Ye Jiaying

Talking about Du Fu's poems here today has evoked many memories of my thirty or forty years of travel. I told Du Fu's poems in Taiwan Province Provincial University more than 30 years ago. At that time, I spoke enthusiastically and my classmates responded enthusiastically. Many people were moved by Du Fu's poems and his profound loyalty. But now, not only in Hongkong, Taiwan Province Province, mainland China, and even in the United States and Canada, I find that Du Fu is really a very difficult and unpopular topic for young people nowadays. I use western theory and gender to talk about the small words about beauty and love in Flower Picking. Everyone feels very novel and interested, but they are not very interested in Du Fu. Because many students think that Du Fu is completely realistic and orthodox, and his ideas belong to the old culture and morality of China's ethics. They are too traditional and conservative, and there is nothing new, which cannot cause any new feelings and new associations. But is this really the case?

I said in the preface of Du Fu's Eight Poems of Autumn Prosperity published many years ago that Du Fu is a comprehensive poet. Among his great achievements in many aspects, the most noteworthy is that he inherited and broke through the traditional sound and broad creative spirit. In that article, I once discussed Du Fu's breakthrough in poetic methods and transcendence of poetic images in the evolution of seven-character poems. In that article, I also said: If China's poems can develop from the road of Du Fu's development, there will be another achievement close to modern images. However, it is a pity that China's old poems have not developed further since the Song Dynasty.

Professor Wang Wenxing, a novelist in Taiwan Province Province, recently wrote me a letter proposing to discuss Du Fu's poems with me. The topic he chose was Du Fu's "Drinking by Tianfu Mud, Beautiful, Strict and Honest". Why did you choose this poem? Because this poem is in the vernacular. Mr Hu Shizhi wrote a history of vernacular literature. Of course, as we all know, Mr. Hu Shi advocates vernacular literature. In the history of vernacular literature, he also praised Du Fu's poem "drunk by the mud of abundance, beautiful and strict." At the same time, Mr. Hu Shi also criticized Du Fu's poem "Autumn Prosperity" as "difficult poem". What about me? I am more liberal. I speak classical poetry, but I also appreciate vernacular poetry, including modern poetry and obscure poetry. I also wrote a preface for Mr. Zhou Mengdie, a poet who wrote new poems in Taiwan Province. Because I think, the beauty and evil of literary works, the level of value, originally does not lie in its dull or dark, but in whether the content it wants to express and the words it uses can be perfectly and properly matched. Poetry criticism should not be based on "white" and "gloomy". The result of blindly seeking "white" is inevitably that the words are slightly tasteless, and blindly seeking "bad" may become a morbid state.

Du Fu's achievements in language are actually various. He can use the plain language of farmers or the elegant language of literati. In the poem "Drink up by the mud of abundance, drink up the beauty, be strict with honesty", since he wrote an old farmer, he completely described his words and deeds in vernacular Chinese, which is very vivid. But when we look at his Eight Poems in Autumn, in that group of poems, he not only uses very elegant language, but also has upside-down grammar. He can write such a sentence as "fragrant rice pecks at parrot grains, green trees perch on old phoenix branches", which we have already mentioned when talking about the tradition of poetry recitation. This is Du Fu's development and breakthrough in seven-tone language. However, Hu Shi's History of Vernacular Literature criticized Du Fu's Autumn Prosperity, saying these two sentences just don't make sense. Because you think "pecking" means pecking with your mouth. How can you peck fragrant rice without a mouth? Wu Bi is a tree, not a bird. How can it "inhabit"? On the other hand, it should be "parrot pecks fragrant rice, phoenix perches on old green branches", so that grammar can be understood. However, you should know that although the grammar is fluent, the meaning has changed subtly and become completely true. Du Fu meant to write that there are so many fragrant rice that people can't eat it, even parrots can't eat it. The beauty of Wu Bi not only attracts the phoenix to inhabit, but also makes it stay on this green phoenix tree branch forever. It can be seen that the original intention of these two sentences is not to write about parrots and phoenixes, but to write about fragrant rice and Wu Bi-in fact, it is not to write about fragrant rice and Wu Bi, but to write about the peaceful "prosperous times" during the reign of Kaiyuan Tianbao. It can be seen that what Du Fu grasps in realism is not only a kind of "truth" that describes reality.

