China's poems have always attracted the attention of the world. Refined language and beautiful artistic conception are its symbolic features. Western poetry is equally dazzling. We can find many immortal works from a lot of poems. There are many differences between Chinese and western poems in style, content and structure, but it is not difficult to find the inextricable internal relations between them.
(A) the former theory
Some western comparative literature researchers point out that the literature of different nationalities will achieve the same goal in the process of parallel development. This phenomenon is indeed reflected in literary works. Although Chinese and western poems have different cultural connotations, we can still find each other's shadows from them. China's poetry has been in the leading position in the world for a long time. For a long time, western poetry has been more or less influenced by China's poetry. Although China and foreign countries have their own systems in ancient and modern times, there are still some connections, and they are not (and cannot be) completely isolated.
Let me start with China's classical poetry and modern British and American poetry, because the influence of China's classical poetry on the West began with the English translation of China's poems.
Judging from Pound's translation of China and the translated works of some British and American translators, the artistic conception of China's poems gradually penetrated into their poetry creation, and China's poems were gradually accepted and studied by them. Pound, a famous American imagist poet, once said that a "new Greece" was found in China literature, which led to a new "Renaissance". China's classical poetry not only influenced their creation, but also influenced their poetry creation theory.
Because ancient Chinese is a language without suffix changes, unlike English, which has obvious changes in person, number and tense, and its expression is not as accurate as that of western languages, Chinese is more vague and implicit. Amy Lowell once said, "Implication is one of the things we learn from Orientalism." The striking feature of China's classical poetry is conciseness and concreteness. This requires the poet to have concise words and implicit expression ability. On the other hand, vivid images and paintings in China's classical poems are also integrated into their creation. The result of this reference is the appearance of "China's Poetry". Poems by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei, Li Shangyin and Li He, and poems by Li Qingzhao, Liu Yong and Li Yu are the most frequently translated by British and American translators. Their creative techniques have had a great influence on modern British and American poets. Buddhism and Taoism, which spread in China, escaped from reality and improved themselves, and also went deep into their poetry creation. Bly wrote a poem entitled "Remembering", which was written by Bai Juyi. His friend Wright went further. He once added such a title to one of his poems: "I was depressed after reading a bad poem, so I went to an idle grassland and kept company with insects." This line drawing method is obviously influenced by China's Tang poems.
(2) Similarity
China's classical poems are characterized by conciseness, implicit artistic conception, unity of poetry and painting, and vivid images, and they are integrated into the poetry creation of modern British and American poets in communication. Let's compare the following two poems first:
Drink wine/alcohol
(Jin) Tao Yuanming
Building a house is human, and there are no horses and chariots. Ask what you can do, your heart is far from self-prejudice. Picking chrysanthemums under the east fence, you can see Nanshan leisurely. The mountains are getting better and better, and the birds are back. This makes sense. I forgot to say it if I wanted to defend myself.
Innasfri i.
William Burroughs Ye Zhi (Irish)
I'm going to Bali, Indonesia.
Build a small house and a mud house;
Set several rows of bean racks and a row of honey nests,
Living alone, listening to bees singing in the shade.
I will find peace, it will slowly fall,
From the fog to the place where crickets sing;
Sunny at midnight, purple at noon,
In the evening, the cardinals' wings are flying everywhere.
I'm leaving, because I heard,
The sound of water beats against the lake day and night;
Whether I'm standing in the driveway or on a dark sidewalk,
Everyone hears this voice in their hearts. ①
As can be seen from the above two poems, their artistic conception and words are very similar. Building a house is exactly the same as building a house. Picking chrysanthemums is the same as planting beans and keeping bees. The artistic conception of "Shan Ye breath" and the middle four sentences of the latter poem can completely complement each other. What the two poets want to express is to leave this painful world of mortals and live a paradise-like life, showing their quiet and far-reaching thoughts and the true meaning of staying away from the hubbub. Judging from the writing technique, both of them adopted the artistic technique of almost sketching, described the scenery objectively and truly without subjective color, and spoke frankly. This can at least prove that there is * * * commonality between Chinese and western cultures.
The elegant and free-spirited artistic conception shown in the two poems is common in both classical poetry and modern British and American poetry, from Li Bai's "laughing without answering his heart" to Du Fu's "fame for a thousand years, fame for ten thousand years, what's good, when you die?" There are many such examples, and there are also many modern British and American poems, such as T·S· Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land, which fully shows such artistic conception.
In artistic expression, there are also many similarities between the two. The greatest feature of China's classical poetry is implicit, vivid and concise. Only a few numbers can set off the atmosphere, and only a few words can express the artistic conception. The characteristics of British and American modern poetry creation are implicit, dignified, concentrated and full of emotion, which are closely related to China's influence on his poetry theory, and even some expressions are basically the same. Ezra pound's two short poems "In the Subway Station", which are quite famous in western poetry circles, are implicit and concise, which is memorable:
These faces suddenly appeared in the crowd.
