Source of this article: Anqing Evening News
Transferred from: China Poetry Network
Mudan as a poet
Mu Dan (1918-1977), real name Zha Liangzheng, born in Tianjin, ancestral Haining Wang, Zhejiang, in 1932 after entering Nankai High School began to write new poems, in September 1935 was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University, in October 1937, after the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, moved south with the school, continued his studies at southwest United University (in addition to majoring in English literature, also took Russian), stayed in school after graduation in 1940, joined the Chinese Expeditionary Force in 1942, served as a military translator, and went to Burma to fight against Japan. In 1945, he published his first poetry collection" "Expedition", in 1947 he published his own poetry collection "Mudan Poetry Collection", and in 1948 he published the poetry collection "Qi". In early 1949, he went to Thailand with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and in August of the same year, he went to the United States to study British, American and Russian literature at the Graduate School of the University of Chicago.
Mu Dan was sensitive and thoughtful by nature, and showed his literary talent in middle school. From 1934 to 1935, he published poems in Nankai High School Students under his real name and pen name "Mu Dan", and from 1936 to 1937, he published poems in Tsinghua Weekly and other journals under the pseudonym "Mu Dan". The decade from the end of 1937 to 1948 was a period when "Mudan" emerged as a new poet, fully demonstrating his creative potential and energy, and reaching a remarkable state. Wen Yiduo's "Modern Poetry Banknotes" compiled during the Southwest United Congress were selected as an exception to 11 Mudan poems, and the number was second only to Xu Zhimo.
After a long period of injustice and exclusion, Mudan as a poet was rediscovered and recognized. Today, Mu Dan is widely regarded as one of China's most outstanding modern poets, and especially a poet who fully embodies the new poetry's pursuit of "modernity" and its achievements. It is in this sense that in the history of Chinese new poetry, Mu Dan represents an era.
The reason why Mudan reached such a situation in his early years before the age of thirty was that, in addition to his outstanding poetic talent and the factors of the times, it is well known that he was influenced by modern English poetry. What is even more valuable is that Mudan's ability to create and integrate is as impressive as his sensitivity and absorption ability. The influence he received contributed to the sharp changes in his art, but his poems were not the "after-reading feelings" of modern Western poetry, let alone the so-called "reproduction" that some people called. His poems, which are intertwined with modern consciousness, national troubles and the criticality of the times, embody a strong creative vitality. If Mu Dan's work could be sustained and deepened, he would probably take himself and the new Chinese poetry of his time to a higher level. It is a "pity" that after this, Mudan basically stopped his own poetry, and in his place, a poetry translator came to us.
From the poet MuDan to the translator Cha Liangzheng
After MuDan returned from the United States in early 1953, he taught at the Department of Foreign Languages at Nankai University. From then until 1958, apart from publishing a few poems in 1957 and causing himself trouble, he devoted himself to, or "turned" to translation. During those years, he published translated "Pushkin's Lyric Poems" (Part I and II) under the real name "Cha Liangzheng", "Poltava", "Bronze Knight", "Ode to Gavli", "Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Eugen Onegin" and many other narrative poems, poems by Shelley, Keats and others, and "Literary Principles" and "Belinsky Thesis" by Ji Jingfiev, etc. In addition, he also co-translated "Selected Poems of Black" with Yuan Kejia, and published Byron Lyric Poems under the name of "Liang Zhen".
Looking back on the five years after his return to China, his wife Zhou Youliang said, "That was the golden age of Liangzheng's translation of poetry." But this "golden age" came at the expense of the disappearance of a poet.
Looking back at the history of new Chinese poetry, although many poets have engaged in translation or existed as poet translators, Mu Dan's situation is not the same as theirs: Bian Zhilin initially began by translating poems, and then "writing new poems to send feelings", translating poems and writing poems complement each other, dai Wangshu became famous, and promoted both creation and translation, while Mu Dan, in his early years, devoted himself to creation, he turned to translation in his thirties and was not a translator who accompanied creation. It was as a professional translator that he began his other career.
Why did he make such a choice? There are "external causes" and "internal causes".
First of all, most of the more than three years he spent in the United States were spent getting married, starting a family, studying and working, especially the excitement and yearning brought to him by the "earth-shaking" changes in China, which made him not really sink down and touch the roots of his words. Upon his return, he soon discovered his innocence. What he had endured on his return also made him understand that he had to pay tribute to his own past. His past self, including his kind of poetry, is completely out of tune with a new era.
I think this is the main reason for "from the poet Mu Dan to the translator Cha Liangzheng". His turn to a professional translator (fortunately not difficult for him) was a way for him to "mourn" the poet of the past.
As for why Mudan would have chosen Pushkin, Shelley, Keats, and Byron to translate at that time, it is clear that at that time only foreign poets with "positive romantic spirit" and "revolutionary romantic spirit" could be accepted. Although Mudan is regarded as the poet of the most modernist nature, "modernism" and "romanticism" are not so distinct and unrelated in both the West and China. In fact, in the domestic environment of the fifties, Pushkin's poems are likely to feel more intimate to him than Eliot's. The human touch of Pushkin's poems, the fate of exile and the desire for freedom, the opposition between the poet and power, also allude to the deeper part of his heart.
In this way, from the 1950s until the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Nine Leaves Collection was published (1981), mainly as a translator of Pushkin, Shelley, Keats, Byron and others and became known to a wide range of readers. Except for the circle of friends, no one knows that "Zha Liangzheng" is Mu Dan. Mu Dan, one of the most prominent Chinese poets of the 1940s, has been completely forgotten.
