Every April, many people quote the beginning of Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland" on social platforms: "April is the cruelest month" -- 2022 happens to be the 100th anniversary of the publication 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 Hu Sang, a poet and assistant professor of the Chinese Department of Tongji University.
The Paper : How did The Wasteland, a Western classic, come to China?
Hu Sang: "The Wasteland" was introduced to China not long after it was published. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Chinese poets were influenced by reading the English version. Zhao Luorui's teacher Ye Gongchao and others first introduced Eliot's poetics. In China at that time, even the so-called "Shockwave of the Wasteland" was formed. The "wilderness consciousness" has penetrated into the writings of many Chinese poets, such as Wen Yiduo's "Desolate Village", Bian Zhilin's "Spring City", and He Qifang's "Spring City". Chinese poets see the predicament of the modern world, the disease of modernity, and the ethical situation of the disintegration of modern people from the image of the "wilderness". In particular, Zhao Luorui, at the invitation of Dai Wangshu, translated "The Wasteland" and published it in the New Poetry Society in 1937, which once again promoted the influence of this long poem. Zhao Luorui's translation absorbed the linguistic achievements of Chinese poetry in the 1930s. Her husband was Chen Mengjia, a poet of the Crescent School, and she inherited the family study of her father, Zhao Zichen, a theologian, and was very familiar with the language of the Bible, especially the language of the Union Version. These make the language of the translation of "The Waste Land" rich, smooth and precise. This is an excellent translation. This poem is of great importance to the poets of the Nine-leaf Poetry School. For them, The Waste Land is a model of depersonalized, intellectual writing.
The Paper : What happened to "The Wasteland" in China since then?
Hussan: After 1949, Eliot, like many Western poets, was thrown into the cold palace. In 1960, Yuan Kejia even wrote an article calling Eliot "the imperial clerk of the British and American imperialists".
Later, Mu Dan re-translated it in the 1970s, but it was not published until 1985, and it was included in "Anthology of Modern British Poetry". Qiu Xiaolong (1983), Ye Weilian (1983), Zhao Yiheng (1985), Du Ruozhou (1985), Tang Yongkuan (1994), etc. have translated many versions. The "wilderness consciousness" in "The Wasteland" slowly faded away, and the neoclassical tendency was revealed. The modern activation of classic texts and allusions has stimulated many Chinese poets to look for modernity in Chinese traditions. A typical example is Yang Lian's "Nuo Rilang". In fact, traces of "The Wasteland" can also be seen in Hai Zi's long poems.
By the 1990s, Chinese poetry was no longer satisfied with grand narratives, whether verbal or spiritual. Routineity and narrative become the direction of change. At this time, the symbolic writing of daily life and the narrative treatment of life fragments in "The Wasteland" inspired many poets such as Wang Jiaxin and Xiao Kaiyu. In Xiao Kaiyu's long poem "Homage to Du Fu" (1996), we can see the refinement of fragments of contemporary daily life in "The Wasteland".
The Paper: When did you first read "The Wasteland" and how did you feel at the time?
Hu Sang : In 1997, I read a book of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning poets, "The Brightest and the Darkest," edited by Wang Jiaxin and Shen Rui. It contains some of Eliot's poems. It's just that because "The Wasteland" is too famous, there is no income. The first time I read The Wasteland in its entirety was in 2000, when I came to Xi'an to study at university. In the bookstore, I found a selection of Zhao Luorui's translations, "The Wasteland". Surprisingly, in the preface, I found that Zhao Luorui was a fellow from the same town as me. She was born on May 9, 1912 at No. 1, Siping Road, Guzhen, Xinshi, Deqing County, Zhejiang Province. At that time, she was a rice shop, and the rice shop had gradually declined in the hands of her grandfather. Her house is right next to Pingqiao where I grew up eating wontons. However, I later learned that in 1992, the Zhao family's three-entry courtyard was demolished and rebuilt into a very contemporary brick house by Zhao Luorui's cousin.
