorrow")
"Bear fruit branches bear fruit, / a clump of green hard berries / The longer you look / The bigger they appear, // Small apples" (from "Bear Fruit")
"We are it/ It sings through us —// We can live on this earth / Even without clothes or tools!" (Excerpt from "At Fraser Creek Falls")
"Your itch / Also in my boots / / - Your sea drifting / Son of the heart of the trees." (Excerpt from "The Dirt-Stained Strap")
The effective transmission of present-momentity, and sense of things, realizations, and experiences makes Snyder not a Thoreau as people imagine, a poet who does not eat fireworks in the world, and must enter the world when he is born, and there is no life or death. As Professor Cheng Hong pointed out in Thirty Lectures on American Natural Literature (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, August 2013):
Snyder's unique contribution to natural literature is: First, out of a strong interest in Eastern and Indigenous Indian cultures, he is one of the few Western writers who observe and describe nature from the perspective of Eastern and Western cultures. His works reflect the communication between Eastern and Western cultures across time and space around the theme of man and nature. Second, he explains how, in today's multicultural context, the water and soil of the party where the individual lives can be connected to the whole world from the perspective of ecological protection. He expanded his understanding of the value of the wilderness in the natural literary tradition and put it into practice, advocating a "resettled" lifestyle. Not only did he embrace bioregionalism, but he also tried to describe specific natural landscapes in the bioregional language that is unique to the ecoregional.
Modern and postmodern
In terms of poetic art forms, I prefer many passages in "Turtle Island": "Anasazi" and "No Outer" in the first series of "Bear Fruit", "The Dead by the Roadside", "Spring bathing in the Valley of Coyotes", "Frontline", "Control of Fire", "The Call of the Wilderness", "Pray for the Great Court", "Bear Fruit", etc.; "Facts", "Canopy of Pine Trees", "No For", "Night Heron", "Use of Light", "Liquid Metal Rapid Value-Added Nuclear Reactor" (well-known ecological poet, This post-industrial title refreshes the mind; the last three lines of the poem are wonderful! "Song of the Magpie"; "Ah Shui", "Xuan" (should be annotated, pointing out that "Xuan" is the name of Snyder's youngest son Chinese" in the third series of "Written for Children"; "The Strap Of The Soil", "Song of Tomorrow", "What Happened Before Here" (very chic structure), "Written to the Children", etc.
In addition to the fourth series of essays that put forward his ideas, "Honest Words", "Turtle Island" has only 58 poems; and I like at least 31. Turtle Island inspired me a lot. First of all, the title of the collection of poems is intriguing, and Snyder, in a brief preface, points out its referential metaphor: "Turtle Island originated from ... The legend of creation... And there is an idea all over the world that the earth, and even the universe, is supported by a great turtle or an immortal snake. ...... These poems speak of places and energy pathways that sustain life. ...... The land, the earth itself, is also a living being.... Revisit these roots and understand our ancient childhood to face our common labor on Turtle Island. "It has become common to use the whole of a poem as a metaphor, and the use of a book of poems as a whole metaphor is still rare, which may confirm his influence on Ezra Pound and others. The overall metaphor and the inner poems are diverse, like a banquet that transcends the manchu and Han chinese, with a variety of dishes, from ingredients to cooking methods, but all point to a feast.
Secondly, Snyder's poetry still has many fresh imagery elements, at least, he is free to juxtapose economic and social phenomena and natural things, "liquid metal rapid value-added nuclear reactors", "jet planes", "real estate companies", "bulldozers" and numerous animal and plant terms shine together. This rightfully met requirement for modern poetry, Snyder set an example for us. Modern and postmodern in his ecological poems are distinct and strong.
In the early 1960s, during a trip to India, Gary Snyder (first from left), Peter Ollowski and Alan Ginsburg (first from right).
Again, the "spells" of the specific poems in the "Turtle Island" poetry collection are various, so let's take a look at two poems:
The Dead by the Side of the Road
How could there be a giant red-tailed eagle
Here - the whole body is stiff and dry -
On Interstate 5 Road
Shoulders of the road?
Her love of dancing wings
Zach peeled off a skunk with its head crushed
Washed the skin with kerosene; hung,
Tan, in his tent
Baby deer stewed on halloween eve
Hit by a truck on Highway 49
Feed cereal from the mouth;
Peel it.
Trucks carrying logs run on fossil fuels
I've never seen a puffy-tailed raccoon, and later found one on the road:
Peel it with a diagonal nail
The soles of the feet, nose and beard are still there;
Soak in salt water
Sour pickled water with sulfuric acid flavor;
She will become a small bag of magical tools.
