Every April, many people quote the beginning of Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland" on social platforms: "April is the cruelest month" -- 2022 coincides with the 100th anniversary of "The Wasteland".
"The Waste Land" is the representative work of British poet Eliot, whose publication is known as "a milestone in Western modern poetry". In October 1922, The Waste Land was first published in the inaugural issue of Eliot's own quarterly journal, The Standard. At the end of the same year, it was published in a single volume in the United States. Eliot also added more than fifty notes to the single volume.
In April, The Paper reporters interviewed several Chinese poets, many of whom are critics, writers, Scholar, translator, editor of literary journals.
This article is an exclusive interview with The Paper on "The Wasteland" by the poet and young critic Konoha.
【dialogue】
The Paper: When did you first read "The Wasteland" and how did you feel at that time?
Konoha: I should have read it after college. However, before that, I had a little understanding of "The Wasteland" through friends and the media, so I was shocked and had some thoughts after reading "The Wasteland" in its entirety. I even felt that Eliot as a critic was more important, especially to myself at the time. This includes Terry Eagleton's claim that there is a meaningful inconsistency between Eliot's poetry and prose style: "Poetry is mystical, metaphorical and pun intended, while prose is clear and solemn, Have a sublime self-confidence." It may also be that Eliot's literary theory has a revelatory penetrating power.
The Paper: Can you talk more specifically about ideas that are different from shock? When it comes to "The Waste Land", it seems that many people cannot avoid Eliot's other works and literary theories. Did you read Eliot's literary thesis before reading "The Waste Land"?
Konoha: I read the whole book with imagination and expectation. I can't remember the dissatisfaction after the surprise. Now, it may include: Can a long poem maintain the sharpness and potential of the opening? Annotation is also a poem, a style, but is there anything suspicious about poetry that relies on a lot of explanatory self-annotation by the author? The overall structure is new, with the help of myth and everyday life, but can it be more compact and powerful? However, frankly speaking, it is unclear whether the poem was understood or misunderstood at the beginning and now, and whether the "conclusion" of some experts may also limit the imagination of readers...
"The Waste Land" and Literary Theory, I read almost at the same time. When I was in college, some people around me were crazy about reading, and I was also crazy. The process of reading was also a process of discovering my own interests and directions. In retrospect, Eliot as a poet had little direct and concrete influence on me. I have always liked his literary theory and poetic revelation, and reading it at different times will have some different feelings. Such as "modern mind", "existence of the past", "auditory imagination", such as music sense, drama sense, abyss sense, such as wasteland, hollow man, etc. Named, such as the 25-year-old hypothesis and the mysterious platinum silk... Because of the existence of humanistic theories such as him and Brodsky, I even paranoid that a poet who cannot write literary theories or prose to the extreme may also be difficult to become an outstanding poet.
However, the impact is a mystery. Sometimes I feel uninfluenced by someone, but I may have quietly modified it. On the contrary, sometimes you like someone, but you may not really be able to incorporate the essence of it into your own creations.
The Paper: Has your feeling about The Wasteland changed in recent years?
Konoha: I criticized The Wasteland in a 1997 article. There was the brute force of a newborn calf, wanting to express more ideas without writing much poetry. Today, some views have changed, but one thing has not changed, that is, because of my own temperament and interests, I was considering whether there is a "healthy poetics" and "construction poetics" early on, and vaguely hoped to get out of the way. A road out of the "wilderness". Later, I gradually felt that the farther I went, the closer I seemed to be from the "wilderness". However, in recent years, new discoveries have been made, which are related to the views of poets such as Auden: "May I, like them / Consisting of love and dust, / haunted by the same denial and despair /, It can present/a sure flame." Of course, how to present the "affirmative fire" is a lot of thought.
