Specifically, from the students' point of view, western readers have always faced two barriers when accepting China's ancient poems: "beautiful pronunciation" and "original text and English translation"; From the teacher's point of view, there are always two gaps in teaching China's poetry in the west: the gap between "poetry teaching and language teaching" and "research and teaching". These problems have long plagued teachers and learners.
Recently, the English book How to Read China's Poems: Selected Readings has been a success. On Amazon's website, this book has been selling well for a long time, and it has been printed for the fourth time in just one or two years. The reason for its success is undoubtedly that the author tried to suit the remedy to the case and overcome the difficult problems of learning and teaching. The author's inspiration for writing this book comes from his long-term teaching experience in the United States and his understanding of China's poems, that is, no textbook has been able to solve the above difficulties. He hopes that through such a suitable textbook, the barriers will be broken, so that readers who grew up in the western cultural background can get the same aesthetic experience as readers in China when reading China's ancient poems, and can effectively understand the essence of China's ancient poems.
How to read China's poems: The Selected Works of Reading Guidance (hereinafter referred to as the Selected Works of Reading Guidance) contains 65,438+043 ancient China poems and several related academic documents. This 143 poem is arranged according to the development of poetic style: the author divides China's dynasties into six periods: pre-Qin, Han, Six Dynasties, Tang and Five Dynasties, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and then divides each historical period into several chapters according to the evolution of poetic style, with a total of 18 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a poetic style, accompanied by abstracts of relevant academic papers, as well as analysis and appreciation of specific poems.
More importantly, every poem selected in the reading guide is accompanied by the original Chinese text in addition to the English translation. Each word of the original text not only has one-to-one translation and Chinese Pinyin, but also combines the written text of poetry with audio reading, which is a major feature of the selected reading guide. This way can integrate the beauty of words and phonology in China's ancient poems. Professor Cai Zongqi called China's ancient poems "a living tradition of singing and writing". Different from western classical poetry, China's poetry pays attention to meter, tone, rhyme and level tone, and has a tradition of chanting. The development of China's poetry is closely related to music. It can be seen that China's poems have the beauty of music. Only in this way can this book have rich and flexible links. Make full use of online learning resources, you can download the recitation audio of these poems online for free. This way of teaching poetry fills the gap in previous poetry teaching and Chinese teaching, learning both poetry and Chinese, and enhancing readers' sense of Chinese language. Therefore, the original state of words and phonology is preserved and presented to the greatest extent. The superiority of digital technology also makes this book respect the musicality of Chinese characters and Chinese as never before.
In addition, in order to help western students master the rules of rhyme, tone and rhythm of various poetry styles, the author thinks of some methods. Especially for western students' difficulty in understanding the level tone, Professor Cai Zongqi creatively created a level tone interpretation method in this book according to the theory of his teacher Professor Gao Yougong. Practice shows that this method is very convenient for western students to easily master the skills of identifying flat lines.
Secondly, this compilation method can dilute the barrier between academic research and daily teaching. Professor Cai found that there is a huge gap between academic research and daily teaching, academic research articles are too abstruse to be applied to daily teaching, and many comments on specific poems and poets are scattered in other documents, which is not systematic enough. Therefore, under the guidance of the way of compiling Selected Works, readers will have a clear understanding of the development of China's ancient poetry and have an overall grasp. In addition, each chapter focuses on a poetic style, and the important papers of experts in this field are carefully selected. These papers pay attention to the characteristics, form and rhythm of a poetic style, and appreciate related poems. The language is simple and easy to understand, so that profound academic achievements can be used in daily teaching.
Thirdly, the ways of poetry interpretation in the selected reading guide bridge the gap between the original Chinese text and the English translation to a great extent. There has always been a big obstacle in the translation of China's ancient poems, that is, it is difficult to give consideration to faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, especially those works with abstract content, rich meanings and neat meter. In order to ensure the integrity of the content, their translations are likely to lose interest, let alone let western readers understand their aesthetic essence. It can be seen that it is difficult to achieve the teaching purpose only by providing translated works. Different from other books of the same kind, the reading guide will fully respect the curiosity and initiative of scholars, list the original text together with the translation, and provide the interpretation of each word and the special expressive force of the words placed in the internal artistic form of each poem. This unique presentation makes up for the deficiency of the English version, and also helps readers to understand some important concepts that are difficult to translate, such as leveling, antithesis, rhyme, etc., so that western readers who are not familiar with the cultural background of China can also understand the mystery of China's ancient poems. This is an effect that other similar books can't achieve.
It can be seen that the content arrangement of Selected Works of Guidance is unique, which can not only face up to the difficult problems, but also meet the realistic needs of western readers to accept China's classical poems. However, it is not only a popular and elementary guide to poetry, but also a book for western readers to deeply understand China's classical poetry culture. As can be seen from the subject catalogue on the second page of the catalogue, the academic documents collected in each chapter are not only related to the poetic style emphasized in that chapter, but actually there is a catalogue containing the theoretical system between them. There are six subject knowledge and cultural background, poetry theme, poetry style, wording, syntax and structure. Each topic is subdivided into several sections according to different themes, and each section contains several documents with page numbers, because they are all scattered in various poetry chapters. For western readers, this is a shortcut to understand China's classical poetry, and it is also helpful for western readers and students to understand China's classical culture.
The publication of this book benefits from Professor Cai Zongqi's teaching experience and practice in the United States for many years. More importantly, it benefits from his research method based on the perspective of "inner culture", that is, he does not stick to China's traditional thinking paradigm or simply rely on western theories, but uses modern new theories and tools to find problems. This idea is reflected in the compilation of this book, which neither copied the western classical poetry theory to analyze China's poems, nor followed the traditional teaching methods of China. After the publication of Selected Works of Reading Guidance, it aroused strong repercussions overseas. She crossed the road of knowledge and the long river of culture and blew the east wind of China's poetry culture to the west, which not only became the latest achievement of China's poetry teaching in American universities, but also played an important role in promoting China's cultural strategy of going abroad.