Today, I will choose a lecture for you to take you in a different way and see how to understand ancient poetry by referring to foreign languages.
1
What exactly does "heaven and earth" mean?
The first step to understand poetry should be to understand the characteristics of language, and the easiest way to understand the characteristics of language is to learn a foreign language first.
This has to mention a famous saying by robert lee Frost, an American poet laureate: "The so-called poem is what is lost after translation."
Although frost's famous saying is still controversial in textual research, it shows an essence of poetry anyway:
The aesthetic feeling of poetry comes from rhetorical art, and different languages have developed different rhetorical devices, which makes poetry translation often equal to the translator's re-creation.
If you are patient, you can try to translate one or two classical poems into English, and then one or two English metrical poems into Chinese, and experience for yourself what you have gained and lost in the process of translation.
The specific approach is usually: first, translate classical poems into modern Chinese, and then translate them from modern Chinese into English.
But you will find that even the first half of the work is often difficult to complete, because ancient Chinese and modern Chinese are not the same language.
We can take a look at a famous sentence by Li Yu, the late ruler of the Southern Tang Dynasty: "Flowing water and falling flowers in spring are heaven and earth."
Li Yu's ci style is famous for its clearness, neither lettering nor allusions, but even so, no one can tell what the word "heaven and earth" means: does it mean heaven and earth, or does it mean the difference between today and the past? Of course, there are other explanations. These four words are unclear and unclear, but they are also confusing.
Grammatically speaking, "Tian" is a nominal compound word, which can be used as a noun, while "person" is also a noun. The two nouns are juxtaposed in one place and cannot form a smooth sentence with complete grammatical structure.
The reader must complete the grammatical structure in his mind in order to understand it, but how to complete it depends on the reader's mind, whether to add a "de" between "heaven" and "earth" or to make it more complicated and make it "different from ancient times, such as heaven and earth".
If it is translated into English again, it will be literally translated into paradise earth, or more quaint, paradise time, which is completely inexplicable nonsense. Therefore, it is necessary to supplement the complete subject-predicate structure, express tenses and simple and plural numbers, and add definite articles or indefinite articles.
In this way, the meaning of the sentence will inevitably become accurate and will not bring ambiguity, but the problem is that without ambiguity, the original poetry will disappear.
There are many similar examples, and I choose two sentences with clear meanings: the famous humanistic sentence in the late Tang Dynasty, "The cock crows in Maodian, and there are no other words except six nouns in ten words."
There is also Lu You's famous sentence "The boat snows at night, and the autumn wind is scattered". Fourteen words are also filled with six nouns, and there is no "subject-predicate-object complement" at all. Any literal translation is bound to be a confusing sentence.
This is a major feature of ancient Chinese. In poetry, a noun is an image, and the juxtaposition of several images constitutes a freehand brushwork picture. As for how the images are put together, which is more important and what kind of emotions they point to. ...
In all these cases, the vaguer the poet's language, the greater the reader's imagination.
How vague should the language be, and how much imagination should be left for others? There is a subtle and appropriate limit to test the poet's means. On the reader's side, the so-called sensitivity to the beauty of poetry also depends on the subtle discretion in the imagination space.
To give a simple example, He Zhu, a poet in the Northern Song Dynasty, famously said, "How much leisure is there? A stream of smoke is full of wind, and plums are raining in yellow. "
The language is simple. First, ask a question, ask how many leisure worries there are, and then use a metaphor to answer, leisure worries are as much as Sichuan smoke, as much as city wind, as much as plum blossom rain.
Using three images to describe the same thing is called metaphor in rhetoric. Metaphor is not common, so once it is used wisely, it is praised by people. It is because of this metaphor that Zhu He got the nickname "He Meizi". However, is this understanding really correct?
2
The uncertainty of ancient Chinese makes poetry intriguing.
The above understanding is right or wrong, because the three images of "Yichuan Smoke" can be both metaphor and realism. If we only understand them as metaphors, we will understand them too rigidly.
