Studying ancient literature is mainly about studying writers' works. These writers and works are ancient, not contemporary. The life of contemporary writers is easy to understand, but it was not so easy in ancient times. There are no records and no materials, which are often encountered. Contemporary works are also easy to find, but ancient times are different, and some of them have been lost and have not been handed down. Therefore, some of our writers who have no works, such as Historical Records Biography of Qu Yuan and Jia Sheng, said: "Since Qu Yuan is dead, there are followers of Song Yu, Le Tang and Jing Ke in Chu, and they are all famous for their kind words." The works of Le Tang and Jing Ke can't be seen today, and there is a big move. It is still unreliable to say that they were written by Jing Ke. There was a Yan Zhu in the Western Han Dynasty, whose works were not handed down, and they all became writers without works. Some writers, although some works have been handed down, have suffered great losses. The works of the four great poets in the Southern Song Dynasty, You Maoyang (Wanli), Fan (Chengda), Lu (You) and You Mao, are rarely handed down from generation to generation, which is extremely disproportionate to the title of "Great Poet". Therefore, reading and learning ancient literature is more difficult than contemporary literature in terms of materials.
Naturally, there are difficulties not only in materials, but also in language and writing. Literary works, as far as their contents are concerned, reflect the author's understanding of social life, or the expression of the author's delicate ideology. The tool used to reflect life and express emotion is language. An era has an era of social life, which is constantly changing. Although language changes slowly, the differences between ancient and modern times are still remarkable. Han Yu said, "Zhou Yu's soup plate is crooked." Because the language has changed, it is difficult to read. Many people in Oracle Bone Inscriptions don't know each other because the words have changed. Not only the pronunciation of glyphs has changed, but also the meaning of words has changed. Shuowen, like the word "annoying", means "hot headache" and is a sick phenomenon. Now when we say "annoyed", we don't mean to get sick. This difficulty caused by the ancient and modern changes in language and writing is the first problem to be solved in reading and learning ancient literary works.
Of course, the manuscripts of ancient works we see today are very few, and they are generally copied. After the Song Dynasty, there were block prints, but there were still people copying them. Wrong copying is always inevitable. There is a famous article, Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Garden", which contains a sentence "Smell it, follow the rules, and have fun". Su Shi's manuscript and some later engravings are all "pro-going", and only one Song engraving is "regular going". It is true that it is easier to understand when you are close to the rules, but let's continue: "If you fail, you will find the disease." Since "going" means going, how can you say "unsuccessful"? Is it not contradictory? It seems that "pro" is a typo and should be "standardized". "Going" means going, and there are many such typos in ancient works. In college, a teacher talked about Zhuangzi. He said that there is a phrase "women today" in Zhuangzi, and there is a philosophical history about Zhuangzi's view on women. In fact, there is a typo in this sentence, which should be "safe return now". The word "female" is a belated pronunciation, and there is no such word as "woman" at all. Wrong copying and wrong engraving will harm others and yourself. It seems that the improper handling of typos in ancient works hinders the correct understanding of the ideological content of the works. Sometimes typos ruin our enjoyment of the artistic beauty of our works. There is a saying in "Nine Songs to the King", and Mr. Wen Yiduo said in "Correction of Songs of the South": "It is wrong to repair, laugh when you laugh, and laugh when you laugh." When you laugh, your moldy teeth are slightly exposed, which is similar to Shan Gui's meaning of "laughing and laughing". It describes the beauty of a person's body, which is very vivid. If "repair" is understood as "decoration" according to Wang Yi's annotation, proper repair is appropriate decoration, which is abstract, so it will be very boring.
What attitude should we take towards typos in ancient works? People in the Ming Dynasty carved books and corrected whatever they didn't understand. Many people are dissatisfied with this practice. Of course, we can't adopt this method. You can't do whatever you want, you can change it if you want. Even if it is a typo, you should explain the reason when you correct it. In fact, the typo of ancient works, especially literary works, is sometimes very complicated, not only because it is fluent, but also because it is easy to understand and difficult to understand, and there is also an aesthetic problem. Everyone is familiar with Wang Bo's Preface to Wang Tengting. There is a "maze of Gechuan". Some books are used as hyphens and some books are used as mi characters. Even Chinese characters and rice are easy to understand, but it is difficult to understand only crossword puzzles. But from the perspective of literary appreciation, it is precisely this word that is not easy to understand, but it makes people feel beautiful. It's really difficult to judge what words are on the author's manuscript.
