The Paper's reporter Cheng Qianqian intern Hu Huashi
On September 26th, Bao Huiyi, Associate Professor of the Department of English, School of Foreign Languages, Fudan University, Chen Jie, Associate Professor of the Department of French, and Jiang Linjing, Associate Professor of the Department of German, gathered at the flagship store of Duoyun College to discuss their new book "The Rose of Sharon" with the readers.
The Rose of Sharon
The book "Sharon's Rose" was born out of the first interdisciplinary and cross-language intensive reading class jointly held by three teachers from the School of Foreign Languages of Fudan University, which was launched by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in August this year.
The name "Rose of Sharon" is taken from the Old Testament Song of Solomon: "I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley." "This rose, which grows in the wetlands of Israel's coastal waterfront, is shaped like a tulip or an autumn daffodil, and each plant blooms only one flower, reaching a height of up to ten inches, and the deep red color of the flowers penetrates deep into the muscle marrow, and even the calyx is black. The book "The Rose of Sharon" starts from the six classic images of swans, heads, flowers, towers, wine and roses, from the image interpretation of poetry, the visual symbols of painting to the vertical and horizontal guidance of philosophy, interpreting trilingual literature and painting through international vision, extensive knowledge and beautiful texts, and excavating the unique humanistic stories and romantic allusions related to them.
At this sharing meeting, due to the arrangement of the activity venue in the flagship store of Duoyun Academy, the highest bookstore in Shanghai, which was particularly in line with the image of the "tower" in the book, the three teachers specially shared the image of the "tower" in English, French and German trilingual literature.
The scene of the event
"By the Tower" and the male authority symbolized by the tower
First, Jiang Linjing shared the poem "By the Tower" by the 19th-century German poet annette von de droste hulshoff. The poem is about the waves in a woman's heart when she is on a tower by the sea, looking into the distance. "She looked down and saw the waves on the beach to play with, hoping to venture far away, and then suddenly became very humble, hoping to get rid of the shackles of aristocratic women." Jiang Linjing explained. She then describes the poet's life experience, stating that the tower in the poem is not entirely imaginary, because her sister bought a tower castle after marrying a baron and invited her to live in it. Annette was in her forties at the time, she had never been married, so she came to the tower like she had left her hometown. She received a good education from an early age, but she has always been in the shackles of the family, so she can leave that place and face the self who really wants to be a poet, and that period has also become a blowout period in her creation. ”
Turning the gaze back to the poem itself, in the first paragraph of the poem there is the following sentence: "The storm of Menades blows together the waving hair". Menades refers to the madwomen around Dionysus, the god of wine, who in classical painting usually have wild images of long hair, which seem to be the kind of evil but free-spirited female figures. And what about Annette's own hair? As can be seen from her portraits, her hair is the hairstyle of the aristocratic women of the traditional Romantic period, very delicately woven, very different from the hair of Menades, which reflects the difference between her ideal and reality.
Looking back at the image of the tower, Jiang Linjing introduced that the tower is a positive word in German. In many medieval ancient cities, the church must be the highest point in the entire ancient city, it represents the authority of God, the authority of men; and whether it is the tower of the church or the tower of defense, or the lighthouse, the water tower, it is towering, it symbolizes an authority, protection and resistance.
In addition, there are images of women and hair in the poems, which are combined, and in the Context of German, Jiang Linjing reminds the audience that we can think of the story of Rapunzel in Grimm's fairy tale, which tells the story of a little girl who is locked up in a tower by a witch, and every day the witch climbs up the tower along her hair. The hair and the tower became the passage that bound her, but the hair also became the possibility for her to leave the bondage. The final development of the story is also fairytale, and then a prince comes, and the prince climbs up the tower along her hair, and the two meet, and finally become a family. In this poem, there is also the intention to flee the tower, and the hair is a symbol of running towards freedom.
As for why the location chosen for this poem is next to the tower, rather than on the tower, in the tower, Jiang Linjing believes that on the one hand, the poet wants to get rid of the shackles of female identity and live freely like a man; at the same time, she is also a very traditional Catholic lady, so the tower also symbolizes a kind of self-protection for her, so she is not willing to leave the tower. When we combine the Rapunzel behind these images with the male authority of the tower, it is easy to understand the poet's thoughts and walk into her heart.