The female deer was apparently hit
Longitudinal through one side -
Shoulders and ribs outside
There was blood all over my stomach
Maybe save the other shoulder
If she hadn't been lying down for too long—
Pray to their souls. Ask them to bless us:
The trail of our ancient sisters
Now paved the way and killed them:
Eyes as glittering as night
These are the dead on the side of the road.
Narration and white drawing. The supplication at the end. present. What immediately comes to mind is the "poetry of facts" advocated by Isha et al. The poetry of facts is very complementary to the spell of poetic lyricism. But if we had read Snyder's poems such as "The Dead by the Roadside", "Hudson's Mystery", "Controlling Fire", and "Flora of Mankind" more than 50 years ago, we would have been inspired earlier. Moreover, in addition to the "facts" of poems like Snyder's, there are other facts, according to the foreign realm, the image outside the image: facts beyond the facts.
The poem points to the application of ancient hunting rituals in modern "road hunting". The poem reveals a derogatory rebuke of the practice of crossing the road through animal roads, how to comfort the "dead on the side of the road"? There are ancient rituals; Snyder also points out the measure we deserve: the complete use of every part of the animal. The poems touch on a real-world problem: understanding the complexity and cruelty of the food chain, discerning the value of the sacred and the shared. This makes the "facts" in addition to the "facts" have a larger "facts", conveying Snyder's ecological view of "resettlement". Gao Ge and Wang Nuo's book "The Study of The Ecological Poet Gary Snyder" (Xuelin Publishing House, September 2011) also analyzes it in this way, and quotes Reesnide: "Modern people do not need to hunt, many people can not even afford meat, and in developed countries, the availability of various foods allows us to choose not to eat meat at will." Forests were cut down to make pastures, and cattle and sheep were raised to supply the U.S. market. Staying away from food sources allows us to have more shallow comfort and more obvious ignorance. It is this ignorance and blindness that makes nature suffer unimaginable calamities. Snyder describes the right ritual of passing on gratitude and respect through poetry, "tasting the whole and passing on the knowledge" (Flora of Man). Rituals are only forms, but through forms the mind is sublimated, and what sublimates is the concept of man, and the concepts and understandings are guided by methods and practices.
"Facts outside the facts"
Similarly, in Controlling Fire, the verse tells us that the moderate burning of the forest is the salvation of the forest, which is the law of nature. Critic Patrick Murphy also argues that the "fire" in this poem also metaphorically requires a burning purification of American culture... Both the advocacy of moderate forest burning and the other symbolic metaphors illustrate the "fact outside the facts" that the poem possesses. Snyder set an example for us.
"The Canopy of Pine Trees"
Blue night
Frost fog, sky
Brightened by the moon
The canopy of a pine tree
Curved, snow blue, faintly
Blend into the sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
The footprints of rabbits, the footprints of deer,
And what do we know.
This is probably the most widely circulated Snyder poem in the world of Chinese poetry, and may fit people's imagination of ecological poets and out of a narrow understanding of poetic beauty. Most people will overlook the two most important lines in this short poem: "The footprints of the rabbit, the footprints of the deer, / What do we know?" These two lines take the short poem out of the generalized longing for nature and force one to reflect on one's attitude toward nature: What do we know? Yes, many people are not the right "inhabitants" of the planet, Snyder said, "to re-inhabit, you must be reborn on this turtle island!" ”
Turtle Island is back. As Snyder wrote in "Song of Tomorrow." And in the era when we advocated that "green water and green mountains are golden mountains and silver mountains", "Turtle Island" should have a different meaning.
Snyder's Turtle Island has its core and meaning in each capital, and the whole is woven into a net. The relationship between man and nature is his big theme, through the exposure of natural suffering, the presentation of the regenerative power of all things, the display of the inhabitation of several peoples, engaging in what he calls the "real work" of mankind - breaking the opposition between wilderness and civilization, and changing the world back to its original, complete and real appearance, "the way we live". Snyder is not a person who asks questions and then turns around, and his concepts of "A Place in Space" (also translated as the classical Chinese 'corner of heaven and earth') and "re-inhabitation" are almost a certain direction and framework for human survival and environmental protection. Thomas Parkinson argued that Snyder "created a new culture," and Snyder himself said that to work for wilderness nature was to rebuild culture and practice it, "I don't just write poetry." I also paint a bigger picture in my work. I see it as a big plan in which everything is part of that picture. "It has a very Chinese style of "unity of knowledge and action".