In fact, Chinese characters include form, sound and meaning. Here, practicing Chinese characters is similar to Fanzi, mysterious, confusing and homophonic. It is not easy to find out what the original is and how it went wrong. But it may be a hyphen. Wen Feiqing's "Farewell to Chen Wei Hou Guan, Farewell to the Long History of Li Xiao" poem says: "Spring clothes shine on dust and grass, and night boats smell raindrops and reeds." Even in crossword puzzles, it can be seen that the word Fan Lian is similar in shape and easy to make mistakes. After making a crossword puzzle by mistake, it was somewhat puzzling, so someone read the homonym and changed it to "meter". Naturally, this is just a speculation, a possibility.
When we read ancient literary works, we may encounter some words that are wrongly copied and engraved. The most important thing is to explain the meaning of the words. The meanings of ancient and modern characters have changed, and classical Chinese is not easy to understand without spoken language. A scholar in the Song Dynasty said, "Night dreams are ominous, and books are good." Written as "the night is embarrassing, it is embarrassing." It was written by using the changes of ancient and modern meanings. As soon as you open the Book of Songs, you will see the word "My Fair Lady". What is a "My Fair Lady"? It's hard to understand. It would be easy to understand if it were a "slim and steady girl". Of course, reference books and dictionaries can be consulted with the changes of ancient and modern meanings, laws and regulations and the names of things, but dictionaries are also invalid. For example, in A Dream of Red Mansions, Wu's rent list says "twenty dragon pigs", but what is "dragon pigs" can't be found in the dictionary. To this day, most redologists are still confused. This is really hard to learn. When reading difficult words, I don't know them; Difficult words, I can't understand them, which is often the case. Even knowing each other is not that simple to explain. There is a saying in The Book of Songs: Cutting Tan that "no vegetarian can eat". There are no difficult words! But how to explain "vegetarianism"? Before liberation, a university professor described "vegetarianism" as "vegetarianism" and "eating rice for nothing", and was dismissed as a result. Because "vegetarian meal" has always been interpreted as "getting something for nothing", the so-called "being an official, willing to be rewarded". Gong Zizhen wrote a poem, saying, "I have the responsibility of vegetarian food and am ashamed to cut sandalwood." In fact, "free food" or "free food" is wrong. Mao legend: "it's plain and empty." Empty can be interpreted as empty. Confucius said in The Analects of Confucius Advanced that the word "empty" mentioned by Yan Hui is "almost empty", which is interpreted as empty, and "no vegetarian meals" means "no worries and no food". "He is a gentleman, not a vegetarian!" In other words, "those grandfathers don't worry about having no food!" "Words, it is natural to say that the lumberjack is worried about clothes and food.
In short, to learn and read ancient literary works, we must first translate the poems written by the ancients into poems as easy to understand as those written by contemporary people today, which requires a school survey and exegesis. Collating is mainly to solve Yan Wen's typo problem. When I was in college, I studied under Mr. Xu Weitong. On one occasion, Mr. Wang said to me, "I am very happy to hear from Mr. Xu that you conducted a survey with his school." Collating, in the past, people only collated classics, and later some people collated books. As for the library department, it is not easy, because collation can only solve the problem of language barrier at best, but can't solve it. There is a proofreader who says that it is the most unacceptable to choose good and follow. " Of course, Mr. Liu's point of view may be a little biased, but what is "choosing goodness"? Just change the word casually. It is not enough for collating. Regarding exegetics, a scholar in Qing Dynasty said, "Song Ru didn't understand exegetics, but Zhu knew a little." Very demanding. I listened to Mr. Luo Changpei's exegesis in college, but I didn't learn it well. I am still a layman. From the beginning, Mr. Wen Yiduo taught us to read books, ancient poems and vernacular Chinese, not notes. In other words, we should use the knowledge of collation and exegesis to read the vernacular directly, instead of relying on annotations. The dwarfs looked at the stadium and laughed with others. Of course, annotations are a stepping stone for beginners, but we should emancipate our minds and not be superstitious about authority.
The above is only the first step in reading ancient literary works and overcoming language and writing difficulties. But after this, there are still many problems. For example, who is the author of this work? What has he done in his life? Does his work reflect the face of the times? Did people like his works at that time? Are the characters and story lines created in his works real? When he was born, he was different from us. Why can his works still give us an aesthetic enjoyment today? By analogy, as long as you are willing to think, the more questions you have, the deeper your understanding will be. Reading should not only look at the eyes, but also at the brain. Learning without thinking is useless, and it is impossible to make a correct evaluation of literary works, to absorb beneficial nutrients from them, and to enrich and noble spiritual life.
