Zhang Deming
Man invented language in the interaction and struggle with nature. Before the birth of language, human society has been in a wild state of natural disorder. In the age of ignorance, gestures and eyes that convey thoughts and feelings cannot accurately explain the corresponding relationships between people, people and the world, and things. The birth of language is the qualitative change of human society. The greatest achievement of language is to mark things one by one with words and specify their respective names, attributes and functions. The one-to-one correspondence between words and things makes the whole world appear as an orderly whole. The naming of everything in the world has created infinite vitality for the development of human society. Since then, human beings have enjoyed the pleasure and pleasure that language can give in their contact and communication with the world, and accepted and constantly expanded the space for survival and development provided by language. Language is a cultural product invented by human beings, but once it is invented, it will be relatively stable, thus providing norms for human thought and speech. The world we face is the world of language, we live in language, and language expresses our existence. "Language is the realm of existence-the palace of existence; In other words, language is the home of existence. " "Because language is the home of existence, we reach existence by constantly walking through this home." "All beings, whether they are objects of consciousness or things in the mind, people who carry out their own intentions or people who take more risks, or all creatures exist in the language area as beings in their own way." ①
If the ancestors created poetry as well as language, it must be good, because the language born in their hands is true and shining with sacred light. While discovering language, they also discovered the poetic existence of the world. However, once the language is fixed, it will gradually become secular in the process of repeated use by human beings, and the poetic luster will continue to decrease and eventually fade away. The daily use of language diffuses its applicability in real life, but it obscures the direct presentation of poetry to the greatest extent. The mission of contemporary poets is to rename the language, re-invent the poetic nature of the language, break the vulgar and habitual connection between the language and the world, and rebuild the poetic connection between the language and the world. In this way, the difficulty of poet's creation becomes the difficulty of language, and the pain of poet's thought is the pain of language. Words, the obvious monster of meaning, always scratch the poet's thinking nerve.
Language is the home of existence, and people live poetically on the earth. Only poetry can express people's lifestyle. However, in the fog of the world and the dense forest of language, poets have to go through hardships to find poetic expression. In the process of searching for poems, poets always encounter difficulties in language and anxiety in expression. However, in the home of language, since the poet is exercising the sacred duty of re-inventing the poetry of language, then poetry writing means fighting against everyday language, that is, removing the gold of poetry from the quicksand of language and making poetic language stand out from everyday vocabulary like a banner.
Poetry expression is never an easy task. If all the images and words that are thought and felt are arranged in a row without omission, it will not become poetry. Poetry expression needs careful evaluation and careful choice of language. Why do we always think that new poetry is not as good as ancient poetry? Why do many people still think that new poetry can't achieve the higher achievements achieved by ancient poetry anyway? It is hard to find world-class poets like Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi. One of the most important reasons is that ancient poetry is produced by hard work. "If you win two sentences in three years, you will cry when you sing one." Due to the seriousness and prudence of ancient poets' creation, the language of classical poetry has become an artistic language that can withstand careful analysis and technical consideration, and it is poetic and meaningful. However, new poetry is restricted by the creative concept of "how to say words and how to write poems" advocated by Hu Shi at the beginning of the New Culture Movement. Most of them are hasty and sloppy works, and the language lacks polishing and lamentation. At the same time, because China's new poetry has not found a relatively stable style pattern so far, and the form of poetry lacks rules, even if the poet wants to go back and seriously revise his own poem after writing it, he is often at a loss when honing and rectifying it, and sometimes the revised poem is not as good as the original poem. This is a very regrettable thing.
