Xie Zhibin of Hebei University
The Story of the Peach Blossom Garden by Tao Yuanming is a classic in ancient Chinese prose and has always been selected as a middle school Chinese textbook. There is a description of the scene of Peach Blossom Garden in the article:
The land is flat and spacious, and the houses are just like it. There are fertile fields, beautiful ponds and mulberry trees. Traffic in buildings, chickens and dogs hear each other. Among them, men and women dress like strangers. Yellow hair droops and enjoys itself.
There are different opinions on how to understand "knowing as an outsider" in this article. According to Shen Hengzhong's Notes on Learning Difficulties —— Preparing Lessons in Classical Chinese in Middle Schools (Shanghai Education Press, 1999), there are mainly the following four statements:
First, it has been 6 years since the Qin Dynasty to the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and the clothes of people in Taoyuan will not be the same as those of outsiders. Perhaps the original text is wrong, and "knowing as an outsider" means "knowing as an outsider" or "having an outsider".
second, "knowing as an outsider" means "being like a person from another world".
Third, "outsiders" refer to people from the Qin Dynasty outside Taoyuan.
fourth, "outsiders" are people outside Taoyuan.
The fourth statement is adopted in the current middle school textbooks, and "outsiders" are understood as "outsiders". Some teachers think this understanding is unreasonable. The reason is the same as the first statement above, that is, people in the Peach Blossom Garden have been isolated from the outside for nearly 6 years since "the ancestors avoided the chaos of the Qin Dynasty and led their wives to this desperate situation". Their farming methods and dressing styles cannot be the same as those of outsiders, but they should be very different. Therefore, the "outsider" in "knowing as an outsider" can not be understood as "outsiders" but as "foreigners".
this can be counted as the fifth statement.
This statement is not only found among teachers, but also found in some notes translated from today to today. For example, Xin Zheng's Selected Essays of Ancient Masters (Jiangsu Ancient Books Publishing House, 2) notes: "Outsiders: outsiders, foreigners."
We believe that "outsiders" in "knowing as outsiders" can only be interpreted as "outsiders", referring to people outside the Peach Blossom Garden, and other explanations are incorrect. In the Eastern Jin Dynasty in which Tao Yuanming lived, "outsiders" were only interpreted as "outsiders" and not as "foreigners". The third meaning of "outsiders" in the Chinese Dictionary is "outsiders". The second meaning is: "In ancient times, it refers to people outside the vassal state ... in modern times, it refers to foreigners." Can be seen as a "foreigner" solution, is a post-uprising. It is a taboo to interpret ancient words with the meaning of future generations.
In The Peach Blossom Garden, "outsiders" appear three times. There is no doubt that the other two times "outsiders" are interpreted as "outsiders", and the "outsiders" in this sentence is no exception. "Among them" in this sentence refers to the Peach Blossom Spring, so the corresponding "outsiders" can only refer to people outside the Peach Blossom Spring.
People have doubts about this, thinking that this understanding is unreasonable, but they interpret "outsiders" as "foreigners", "people from another world" or "people from the Qin Dynasty outside Taoyuan", and even suspect that the original sentence is wrong. The root cause lies in the lack of correct understanding of the syntactic structure and usage of the word "Xi".
let's talk about structure first. The subject of this sentence is "planting among them, men and women dress", and "knowing as an outsider" is the predicate. Tao Yuanming's Collection, published by Yili People's Publishing House, translated this sentence as "men and women who come and go to farm wear shoes just like people outside", which means that the syntactic structure of this sentence is wrong-they regard "coming and going to farm" as the attribute of "men and women" and regard "men and women's clothes" as the single subject of "knowing as outsiders". The first and third statements quoted above also only take "men's and women's clothes" as the subject.
let's talk about the word "noted". "Xi", like the word "Xian" in this article "Xian Lai Inquiry", is an all-encompassing adverb of scope, which is equivalent to "all" or "all". Zhonghua Book Company's Practical Dictionary: "It's all right to know." In the sentence "Among them, people grow crops, and men and women dress like strangers", what the word "informed" covers-that is, its semantic direction is "planting crops" and "clothes for men and women". "Knowing as an outsider" means saying "Everyone is like an outsider". This means that "farming" and "men's and women's clothes" are similar to those of outsiders.
China Youth Publishing House and Tianjin People's Publishing House * * * jointly published "Classic Chinese in Junior High School" (a combined edition) translated this sentence as: "People there come and go to farm and work, and men and women wear the same clothes as people outside." This translation is obviously inconsistent with the author's original intention. This sentence has two meanings: one meaning "the people who come and go are like outsiders" and the other meaning "the men and women who dress like outsiders"-this is the author's original intention. To express these two meanings in one sentence, it becomes "one of them, men and women dress like strangers." It can be seen that the word "informed" is only useful when two things are said together. Its function is only to express comprehensiveness, which can only be understood as "all" and cannot be understood as "complete". "Knowing as an outsider" cannot be understood as "completely the same as people outside". It is precisely because people understand this sentence as "completely the same as people outside" that they doubt the rationality of this sentence; The reason why people think that "outsiders" should not be interpreted as "outsiders" but should be interpreted by others is also based on this understanding.
According to the structure of this sentence and the usage of the word "Xi", we think this sentence can be translated as follows: "Here, (people) are farming (and) men and women are dressed like people outside."
It should be noted that we think that "men's and women's clothes" in the original text refers to the clothing system, not the specific dress. If you refer to the specific dress, it is not only different from the people outside, but also different from the people in Taoyuan. The author said in Peach Blossom Garden Poetry: "Cowpea is still ancient, but clothes are not new." "System" and "law" are synonyms, and "clothes are not new" is equivalent to "clothes are still ancient". "Clothes" refers to the coat; "Dress" refers to the lower dress, that is, the lower skirt. The dress under the coat is one of the main signs of ancient clothing. In ancient times, both men and women were dressed above and dressed below. The so-called "clothes are not new" means that people in the Peach Blossom Garden have not changed their clothes. This has an important enlightenment for us to understand the sentence "men and women dress".
the reason why the author wants to say that "men and women dress like strangers" is profound.
Yuan Hongdao, a famous literary critic in the Ming Dynasty, said in his comments on The Peach Blossom Garden:
The "cheerful" section (referring to "suddenly enlightened" to "enjoying oneself") means the bleak weather, that is, being on earth, so it is called "learning as an outsider". (For details, see Liu Shi in Ming Dynasty? Ancient and modern Wen Zhi Tao Hua Yuan Ji, Jiangsu Guangling Ancient Books Printing Society, 1991)
It can be seen that "knowing as an outsider" is the author's crowning touch. The author takes this opportunity to point out that the Peach Blossom Garden is not a fairyland, but on earth. Only when the Peach Blossom Garden is located in the human world can the two societies be comparable, and the theme of the works that they hate troubled times and yearn for a happy society can be reflected. The so-called "human world" does not mean "foreign country" or "another world", but the real society outside the Peach Blossom Garden.