Today we are experiencing a new round of "traditional culture fever", whether in film and television dramas, games or daily life, various elements of classical culture are not uncommon. And the question that arises from this is: What do we gain when we appreciate classical Chinese culture? What kind of experiences and feelings do we share?
At the end of last month, the "Phoenix Network Reading" cultural live broadcast room, which was guest by poet Nishikawa, talked about this topic. As one of the most representative figures in the contemporary poetry world, Nishikawa has continued to pay attention to Tang poetry and Song painting over the years. In 2018, Nishikawa published "Reading Tang Poems", and in 2021, he published "Northern Song Dynasty: Landscape Painting Utopia".
Nishikawa said that the core of his work over the years is still writing poetry, and whether it is writing Tang poems or Song paintings, he writes from the perspective of "literary criticism", not the way of scholars. It can be said that these two new works "are a contemporary criticism of the poetry of the Tang Dynasty, the artworks of the Song Dynasty, and paintings." ”
During the live broadcast, Nishikawa read aloud three of his own poems. Combined with the work, he wants to tell a seemingly simple thing, but few people can say clearly -- what poetry is. Today, Movable Type Jun shared the transcript of this live broadcast with book friends.
01
Why Du Fu is great
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Du Fu | Xichuan
Your deep love is accommodated
So much sun and rain; so much misery
You are eventually transformed into a song
Countless autumns point to tonight
I finally fell in love with the fading in front of my eyes
Streets and pine forests
Between two great rivers, in the place where you once rested
Country Inn, I finally heard
A sound: majestic, strong and calm
It is like a thriving peony blooming late in Chang'an
In an obscure era
You are the only soul
Beautiful mountains and rivers must be trusted
Your thin, easy-to-destroy civilization
It must go through your touch and then be saved
You have courage that borders on stupidity
Listen to the slanting candle fire inside
You've never even heard of Keats and Yeats
The autumn wind blows the bright moon at the top of the mountain
Crow, knock on your door
The Emperor's chariot galloped by
This was followed by hunger and banditry
But great art is not a knife and a gun
It is good and tends to be pure
Tens of millions of mansions obscured the horizon
You built them in order to remember those
Women and men wandering in the middle of the journey
And salvation is in vain, and you know better than we do
The so-called future is only the past
The so-called hope is nothing but fate
Question: In the recently published "Reading Methods of Tang Poems", you also wrote about Du Fu, from writing the poem "Du Fu" 30 years ago, to looking at Du Fu again now, have you changed your views on him?
Xichuan: When I was young, when I read Du Fu, I only thought that he was the most powerful poet in Chinese history, and I always saw Du Fu with an aura. But as I get older, I can experience more and more things. Of course, Du Fu is still a great poet, but everyone has a specific age, and I often wonder, what was it like when he was 50 years old, when he was 55 years old? Du Fu lived a total of 58 years, about the same age as I am now. So over the years I've started to feel a little bit like his peers, which makes me feel a little closer to him. Sometimes people joke with me, saying how you talk about Li Bai and Du Fu, just like talking about your colleagues in your unit.
Q: It's all poetry.
Nishikawa: I'm at least a little bit blunt about saying that I want to get into this unit, that I want (and them) to be a unit of people.
Q: In "The Reading of Tang Poems", you wrote about the "Anshi Chaos", you said that the "Anshi Chaos" made Du Fu a great poet, and if there was no "Anshi Chaos", he might have been a second-rate poet.
Nishikawa: Du Fu's early poems are also good, "will be the top of the mountain, overlooking the mountains and small.". But the poems that represent his highest achievements were written by him in the midst of his later upheavals.
Many poets create by experiencing other people's poetry before they actually experience life. How people in the past write a thing, how people in the past write a landscape, there are many ready-made words. If a poet is familiar with this set of things and draws gourds in the same way, the poems written can also be "almost inseparable".
But when life starts to hit you directly, those ready-made words are a bit "out of the loop." This is a time of real test for the poet: what kind of life can your poems handle?
Some people have small scales, stuck within the range of what words used to allow you to deal with. When the Anshi Rebellion came, what did Wang Wei and Li Bai do? Wang Wei basically chose not to write. Because Wang Wei's vocabulary, his taste, was so elegant that he could not face the dead. And Li Bai's personal nature is particularly strong, his concern for himself is the main, and his concern for the world is secondary.
