Evaluating Ji Xianlin through Poetry

In the book Random Thoughts on Ji Xianlin's Life, Mr. Ji's comments on China's modern poems made me feel that I was not alone. Mr. Ji Xianlin said: "It is also a great event in the history of China literature that the classical Chinese becomes vernacular Chinese. In the past 70 years, China's cultural creation has made great progress; However, according to my personal opinion, the development of various schools is extremely unbalanced. Novels, including novels, novellas and short stories, as well as plays, are completely westernized in form. Is this a blessing? Is it a curse? I haven't seen any experts discuss it. My personal opinion is that it is hard to say that the current novel form is superior to China's classical novels. So is drama. As for the new poem, I think it is a failure. " I agree with Mr. Ji Xianlin that the road that China's modern poetry has taken in the past 100 years has indeed proved to be a failure, and this road is impassable.

To say that China's modern poetry is a "failure", we must say something. Every language has its own characteristics. When we learn modern poetry by translating poetry, the charm of language itself almost disappears. China's translated poems have almost no poetic skills except finding some rhymes at the end of the sentence. In English poetry, the poetic rhythm formed by its own language characteristics cannot be organically applied to Chinese even after detailed theoretical explanation. Therefore, as a result of studying foreign poetry, China's modern poetry is seriously lacking in rhythm, leaving only the so-called content. If you lose the sense of rhythm, you can't express a content only in this way, and the specialty of poetry can't be brought into play at all. Therefore, China's modern poetry has become the arrangement of long and short sentences. In Han Han's words, as long as you can use the Enter key, you can write a poem. A long sentence becomes a poem. This kind of modern poetry is often tasteless. Therefore, Mr. Ji Xianlin said, "Pure poetry advocates abandoning rhythm, while I advocate that poetry must have rhythm, otherwise it can be called by any name, but it doesn't have to be called poetry."

Poetry is not used to express philosophy. When China's modern poetry copied western modern poetry on a large scale, there was only the so-called content except the poetic skills that could not be copied. However, when learning the content of western poetry, the artistic conception that originally belonged to the characteristics of China's poetry was also restricted, leaving only slogans and superficial truth. So Mr. Ji Xianlin said, the so-called misty poetry, "I always suspect that this is a hero's deception. Poets in China try to pretend to be thinkers, thinking that the only remaining "philosophical" world of modern poetry can bring them flowers and cheers. Unfortunately, most obscure words hide pale souls.