Konoha: Actually, it's not accurate to say "outside", I want to emphasize a certain difference. I was hoping to build something in meter (form), language, and thought, such as strength, clarity, and straight to the heart. Only vague, tentative, and intermittent, though. I am ashamed that the number of poems I have written so far is limited, and the exploration is not deep enough, and I feel that different forces are tearing at me. In the face of the Chained Girl, it is difficult to write out-of-the-box and comforting works; in the face of the epidemic, it is also difficult; in the face of trivial daily life, it also needs to be truly and wisely created...
Life has always taught us. Actively and passively see darkness, grayness, decadence, and also within myself. We are living on a new wasteland. Looking back at this time, we will find that Eliot and others have gathered enormous traditional energy, while rebelling and establishing, and creating art that belongs to his era and even the future. The search for the Holy Grail itself has already pointed to salvation and regeneration, to give one more concrete example. The first sentence of "The Waste Land" "April is the cruelest month" is known to many people, but few people can immediately say the second sentence: "From the dead land / Cultivate the lilac" (also translated "From the dead /The land breeds lilac"), the lilac and the dead, the counterpoint of life and death have been intertwined and ascended throughout the poem, revealing very complex meanings, both reality and irony, making "cruel" full of tension and reverse force. The Sanskrit word at the end of this long poem means "giving, sympathy, restraint", and this restraint is not without consolation. Eliot's "A Lyric Poem" in his early years had revealed the courage to face his fate: "The butterfly that only lived for one day has the same / also experienced eternal experience", and later in "Four Quartets", he said bluntly " The destroyer of time is also the preserver of time."
In other words, only after entering the deepest dark night, the harshest truth, and the greatest division, can a person lift up more light and wind. Because of its own limitations and the limitations of the times, beauty and love have always been difficult, even ruthless, and sharp.
The Paper: Modern poetry, including "The Waste Land", once gave people a feeling of division, fragmentation, darkness, and negation, but Auden's "September 1, 1939" ended with a "positive" flame". What new thinking has this "fire of certainty" made you think about?
Konoha: The title of my article about the scholar and poet Zhang Xinxin is "Affirmative Flame". The main spiritual resources come from Auden, as well as the "Affirmative Dialectics" of several philosophers and writers. Disruption and standing are never simply opposites, and the same is true of negative dialectics and affirmative dialectics. At the same time, they both excite and demand human wisdom, courage and patience. Just like a person criticizing society, this itself is also constructing, because it points out the problem, "exposing the suffering and attracting the attention of healing" (Lu Xun). The reason why the Shanghai epidemic is so tragic at this moment is that only when death or disaster occurs, can people from the grassroots level to the top level passively improve a little bit, and the system itself lacks a mechanism for prediction, warning and self-correction. And some works spring up at this moment, while others will look back and ponder from a certain moment in the future.
In the end, there is also negation in affirmation, and there is criticism, which leads to a new, stronger and clearer affirmation. This affirmation process is by no means cheap praise or obedience to praise, but confrontation, even resistance, rising from the predicament, the abyss, and the dark night, which may require higher aesthetic power and creativity, love and offense.
The Paper: How do you think The Wasteland has influenced you and your generation of Chinese poets?
Konoha : For me, "The Wasteland" is a temptation to pay attention to Eliot's other works; at the same time, I also feel that I have to read modern poems of different styles, as well as new knowledge and new ideas and Chinese classics. Reading will give birth to new ideas, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Rilke, Celan, Stevens, Borges, Dickinson, Sodergrand and so on. At this time, looking back at "The Wasteland", there will be other shocks and thoughts. By the way, it is great that a poet can write "The Waste Land", and it is even greater that he can write "The Four Quartets" at the same time, although the latter may not be as powerful as the former.
The influence of "The Waste Land" can be said to be comprehensive, but there are not many poets who specialize in Eliot and have achieved extraordinary achievements. I make a comparative judgment. In terms of revolutionary, pioneering and influential, "The Waste Land" is a bit like "The Theory of Relativity" in the poetry world. Since then, beauty has changed, language has changed, self has changed, and the universe has changed . After "Flower of Evil", especially "The Wasteland", poets have to rethink what is "the gravitational force of poetry", what is "bending of light", what is modernity, and what is world poetry. At the same time, it is also destined to be the object of some poets' objection or verification, inspiring new creations.
