Brecht: Conscience under the wheels

(Image source: Panorama view)

"I'm amazed at how much luck a person needs to be crushed by wheels!" How many sudden thoughts! How many friends! ”

This is Brecht's exclamation in the play "Sichuan Good Man". Another reader in distress will naturally remember such sentences deeply. Indeed, an upright person, living in this world, sooner or later encounters his own moral anxiety. Sudden thoughts and a certain number of friends, perhaps not important, there will always be moments when you will be in the mirror, confirming the position of your heart. Either way, one will always move forward.

It is conceivable that, likewise, writing is a way of relieving. Such anxiety must have existed in the writer's experience beforehand. It's also a moment for readers and authors to build relationships. As a classic writer, this is the first situation Brecht presented to me.

To me, Brecht is really a special writer. When I read "The Good Man of Sichuan", it was during the period when I was reading foreign literature extensively. Brecht's translations of his plays are unavoidable literary classics, and I read most of them. Another of these works that I have to recall is the biography of Galileo, "out of the darkness of reason, which guards the gate all day long".

The first time I remember his poems was in Hannah Arendt's review collection People of the Dark Ages, translated by Wang Lingyun and Tan Yi. In his essay on Brecht, Arendt quotes this sentence: "No longer cares for his whole youth, but does not include dreams; / Long forgetting the roof, but always remembering the sky above the roof." "The sky on the roof retains a clear blue, and it seems to appear only when people are asleep." The term "Dark Ages" was derived by Arendt from Brecht's poems.

Touched again by Brecht, it was in the song "Traveling in a Comfortable Car", translated by Green Plains:

Travel in a comfortable car

On a rainy village road

At dusk we saw a ragged man

Bowing, begging us to take him for a ride.

We had the house, we had space, we drove over

We heard me say sadly, "No."

We couldn't bring anyone.

We walked a long way and maybe had a day trip

At this moment I was suddenly surprised by my voice

This and this of mine

The whole world.

This surprise is also passed on to our readers, with a hidden pain that has happened before. I think of a painting by a foreign painter in which a man rides a white horse in a field near the sea, followed by a transparent ghost with a skull. Maybe I can recount that scene, but it's hard to convey the same emotion.

The poet critic Zhang Dinghao once talked about the situation of Brecht's poetry in Chinese, and his sentiment was that poetry translated directly from German was not as good as translated from English. Of course, this is also because it is difficult to find Brecht's poetry on the market at that time, and we have no way of understanding the overall outline of the poet. Now, after waiting, a relatively complete selection of Brecht's poems has finally been published, translated by Huang Canran.

The entire collection of poems is compiled in chronological order, dividing Brecht's poetic career into seven periods. I spread out this yellow book of poems in the light, looking for what I needed. First, I looked up the song "Sky Above the Roof" and the song "Travel in a comfortable car." Sure enough, both works were selected from the book and dated, the first in 1917 and the latter in 1937. Mr. Huang Canran's translation is different, which seems to be expected.

The next thing I found was the kind of surprise that had appeared in "Travel in a Comfortable Car." "But all this, even the most familiar parts, / I make them stunned. / A mother breastfeeds her child, / I describe it incredibly. / A janitor turns a frozen man away / I act unheard of. "It's the Playwright's Song from 1935. Brecht used just a few words to outline this mixture of "shock", "indifference" and "pity", and also repeatedly showed the bipolar situation in "The Good Man of Sichuan". And this concise, clear, linear poetic language is exactly what he is good at.

It seems that Brecht belonged to what Schiller called the "naïve" poet, or, in another translation, the "plain" poet. His simplicity, his proverbs, his social practice and the combination of writing texts all make him completely different from another type of "sentimental" writer. Huang Canran quotes George Steiner in the preface to the translation: "For him (Brecht) poetry is almost a daily visit and breathing" Similar to Schiller's dichotomy, Brecht himself made a similar judgment, arguing that there were two camps of German poetry after Goethe, "episcopal and blasphemous"; it was clear that Georg and Rilke belonged to the former, while Brecht, of course, placed himself in the latter.

"An overly sensitive conscience, if not balanced by great activity, can cause melancholy." This is a proverb that Goethe gave to Ekman, and perhaps it can be used to compare Brecht's situation. Even before reading "The Good Man of Sichuan", I had experienced Brecht's image in the autobiography of Nobel Prize writer Canetti. In Canetti's eyes, Brecht was a pragmatic writer who "in every way made one aware of his contempt for 'noble' moral ideas", "what he chooses must be immediately used by him, these are his raw materials, and he uses them to produce unceasingly ... He's a guy who's been making things." The terms "raw material" and "production" do fit what Steiner called "daily visits and breaths"; but as for the "contempt for moral thought", it is clear that it is now clear that brecht has put on himself a coat, as the young Canet saw as "a proletarian attire". This outfit can be used to symbolize Brecht's "mobility" that lasts a lifetime.

During the same period, Brecht and his friend Benjamin were both drawn to left-wing ideas, but the way they presented themselves as poets was completely different, and Benjamin did seem too melancholy. The preface quotes, "Brecht began by associating himself with the 'earthly' poetry of the vagabond outsider, rather than with the indulgence and esotericity of the German tradition he saw." Throughout the collection, Brecht does not see poetry as "art", but as a "tool"—perhaps with the exception of the early masterpiece Memories of Mary Ann.

Two other late poems that interested me in the collection of poems. One is "I, Survivor" (1944): "Of course I know: so many friends died / and I survived it was pure luck." But last night in a dream/I heard those friends say to me: 'Survival of the fittest.' So I hated myself. The other is "The Unbearable Morning" of 1953: "The silver poplar, the famous local beauty, / Today is an ugly old woman." That lake/is a stinky pit of dishwashing water, don't touch it! / The upside-down golden bells in the goldfish algae are cheap and vulgar. /Why? / Last night in a dream I saw some fingers pointing at me, like pointing to a leper. Knuckles are damaged by labor, / broken. You don't understand! I screamed, / Conscience condemned. ”

These two poems are sharp introspections in Brecht's own dreams. Again, it is reminiscent of Arendt's poetic tragedy, which she mentions in her review article, and she does quote both poems directly in her article. Arendt believed that when Brecht wrote an ode to Stalin, he was punished for the loss of talent. But she also agreed with the famous ending of "To Future Generations" and asked people not to judge him too harshly. Arendt, while critical of Brecht's political practices, first understood his "darkness in the Valley of Tears, and great indifference."

The collection does not contain the part of the political poem that Arendt mentioned. However, it is worth mentioning that in the Brecht Anthology published by the People's Literature Publishing House in 1959, the poems included are mainly of this genre. They can be found in Feng Zhi's translation of Selected Poems of the Seven Germans, also recently published. Comparing these two parts of the work, the reader can see that Brecht, who wrote slogan-style poetry, has indeed completely lost its luster. This also reminds me that in Mr. Feng Zhi's own poetry collection, the poems of the 50s and 60s also look pale and hollow. In them, the same tragedy happened.

Returning to the end of Arendt's article, she concludes, "How difficult it was to be a poet in the 20th century and any other era." And I also thought of the "Good Man of Sichuan" quoted at the beginning, being a poet is also a matter of great luck, how many sudden thoughts, how many friends. What kind of facial model did the poet Brecht leave behind? Let's leave for a moment the last poem in the collection, written in 1956, the year of his death, and arguably a testamentary work: "I always think: The simplest words / are enough." When I say what things look like /everyone's hearts will definitely be torn to shreds. / If you don't stand up for yourself you'll fall / You know for sure. ”