In the poetry of Turtle Island and later, Snyder has always engaged in the deconstruction of industrial civilization and the construction of ecological civilization, using literature to point out that man is subordinate to a certain natural system in the whole world. This theme is embodied bit by bit in his poetry, concentrated and diffuse, free and restrained, by no means without purpose, quite han Yu's advocacy of "wen and Dao unity", and this "Tao" is here in Snyder - Dao Fa Nature! The four words "Taoist nature" are used in Snyder's poems, and naturally have multiple meanings. This is the essence of Snyder's Turtle Island.
Snyder with Alan Ginsburg, 1996
Children of mountains and forests
I first learned that Snyder and his person should have been in a 1981 issue of Contemporary Foreign Literature magazine, which contained a selection of poems from several poets of the "Beat Generation", and soon after, as a teenager, I saw a more detailed introduction to Snyder, almost falling in love with him at first sight. Because I am a native of Taizhou, Zhejiang, where Han Shanzi lived in the Tang Dynasty, Snyder translated 24 poems of Han Shanzi, and he advocated Han Shanzi's life and life style, and he himself was also a representative figure of the "Beat Generation" in the United States, according to his friend and poet Kitajima, "Snyder is the Thoreau of the 'Beat Generation', and the spiritual father of the 'Beat Generation' in the true sense."
Snyder is a child of mountains and forests, has been a sailor, has participated in Zen in Japan, the monk's precepts have tested him physically and mentally, he has worked as a lumberjack, a railway worker, a porter and unloader after dropping out of school, he loves Chinese culture, understands the indigenous culture of Indians, has also been to India, to Hanshan Temple in China, he is also the prototype of the protagonist of the novel "Dharma Wanderer" written by Keruak, another character of the "Beat Generation", "Dharma Wanderer"... All of this fascinates me. Subconsciously, I always feel that only poets and writers who have gathered several cultures can become great poets and great writers. For example, Neruda's experience in Spain, Turkey, etc., such as Walcott's Caribbean Sea as the Aegean Sea, such as the many poets from Russia to North America. So did Snyder, and I was even more fascinated by his buddhist devotion to Eastern culture.
Happily, Snyder and I spent five days in Hong Kong. It was November 2009, and I attended the inaugural Hong Kong International Poetry Night organized by Kitajima. To be honest, I took a leave of absence from a busy business just to meet Gary Snyder. Over the course of a few days, I asked Snyder the following questions: 1. You and Alan Ginsburg are so different, how did you become a significant member of the Beat Generation? 2. What does your ecological outlook "A Place in Space" refer to? 3. How many ingredients does Ryder in Dharma Wanderer have you? 4. Why only translate han shanzi of the Chinese Tang Dynasty and no longer translate others. Wait a minute. There is an approximate explanation for these problems.
Looking back now, there are two things that impress me deeply, one is that he recalls the look on Alan Ginsburg and the words he said: "Allen was a bomb that blew up the popular culture of the time and blew himself up" - the metaphor of "bomb" is apt and vivid, which makes me unforgettable. On the other hand, Snyder himself was deconstructing (making bombs) while constructing (repairing bunkers), and watching him hold his head high, his gray hair raised by the sea breeze of Victoria Harbour, I have many indescribable feelings. The second was that he asked me for my English name, and I casually said the word Water, and he laughed: In American customs, only a certain branch of the native Indians has the habit of using proper nouns as names. Later, he sang to me the Indian folk song "Water" (now see the song "Ah Water" in "Turtle Island", suddenly different feelings). One night in October 2014, I looked through old photos and saw a photo of him singing a ballad to me, so I wrote a poem to remember:
Gary Snyder
You certainly didn't beat down
You say, Alan is a bomb
Blew up the target and blew it up
Forget about things? I also die twice
You look up to the sky as if looking for Alan
It was like looking for a trail of smoke, a hare or a deer
Alan was still talking to me the day before he died
You talk to yourself, your voice fading into the folds of the waves
The fish lifted its mouth and looked at your hair
We slept on salt
The moonlight credit was given to the deeply hidden hunting house
There is a thin blue frost on the pine crown
Maybe in Kamejima, in Kyoto Zen Temple, in Kichidis
Every pine can be your purlin
Thresholds can be omitted
Coyotes are howling, and fox droppings are evenly dried
The axe and grass rake were taken back into the house
Food stewed in the sunset
You got down on one knee on the deck, and I suddenly remembered
You are a sailor who has never retired
You sang me water on the water, an Indian song:
Water, water, water, water
Editor| Zhang Jin and Li Yongbo
Proofreading | Xue Jingning