The Paper: You mentioned "Flower of Evil" just now...
Konoha: Yes. My 1997 article put "Flowers of Evil" in one sequence with "The Waste Land" and "Howl." This is a rough statement, but I still think that way today, just that the textures and variations are more multi-dimensional. Eliot himself said that it was from Baudelaire that he "knew for the first time that poetry could be written that way", and "The Waste Land" also quotes a sentence from the preface to "The Flower of Evil".
To add to that comparison. Strictly speaking, there may not be such an absolute figure as Einstein in modern world poetry, but the "Theory of Relativity" may exist. Er and others established together. Interestingly, the rise of modern poetry may have something to do with modern science's new discoveries about time and movement. Eliot is a master at writing time, not to mention the "April" at the beginning of "The Waste Land", followed by the repeated "time has come", and "and the withered stubble/represented of other times". On the Four Walls", and he continued to touch on this theme later, in the "Four Quartets", which is the most dense and mysterious, classics such as "The day I end is the day I begin." He also has excellent writing on "movement". The inner structure of "The Waste Land" in search of the Holy Grail is moving, and ultimately "wind brings rain" is moving, and almost every part is implicitly or explicitly revolving around life, action, and sports. There is a sentence in "Four Quartets" that embodies a kind of "science" and wonder: "Only with the help of form, with the help of patterns, / words or music can achieve / stillness, like a still Chinese vase / perpetually in its stillness Movement." Good: speech strives to reach stillness, and permanently, in stillness, to move.
The Paper: Every April, someone reposts the opening sentence of "The Wasteland" in the circle of friends. How do you see the relationship between this long poem and the present?
Konoha: Eliot's legacy, very complex and subtle. People in different fields and levels may say "April is the cruelest month". This is the fate of the classics, both fortunate and unfortunate. Today, The Wasteland is far away, but it is still very pioneering, it has a reflexive and self-refreshing side, and it continues to flow into the flow of time.
Frankly, we haven't written a new landmark text. Just like novel creation has achieved many aspects and levels, but most of them are still shrouded in "Metamorphosis". A generation has a generation of reality, and a generation has a generation of poetry. Just like Eliot, Yeats, Rilke and others, aspiring contemporary poets have to face their own life experience and emotional abyss first, and then forge poems with the consciousness of the times.
The Paper: When we commemorate Eliot and The Wasteland, what do we need to commemorate?
Konoha: To commemorate is to reflect. Reflect on the text, reflect on the status quo. I see some people, such as Nishikawa, who talked about the translation of "The Waste Land", which is quite interesting. The name "Waste Land" was widely accepted when it was first translated. In fact, the literal translation seems to be more "waste + land" mean. When commemorating this poem, perhaps we can reflect on this first: what can the "waders" bring prosperity and civilization cannot bring? What can ruin and poverty bring that prosperity and civilization cannot bring?
"Humans/Can't stand too much truth", Eliot has always been a creator who cares about truth. "The Wasteland" is not backwards, but pushes the poet to the reality and the unknown. Time is constantly rebelling and restarting. We are still on the extension line of "The Wasteland", and the scarcity and exhaustion at this time are more manifested as endless sensory experience, life fission and technologicalization. For contemporary poets, it is more difficult to live and write: the Holy Grail cannot be found, and the AI is not clear; the wholeness and fragmentation of the world is a test of our insight and shape, and the forging of this body and language. . That is, the wasteland has put on a mask, and the more naked contemporary poets are, the more naked is poetry. A hundred years ago, "The Wasteland" was already a hypertext with hyperlinks, which could do anything and everything, but if today's poetry wants to have its own transcendence, one possibility is to create a hypertext that is symmetric to this era and its algorithms. A poetry that emerges from reality, synthesizes the aesthetics of the Force and the future, as well as the consideration of the self, cultural community and even post-humanity.
