These ghostly faces in the crowd;
Petals on wet black branches.
(translated by Zhao Jielu)
Among American Imagist poets, ezra pound has the strongest interest in oriental culture, the deepest research and the most introduction. He not only translated and rewritten many China classical poems, but also wrote some short poems in the form of Japanese haiku. These poems with oriental characteristics, with their "fresh breath of images and techniques", have injected great vitality into the theory and creation of American imagist poetry and greatly changed the American poetry world. In the Subway Station is Pound's most representative haiku poem, and it is also recognized as the representative work of Imagist poetry.
There are only two lines in the whole poem, but it has gone through a long and interesting brewing process. One day, Pound got out of the subway car near Concorde Street in Paris. In the dim light of the station, he suddenly found beautiful and moving female faces flashing in the dark crowd, just like some soft white petals dancing in the breeze and drizzle. The aesthetic experience of this moment left a deep impression on the poet's mind. The poet spent the whole day thinking about words that could correspond to his happy mood at that time. Until that night, when Pound returned to his apartment at 92 Leonard Street, he "suddenly found an expression" ... not in words, but in mottled colors. ..... In that case, color is the most basic pigment, and I think that is the appropriate equivalent means that I realized for the first time. However, Pound is a poet after all, and he can still express his feelings through words. That night, he wrote a 30-line poem and immediately ruined it, thinking that it was only a work of second intensity. Half a year later, Pound reduced the poem to fifteen lines, but it was still not tasteful enough and did not reach the emotional intensity of his first experience. A year later, Pound wrote the haiku poem we are reading now. It is said that this is also due to an interesting story told by his French-English friend Victor pilar: once, pilar and a Japanese naval officer were walking in the streets of London on a snowy day when they suddenly found a string of paw prints left by kittens running through the snow. Japanese officers immediately made a haiku poem based on this scene:
"The footprints of kittens in the snow;
Plums are blooming. "
This casual sketch may not be a good poem to others, but it greatly inspired Pound and aroused his keen interest in haiku. Then he read several other haiku poems with great interest, and finally found that the mystery of haiku lies in the superposition of images. "I think it is very helpful to express my feelings in the subway station." So he imitated the form of haiku and wrote his wonderful feelings at that moment in the subway station. This poem fully embodies Pound's aesthetic orientation of imagism, that is, "image itself is language and not regarded as decoration". In the process of repeated revisions, the poet deleted all the superfluous words, directly stimulated the readers' imagination with images, and let the readers combine the meanings aroused by these imaginations to make the poem concise and ethereal. Although the "face" in the first line and the "petal" in the second line are two completely different images, once they are "superimposed", they form a metaphor that complements each other. Finally, these two images merge into one in the reader's mind and become a new image complex. In this way, the limited, perceptual and concrete image has infinite, rational and abstract connotation. The poet vividly and accurately reproduces the aesthetic experience of the moment he stepped out of the subway car through this technique of image superposition: on a gloomy rainy day, the crowd on the subway station was bustling, and a beautiful face of Zhang Guanghui suddenly flashed out of the dark crowd. However, their appearance was only a flash of illusion, and they soon disappeared in the dim background. This reminds the poet of the petals that fell on the dark and wet branches in the wind and rain. Won't they wither and die soon? The poet seems to be lamenting the beautiful brevity of modern urban life.
(Zhao Jielu)