Petals on a wet black trunk
This is basically the same as China's classical artistic conception of "Peach blossoms set each other off in red", "willow silk" and "pear flowers bring rain", which reflects the results of cultural exchanges between China and the West. But I personally think that the artistic conception expressed by these metaphors in western poetry is not as beautiful as China's, so it is imaginative. Poetry vividly reproduces the scenes where beautiful faces emerge in the crowd, but it lacks a space for people to fly in the sky and the aesthetic feeling of language. This is related to the different thinking forms between China and the West, which will be discussed later in this article.
(3) Difference
You can see * * * by comparison, and you can also see your personality. Although Chinese and western poetry can find a certain source in origin, or prove the connection and influence between them, it is not difficult to find the differences between them in comparison. The existence of this huge difference is caused by its different nature and different thinking forms.
China's poems are good at describing scenery, expressing emotions, setting off the atmosphere or creating artistic conception, while British and American poems focus on describing the reaction caused by scenery in people's minds, thus expressing their subjective consciousness. This is the difference caused by their different thinking modes. China people pay attention to expression, while westerners pay attention to reproduction. The theory of poetry literature developed under the command of this way of thinking is naturally quite different from poetry creation. In the East, represented by China, the theory of artistic conception and the theory of enlightenment were formed, while in the West, the theory of typicality was formed. Therefore, China's poems pay more attention to the creation of artistic conception, and pursue the effect of expressing everything, which gives people unlimited room for reverie. This kind of poem appeared because the traditional way of thinking in ancient China was intuitive. Even now, China people still pursue the creation of artistic conception when writing poems. Too white makes no sense. Of course, the pursuit of straightforwardness in some contemporary new human writers' works is another matter and cannot be generalized. After all, these people do not represent the mainstream of China's poetry creation.
China's poetry pays attention to implication, taking lightness as beauty, while British and American poetry is more unrestrained and wins with emotional agitation. A prominent example is the handling of love, where the characteristics of Chinese and western poetry can be fully reflected. China poets describe love as "frowning, but thinking" and never express that kind of love, while western poets will shout "You are my sun, and the fire of love makes me anxious." It is hard for China people to accept this outspoken attitude, and the essence of the difference lies in their different aesthetic orientations.
In addition, China's poems mainly praise, while modern British and American poems mainly reveal. China's poems always bury the poet's feelings in his poems, and only "emotion" can feel its beauty. The most prominent example is Ma Zhiyuan's Tianjingsha Qiu Si. He hardly used a word to express his feelings, but simply arranged "dead vines", "old trees" and "dim crows" together, drawing a few strokes. However, the lonely and desolate atmosphere is just right. "Sunset" painted the whole picture with a layer of yellow, and finally brought out "heartbroken people are at the end of the world". It feels as if there is no direct connection before and after, but the feelings are coherent and the ideas are coherent. The reader reads on in one breath, as if he were a wanderer in a painting written by a poet, causing a strong sound of * * *. The juxtaposition of ten kinds of still life, though without any subjective feelings, strongly expresses a lonely and sad feeling than any other language, which is the charm of China's classical poetry. In contrast, modern British and American poetry emphasizes the psychology of perverts in capitalist society, directly expresses the poet's meaning, expresses his own thoughts without affectation, and the space for aftertaste is relatively reduced, but this is more in line with the psychological characteristics and thinking characteristics of westerners.
variation analysis
In the above article, it is mentioned that different ways of thinking between China and the West lead to cultural differences. What causes the difference in thinking? This is a problem that even scientists are studying. The author really can't answer, and can only analyze the manifestations of thinking differences from the surface.
Different from the western business and open society, which pay attention to the clarity of concepts and categories, the logic of analysis and induction, and the abstract way of thinking, China formed a perceptual and intuitive way of thinking as early as the pre-Qin period. The former holds the philosophical view of "the separation of man and nature" and emphasizes the opposition between man and nature, thus trying to clarify the internal connection and logical relationship of things; The latter holds the philosophical view of "harmony between man and nature", emphasizing unity, integrity and intuitive grasp, while ignoring precise and abstract logical analysis and induction. It is a typical way of "looking at things with things", which is obviously different from the way of "looking at things with me" in the west. The results are vague and difficult to analyze and study. We can only understand meaning by feeling, and there is no precise scale to measure meaning. For example, the first sentence in the opening of Laozi: "Tao can be Tao, but it is extraordinary; Famous, very famous. " The meaning of "Tao" has been controversial for a long time, and there is no suitable word to express its meaning in translation, so it has to be expressed by "Tao", which is a typical product of intuitive thinking. After this intuitive thinking rises to rationality, it is still inseparable from sensibility. When it is applied to literature, especially poetry creation, it will produce a series of unique concepts, such as character, elegance, masculinity and so on. Unlike in the west, the concept is clearly defined first, and then the theoretical system is constructed after the reasoning process. It originated from perceptual experience, was established by feeling, and gradually developed and perfected in the past and future, with the characteristics of combining concreteness with abstraction and combining experience with generalization.