"The Waste Land" is the representative work of British poet Eliot, whose publication is known as "a milestone in Western modern poetry". In October 1922, The Waste Land was first published in the inaugural issue of Eliot's own quarterly journal, The Standard. At the end of the same year, it was published in a single volume in the United States. Eliot also added more than fifty notes to the single volume.
In April, The Paper reporters interviewed several Chinese poets, many of whom are critics, writers, Scholar, translator, editor of literary journals.
This article is an exclusive interview with The Paper on "The Wasteland" by the poet and young critic Konoha.
Konoha, on top of Joyce Tower in Dublin, summer 2019
【dialogue】
The Paper: When did you first read "The Wasteland" and how did you feel at that time?
Konoha: I should have read it after college. However, before that, I had a little understanding of "The Wasteland" through friends and the media, so I was shocked and had some thoughts after reading "The Wasteland" in its entirety. I even felt that Eliot as a critic was more important, especially to myself at the time. This includes Terry Eagleton's claim that there is a meaningful inconsistency between Eliot's poetry and prose style: "Poetry is mystical, metaphorical and pun intended, while prose is clear and solemn, Have a sublime self-confidence." It may also be that Eliot's literary theory has a revelatory penetrating power.
The Paper: Can you talk more specifically about ideas that are different from shock? When it comes to "The Waste Land", it seems that many people cannot avoid Eliot's other works and literary theories. Did you read Eliot's literary thesis before reading "The Waste Land"?
Konoha: I read the whole book with imagination and expectation. I can't remember the dissatisfaction after the surprise. Now, it may include: Can a long poem maintain the sharpness and potential of the opening? Annotation is also a poem, a style, but is there anything suspicious about poetry that relies on a lot of explanatory self-annotation by the author? The overall structure is new, with the help of myth and everyday life, but can it be more compact and powerful? However, frankly speaking, it is unclear whether the poem was understood or misunderstood at the beginning and now, and whether the "conclusion" of some experts may also limit the imagination of readers...
"The Waste Land" and Literary Theory, I read almost at the same time. When I was in college, some people around me were crazy about reading, and I was also crazy. The process of reading was also a process of discovering my own interests and directions. In retrospect, Eliot as a poet had little direct and concrete influence on me. I have always liked his literary theory and poetic revelation, and reading it at different times will have some different feelings. Such as "modern mind", "existence of the past", "auditory imagination", such as music sense, drama sense, abyss sense, such as wasteland, hollow man, etc. Named, such as the 25-year-old hypothesis and the mysterious platinum silk... Because of the existence of humanistic theories such as him and Brodsky, I even paranoid that a poet who cannot write literary theories or prose to the extreme may also be difficult to become an outstanding poet.
However, the impact is a mystery. Sometimes I feel uninfluenced by someone, but I may have quietly modified it. On the contrary, sometimes you like someone, but you may not really be able to incorporate the essence of it into your own creations.
The Paper: Has your feeling about The Wasteland changed in recent years?
Konoha: I criticized The Wasteland in a 1997 article. There was the brute force of a newborn calf, wanting to express more ideas without writing much poetry. Today, some views have changed, but one thing has not changed, that is, because of my own temperament and interests, I was considering whether there is a "healthy poetics" and "construction poetics" early on, and vaguely hoped to get out of the way. A road out of the "wilderness". Later, I gradually felt that the farther I went, the closer I seemed to be from the "wilderness". However, in recent years, new discoveries have been made, which are related to the views of poets such as Auden: "May I, like them / Consisting of love and dust, / haunted by the same denial and despair /, It can present/a sure flame." Of course, how to present the "affirmative fire" is a lot of thought.
Eliot's Anthology
The Paper: Why do you say "poetics of health" and "poetics of construction" are outside the "wilderness"? What later experiences made you feel that the farther you went, the closer it seemed to the "waste"?Konoha: Actually, it's not accurate to say "outside", I want to emphasize a certain difference. I was hoping to build something in meter (form), language, and thought, such as strength, clarity, and straight to the heart. Only vague, tentative, and intermittent, though. I am ashamed that the number of poems I have written so far is limited, and the exploration is not deep enough, and I feel that different forces are tearing at me. In the face of the Chained Girl, it is difficult to write out-of-the-box and comforting works; in the face of the epidemic, it is also difficult; in the face of trivial daily life, it also needs to be truly and wisely created...