"like ... is like ... and like" is not in the original text, but the reader's brain fills it. If you don't do this kind of brain tonic, you can use "a stream of smoke, catkins in the city, and plum blossoms in the yellow rain" as a way of writing, which is a common routine in poetry.
The so-called knot feelings with scenery means that when the feelings are expressed to a certain extent, the poem should be over. At this time, it happened that the whole poem ended with a seemingly unemotional scenery description.
For example, Yuan Zhen heard that his good friend Bai Juyi was demoted from office, so he wrote a poem with only four sentences: The residual lamp has no flame shadow. I heard that you were demoted to Jiujiang tonight. Sitting up in a dying illness, the dark wind blew the rain into the cold window.
The first two sentences are about hearing the bad news one night, and the third sentence expresses strong feelings, saying that although he was critically ill, he sat up shocked by the news. What happens when you sit up? From the point of view of human nature, you can cry or scold, in short, your mood will go further, but Yuan Zhen didn't write it like this, just saying "the dark wind blows the rain and hits the cold window", and that's the end.
The so-called "black wind blows rain and hits the cold window" is not only the real scenery Yuan Zhen saw after sitting up, but also a portrayal of his mood and his feelings about the current situation. As for the mood and present situation, I don't know, let you experience it from the atmosphere of the scenery. How deep you can appreciate it depends on your own feelings.
Then He Zhu's sentence can also be understood in this way. "How much leisure do you have?" The question was asked, but it was not answered. Then, I wrote a paragraph describing the scenery of "a stream of smoke, a city full of wind and plum yellow rain". Please feel the author's feelings from these scenery.
What kind of understanding path is right, metaphor or "bonding feelings with scenery"
The answer is: both are true, and both are true at the same time.
If you have a strong sense of logic, you may ask: "The three images of' Yichuan Tobacco' are either metaphors or real scenery, which is definitely not the case."
The fuzziness of ancient Chinese just shows its charm here, and vague language should be understood vaguely. In the vague understanding, either one or the other becomes a * * * relationship full of uncertainty, and it is at arm's length with the other party.
No matter from the author's point of view or the reader's point of view, the feeling of poetry can be regarded as a kind of "controllable out of control", just like the drift of a racing driver.
It is this sense of uncertainty that makes poetry particularly intriguing. Many people can understand it, but few can explain it. It is precisely because there are few people who can explain that translation becomes more difficult.
three
English Poetry and Translation Problems
If we try to translate English poems into Chinese, we will also encounter this kind of trouble.
Shakespeare's dramatic lines are mostly written in plain poetry, which is a poetic genre between prose and poetry. But even such poems often leave translators with no choice but to re-create.
Look at Hamlet, which we are most familiar with. The heroine O 'Filja thinks Hamlet is crazy. She has a line of self-pity: Ah, I'm so unlucky, I saw what I saw, I saw what I saw.
You might as well experience the feeling of duality in English. The literal translation will be like this: "Ah, sadness is me, seeing what I see, seeing what I see." Of course, it doesn't sound like Chinese sentences.
So Zhu Shenghao's translation is: "Oh, I am so bitter. Who expected that the prosperity of the past has become the soil of the present! " The two nouns "prosperity", "dirt" and the verb "variation" in the translation are all added by the translator. Although the meaning has become clear and fluent, it is obviously expressing the English meaning in China's way, which also makes the original implication straightforward and the original complexity simple.
We can also refer to Liang Shiqiu's translation: "Ah, I am so blessed. If you see what you saw before, you must look at what you see now. " This translation is more in line with the original text, but on the one hand, China people will feel uncomfortable; on the other hand, because so many words such as "once upon a time", "now", "later" and "these" are added, the tense in the original text is barely expressed, which makes the original set of concise and powerful dialogues look bloated.
The rhetorical feature of Shakespeare's original works is that it forms duality with time. Although duality is the most common figure of speech in ancient Chinese and the most qualified figure of speech in other languages, we still can't translate Shakespeare's antithetical sentences without damaging poetry.
In any language, poetry is the most exquisite language form, which will bring the potential of language into full play.