Therefore, after breaking through the language barrier, reading and studying ancient literary works should stand on the standpoint of the proletariat and analyze, criticize and evaluate the read works with Marxist-Leninist viewpoints and methods. Because what we read is China's ancient literary works, most of which were produced in class society. Lu Xun said: "Literature has class nature. In a class society, although writers think they are "free" and think they are beyond the class, they are unconsciously dominated by the class consciousness of their own class. Those creations are not just the cultures of other classes. " Lu Xun only briefly talks about the relationship between literary creation and class here. In fact, the class analysis of literary works is very complicated. There is a tendency to doubt the class nature of literature in class society. Taking landscape poems as an example, they strongly denied the class nature of literature. And put forward that people have * *, that is, human nature. People, one is to survive and the other is to live. Although the life of each class is different, the survival is the same. The so-called "eroticism", love and death are eternal and universal themes in literature. There is nothing new, just the same old tune of Liang Shiqiu and others. Of course, Marxists don't think that a person's eating and sleeping, every move, every word is full of class. But in a class society, people have class nature. The author always shows an attitude of affirmation or negation, love or hatred to the life phenomena he describes, that is to say, he shows the tendency of the author and embodies the class nature of his works. Class nature is always revealed by the author's attitude towards the people or things described in his works more or less explicitly or implicitly. Therefore, when reading ancient literary works, we must pay attention to what writers praise and condemn. We must not catch up with the fashion of "theory of human nature" and look at literary heritage from a super-class perspective, so it is impossible to truly understand their value.
When reading ancient literary works with Marxist viewpoints and methods, we should also regard literary phenomena as the product of objective existence under certain historical conditions. Its existence is not isolated, but exists in the interconnection with other things. In this way, we must pay attention to the relationship between literature and political economy, philosophy and religion, science and art, and their mutual influence. It is difficult to understand the profundity of Du Fu's poems if we don't understand the social, political and economic situation and religious art of China in the Tang Dynasty in the eighth century. "Zhumen wine stinks, and the road has frozen bones." Not empty talk, but real life. If you want to read Watching Gong Sundaniang's Disciple Sword Dance, you can't understand the situation of the art world at that time, and you can only stay in the stage of understanding. Similarly, if you are not familiar with the history and society in the middle Tang Dynasty, you will not be able to thoroughly understand Han Yu's The Original Road and Shi Shuo. In a letter to Xu Maoyong, Lu Xun said: "The relationship between literature and society begins with its sensitive description of society. If it is strong, it will affect society and bring about changes. This is like sesame oil originally made of sesame seeds, soaked in sesame seeds, and more oily. " Literary works not only objectively reflect social life, but also become "a beacon to guide the future of national spirit" if the works reveal unreasonable phenomena in social life and arouse people's dissatisfaction with reality, thus demanding to change the unreasonable society, make it reasonable and transform social life. In the past, some leaders of peasant uprisings read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, from which they learned many strategies for defeating the enemy. The Water Margin was banned from reading by the feudal landlord ruling class, who thought it was a "teaching thief" for fear that people would rise up against it after reading it. The Romance of the West Chamber was also regarded as an obscene book by them, fearing that people would strive for "all shall be well, jack shall have Jill" after reading it, thus undermining the moral standards they advocated. We in China always advocate applying what we have learned when studying. When studying and reading ancient literary works, we should also learn something useful from them and do something beneficial to the people. Literary works are spiritual food, and studying ancient literature should also make you an ideal, moral, noble and pure person. Of course, many ancient literary works are dross and need to be criticized.
For ancient writers, we often say that there are time restrictions and class restrictions. Because most ancient writers were born in the landlord class, even if they made progress ideologically and politically, they only wanted to eliminate the disadvantages of society in order to ensure the survival of their class society. He sympathized with the peasants' poverty and disapproved of peasants' rebellion. At the end of Yuan Dynasty, a group of people wrote poems, sympathizing with the sufferings of people's livelihood, but swearing at the mention of peasant uprising. While sympathizing with the people's resistance to the oppression of corrupt officials and bullies, the author or editor of Water Margin praised the feudal regime for suppressing the peasant uprising and praised a group of people who "reformed" to help the feudal rulers. This highlights the class limitations of these authors. Although ancient and modern times are different and "feelings" are excusable, we should criticize the places that have a bad influence on today's society. Criticism does not mean completely denying a writer or work. That's what I think and do.