Life has always taught us. Actively and passively see darkness, grayness, decadence, and also within myself. We are living on a new wasteland. Looking back at this time, we will find that Eliot and others have gathered enormous traditional energy, while rebelling and establishing, and creating art that belongs to his era and even the future. The search for the Holy Grail itself has already pointed to salvation and regeneration, to give one more concrete example. The first sentence of "The Waste Land" "April is the cruelest month" is known to many people, but few people can immediately say the second sentence: "From the dead land / Cultivate the lilac" (also translated "From the dead /The land breeds lilac"), the lilac and the dead, the counterpoint of life and death have been intertwined and ascended throughout the poem, revealing very complex meanings, both reality and irony, making "cruel" full of tension and reverse force. The Sanskrit word at the end of this long poem means "giving, sympathy, restraint", and this restraint is not without consolation. Eliot's "A Lyric Poem" in his early years had revealed the courage to face his fate: "The butterfly that only lived for one day has the same / also experienced eternal experience", and later in "Four Quartets", he said bluntly " The destroyer of time is also the preserver of time."
In other words, only after entering the deepest dark night, the harshest truth, and the greatest division, can a person lift up more light and wind. Because of its own limitations and the limitations of the times, beauty and love have always been difficult, even ruthless, and sharp.
The Paper: Modern poetry, including "The Waste Land", once gave people a feeling of division, fragmentation, darkness, and negation, but Auden's "September 1, 1939" ended with a "positive" flame". What new thinking has this "fire of certainty" made you think about?
Konoha: The title of my article about the scholar and poet Zhang Xinxin is "Affirmative Flame". The main spiritual resources come from Auden, as well as the "Affirmative Dialectics" of several philosophers and writers. Disruption and standing are never simply opposites, and the same is true of negative dialectics and affirmative dialectics. At the same time, they both excite and demand human wisdom, courage and patience. Just like a person criticizing society, this itself is also constructing, because it points out the problem, "exposing the suffering and attracting the attention of healing" (Lu Xun). The reason why the Shanghai epidemic is so tragic at this moment is that only when death or disaster occurs, can people from the grassroots level to the top level passively improve a little bit, and the system itself lacks a mechanism for prediction, warning and self-correction. And some works spring up at this moment, while others will look back and ponder from a certain moment in the future.
In the end, there is also negation in affirmation, and there is criticism, which leads to a new, stronger and clearer affirmation. This affirmation process is by no means cheap praise or obedience to praise, but confrontation, even resistance, rising from the predicament, the abyss, and the dark night, which may require higher aesthetic power and creativity, love and offense.
Elliott People Visual Infographic
The Paper: How do you think The Wasteland has influenced you and your generation of Chinese poets?
Konoha : For me, "The Wasteland" is a temptation to pay attention to Eliot's other works; at the same time, I also feel that I have to read modern poems of different styles, as well as new knowledge and new ideas and Chinese classics. Reading will give birth to new ideas, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Rilke, Celan, Stevens, Borges, Dickinson, Sodergrand and so on. At this time, looking back at "The Wasteland", there will be other shocks and thoughts. By the way, it is great that a poet can write "The Waste Land", and it is even greater that he can write "The Four Quartets" at the same time, although the latter may not be as powerful as the former.
The influence of "The Waste Land" can be said to be comprehensive, but there are not many poets who specialize in Eliot and have achieved extraordinary achievements. I make a comparative judgment. In terms of revolutionary, pioneering and influential, "The Waste Land" is a bit like "The Theory of Relativity" in the poetry world. Since then, beauty has changed, language has changed, self has changed, and the universe has changed . After "Flower of Evil", especially "The Wasteland", poets have to rethink what is "the gravitational force of poetry", what is "bending of light", what is modernity, and what is world poetry. At the same time, it is also destined to be the object of some poets' objection or verification, inspiring new creations.