The topic we are talking about today is "the iconicity of Du Fu's poems in realism". But I want to make it clear first: the "metaphor" I said is not the symbol or implication of the eight nouns I quoted when I described the relationship between image and affection in the West when I talked about "Fu Bi's trip" in the Book of Songs. The western concept division is very clear. Just like the "cross" of Christ and the red maple leaf in Canada, it is a "symbol". However, if an idea is pinned on something, such as the object-chanting poems of the king of the Southern Song Dynasty, it often contains thoughts about the motherland, which is "pinning". And the metaphor I am using now is not the narrow sense of "symbol" and "implication" in western writing. I'm talking about the relationship between emotion and image in China's poems, that is, the relationship between the poet's heart and external things. Our cultural traditions in China are very subtle. The ancients said that the heart has a connection, and we experience everything with our hearts and spirits, not with our bodies and senses. The so-called "walking with God" is your spirit running. Therefore, when it comes to poetry, we China poets have such words. Wang Fuzhi's "Jiang Zhai Shi Hua" said: "Although the scene is divided into scenes, the scene is full of feelings, and the feelings are full of scenes, touching the sadness and joy, glory and contingency, hiding their homes." He said that people's inner feelings and external scenery are different in mind and things-then when we talked about Fu Bixing last time, we also said that the so-called "xing" means looking at things, and it is the external things that move your heart; "Comparison" is based on mind and matter. It is a kind of good feeling that you have in your heart first, and then use external images as metaphors. Therefore, this "feeling" and "scenery" can be conceptually "in the heart" and "in the object" respectively. However, although the scene is divided into mind and object, when writing, it is the scene that gives birth to emotion, emotion gives birth to the scene, and emotion and scene are born together. "Touch of sadness and joy" means that your sadness and joy are touched. What's it about? "Honor and Disgrace" means the prosperity and decline of vegetation. How did the brilliance and tension of foreign things come to you? He said it was "each hides his own family", which is what Laozi said. The fortunes depend on each other and the fortunes lurk. In your poems, you write about the glory of vegetation, what you write is superficial, but there is your inner affection inside; And when you write your feelings, you also put your feelings on the scenery. Huang Zongxi's Preface to Jingzhou Poetry said: "Poets extract the pure air of heaven and earth and take flowers and birds as their temperament. Its scenery and meaning are inseparable. " The poet's feelings can be simply integrated with the wind and rain of foreign objects, and it is impossible to clearly distinguish feelings from foreign objects. One of the characteristics of Du Fu's poetry writing is that he really puts his inner feelings into it. He mainly expresses his inner feelings, not rigidly portrays foreign things. In other words, the tones of the words "parrot" and "fragrant rice" are flat, and the tones of the words "Phoenix" and "Wu Bi" are flat, which can be reversed completely, but not flat. Then why doesn't Du Fu speak fluently, but must speak backwards? This involves what Wang Guowei called "opening up the border and penetrating the soil". Wang Guowei said in Shi Shuo Xin Yu: "There is a creative environment and a writing environment. This ideal is divided from two schools of realism. But it is difficult to distinguish between the two, because the environment created by great poets must conform to nature, and the environment written must also be adjacent to the ideal. " The scenery we usually say is not the real scenery, but the scenery imagined by the poet. Just like Wang Guowei's "Butterfly Lovers", between the lines reads: "I remember hanging a solitary sail in the East China Sea. See you at sea every year. For a few days, the wind blew everywhere. Looking at the castle in the middle will change. " He said that there is a sacred mountain in the East China Sea that seems to be very close and can be seen every year. Once I hung up my sail and went out to sea to pursue it. However, when I went through all kinds of hardships to the island, I suddenly found that its scenery had completely changed, so dark and tragic, and it was no longer as sunny as I saw from a distance. Of course, the sacred mountain on the sea is land-making. Wang Guowei said that he would hang sail to the East China Sea to find the holy mountain, which is also land reclamation. This is "the realm created by great poets must conform to nature". In fact, not only poetry, but also novels. Kafka, a Jewish-German novelist, wrote in Metamorphosis that it is certainly a kind of creation for a person to become a big beetle. How can a person become a big beetle? This is absurd and impossible. However, Kafka's story is so absurd. He wrote about the feeling that the man couldn't turn over in the morning. He wrote about the feeling that the man was hiding in the corner and was hit by his sister with an apple. These are all true in real life. This is also "the environment created by great poets must conform to nature." However, what we are concerned about now is not "creating the environment". Rainbow Guowei likes to write about the imaginary realm in philosophy. Like Kafka, he likes to write about his own imaginary experience of life, so they are all people who like "creating realm" and "creating realm must conform to nature". But Du Fu is not. Du Fu is a person who likes to write about reality, so what we are going to talk about today is actually Du Fu's "the realm written by a great poet must be adjacent to the ideal". In other words, the reality written in Du Fu's poems is not pure reality, which contains his ideals.