Wealth and fame are determined by fate. Why be a servant?
In the dust of swallows, in the shadow of chickens, I saw it and chased it.
Under the dense forest in the mountains, several people are really alone.
It seems that on Yan Jun's day, an old friend, Zhou Long, was alone with the sheep.
Try to put down all the fishing rods, there are hundreds of constraints.
There are smoke forests on both sides, and there is no honor or disgrace here.
The portrait of the abandoned platform has not been sung enough so far.
Wang Zengqi's self-portrait, Liaoning People's Publishing House.
Regarding Wang Zengqi, people often talk about his novels and essays, but seldom mention his poems. The publication of the collection of poems "Self-portrait" just gives us an opportunity to appreciate and understand this novelist's poems.
The author has no research on poetry, but when reading this collection of poems, I found that Wang Zengqi's poems actually have a common creative track with his novel creation. Anyone who knows him knows that Wang Zengqi studied at National Southwest United University in his early years. At that time, modernism had a deep influence on him. His novels written in1940s have a strong stream of consciousness. Even works with realistic colors, such as Down and Out and Famous Chickens and Ducks, are good at adopting the techniques of modernist novels (such as frequent changes in narrative perspectives).
At the same time, the poems written on behalf of others are also deeply influenced by modernism, and some of them stick together irrelevant images, creating a defamiliarization effect: insects sing like light fog, and colorful lies fall as quietly as the old places under the shade. (Larix gmelinii, 1942) Some people use a few lines to create a difficult artistic conception: life is like a river and dreams are a piece of water. Bow down to my half-conscious reflection. The flowers on the curtains faded, so I took two pictures like a movie. ("Private Seal of Autumn Collection", 1942)
These modernist new poems are not only like the lamentation of a melancholy youth at that time, but also like a rational poet's thinking about the world. Wang Zengqi did write his poems very "modern", but he didn't feel stiff when reading them. He didn't learn and imitate by death, but really melted the flavor and essence of modernist poetry into his pen. If you don't have sufficient talent, it's hard to do it.
However, if we only see this side of modernism, it is difficult to fully understand him. In A.D. 1980, Wang Zengqi became a famous writer with Empress Dowager Cixi and Notes on Making a scene. This sensational effect is of course related to the success of the work itself, but it is worth thinking about: what kind of evaluation mechanism is used to define this "success"? This will return to the literary environment at that time-the pursuit of "modernism" led to a new understanding of the formal elements of Wang's novels. At that time, many people saw Wang Zengqi's formal experiments, directly linked him with the modernist influence he accepted in1940s, and came to the conclusion that "Wang Zengqi = modernism". The imagination of the opposition between modernism and realism has opened the distance between Wang Zengqi's works and reality, making them aesthetic and humanized. Nowadays, in the words of Tanggu pedestrians, Wang Zengqi has become a "landscape". We are addicted to this "landscape", but we forget its "origin".
Some scholars have realized this. For example, Luo Gang thinks that the significance of Wang Zengqi to China's contemporary literature lies not only in bringing the "new literary tradition" in the 1960s to the "new period literature" in the 1960s and 1980s, but more importantly, what foreshadowing time has laid for Wang Zengqi's creation and how he was finally born.
Reading Wang Zengqi's later poems from this angle will have different enlightenment. After 1949, Wang Zengqi successively served as the editor-in-chief of Beijing Literature and Art, talking about rap and folk literature, experiencing rural labor, collecting folk songs and writing operas. This experience is very valuable to Wang Zengqi himself. He himself admitted: "I have been compiling Folk Literature for several years and know that folk literature is an ocean and a treasure house." He also warned young writers: "read a little drama, folk art and folk songs." In his view, the language of the masses is "living" and "rolling", and the opposition between "earth" and "foreign" is not absolute, and folk songs can also be very modern. The influence of folk song language is also clearly shown in the second half of the poetry collection "Self-portrait". For example:
Wild geese fly in the sky, and their shadows stay on the ground.
Bater is leaving his hometown, and his heart is full of sadness.
Bater is lying in a circle by the river, smelling the grass.
The river in the circle has been flowing all day, but it has not flowed out of my hometown.
(Bater is leaving his hometown, 1986)
Compared with early modernist poetry, the language of this poem is more refined, popular and colloquial, with less skill carving and more folk flavor. At the beginning, the technique of folk songs is obviously used, and the whole poem adopts the common narrative and lyric writing mode in folk songs. Not only is it beautiful to read, but it is also elegant. Although not as profound as the early poems, they are lively, fluent and interesting.
It is also worth mentioning that old poems account for more than half of self-portraits. This is also a very interesting phenomenon. This confirms Wang Zengqi's emphasis on classicism. While admonishing young writers to learn folk songs, he also reminded them to "recite ancient prose and poems while they are young". However, just as Wang Zengqi is not a modernist, his inheritance of classicism is not conservative. His old poems are not pedantic, but flexible and eclectic: there are standard old-style poems, as well as songs and bamboo branches; There are both quaint vocabulary and popular spoken language in the poem; It not only shows the life interest of intellectuals, but also shows the floating joy of ordinary people. It can be said that Wang Zengqi's old poems have opened up the difference between elegance and vulgarity in ancient and modern times. Judging from his poems and novels, the scholar-bureaucrat spirit is not stronger than the street fireworks spirit. Some people say that he is the last scholar-bureaucrat. In my opinion, he is more like a little old man who likes to record his life among the people.
These characteristics are inseparable from his deep involvement in folk literature and life in the fifties and sixties. Perhaps it is this deep involvement that shaped the Wang Zengqi we saw. Therefore, it is time to go back and clean up the spiritual legacy left by that era, and the poems in the self-portrait may provide some clues and enlightenment for us to find this legacy.