After reading "The Wasteland" at that time, due to the lack of knowledge reserves, I was full of doubts about it. However, the darkness, desolation, desire and mess inside left a deep impression on me, especially from the legend of the Holy Grail and the King of Fish in The Golden Bough. Later, in order to study "The Wasteland" and other poems, I specially collected a lot of Eliot's English poems from the Internet and printed them into a book of Eliot's poems. At that time, the printing fee was very expensive. It was one yuan per page, which was the price 22 years ago. After studying the English version for a long time, I gradually understood this long poem better. Its ability to name eras and the richness of its perception of the contemporary world is astonishing. However, due to my personal writing preferences, I am a little dissatisfied with its overly intellectualized and redundant allusions. I didn't devote myself to it, and I didn't learn much skills.
The Paper: Afterwards, did your reading of "The Wasteland" change?
Hu Sang : Indeed, when I returned to Jiangnan from Xi'an. I am more touched by some of the fragments written by Eliot, especially the phrase "I read books most of the night, and I go to the South in winter." ". I especially like Zhao Luorui's translations, and many sentence patterns and intonations will inadvertently permeate into his own poems. For example, Wagner's sentence "The sea is desolate and empty" was activated by him, and Dante's sentence "I didn't expect death to destroy so many people", I deeply felt it and imitated it secretly.
I have been teaching at the university all these years, and it never occurred to me to explain this poem to my students. However, with the continuous study of the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, etc., in fact, I can better understand the magic of the allusions in the poems, and I can better understand the life force nourished by the Western tradition. So I feel more and more that he has a strong creativity and a deep understanding of modern life. These are beyond our poetry. Over the years, I have become more and more aware of Eliot's greatness and the need to reread it again and again.
The Paper : Why didn't you think about explaining this poem to students?
Hussan: I might find it too difficult. Apart from telling at an intellectual level, I don't quite grasp the path to tell this poem. It's like I didn't cover Ulysses in class, even though I've always thought it was the greatest novel of the 20th century. I have always been studying. But I always feel that I am not ready to explain it to the students.
Teaching The Wasteland in a classroom was a huge challenge. For such a rich poem, it would be extremely cumbersome to read carefully. And I like to give lectures by perusal the most. I think undergraduates most need a kind of close reading ability, exercise the ability to understand the work between the lines - sensibility, cognition and imagination.
Also, Eliot himself was an excellent critic. But in my reading vision, the more classic ones, except Helen Gardner's "The Art of Eliot", the criticism and interpretation of Eliot in Western academic circles are not rich. Teaching in a university class requires a knowledge base. Without the interpretation basis of first-class Western scholars and critics, I dare not interpret it without authorization. The reason why I dare to talk to my students about The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's tragedies is because I can draw on a large number of Western classics of Dante and Shakespeare to expound. After all, we have a contextual gap with Western literature. I believe more in the accuracy of the elaboration of scholars and critics within their context.
Of course, another important reason may be that Eliot annotated the poem too much, which limited the way the reader could read it. To read it, there is no joy in reading Dante and Shakespeare, which is constantly making new discoveries.
Hussan : Not too much. For my friends and I, The Waste Land is like a gigantic peak, standing there silently. We may climb silently alone, and it is not suitable for a group to climb together. In fact, among the poets we have talked about in the past 20 years, Eliot's poems are often absent. We may often talk about his literary theories, especially his Tradition and Personal Talent, or his expositions of Dante, Shakespeare, metaphysical poets. Due to Eliot's conservative tendencies, the "modernity" of his poems, although characteristic, is not particularly pronounced. Nor is the verbal and emotional passion of his poetry strong. So, in terms of foreign poetry, we are probably talking about poets like Brodsky, Heaney, Walcott, Bishop, Celan, Milosz.
The Paper: How do you think The Wasteland has influenced you and your generation of Chinese poets?
Hu Sang : At the beginning, I didn't quite understand the grand naming ability, the ability to refine experience, and the complex insight into contemporary life in "The Wasteland". It takes too much wisdom, or a mature mind, to understand it.