But Du Fu is different, Hu Yinglin of the Ming Dynasty said that his (Du Fu's) poems are "helpless", that is, the predecessors did not provide writing methods, he had no examples in front of him, and he could not deal with an era by learning from others. He just did it anyway.
02
True closeness to the ancients is not blind praise
Q: You are a poet who writes modern poetry, but in the past two years, you have written "The Reading Of Tang Poems" and "Northern Song Dynasty: Landscape Painting Utopia".
Nishikawa: I wrote "The Reading of Tang Poems" because I was not accustomed to the attitude of many people towards Tang poems. As a writer, many of the interpretations of Tang poems by others are a bit itchy for me. That kind of blindly praising the interpretation of ancient poems, I feel that it is not strong enough, but it is not addictive. Some Tang poems that everyone thinks are good, I think are not so good. Some of the ancients did a pretty bad job, I dare say so.
I have given some examples in the article that are not well written, some are Bai Juyi, some are Yuan Shu. Ordinary people can memorize good poems, and I can recite stinky poems. Because it's fun.
Yuan Shu has a poem that I can still recite, and that poem reads: "The city gate is four go to the secretary of state, go to persuade Liu Yu to be the son of heaven, Liu Yu does not dare to be the son of heaven, and Cao Yu usurpation has begun from now on." It means that those disciples under the city gate walked around to persuade Liu Yu that you should be a son of the day, and Liu Yu did not dare to have a son of heaven, so Cao Cao usurped the chaos. Is this poetry?
Q: It's a bit of a poetic feeling.
Nishikawa: Motoki he didn't write it as an oil poem. Ancient Chinese poetry contains a lot of these things, and those who now think that they are in harmony with ancient poetry all day long, basically do not read them. In connoisseur books, in programs about ancient poetry, such poems will not be included.
There is no need to look up to the ancients, they are the same as us, they are all human beings, they have lived for so many years, and we now live a little more than them. Most people will feel that we are not talented, the ancients have talent, that is because this "talent" is his culture. I have my talent, and I have read things that the ancients have not yet read.
The real closeness to the ancients is not to blindly tout, but to get closer to the ancients. It's like falling in love, you know where the other person's shortcomings are, but you can still tolerate him, you still love him, this is true love.
03
Hanfu, ancient style, false traditional popularity
Q: Now there is a kind of Hanfu fever, ancient wind fever. For example, some ancient poems are composed into lyrics to sing. What do you think of this pop culture?
Nishikawa: The question is what do they want to do?
Most of the ancient songs we know now date back to the Ming Dynasty, and I can sing a few ancient songs with Ming Dynasty songs. For example, Li Bai's poem "The bright moon goes out of the guanshan mountain, between the vast clouds and the sea". This is a fast ancient song, and a slow ancient song, "Chang'an a moon, ten thousand households pounding clothes" This is "Midnight Wu Song". The ancient style you are talking about, is this kind of song?
Q: Sounds more complicated than yours.
Nishikawa: So it's still modern music. I think there may be some modern people's imagination of the ancients in the "ancient style", but the ancients may not really live like you think. In real life, many people use "false traditions" to give themselves the feeling of living elsewhere. That is, although he is in the contemporary era of chai rice oil and salt, he prefers to live in a ancient era that seems to be full of poetry.
Once in Xi'an I had an affair, near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, I saw a lot of children wearing Hanfu, some people sitting under a big umbrella, wearing Hanfu playing with mobile phones.
Q: It's like I'm in the crew all at once.
Nishikawa: I have also observed the monks in the temple, and they are also very funny, they are dressed in monk robes, and there is a pair of sneakers on their feet. Why not change even the shoes to the style of the ancients?
Q: The revolution was not complete.
Nishikawa: Inside the café too, a little girl in Hanfu came in. I thought to myself, she must have wanted a cup of tea, because drinking tea was suitable for her clothes, and as a result, people also wanted a cappuccino. I thought to myself why would she wear Hanfu and drink cappuccino? Not only Hanfu, but this situation is everywhere. In Yangshuo, in Dali, you can always see the antique eaves, under the eaves are actually not selling stinky tofu, but selling coffee.