The Paper: You mentioned "Flower of Evil" just now...
Konoha: Yes. My 1997 article put "Flowers of Evil" in one sequence with "The Waste Land" and "Howl." This is a rough statement, but I still think that way today, just that the textures and variations are more multi-dimensional. Eliot himself said that it was from Baudelaire that he "knew for the first time that poetry could be written that way", and "The Waste Land" also quotes a sentence from the preface to "The Flower of Evil".
To add to that comparison. Strictly speaking, there may not be such an absolute figure as Einstein in modern world poetry, but the "Theory of Relativity" may exist. Er and others established together. Interestingly, the rise of modern poetry may have something to do with modern science's new discoveries about time and movement. Eliot is a master at writing time, not to mention the "April" at the beginning of "The Waste Land", followed by the repeated "time has come", and "and the withered stubble/represented of other times". On the Four Walls", and he continued to touch on this theme later, in the "Four Quartets", which is the most dense and mysterious, classics such as "The day I end is the day I begin." He also has excellent writing on "movement". The inner structure of "The Waste Land" in search of the Holy Grail is moving, and ultimately "wind brings rain" is moving, and almost every part is implicitly or explicitly revolving around life, action, and sports. There is a sentence in "Four Quartets" that embodies a kind of "science" and wonder: "Only with the help of form, with the help of patterns, / words or music can achieve / stillness, like a still Chinese vase / perpetually in its stillness Movement." Good: speech strives to reach stillness, and permanently, in stillness, to move.
The Paper: Every April, someone reposts the opening sentence of "The Wasteland" in the circle of friends. How do you see the relationship between this long poem and the present?
Konoha: Eliot's legacy, very complex and subtle. People in different fields and levels may say "April is the cruelest month". This is the fate of the classics, both fortunate and unfortunate. Today, The Wasteland is far away, but it is still very pioneering, it has a reflexive and self-refreshing side, and it continues to flow into the flow of time.
Frankly, we haven't written a new landmark text. Just like novel creation has achieved many aspects and levels, but most of them are still shrouded in "Metamorphosis". A generation has a generation of reality, and a generation has a generation of poetry. Just like Eliot, Yeats, Rilke and others, aspiring contemporary poets have to face their own life experience and emotional abyss first, and then forge poems with the consciousness of the times.
The Paper: When we commemorate Eliot and The Wasteland, what do we need to commemorate?
Konoha: To commemorate is to reflect. Reflect on the text, reflect on the status quo. I see some people, such as Nishikawa, who talked about the translation of "The Waste Land", which is quite interesting. The name "Waste Land" was widely accepted when it was first translated. In fact, the literal translation seems to be more "waste + land" mean. When commemorating this poem, perhaps we can reflect on this first: what can the "waders" bring prosperity and civilization cannot bring? What can ruin and poverty bring that prosperity and civilization cannot bring?
"Humans/Can't stand too much truth", Eliot has always been a creator who cares about truth. "The Wasteland" is not backwards, but pushes the poet to the reality and the unknown. Time is constantly rebelling and restarting. We are still on the extension line of "The Wasteland", and the scarcity and exhaustion at this time are more manifested as endless sensory experience, life fission and technologicalization. For contemporary poets, it is more difficult to live and write: the Holy Grail cannot be found, and the AI is not clear; the wholeness and fragmentation of the world is a test of our insight and shape, and the forging of this body and language. . That is, the wasteland has put on a mask, and the more naked contemporary poets are, the more naked is poetry. A hundred years ago, "The Wasteland" was already a hypertext with hyperlinks, which could do anything and everything, but if today's poetry wants to have its own transcendence, one possibility is to create a hypertext that is symmetric to this era and its algorithms. A poetry that emerges from reality, synthesizes the aesthetics of the Force and the future, as well as the consideration of the self, cultural community and even post-humanity.
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