Classic Tower Case: The Origin of the Tower of Babel
Then, Chen Jie told a very classic case of the tower, that is, the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The source of this image of the Tower of Babel is the Old Testament genesis of the Bible: "At that time, the accents and speeches of the people of the world were the same, and they were in ... We are going to build a city and a tower, and the top of the tower will reach the sky... The Lord saw the city and the tower they had made, and said, 'Look, they are all the same people, so that there is nothing they will do in the future, and we go down and mess up their accents there, and make them speak differently from each other', and so they scatter on the whole earth, and they stop working, because the Lord is there to confuse the language of the people of the world, so that the people are scattered all over the earth, so that the city is called Babel.' ”
According to the text of the Bible, Chen Jie sorted out the origin of the Tower of Babel and distilled three important elements of information. First of all, the Tower of Babel is not an isolated existence, in the biblical narrative, the Tower of Babel is associated with a city, it mentions many times to build a city and a tower, the city and the tower are related; second, whether it is to build a city or a tower, such a plan led by human beings is actually against the will of God in the Old Testament; third, because of the violation of such a will, God punishes people, punishment is embodied in the language level, the language is confused to hinder their communication, Hindering their communication undermines their chances of accomplishing things together.
On the basis of these three points, Chen Jie further elaborated. First, it is clear here that there are problems with building towers, and the problem is twofold: First, the purpose of building towers is to keep us scattered all over the earth, and the Bible chapter 1 verse 28 tells us that God, in creating all things, said, you will give birth to many and fill the earth. God's request is that you be all over the earth, scattered and scattered, and cannot be gathered, but building a tower will create a state of settlement and settlement; second, the act of building a city is also wrong in the book of Genesis, because in chapter four, the first son born to Adam and Eve, Cain, killed his brother Abel, and Cain became the first murderer, and after he was punished by God as a sinner, chapter four mentions that Cain gave birth to a son called Enoch, and Cain built a city called Enoch. Cain the sinner became the first builder of the city in the biblical narrative, so the city itself was wrong.
It is wrong to build a city, so why is there a problem with repairing the tower? In this regard, Chen Jie explained that many historians believe that the Tower of Babel described in the Bible may have a prototype in history, and the prototype may have been the tower temple in the ancient babylonian city that once existed in history, which was the place where the ancient Babylonians used sacrifices. Chen Jie further explained that the pagoda temple in ancient Babylon is a kind of place that exists in many civilizations, and this place may have a physical existence or an imaginary field, which is called the center of the world in Latin. The place that can be called the center of the world must be the place that connects the divine world and the human world. Back to the tower temple in Babylon, in addition to its sacrificial significance, there is actually another layer of symbolic significance, that is, people approach the gods by climbing this tower. In Protestant culture, however, this is an act of blasphemy. Neither the New Testament nor the Old Testament of the Bible allows man to approach God voluntarily, and in the Christian view, this can only be arranged by God. Deep down, the construction of the Tower of Babel is, in the abstract sense, a relationship between one and many. This allusion comes from the Book of Genesis, in the context of genesis, there are many creators, and one is the Creator. Thus, in the context of Genesis, man competes with God for a unique creator status through self-fulfilling behaviors such as building towers and building cities. Man finds himself united to achieve fulfillment, and this achievement gives him the confidence and confidence to proclaim himself, and with this confidence, like Lucifer, man will become a competitor of God.
Chen Jie further pointed out that the Tower of Babel embodies the process of man's self-deification in the sense of the Bible, and all the roots come from man's desire to become a second Creator. In the 16th century, in his actions to promote the Reformation, Luther used the relationship between the Tower of Babel one and many to describe the relationship between Protestantism and the Holy See. In his narrative, the Church of Rome is the existence that does not self-control the one who wants to compete for the sole absolute ruler; the Church of Rome's control over Christendom is like the incalculable plan of the Tower of Babel. He argues that since God has punished man in the post-Barbetian era, it means that the only divine "one" power (i.e., the unity of language) that man originally had is gone. Luther believed that since this single power had been stripped away, we should reconcile with the post-Babel era, that Latin should not be the only language that controlled the spread of Christian thought, and it was in this context that the entry of local colloquialisms into the sacred realm began to become possible, and Luther could preach in the German dialect.