In the creation of new poetry, language and thought are always out of sync. When a thought and life perception are formalized into poetic language, we will all face difficulties in expression. In fact, the difficulties in language expression are not unique to the creation of new poems, but also encountered by ancient people when writing poems. Lu Ji said: "I look at the works of talented people and steal them to win their hearts." His words are changeable. Yan Yan likes and dislikes it, so to speak. Every article belongs to itself, especially its feelings. Often suffering does not mean things, and there is not enough literature. Unknown difficulties, it is difficult to cover up, it is also difficult to be able to. (2) Liu Xie also said: "Mountain climbing is full of feelings, and watching the sea is full of meaning. My talent will go hand in hand with the wind and cloud. Party, gas times before resignation; This is almost successful, but it is half-hearted. " (3) Similarly, in the face of the unsynchronized language and thought, the language difficulty of poetry expression, the ancients turned it into the motive force of creation and the logical starting point of "bitter singing", while modern poets tried their best to avoid this problem and did not hesitate to dispel the language difficulty with prose. After more than 80 years' development, China's new Book of Songs has not achieved satisfactory results, which may have a lot to do with the poet's failure to pay attention to the poetic reconstruction of daily language from the beginning.
Heidegger once pointed out: "Poetry is a kind of creation, which is realized through words." ④ What is highlighted here is the great significance of writing or language to the construction of poetry. Of course, this kind of writing and language in poetry construction is not a direct record of ordinary language, but a poetic language that conforms to the norms of aesthetic expression and is the poet's aesthetic discovery and poetic reconstruction of daily language. In other words, the invention and reconstruction of poetic language can not be separated from the support of everyday language, and always starts from everyday language. Although the language of daily life is always covered with poetic elements, it is impossible for us to establish another language system without it. Instead, we should follow the clues provided by these languages into poetic thinking, and at the same time grasp these languages to melt and forge, so as to combine new elements belonging to poetic language. This is a painful process, and it is an opportunity and challenge given to poets by modern China people. Re-shaping the poetic space of language is a sacred mission entrusted to contemporary poets by history.
[Notes]
(1) Heidegger: What is a poet? Lin Zhong Lu, translated by Sun Zhouxing, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1997, p.316-317.
② Lu Ji: Wen Fu.
③ Liu Xie: Wen Xin Diao Shen Long Si.
④ Heidegger: Reading Heldring's Poems, translated by Sun Zhouxing, Commercial Press, 2000, p. 44.
[This post has been edited by the author on July 24th, 2006 16: 48: 35] Folk resources of new poetry creation.
Zhang Deming
Not long ago, I listened to a lecture by writer Alai. His theme is the folk resources of literary expression. In the lecture, Alai traced the development of the integration of western literary creation and folk resources, as well as the rational utilization and creative transformation of folk resources. In view of the striking similarities between his novel The Dust Settled and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Latin American magical realist writer Marquez, he listed the literary masters and creative achievements of countries around the world under the influence of the French surrealist literary movement, such as moniz, an American black woman writer, Nie Luda, a Colombian literary master Marquez, and other Latin American writers Paz and Egri Tis. He also pointed out that if we only rely on the influence of European literature (which was the mainstream literature at that time and even today), the creative achievements of these writers will be greatly reduced. What is commendable is that on the one hand, they absorbed the most advanced literary ideas and creative methods in Europe, on the other hand, they also made full use of local folk resources. From this point of view, Alai thinks that his novel The Dust Settles is really influenced by Latin American magic realism, but it is more important to dig deep into Tibetan customs and culture, artistically process this unique customs and culture, and borrow rich folk resources to make his literary expression reach a higher level and achieve fruitful results.
From this I thought of our new poetry creation. It should be said that it is not a day or two since China's poetry world is in recession. In recent ten years, China's new poetry has been in prosperity. On the one hand, there are many poetry creators, and poetry works, especially online poetry works, emerge like a flood. On the other hand, there are few excellent works and few excellent poets, and no one can compare with Shu Ting, Bei Dao and Hai Zi in the 1980s. At the same time, the artistic exploration in poetry creation is also very unsatisfactory. In recent years, the poet's artistic attempt has been polarized: some people are desperately imitating the West, learning their artistic expression skills, their image combination methods and their ideological depth; There are still some people who are trying to find their hearts and write down whispers in their sleep. Language combination and image superposition are as personal as possible, without the necessary intervention of public discourse, which makes readers read like clouds. This creative situation in the poetry world invisibly reduces its aesthetic effectiveness, and its readers are discouraged by the lack of realistic and contemporary poetry. In the words of Mr. Xie Mian a few years ago, this situation is-"Poetry is leaving us, and she no longer cares about this land and everything on it ..."
