Returning to the countryside [4] On the ideological content of Tao Yuanming's poems

Author: Tao Yuanming

Gui Tian Yuan lives in Si Qi.

Long-term tourism mountain ze, wild forest entertainment.

Try to take your son and nephew and put them in the wild market.

Wandering between hills and ridges, I don't want to live in the past.

There are remnants of well stoves and mulberry leaves.

Excuse me, what is this person like?

The wage earners told me that there was no death.

I've really lived in a different place all my life.

Life seems illusory, and eventually it will be empty.

To annotate ...

① Go: Leave. You: You are an official. It's been a long time since I left Yamazawa to be an official.

2 Langmang: bohemian. Today, there is endless fun in the wild.

3 try: temporarily. Hazelnut: An overgrown plant. Ruins: Ruins. Let's take our son and nephew, push away the overgrown vegetation and walk in the ruins.

Four hills: graves. Yiyi: The meaning of missing. These two sentences mean wandering between graves and thinking about the places where people lived in the past.

⑤ (wū): daub. These two sentences mean that there are traces of well stoves, as well as dead branches of mulberry and bamboo.

This person: The people here refer to people who have lived in the ruins. Ru Yan: Where to?

⑦ Nothing (mǐ): Death. One is "death".

Me: Twenty years is a lifetime. Chaoshi: a place where city officials live together. This kind of place has been watched by everyone, but now it has changed, so it is called "another city". This is an idiom at that time. It is true that this sentence and the next sentence mean "change a city in one's life"

9 illusion: illusion refers to impermanence of life. The meaning of this sentence and the next sentence is that life is like a dream of change, and there should be nothing in the end. [2]

translate

It has been a long time since I left the mountains and rivers, and I am comfortably addicted to the wilderness.

Let's take our son and nephew for a walk in the bushes of the waste market.

Wandering between graves, you can vaguely distinguish your former residence.

There are traces of wells and stoves, and dead and rotting plants of mulberry and bamboo still exist.

Go up and ask the woodcutter, "Where did the residents move in the past?"

The woodcutter said to me, "All are dead, and there is nothing left."

"Twenty years has changed the face of the market", indeed.

Life is like an illusory change, which will eventually disappear.

Make an appreciative comment

In 406 AD (the second year of the Eastern Jin Dynasty), that is, the year after Tao Yuanming was appointed by Peng to abandon his official position and retire to seclusion, people wrote five famous sentences of "Returning to the Garden", when the poet was forty-two years old. This poem is the fourth.

Tao Yuanming, who has only been a magistrate of Pengze County for more than 80 days, can't stand the dirty and secular shackles of officialdom. He resolutely resigned and retired, devoted himself to farming and never became an official again. The relaxed feeling of leaving the official career, the happy feeling of returning to nature, the quiet countryside, the simple communication and the hard work experience make this group of poems become outstanding pastoral poems, which also embodies Tao Yuanming's beautiful sentiment of pursuing freedom, being content with poverty, living in seclusion in Shan Ye, being honest and upright, being far away from officialdom and being detached from the secular world. [3]

The author resolutely abandoned his post and returned to the field, and in the third poem of this group, "Returning to the Garden and Planting Beans in Nanshan", he expressed his determination to return to nature and seek the return of humanity at the expense of hard work and revealing his clothes. The first four sentences of this fourth poem are about a ramble with sons and nephews after returning home. The first sentence, "Traveling in the mountains", is a review of "falling into the dust net by mistake" and "living in a cage for a long time" written in the first poem of this group, "Returning to the Garden and Living in a Few Folk Rhymes". The second sentence, "Wandering in the wild forest", is the author's natural joy after leaving the dust net, returning to the old forest, flying out of the cage and returning to the old forest. The word "wild" in this sentence means wild, and the writer is in a state of physical and mental freedom at this time; It seems inappropriate to interpret this word as "describing the vastness of the forest fields" in the Collection of Tao Yuanming collated by Qi. The word "entertainment" in the sentence expresses the author's recognition and appreciation of nature. As can be seen from the third poem, after the author returned to the countryside, he not only had the entertainment of the Woods, but also had the family happiness of traveling with his sons and nephews. From the description of the fourth sentence, we can see that it is full of interest, and the word "wild city" at the end of the sentence leads to what we see, ask and feel.

Most of Tao's poems are direct and straightforward, and they see deep meaning and curiosity in the plain. This poem is also a straightforward work. The fifth to eighth sentences of the poem, "Wandering between hills and ridges, living in the past, there are remnants of well-organized stoves and plants with mulberry and bamboo", are the second paragraph of the whole poem, and after the last sentence of the first paragraph, it is written as "Cloth Yellow Market". These four poems are similar to the first one, "Returning to the Garden, with few but no common rhyme". Dogs barking in the deep alley and mulberry crowing at the top of the chicken is a vibrant pastoral picture, which is the contrast between life and death, today and the past. The author, who is indifferent and affectionate, understands life and loves life, has his own deep feelings and infinite compassion in the face of life and death in this world and the present and past of time. It is conceivable that he wandered between the mountains and ridges, so attached to his former residence, and so fond of observing and describing the remaining "well stoves" and "mulberry bamboos".

The ninth to twelfth sentences are the third paragraph of this poem. Asked the author of the first two sentences; The last two sentences were answered by the person who wrote the salary. The question "What is this person like?" And the answer "nothing after death" is extremely simple. Simple questions contain the author's infinite dismay at the desolate scene and infinite concern for the people who originally lived here; The simple answer truthfully tells a cruel fact, and behind it is a life problem that puzzles countless philosophers, thinks and seeks answers from all angles.

The thirteenth to sixteenth sentences of the poem, "I have been in different cities all my life, and this sentence is true." Life seems illusory, but in the end it is empty. "This is the last paragraph, and it is also the feeling of the screenwriter after listening to the completion of the capital. These four poems are an inescapable thing and the law of nature, that is, if you fish when you are exhausted, there will be decline, and life is death. This poem seems dull, but it contains huge emotional capacity and profound philosophical significance; This is the so-called thick accumulation and thin hair, and it is also difficult for Tao poetry to reach. As Zhu Guangqian said in the thirteenth chapter of On Poetry, Tao Yuanming's Emotional Life and Some Philosophies, "Confucianism and Buddhism spent a lot of pen and ink to clarify it, but their profound spirit was advanced and hit the nail on the head." What readers understand here is not a theory, but a taste, a mind and a specific personality. "When reading Tao's poems, we should see his inner state, the light of wisdom, and his understanding of the world and life.

Some appreciation articles think that the author's trip is to visit an old friend, and it is sad to hear that his old friend "died of illness." However, judging from the whole poem, there is not a word in the poem that recalls friendship and old trips, so it seems unnecessary to speculate. Moreover, that explanation also narrows the connotation of this poem. Wang Guowei once said that the poet's view of things is "from ancient times to the present", not "from one person to one thing" (deleted from the human world), but "the nature of all mankind" (A Dream of Red Mansions Review). The meaning of this poem is just as Wang Guowei said. From the settlement of human beings in previous lives, from the sadness aroused by the words of the tiller to the philosophy grasped by the author, it has surpassed a person, not personally and accidentally, but a universal and inevitable human tragedy.