A few years ago, there was an exhibition in Paris, France, entitled "The World Shares Exoticism". It is that the French enjoy the exoticism of China, and Chinese enjoy the exoticism of France or Germany, Spain, Arabia, india. I think there are some contemporary people who think of antiquity not as exotic, but as "out of context". I am not such a naïve person, I believe that there is someone behind this push, I believe that there must be capital here, you wear Hanfu it to make more money.
From a large cultural point of view, if a person completely feels that the ancients are good, this matter is more serious. It shows that the present cannot satisfy you, and you feel that the ancients can satisfy you. But to be honest, the ancients can't satisfy you, you can only assume that a fake ancient person comes out, a virtual ancient, a distant place, coaxing yourself to be happy.
Q: Could it be that everyone is a little tired of the faster pace of life now? Because in our imagination, the ancients were more idle, more slow. Imitating them, like wearing Hanfu and playing the guqin, is a kind of slower life that people yearn for.
Nishikawa: I'll start by playing the guqin. There is an old gentleman in Yangzhou who plays the guqin. After a few of our friends went, we asked him to actually play a song for us. Before playing, he had to make preparations like luck, and when he was finished, he was sweating profusely.
There is a saying called "life is generally calm, there are always waves in the heart". Any category, industry, you really want to go in, to become a more in-depth insider, it will make you sweat. It's not that you just have to dip your head twice, put on clothes, or light an incense in your daily life.
The most extreme is a photo I have seen on the Internet: on the mountain, several people in ancient costumes, playing chess there, and hanging on the side is a song Huizong's "Listening to the QinTu", which I believe is a replica. Moreover, if the ancients wanted to view the paintings, they could not hang on the branches to appreciate. The ancients always had a small squatter waiting around them, and they also found a small squatter to stand next to it. This is actually a mentality at the moment, and all people who want to travel back to ancient times want to go back to being human. Cross back to become a princess, become a scholar, become an official.
Sometimes I joke with people, I say that it is possible that you crossed back to catch up with the "Anshi Chaos", that is also ancient, you can not say that only the "Kaiyuan Shengshi" is ancient. If someone wants to go back to ancient times and do a small squatter, I think this is still a bit interesting, indicating that his understanding of ancient times is still hierarchical, but now basically no one has this idea.
04
How foreigners understand ancient Chinese poetry
Nishikawa, "The Great River Turns and the Big Bend: A Poetic Thought Exploring Possibilities" (Peking University Press, 2012)
Question: In the book "The Great River Turns and the Big Bend," you introduced foreign translations of Du Fu's poems. Then these foreign versions of Du Fu's poems were translated back to Chinese.
Nishikawa: The things between translation and translation are particularly fun, and we sometimes do this game, such as translating a German poem into English, then from English to Chinese, from Chinese back to German, and we will find that the poem has changed a lot. In this book, I gave an example, which is Du Fu's "Spring Hope".
The country is broken by mountains and rivers, and the city is deep in spring grass and trees.
When I feel the flowers splash tears, I hate the birds and be frightened.
The flames lasted for three months, and the family letter arrived at ten thousand gold.
The white head scratches are shorter and more overwhelming.
Why this example? Because in addition to collecting foreign translations of ancient Chinese poems, I also collected Chinese ancient poems that I translated in modern Chinese. I found a slightly better modern Chinese translation, and its translator would assume that the modern Chinese of the thirties was the most beautiful, so the feeling of translating ancient poems into the thirties was the feeling of translating Du Fu into Xu Zhimo. But Xu Zhimo's language could not handle Du Fu, and the distance between them was too far.
More generally, the words are directly translated into modern Chinese, for example, "the city spring grass and trees are deep" is translated as "the city's spring grass and trees are luxuriant". "The city spring grass is deep" is good, but "the spring grass and trees of the city" is not interesting. Between Ancient Chinese and Modern Chinese, if you translate the words directly, you will find that what is established in ancient poetry is not established in new poetry. It shows that between modern Chinese and ancient Chinese, its rhythm is not the same. The rhythm of language is different, indicating that the way of feeling the world is different.