For poetry creation, it is necessary to learn from the West, because China's new poetry accompanied by the May 4th New Culture Movement was produced on the basis of learning from western literature. It is also very important to express your inner feelings and experiences, because poetry is a poetic reflection of the life of the universe, so it must bear the poet's strong subjective feelings. However, it is not enough to make our poems have high aesthetic taste and deep mass base, which is loved by most people. Originally, poetry is a nobleman in literature, and should maintain elegant character. Vulgarity is not its specialty, but poetry is not necessarily a mysterious girl in an ivory tower, and people who grew up in a boudoir don't know it. It should not only improve readers with elegance, but also extend their life by winning readers. Therefore, blindly westernization and privatization are not the best choices for poetry creation.
At this time, it is a wise move to learn from the people, find folk resources and enrich the performance materials of poetry. The word "folk" here is not the concept of "folk" used in the quarrel of poetry circles in the late 1990 s, but refers to oral literature handed down by ordinary people in real life, which embodies the wisdom and imagination of ordinary people and is the source of poetry creation. Looking back at the history of world poetry development, we can easily see that many excellent poems in the history of literature are related to folk literature, which is the result of writers learning from folk and transforming folk resources into literary expressions, such as Homer's epic in ancient Greece (Iliad and Odyssey), Faust by German writer Goethe, Song of Eternal Sorrow by Bai Juyi, a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, and so on.
It is of triple significance to learn from the folk and make full use of folk resources to improve our poetry situation and improve our poetry creation. First, the expansion of imagination. A person's intelligence is limited. No matter how brilliant a writer or poet is, he will also have his own thinking defects and lack imagination. Folk literature has accumulated the intelligence and wisdom of the general public, and it also shines with the spiritual spark of their rich imagination everywhere. Poetry expression needs rich imagination as a support, and folk resources can be provided to you. Second, the publicity of literary images. In recent years, one of the main reasons why poetry is far away from readers is the excessive personalization of poetry creation. Poets blindly emphasize self-experience in the choice of images. Many images and metaphors are only understood by the poet himself. Others seem to be guessing riddles when reading, and there are always many obstacles and barriers. If so, readers will be scared away by these strange poems. There is a deep accumulation of folk culture in folk resources. If our poets can pick out some image elements as their own poems, their poems will naturally be widely and quickly accepted by people, and there will be no gap between reading and appreciation. Third, promote the development of epic creation. There are many reasons for the lack of China's ancient epics, one of which is the separation between writing and oral language, and the folk oral literature has not been successfully transformed into text literature. The basic strategy of the May 4th New Culture Movement is to be consistent in words and writing, and to "write poems as you say them", which provides favorable conditions for the creation of long narrative poems. However, due to the immaturity of modern culture, there are no epics in China's modern literature. In 1980s, He Jiang, Yang Lian, Haizi and others tried to write an epic, but they were all unsuccessful. There are many reasons for their failure, one of which is that they trust text literature too much and only look for resources for epic creation in written literature, ignoring learning from the people. Now advocating that poetry creation should boldly absorb folk resources may promote the development of epic creation. Because the folk resources of all ethnic groups in China have accumulated images of family, history and culture to varying degrees, recording the pioneering course of our ancestors, and growing constantly, which has been written by future generations. Learning from these folk cultures and using folk resources for reference, our epic creation may usher in a prosperous sunrise. Go back to the top and write down the gray and red of this city with this poem!