in the third section of Fortress Besieged, Mr. Qian Zhongshu talked about Eliot in this way: Miss Su Wenwan introduced a new poet
Cao Yuanlang to Fang Hung-chien and others, and this poet brought a collection of poems for Miss Su's advice. Fang Hung-chien held the collection of poems "respectfully, and when he opened it, he saw the neat Song font written with a brush. The title of the first sonnet was" Mixed Dishes ",and the word" one "was marked below." This poem reads:
Last night, the stars were swaying in the wind of tomorrow night. (2)
A plump pregnant woman's belly was trembling and sticking to the sky. (3)
When did this runaway woman in grass widow get a new husband?
Jug！ Jug！ (5) in the sludge-efango e ilmondo! (6)-
The nightingale sings (7) ...
The last couplet of the poem is:
On a summer night after the rain, the earth is full and washed, and the earth is fat and new.
The smallest grass participates in the silent cry: "Wir sind!" (3)
The source of the words is specified in detail after the poem, in which Eliot is translated into "Eliot" (does this translation show Qian Zhongshu's attitude and evaluation of Eliot? )。 "Jug! Jug！ In the sludge-efango e ilmondo! The phrase "The Nightingale sings" directly quotes Eliot's famous poem "The Waste Land": "There, the nightingale's indestructible voice fills the whole desert, she is still calling, and the world is still chasing. "there the nightingale filled all the desert with invisible voice/and still she cried, and still the world pursues,' ‘Jug Jug'to dirty ears". Here, Qian Zhongshu used the famous sentences in Eliot's The Waste Land in the works of the new school poets he mocked. Does this show the author's teasing to Eliot? As we know, Eliot's The Waste Land is famous for its obscurity. When the poem was first published in 1922, almost no one could understand it. Therefore, the poet had to add more than 5 annotations to the poem. However, when the reader hoped that the poet would explain some annotations again, the poet discovered that he might fall into the trap of endless annotations, so he refused to make any annotations for the poem and said, "I don't know the original intention." I just want to say what's on my mind. I'm not sure what I'll say before I say it. I will not definitely use the word' original intention' in the works of me or other poets. " In this way, Eliot's comments on poems are almost as famous as his poems themselves. Cao Yuanlang's short sonnet actually uses 3 notes, which is probably even worse than Eliot's in this respect. No wonder Fang Hung-chien said, "It's really a poem without words and origins, which is almost the same as what people who write old poems call a poem of scholars." It's just that Miss Tang, who was on the side, "read the poem" and couldn't help saying, "Mr. Cao, you are too cruel to our uneducated readers. I don't know any foreign words in the poem. " In fact, this is another feature of The Waste Land. The Waste Land uses allusions frequently, involving 35 writers and 56 works. It uses seven languages, namely English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and adopts five forms: popular language, written language, archaic language, vernacular language and foreign language. In Eliot's view, poetry is "the separation of personality" and "the elimination of personality", "the past determines the present, and now it will also correct the past". The modern and the ancient are always parallel, so Eliot will naturally use other people's poems to say his own words, and borrow other people's glasses to water the blocks in his heart. Mr. Cao and Eliot seem to have some "great minds think alike". When explaining these foreign words in his poems, he said: "The style of my poem is more appreciated by people who don't know foreign words. The topic is the meaning of "mixed company" and "eighteen words". As long as you look at the words of this person and that person, there is a mixed impression in Chinese. Miss Tang, you appreciate this complicated impression, don't you? That is to grasp the essence of the poem, and there is no need to seek the meaning of the poem. The meaning of poetry is the misfortune of poetry! " Finally, Mr. Cao advised Fang Hung-chien, "You should read the poems that love good and hate virtue, and you will know that the things of modern western poets have their origins, but we don't say that they copied them."
Mr. Cao's words are a paraphrase of Eliot's literary thought. Eliot believes that the specific perceptual experience caused by the combination of specific things, situations or events can often arouse certain emotions. In this way, the only way for writers to express their feelings in their works is to find and describe these objective counterparts, and the whole Waste Land is the "objective counterpart" of the poet's inner state. In this way, poetry becomes a symbol, and people should not only understand the meaning of words, but also grasp the symbolic meaning of things. Eliot said that poets should bypass the extreme abstraction of rationalism and grasp the reader's "cerebral cortex, nervous system and digestive tract". "Poets should not attract readers' minds: what a poem actually means is irrelevant. The meaning is just a meat bun thrown to the reader to distract him; At the same time, poetry has quietly influenced readers in a more concrete and unconscious way. " Therefore, the meaning in Eliot's poems is just a scam. When people don't try to understand and translate this scam, they may be understanding Eliot in some unconscious way. When people think they have grasped the meaning of Eliot's poems, it is often when people fall into the trap and don't know it.
Qian Zhongshu's mockery of Cao's lame imitation of Eliot's poems in his novels is obvious, as well as his sarcasm and teasing of some foreign students' ignorance, arrogance, self-righteousness and stupidity. In Fang Hung-chien's words, it is "I simply don't know what to say. Moreover, he is not honest, he is bullying others, he is fearless, and he is unreasonable. However, the author's attitude towards Eliot's symbolic poetry and new criticism theory is not clear in the novel. However, the limitations and disadvantages of Eliot's poems are clearly revealed by Cao's imitation, but at the same time, the advantages and significance of Eliot's poems are in danger of being ignored and obliterated.
Therefore, it is obviously not enough to talk about Eliot only in Fortress Besieged. If we can find his comments on Eliot from Qian Zhongshu's theoretical works, it will undoubtedly help us understand Eliot correctly, and we can further understand the moral of Fortress Besieged. In The Record of Talking about Art, which was created almost at the same time as Fortress Besieged, we soon discovered Qian Zhongshu's comment on Eliot, "Today's people love Eliot (there is no translation here as' love for virtue') to talk about the English metaphysical poetry school in the 17th century, saying that they can understand the righteousness and truth with an official sense, that is, Hegel's remarks". Qian Zhongshu spoke highly of "Hegel's theory", saying, "Things are reasonable, reasons are based on things, and the virtual and the real are born together, * * * is different, and the truth is consistent, and the hue reveals righteousness. Take this truth to say that poetry is interesting, and it is as big as heaven. " Later, Qian Zhongshu talked about Eliot's theory of "objective correlative" for many times in Addendum to Talking about Art and Compilation of Guan Cone. "He is not the one who narrates things and expresses feelings, but the one who says things should be right in modern western poetry", and his method is "emotion must be right in things". Qian Zhongshu combined this theory with China's poetics. Qian Zhongshu clearly made a more objective and detailed comparison and interpretation of Eliot's theory here, and fully affirmed it.
In this way, it should be no problem for Cao Yuanlang to learn from Eliot. The problem lies in his going to extremes. When talking about "Poetry of Scholars" in Tan Yi Lu, Qian Zhongshu said that the truly excellent "Poetry of Scholars" should be "dropping the text without dropping the book bag. Although there are strange words and hard words, it is not proud to hide things with the eccentric code at first". The ridiculous thing about Cao Yuanlang is that he pretentiously "drops the book bag" and "hides things with the eccentric code".