I see too many laymen discussing that we should inherit classical Chinese literature, and I wish that classical literature could be used directly. But we are now the era of modern Chinese, not the era of ancient Chinese. I sometimes go out to participate in some activities, and I often encounter this situation, and suddenly a person in the audience stands up and says that contemporary new poetry is bullshit. I said what do you think is good? He said that Tang poetry and Song poetry are good. I said then I agree with what you said, but please repeat your criticism of me in old Chinese.
Q: It's hard.
Nishikawa: He suddenly found that he couldn't say it, because his way of thinking was modern Chinese.
So how to bring ancient poems to this day, how to use them effectively, so that they are established as ancient poems, and in new poems?
Octavio Paz (1914-1998), a famous Mexican poet, essayist, literary and artistic critic, social activist and diplomat, has won more than 20 important awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Cervantes Prize for Literature for his outstanding literary achievements.
There was a poet in Mexico who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this man was named Octavio Paz. He introduced Du Fu into Spanish. This Spanish Du Fu may be a little out of shape, because he (Paz) invented a lot of things that were not originally in Du Fu's poems. But this somewhat out-of-the-ordinary Du Fu gives people a new feeling.
For example, Paz translated Du Fu's "Spring Hope". A gentleman named Song Bainian turned it back to Chinese -
The empire has been destroyed, only the mountains and rivers are there,
A sea of greenery in March, covering streets and squares.
Difficult current events, tears sprinkled between flowers,
The birds in the sky circle the farewell of the world.
The towers and the stacks poured out the words of the fire,
Letters from family members are worth a million dollars.
When I scratch my head, I feel a thin pin
Don't stop the sparse gray hair. (Note: Song Bainian, editor-in-chief: "Chinese Classical Culture Abroad", Beijing Language and Culture Institute Press, 1994, p. 173)
The first sentence, "The empire is in ruins, only the mountains and rivers are there, and the green ocean of March covers the streets and squares." Corresponding to "the country is broken in the mountains and rivers, the city is deep in spring grass and trees", spring, he said refers to March (of course, Du Fu's poem has "beacon fire even march", there may be a borrowing). "Deep grass" we directly translate to lush vegetation, but he translates it into a modern image - "green ocean".
Why do I say that he (Paz) has a lot of inventions? Because ancient China was not a maritime civilization, we are a land culture, an inland culture in the Central Plains of the Yellow River. So he said "green ocean", ancient China would not have this thing, this is not a translation, but a transformation. Then he said this "sea of green" covered the streets and squares. It turned out that Du Fu's poem said "city", and on this word, Paz felt that he could not just translate it as city, city, which did not mean anything, so he used two other images to refer to "city", which became "street and square". There are also inventions here, the streets have existed in ancient times, but the square is a Western image. Of course, we now have Tiananmen Square, which is to rip off the buildings of the past, and there was no concept of squares in ancient times.
The next sentence: "Difficult current events, tears sprinkled among the flowers, birds in the sky hovering over the farewell of the world." This corresponds to "hating other birds to frighten hearts". Speaking of this, I also remembered that Lord Li Hou had a phrase called "The homeland cannot look back at the moon and the middle of the moon", and many people are familiar with this sentence. I saw an English translation of this sentence, and then I tried to turn it back into modern Chinese, called "I can't bear to think about my motherland bathed in the moonlight", how good, "the motherland bathed in the moonlight", compared to "the moon in the old country", is a completely contemporary feeling. So modern Chinese can have good sentences, but many people, including myself, may not have done it, but I know that some people have done it.
Then I read, "The Words of the Tower and the Stacks pouring out the fire." "The Words of Fire", which he invented again, is surrealism. What is Surrealism? Let's say you all wear a ring with a gemstone on it, and you say a ring with a gemstone, which is not surrealism, but if you say a ring with corn kernels, it's a corn kernel that is set in the place of the gemstone, which is surrealism. This kind of thing that does not exist in reality is surrealism. Here, "towers and stacks pour out the words of fire", which is the expression of surrealism.
"The letters of the family are worth ten thousand gold, and when I scratch my head, I feel a thin pin and can't stop the sparse white hair." He turned the hairpin in the original poem into a pin. This is Du Fu's poem translated by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, and it looks like this, it is valid.
05
We have a misconception about "poetry and distance"
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Dreaming of a soul flying text (excerpt) | Nishikawa
6
When people are over fifty, don't talk about loneliness. Inexperienced with identity.
