In the third section of Fortress Besieged, Mr. Qian Zhongshu talked about Eliot in this way: Miss Su introduced the new school to Fang Hung-chien and others.
The poet Cao Yuanlang brought a book of poems for Miss Su's advice. Fang Hung-chien respectfully held a collection of poems, and when he opened it, it was a neat writing brush. The title of the first sonnet is "Dishes", and the word "one" is marked below. "This poem writes:
Last night and tonight, the stars are swaying in the wind drifting to tomorrow night (2)
A plump and white pregnant woman's belly quivers and sticks to the sky (3)
When did this runaway woman from Widow on the Grass find a new husband?
Jug！ Jug！ (5) In the sludge-Ivango E Ilmondo! (6)-
The nightingale sings (7) ...
The last couplet of this poem is:
On the summer night after the rain, the land is full and clean, and the land is plump and beautiful.
The smallest grass joined the silent cry: "Let's get married!" " " (30)
After the poem, the etymology is specified in detail, and Eliot is translated into "Eliot" (does this translation show Qian Zhongshu's attitude and evaluation of Eliot? )。 "hip flask! Jug！ In the mud. The phrase "The Nightingale Singing" directly quotes Eliot's famous poem "The Waste Land": "There, the invincible voice of the nightingale fills the whole desert, she is still calling, and the world is still chasing. There, the nightingale filled the whole desert with invisible voice/but she was still crying, and the world was still chasing, "Cheers to dirty ears". Here, Qian Zhongshu used the famous sentences in Eliot's The Waste Land in the works of the new poets he mocked. Does this show the author's ridicule of Eliot? As we all know, Eliot's The Waste Land is famous for its obscurity. When 1922 was first published, almost no one could understand it. Therefore, the poet had to add more than 50 annotations to this poem. However, when the reader wants the poet to explain some notes again, the poet finds that he may fall into an endless annotation trap, so he refuses to make any notes for this poem and says, ". I just want to speak my mind. I'm not sure what I will say before I say it. I will never use the word' original intention' in my works or those of other poets. " In this way, Eliot's comments on poetry are almost as famous as his poems themselves. Cao Yuanlang's short sonnet actually uses 30 notes, which is probably worse than Eliot's. No wonder Fang Hung-chien said, "It's really a poem without words and sources, and it's similar to the so-called literati's poems written by people who write old poems." It's just that Miss Tang "read the poem" and couldn't help saying, "Mr. Cao, you are too hard on our uneducated readers. I don't know any foreign words in the poem. " In fact, this is another feature of the wilderness. The Waste Land is frequently quoted, involving 35 writers and 56 works. It uses seven languages, namely English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and adopts five forms: catchwords, written languages, archaic languages, vernacular languages and foreign languages. In Eliot's view, poetry is "the separation of personality" and "the elimination of personality". "The past determines the present, and now it will correct the past". Modern and ancient times are always parallel. Eliot will naturally use other people's poems to say his own words and borrow other people's glasses to water his own block. Mr Cao and Eliot seem to have some "great minds think alike". Explaining these loanwords in his poems, he said: "The style of my poems is more appreciated by people who don't understand loanwords. The topic is the meaning of "mixed company" and "eighteen words" Just look at this person and that person, and Chinese will have a mixed impression. Miss Tang, do you appreciate this complicated impression? That is to grasp the essence of poetry, there is no need to seek the meaning of poetry. The meaning of poetry is the misfortune of poetry! " Finally, Mr. Cao advised Fang Hung-chien: "If you read those poems that love goodness and hate virtue, you will know that the things of modern western poets have their origins, but we will not say that they copied them."
Mr. Cao's words are an interpretation 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 has become a symbol, and people should not only understand the meaning of words, but also grasp the symbolic meaning of things. Eliot said that the poet should bypass the extreme abstraction of rationalism and grasp the reader's "cerebral cortex, nervous system and digestive tract". "Poets should not attract readers' thoughts: it doesn't matter what a poem actually means. Meaning is just a meat bun thrown to the reader to distract his attention; 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 are not trying to understand and translate this scam, they may be understanding Eliot in some unconscious way. When people think they have understood the meaning of Eliot's poems, it is often when people fall into the trap and don't know it.
Qian Zhongshu's ridicule of Cao's poor imitation of Eliot's poems in his novels is obvious, as well as his irony and ridicule of some foreign students' ignorance, arrogance, self-righteousness and stupidity. In Fang Hung-chien's words, "I don't know what to say at all. Moreover, he is dishonest, he bullies others, he has nothing to hide, and he is unreasonable. However, the author's attitude towards Eliot's symbolism poetry and new criticism theory in the novel is not clear. However, Cao's imitation of Eliot's poems clearly reveals the limitations and shortcomings of Eliot's poems, but at the same time, the advantages and significance of Eliot's poems are also in danger of being ignored and obliterated.
Therefore, it is obviously not enough to talk about Eliot in Fortress Besieged. If we can find Qian Zhongshu's comments on Eliot from his theoretical works, it will undoubtedly help us understand Eliot correctly and further understand the moral of Fortress Besieged. In the book Talking about Art, which was written almost at the same time as Fortress Besieged, we soon found Qian Zhongshu's comment on Eliot, "Today people love Eliot (there is no translation here' love goodness and hate virtue') and talk about17th century English metaphysical poetry, saying that it can be understood by the official sense, that is, Hegel's remarks are redundant". Qian Zhongshu spoke highly of Hegel's theory, saying that "things are reasonable, things are reasonable, emptiness and reality coexist, * * * is different, reason is consistent, and hue is meaningful." In this sense, poetry is interesting and as big as the sky. " Later, Qian Zhongshu talked about Eliot's theory of "objective counterpart" many times in "On Art and Supplement to Pipe Tapes". "He is not the one who narrates things and expresses emotions in modern western poetry, but the one who says things should be right", and his method is that "emotions 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 is that he went to extremes. In Tan Yi Lu, Qian Zhongshu talked about "the poem of a scholar" and said that the truly excellent poem of a scholar should be "without losing a book bag". Although there are strange words, I am not proud of hiding things at the beginning of the strange code. " The funny thing about Cao Yuanlang is that he pretentiously "drops his book bag" and "hides things with strange codes".