Yeats who built the tower
The subject of Bao Huiyi's lecture is the 20th-century symbolist poet Yeats. Before mentioning Yeats, she first points out the interesting fact that Yeats loved metaphysics so much that tarot astrology was a tool in his poetic semantic library for constructing a system of personal symbolism. So Bao Huiyi first shared the 16th card in the tarot card: the tower. The tower card was not called the tower at first, in the late Medieval Italian tarot card, it was the card after the devil, but the card did not show the tower at that time, it was originally called the Devil's House; by the 16th century, in the Marseille tarot system in southern France, its name changed from the Devil's House to the House of God; and in Belgium, the card was called Lightning. These cards later evolved into the Tower card. Yeats was fascinated by the card, and one of the most important collections of poems in his later years, the Tower Collection, included some of his collected poems, including "Sailing to Byzantium".
Today's most widely used tarot, the Ledwert tarot, combines the essence of the previous images of the various tarot cards, but the roof is turned into a crown, and many manuscripts will paint the garden of Eden as the image of the tower, and the garden of Eden is also associated with the meanings of expulsion, closure, isolation, and isolation.
Bao Huiyi also talked about the connection between hell and the tower. It is said that three days before His ascension, Jesus was still physically on the cross, but his soul passed through a place like a tower and rescued those in hell who had not heard the gospel, including some in the Old Testament, and Adam and Eve were also saved. And Leviathan, it is a giant beast like a fish, with a huge mouth to represent the open mouth of hell, the tower and the Leviathan grow into one, to rescue them out of hell, is to rescue them out of hell this tower, this is a way up, contrasted with the way down the devil's house. This background helps us understand Yeats' double reconstruction tower activities. Not only is it a tower in the poetic sense, this tower is also the architecture of his works. Yeats called himself a symbolist throughout his life, not only in his poetry, but also in his prize money for the acquisition of a medieval tower in a remote location after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Built in the 14th-15th centuries, the tower is very simple, with four floors, one room on each floor, connected by a spiral staircase. Yeats writes here every summer. He inscribed on the tower the following inscription: "I, the poet William Yeats / With old thick cardboard and seaweed greenstone slabs / And iron from the Gort furnace / Rebuilding the tower for my wife George." / May these words live on / Until everything is once again reduced to ruins. Everything that was tangible will be reduced to rubble, but he still wants to emphasize that these words last forever. Bao Huiyi believes that although this inscription seems to be somewhat rigid and self-conscious, there is also a heroism that knows the tragedy of its inability to do it. In fact, Yeats has always tried to insist that this tower is his spiritual work, he hopes that others will remember his work when they walk here, but at the same time it is more important to its symbolic significance, although everything will be turned into quicksand, but the attempt to build a tower on the quicksand can enable him to survive forever.
In addition, Bao Huiyi also shared the second poem in Yeats's group poem "Meditations during the Civil War", called "My Home", which directly describes the tower he bought. Yeats is usually given the impression of romance and lyricism, but in his later years he was very worldly, and he joined the Irish independence political movement more and more actively. In 1916 Ireland won the War of Independence, but there was no statehood at that time, when Northern Ireland was pro-British, Protestants wanted to stay in Britain; most of Southern Ireland, became the Republic of Ireland, was Catholic, Yeats was elected as a senator when the Republic of Ireland was established, as a national conscience, was placed in a false position in politics. But he himself has been reviewing, occupying such a position, what can I do for the people? Later, when the civil war was fought, the fratricidal war between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland made Yeats feel very heartbroken, and finally hit his doorstep and killed a worker who built the tower for him, so he was also secretly threatened by a very real threat, and his people, all the civilizations represented by the tower, were falling apart. And everything that exists, whether it is symbolic or spatial, is ultimately in vain. Yeats once said that there are two tower builders, a soldier who built a tower 5 centuries ago is being forgotten, and I am the same, but I built the tower in my heart. My own flesh is also collapsing, but I want to build up a lonely heart like a tower, which is a symbol of suffering and loneliness. He still did not give up the campaign to build towers. For him, the tower was a purely poetic form and a visible embodiment of the symbolic movement to which he himself was committed.
The last poem written by Yeats in his life is also called the Tower, the Black Tower, and it is not collected in the poetry collection. The poem alludes to irish burial traditions, in which both queens and soldiers are buried standing in full armed form. In this poem, Yeats presents two types of people, one is the soldier who will not surrender in the ancient black tower, and the other is a betrayer in the tower, an old cook. Yeats concludes by proposing where his position is as a poet: even if he is about to be a metaphor for being a watchman in a tower with little life, his position is still with the soldiers, not with the old cook. This is the end of the symbolic construction movement of Yeats's life.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Liu Wei