Those who have not come should not come. Godot don't come either.
The master who sharpened the scissors and sharpened the knife also honed his patience, but he was no longer needed.
The Americans panicked, Chinese gradually getting better, and the cats and dogs, like me, caught up with the great changes that had not occurred in three thousand years.
7
Never seen a banknote with the number 8888. On a moonlit night, there is a lot of fun in the bank.
Count the money, the joy of the turtle. Counting money while nostalgia, the great joy of the turtle.
Step into the era of WeChat Pay, but WeChat Pay can't buy companies that do WeChat Pay.
Hippie mixed with young Jobs, punk mixed with retired Ma Yun.
8
Growing bamboo in the 5G era? Bamboo shell mobile phones, bamboo shell watches: a new idea for environmental protection.
Wang Huizhi, who planted bamboo in other people's empty houses, seems to people today to have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Oh, but the country doesn't need it. Idle people are at odds with blockchain.
None of the little brothers and sisters in Hanfu felt that they were ghosts.
9
The little bastard was overwhelmed not because he saw the goddess, but because he suddenly faced too many goddesses.
A serious book from my childhood eventually graduated from the jokes and negative news of cyber paradise.
Nostalgia, nostalgia for the villages I visited: cows under calves, my first memories.
Nostalgia, nostalgia for a time that is not their own. I want to see the tiger who kills the tiger and the dragon.
10
Heavier body. Dreams are light. The big picture is everything outside the window.
Nightmares of not adapting are becoming less and less. There are also fewer and fewer dreams. Tiptoe into other people's nightmares and dreams.
One room. Did I go through the wrong door? The other room, did I go through the wrong door?
The ghosts in my house please get out. The precarious theory of evolution is still whispering.
2019.1.23-11.6
Q: The poem you just read, there are a lot of words that belong to our time, such as 5G, such as blockchain, Ma Yun, you have written all these words into the poem. From this, I want to ask a question, what things can be included in poetry, is there a certain rule?
Nishikawa: There is no certain rule, anything can be included in poetry, but depending on how you use it, such as a very unsympathetic thing, you have to see what to use to carry it, to bring it to the poem.
We say the bicycle thing, and now some people may start to feel that it is possible to write about the bicycle, because it is already a nostalgic object. But in the past, when it was still a basic means of transportation, many people would find it poetic. But Haizi has a line called "A Tall Goddess's Bicycle," which I find interesting. This tall goddess may be a big girl who has sucked some of the steel temperament of the bicycle away, making it an object that can be aesthetically pleasing. So theoretically everything can be written, but you have to learn how to deal with it, otherwise you can't do it in a hurry.
Q: The poems we usually see are basically "quiet years" or "parting from sorrows" style, and may be mainly lyrical. Such a poem is more relevant to the so-called concept of "poetry and far away", but your poem is not very suitable for this concept.
Nishikawa: I'm against this, I hate this. At present, ordinary people's understanding of poetry comes from Tang poetry and Song Ci, and the other is Western "positive romantic" literature, which is nothing more than Shelley, Byron, Pushkin, plus a Tagore. That's just a few people.
Speaking of Shelley[1], I don't know how great a poet Shelley is, but I know that he has a poem called "Winter is coming, will spring be far away?" ”
Speaking of Pushkin[2], it is the sea, the element of freedom, "If life deceives you, don't be sad, don't be sad", this is the kind of thing. It's all chicken soup for me.
Tagore's poems leave the impression that a mother takes her child to collect shells on the seashore, but in fact we Chinese misunderstand him too much. Tagore was one of the Three Saints of modern India. These three saints, one is Mahatma Gandhi and the other is Alopedro Gaws, also known as Sri Aropindo. And then there's Tagore. Tagore is not saying that there is only the mother who collects shells, and his main works are not written in English, but in Bengali. Tagore in Bengali is very "hard", but Tagore, which is translated into English as Chinese becomes particularly soft and "feminine".
Some poets who do not know the depth say, I want to be the second Tagore in Asia. Sorry, you can't do Tagore. I just said that Tagore is one of the three saints of India, and his importance lies in the transformation of Indian society, the transformation of Indian religion, the transformation of Indian education, and Tagore is such a person.
