It means that writing this book is very hard, but people don’t understand it. They say this book is random writing or even anti-book or banned.
From Qing Dynasty novelist Cao Xueqin's "A Paper Full of Absurd Words", this five-character quatrain is selected from "A Dream of Red Mansions Chapter 1". The poem expresses the author's depression that is difficult to express and is afraid of being incomprehensible to the world.
Original text:
A paper full of absurd words and a handful of bitter tears.
It is said that authors are crazy, who can understand the meaning?
Translation:
Writing this book was very hard, but people didn’t understand it. They called this book random writing or even anti-book or banned book.
It is said that the author is too obsessed with the infatuation of his children, but who can really understand the meaning of the book?
Extended information
Poetry appreciation
After Taoist Kongkong recorded the poems from "The Story of the Stone" from beginning to end, he changed "The Story of the Stone" to "The Story of the Stone" "Love Monk Record". Donglu Kongmeixi wrote the title "Fengyue Baojian". Later, Cao Xueqin read it for ten years in the Mourning Hongxuan, added and deleted it five times, and compiled it into a catalog. It is divided into chapters and titled "The Twelve Hairpins of Jinling". And inscribed the poem.
From the perspective of the poem, "absurdity" not only refers to the absurd stories that the author introduced in the book, such as "Refining Stones to Mend the Sky" and "Qinggeng Peak", but also refers to the decadence of society at that time described in the book. , cruelty, mutual strife and even the road to destruction. Confucian scholars at that time also believed that this was a "big lie", so the author wrote "a page full of absurdities" with resentment.
Because the author has sympathy for many characters in the book, he said that he wrote this book with "a handful of bitter tears". He was afraid that future generations would not know his true intentions, so he said, "Everyone says that the author is an idiot. Who can understand the meaning?" The meaning of fate varies depending on the reader's vision: Confucian scholars see "Yi", Taoists see lust, intellectuals see romance, revolutionaries see rows of people, and gossips see the secrets of the palace." Here, the author tells what he cannot say directly. Qu Lian who is deeply afraid of not being understood.