When reviewing Mu Dan's "origin and destination", Wang Zuoliang sighed: "The poet Mu Dan has finally become a translator Zha Liangzheng, which has twists and turns, but it may not be a bad destination." This is the making of fate. Soviet poets such as Akhmatova and Pasternak turned to translation during the difficult period when their creations were under attack. For Mudan, he had to turn more thoroughly, because in that era he had gradually lost no other choice. For him, engaging in translation even had the meaning of "surviving"—for the sake of spiritual survival, for breathing, for the sake of sustenance for his love of poetry, for the attainment of his tortuous self-realization as a poet.
And this meaning of "translation as survival" is more obvious and profound to Mudan later. "History has opened a huge page,/ How many people wrote oaths at Tiananmen, / I raised my hand there too: / Flood flooded the lonely island", this is a verse in "Funeral Song". Even though he also hopes to integrate into the torrent of history, the torrent of history cannot tolerate such an "island" as him. The torrent of history only needs its victims, and Mu Dan, who had joined the anti-Japanese expeditionary force organized by the "National Army", was the "very suitable" one. In December 1958, the poet was declared a "historical counter-revolutionary" and deprived of the right to teach and publish his works, supervising labor in the school library. It was the darkest three years of pain and silence of his life. After being "deregulated" in 1962 and demoted to libraries, Mudan returned to translation. In addition to the heavy work of book collation, he chose to translate Byron's more than 20,000 lines of long poem "Don Juan". He was going to hold this boulder and sink it into the depths of his destiny. After the Cultural Revolution began, he was again greatly impacted after returning to school after the end of the labor reform in 1972, and the first thing he had to do was to return to the collation and revision of the translation of "Don Juan". What else can he pin down on? In a letter to his early poet friends, he said "with a bitter mouth": "I painstakingly make translations, but in fact I accept my heart by translating poems, otherwise my heart will have nowhere to rest." Knowing all this, let us look at his translation of Pushkin, which is more than just a general language transfer, it is the sustenance of all one's suffering, love, and spiritual world!
If we look at it from this point of view, the poet Mu Dan became the translator Char Liangzheng, which was not only "not a bad destination" in that era, but it was a great blessing for Mu Dan himself, for the vast number of readers and modern Chinese poetry. Zhou Jueliang also lamented this when looking back at Mu Dan: "The achievements of Mu Dan's translation of poems make us feel gratifying, but we also feel a little sad. If Mudan could devote all his energy and talent to translating poetry to writing poetry, what would we gain—if? ”
Such lamentations and exclamations have been coming since Mudan's death. But we can say that in that era when it was difficult to have real poetry, Mudan fortunately did not continue to write poetry! This is the widely quoted phrase in Adorno's The Minimum Morality: "There is no right life in the midst of mistakes." Fortunately, Mudan did not use his poems to try to adapt or celebrate that era. His talent has not been sadly distorted and abandoned, as many writers and poets have done, but in the "name of translation" continues to serve the linguistic and spiritual values with which he subscribes, and has left us with such a precious legacy.
Therefore, the poet Mu Dan became the translator Cha Liangzheng, which seems to me today to be a wise choice. It can even be said that this happens to be where "Providence" lies.
Between writing poems and translating poems
As a poet translator, Mudan's most important contribution in his later years was the translation of the Selected Modern English Poems. In 1973, he received a selection of Western modern poems from the United States that Jue liang had donated from the United States, and he returned to the poets who had influenced him in his early years. It can be said that this is a kind of "return" achieved after a lifetime and a huge price. This is not only an identification with the poet you love, but also a re-understanding of yourself, the ultimate affirmation of a lifelong quest after all kinds of confusion, doubt, or even self-abandonment.
From today's point of view, the Selected English Modern Poems, which the poet devoted himself to translating between 1973 and 1976, is an extremely important poetic event for both Mu Dan himself and modern Chinese poetry.
First, this translation embodies a fairly sober, conscious poetic consciousness. Before and after this, the poet has seen through the "false big empty poetry" of the popular poetry world and wants to bring some fresh air through translation. In a letter to Du Yunxie before his death, he clearly said: "Domestic poetry is slogans and branch editorials, and the distance from poetry is far and far. ...... In this case, turning foreign poetry into Chinese poetry has some effect. The reader will see that the original poem can be written in this way. ”
This is one of the differences between a poet translator like Mudan and other translators: his translation is profoundly related to the poetic problems he is concerned with, and is intimately linked to his own inner needs and his concern for the times. What he expected through his translation was a return of a kind of "true poetry." For this reason, the translation of Selected Modern English Poems differs from the poet's previous translations of Pushkin and the English Romantic poets. He translated completely aside from acceptance considerations (he did not expect it to be published at the time, nor did he make any attempts in this regard). What he shows us in translating it is exactly his "original face" as a modernist poet and translator. He no longer frequently added critical words to the prefaces and annotations of foreign poets that were adapted to the needs of publication, as he had in the past when translating foreign poets. It is not "for critical use", nor is it "objective introduction". These modern Western poems that he has translated with his heart deeply reflect his deep understanding, high recognition and painstaking efforts in the value of poetry that he has identified throughout his life. Therefore, it can be said that the poet's translation of modern English poetry is a return to modernist poetics.
Selected Contemporary English Poems is Mudan's posthumous work, which was compiled and published by friends only after the poet's death. It is just an unfinished masterpiece (if the poet were still alive, I think he would have revised and perfected it). But, as far as we see it now, and in the fine translations alone, the poet is fully worthy of the nurturing of his life by poetry, of the tribulations he endured for a long time, of the "gifts" he was endowed with.
Fate is hard to assume and reverse, but I would say that this is the most precious dedication a poet could have made to poetry, to the supreme value of spirit and language in that era. He allowed poetry to "survive" through his translations, and he himself will live forever between his poems and these brilliant translations.