So we have a lot of misunderstandings about foreign literature. When it comes to poetry, it seems that there are only lyric poems, but in fact, there are too many things in the poems. For example, the Imagism school, Hu Shi's literary improvement, came from the Imagism school, and it actually influenced the new poetry through Hu Shi, which affected us. Imagism, then, has some principles, including the use of fewer adjectives and adverbs and more nouns and verbs, that is, to make poetry more "hard" instead of humming all day long. If we don't understand these things and still use that kind of lyrical adjectives and adverbs a lot, you will feel that the best written are romantic poems.
Of course, the tradition of lyric poetry is very long, from the Book of Poetry to the Chu Ci, which is all lyric poetry. But there is a problem with being lyrical, so be sure to balance it out. In the ancients, lyricism could be balanced by knowledge, so that his lyricism did not reach the level of flooding. But today, as many of us become "one-dimensional people," there's nothing to balance that little lyrical feeling within you.
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century, and was one of the first Chinese readers and Chinese poets to come into contact with foreign poets. He combines the rhythms of Andalusian folk lyrics, the techniques of modern poetry and the surreal imagination and is regarded as an outstanding representative of the Spanish "twenty-seven generation" poets.
Of course, the lyricism of contemporary poetry is still there, such as García Lorca in Spain, whose lyricism is a kind of national lyricism, he demands a live effect, and the audience below him must be happy enough to whistle when he recites to echo him. But some people's lyricism is very personal.
Q: Let's go back to what we just said, like "poetry and far away," which has now become a concept. Everyone is more tired at work, after work to read some poems to relax, excerpt some golden sentences, become such a sustenance.
Nishikawa: I can't deny everyone, this is everyone's life. Your life is already very closed, but it's good that you can open your life with poetry. When I first graduated, I felt particularly depressed, because after leaving school, I suddenly became a person who went to work. To what extent was it so bitter that after work, my old colleagues were gone, and I was alone in the office reciting poems aloud. I remember very well that it was a poem by the Greek poet Elitis called "The Crazy Pomegranate Tree." I read aloud, and everyone else was off work anyway, and there was no one in the hallway.
So others sometimes copy a golden sentence to comfort themselves, I can understand. But for a true writer, the words "poetry and far away" are not enough.
Of course, ancient and foreign poets wrote such works as "Poetry and Distance", "The Yellow River is far above the white clouds, a lonely city and a mountain of ten thousand blades." Qiang Di why should he complain about Yang Liu, the spring wind does not close the jade door." This is a distant place, of course, this far away is not a distant place that comforts our small, fragile hearts, and "the spring breeze does not close the jade door" can not comfort you this. But it's far away.
For me, the far side contains the horizon, and I am willing to replace the far side with the horizon. What is Horizon? You walk toward the horizon, you can see it, but at the same time, the horizon is constantly receding. You can never get to the horizon, but you can see it. To quote philosophically, if life on this side of the horizon is our human life, then whose life is on the other side of the horizon? I don't know, maybe it's some metaphysical life, maybe it's god's life. So if you talk about the far side, specifically when you talk about the horizon, you will find that the side is full of the possibilities of thought, it is not a vague concept.
So I'm not a person who is against far away, but if I talk about far away, I will ask you what is far away. When it comes to poetry, I will also ask you what poetry is. People who look forward to the righteousness of the text and swallow the dates will basically give you a wrong explanation, even among the poets. The word "poetry", we know that it is a word next to a word plus a "temple", and the person who interprets it indiscriminately will tell you that the meaning of saying poetry is the language of the temple, that is, the language of solemnity, and the language of righteousness. But this interpretation is wrong, if you look up the "Explanation of Words", you will find that there is another way to write the poem, that is, next to a word, there is the "of the person who cares" for "the one who cares", which is also a poem. The word "poetry" is actually the meaning of poetry, the meaning of the heart.
The definition and interpretation of the word "poem" in the "Explanation of Words" is accompanied by another way of writing "poem", the left side is "speech", and the right side is "zhi"
In the context of the West handed down from ancient Greece, the poet means the maker, the creator, you make a thing, you are a poet, and poetry is what you make. So when we talk to Westerners about what poetry is, the understanding of both sides is often misaligned. This dislocation is not only manifested in the understanding of poetry, but also in the understanding of art.
The word "art" in Chinese is not the same as the English word "art" and the French word "de l'art". I've seen art shows on the Internet, where I talk about fine art and satirize Picasso. Later I found out that they were actually asking for Picasso with the word "art" Chinese. But Picasso did not use the word "art" to demand of himself, he used "art" to demand of himself.
Once you understand the difference in meaning between such words and words, you will know that the culture of this world is so rich. If we were closed and only concerned about the matter at our own doorstep, we would not be able to discuss the world's problems.
6
At the end of the road, perhaps no one applauded the poet
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Eagle's Words (excerpt) | Nishikawa
Second, about loneliness, that is, unfulfilled desires
13. The moon stimulates lust, onions stimulate sexual desire, herbs stimulate the desire to be sick, and flames stimulate the desire to die. As for appetite, I can't tell if it stems from me or as a roundworm in my stomach. As for roundworms, I can't tell if they are involved in my active consciousness.
14. The king must stand upright in the face of desire, and the fool must show his shrewdness under the domination of desire. Although you don't know that something passes away with the wind, you know that the hands of your desires are empty: you enter the door of loneliness.
15. Or for a try of endurance you give up your house. And when you are tired of the hardships and want to regain your amusement, but find that the rat system has been established in the house: you enter the door of loneliness.
16. Or you have grown in self-doubt and begin blind self-punishment. It's like planting a skinny apple tree with your own hands, only to be smashed by a falling plump apple (the apple mistakes you for Newton): you enter the door of loneliness.
17. Or you use a hypocritical mouth to denounce a hypocritical world. Either you're wrong or the world is wrong. You force yourself to the point of being flushed and speechless, and sincerity appears: you enter the door of loneliness.
18. Or you make up a mission and work for it, like an underground worker. But this mission ultimately threatens your life: you enter the door of loneliness.
19. Loneliness, the labyrinth of the self. In this labyrinth, the plant blooms not for seduction, not for sale (it has another purpose); the plant bears fruit without seeing it rejoicing, not seeing it singing and dancing (how can this inner joy be discerned).
20. If you keep a bird, you turn the maze into a bird cage; if you have a dog, you turn the maze into a kennel. You are arguing with a bird when you want to deny that you are a dog; when you want to deny that you are a dog you just bark like a dog.
21. Dangerous lonely person, does your hemorrhoids still hurt? This pain reminds us that time is not a hypothesis but the rhythm of blood flow, the speed of the machine, the friction between the couple, and the loss of brain power. The incessant applause encouraged the lonely to continue sliding on the dangerous ice.
22. You catch a fight by missing a banquet. You got drunk on the streets because you didn't become a sage. You sing, and people think you're screaming. You take, and finally you give yourself. A guy who stalks you falls into a trap with you.
23. Loneliness has a huge volume.
24. Overcrowded in the labyrinth of loneliness.
25. Do you want to read this map: Sorrow is the first fork in the road: one road leads to singing, one road leads to confusion; confusion is the second fork in the road: one road leads to pleasure, one road leads to nothingness; nothingness is the third fork in the road: one road leads to death, one road leads to enlightenment: enlightenment is the fourth fork: one road leads to madness, one road leads to silence.
1997.10-1998.4
Q: Many people feel that this poem is a twist on yours, full of contradictions and offense.
Nishikawa: The sense of contradiction, the sense of offense, full of irony, is that I am starting to become no longer a one-dimensional thinking. For example, "God created life," which is an ordinary statement. But if you say that God created death, that's irony. Irony is not to make fun of, not to make fun of, irony is the richness of your thinking, it is a turning point in the direction of thinking. My later works were full of these things, so many people couldn't read it, couldn't read it, and he thought it wasn't poetry, and I could only say that there was a lot of difficulty here.
Q: In The Great Bend, you say, "The difference between a poet and an athlete is that at the end of the road, maybe no one welcomes us," which sounds a little lonely and pessimistic.
Nishikawa: You understand that right. I had a friend who wrote poetry in his early years, and then he went into business, in the South, and became very wealthy. When he had the money, he started writing poetry again and publishing poetry collections. He came to me, and sometimes we couldn't talk together, and some of the conversations didn't work together. Later I said that you have been doing business for so many years, and now it is such a big deal, but I have not been idle for so many years. You've been in business for 30 years, I've been thinking about poetry for 30 years, and I'm not mixed. No matter how much property you have, you can see it, and you can't see the property of my spirit.
Athletes race, the audience applauds the first place, but the poet also runs, and runs long distances, and after decades of running, you will find that there may be no one applauding at the final place. Maybe there is a person on the distant mountain who sees you running, and that person does not applaud, he just looks, he knows that this person has lived a lifetime, thought for a lifetime, explored for a lifetime, discovered a lifetime, invented a lifetime, I think that person can see it. Even if no one sees it, every writer will have an estimate of his work at a certain time: what I have done and where I have come, needless to say, I am sure of myself.
Q: I think there's another meaning in this sentence — even though I know that no one is welcoming me from afar, I'm going to go on like this.
Nishikawa: Because a person's writing process is actually the process of experiencing his own life, he doesn't necessarily know more. But even if he knew a little, he didn't come to the world in vain.
exegesis:
[1] Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Manor near Horsham, Sussex, England. He was the eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, and was the heir apparent to his grandfather's considerable estate and parliamentary seat. Shelley attended Eton College, where he began writing poetry and then Oxford University, but less than a year later he was expelled for writing and distributing a pamphlet preaching atheism.
In 1813, Shelley published her first official long poem, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem originated from Shelley's friendship with the English philosopher William Godwin, and expressed Godwin's liberal ideas and socialist philosophy. Shelley fell in love with Marie, the daughter of Goldwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and in 1814 the two eloped to Europe. In 1815, they came to Lake Geneva. There, Shelley spent a long time with the poet Lord Byron. That same year, Mary Shelley wrote her most famous gothic novel, Frankenstein. In December 1816, Shelley and Mary Godwin were officially married.
In early 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley left England for a trip to Italy, which was also Shelley's last time. Shelley completed all the important works of his life in the last four years of his life, including The Masque of Anarchy (in response to the Pietrough massacre in Manchester in 1819), The Cenci, and Prometheus Unbound.
[2] Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) was a Russian poet, playwright, novelist, literary critic and theoretician, historian, and political commentator. An outstanding representative of Russian Romanticism, the founder of Russian realist literature, one of the most prestigious figures in the field of literature in the early nineteenth century, he is revered as "the sun of Russian poetry", "the father of Russian literature", and the founder of modern standard Russian. Pushkin's poetic novel Yevgeny Onegin presents a panoramic picture of Russian society at that time, which can be called "an encyclopedia of Russian life". He not only supported some of the views of the Decembrists, but also raised in his works the main social problems of the era; he created a typical image with a highly generalized meaning.
Representative works include poems such as "Ode to Freedom", "To the Sea", "To Chadayev", "I Remember that Wonderful Moment", "Ruslan and Lyudmila", "The Bronze Knight", etc., the poetic novel "Evgeny Onegin", the short story "The Queen of Spades", the novella "The Captain's Daughter" and so on.
Nishikawa is a poet, essay and essayist, and translator. He graduated from the English Department of Peking University in 1985. He is a Juniper Writer in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2002), a Visiting Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University (2007), and a Visiting Artist at the University of Victoria, Canada (2009). He was a professor and librarian of the School of Humanities of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and is now a distinguished professor of Beijing Normal University. He has published about thirty books of various works, including the poetry collection "Shades", the poetry collection "Enough dreams", the long essay "Wandering and Gossiping: A Chinese Trip to India", the essay collection "The Great River Turns and the Big Bend: A Poetic Thought Exploring Possibilities", the monograph "Reading Tang Poetry", "Northern Song Dynasty: Landscape Painting Utopia", the translation of Milosz's ABCs( co-translated), and the Borges at Eighty (Borges at Eighty: Conversations) and so on. He was awarded the Lu Xun Literature Award (2001) and the Annual Selection of China's Book Industry. Author of the Year Award (2018), Top 10 Global Essay Competition in Weimar, Germany (1999), Martin Songxuan Poetry Prize in Sweden (2018), Tokyo Poetry Prize in Japan (2018), etc. His poems and essays have been included in a variety of anthologies and widely translated, and have been published in newspapers and magazines in nearly thirty countries. The 2019 Berlin Poetry Festival brochure praised Nishikawa as "one of the greatsof contemporary poetry"
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