Eliot has little influence on the specific writing of the poets of my generation, because what we initially entered into the poetic world was to rebel against the grand narrative, to establish the immediacy and physicality of specific life, and the authenticity of personal experience. Sex is intensely desired. Eliot, on the other hand, advocated the importance of tradition and history and demanded that the poet be "depersonalized". In this respect, in fact, his literary theory has a greater impact on me. At that time, I was in the class of Mr. Chen Yue when I was an undergraduate, and I was deeply inspired by listening to him explain Eliot's "Tradition and Personal Talent". Since then, I have continued to re-read this article. I also frequently quote Eliot in my own critical writing. Eliot had a profound influence on me when it came to the poet's reconnection with tradition. My poetry also begins to reprocess the appropriation and activation of certain elements of Chinese classical poetry. For example, when I wrote the series of ancient poets, "Meng Jiao: Chebu", "Zhao Mengfu: Allegorical Form", "Jiang Kui: Self-Reliance", "Wu Wenying: Xu Breaking", "Ye Xiaoluan", etc., I always thought of Eliot's teachings.
After I came to Shanghai, I gradually stopped caring about how to build the writing style of a generation, but more concerned about the construction of individual voices and the future of Chinese poetry. At this time, Eliot's ability to name the experience of the times, to cite and update the historical memory and textual experience greatly inspired me. I started with the poem "The Book of Disturbance", and the "wilderness consciousness" in the poem was actually strengthened. Whenever I write about Shanghai, I always think of London as the "disembodied city" in Eliot's poems. But how to understand the contemporary nature of Shanghai is still very difficult. In recent years, I have been concerned about the influence of digital media on contemporary people, and I have been trying to name the experience of this city, trying to write poems such as "The Age of Inner Volume", "Empty City" and other poems. It's a tribute to The Wasteland.
Of course, our generation of Chinese poets has actually changed in recent years. They have lost the traces of personal writing. They all have a certain understanding of the huge naming ability of "The Wasteland", and even the writing style that transcends the individual. Distilling and naming history and reality is indispensable for poets who are opening up.
The Paper : In April, many people like to quote "April is the cruelest month". How do you see The Wasteland's relationship to the present? What do we need to commemorate today when we commemorate The Waste Land?
Hu Sang : "April is the cruelest month" is Qiu Xiaolong's translation. The translation in my memory is still from Zhao Luorui: "April is the cruelest month". The specificity of "one month" is startling to me. The cruelty of the beginning of the poem is that it is based on the "one" specific thing "April" that we are accustomed to. Does this "April" have that much tolerance?
In the huge context of pandemics, international wars, refugee waves, nuclear crises, energy crises, and food crises, how do we view a month, a week, a day, and the specific people around us? I feel that the sense of emptiness and crisis in The Waste Land has dominated this century. Once, in the neoliberal context of my youth, I thought that "The Waste Land" was just a poem with a strong symbolic sense. But it took me two years to realize that this poem is our reality, it has been floating in our air. It stimulates the imagination of present life by viewing fragments of contemporary life by referencing the classics. What we need is this "seeing," or, in Benjamin's parlance, citing texts, citing history. To cite history is to illuminate our present life. When we are in the wasteland, we need mirror devices of history to help us rebuild our ability to "see". "The Wasteland" has always reminded us how to cite the past, how to see that history lives in the eternal present, and how to see that our records of the times will become memories of the future. At the same time, we fear that our words will become frivolous, and we will let our memories go where they go, stolen, smeared, and blocked. To borrow a phrase from Eliot's "The Waste Land," we fear that our words will become "savage silence."
"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 Hu Sang, a poet and assistant professor of the Chinese Department of Tongji University.
Husan
【dialogue】The Paper : How did The Wasteland, a Western classic, come to China?
Hu Sang: "The Wasteland" was introduced to China not long after it was published. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Chinese poets were influenced by reading the English version. Zhao Luorui's teacher Ye Gongchao and others first introduced Eliot's poetics. In China at that time, even the so-called "Shockwave of the Wasteland" was formed. The "wilderness consciousness" has penetrated into the writings of many Chinese poets, such as Wen Yiduo's "Desolate Village", Bian Zhilin's "Spring City", and He Qifang's "Spring City". Chinese poets see the predicament of the modern world, the disease of modernity, and the ethical situation of the disintegration of modern people from the image of the "wilderness". In particular, Zhao Luorui, at the invitation of Dai Wangshu, translated "The Wasteland" and published it in the New Poetry Society in 1937, which once again promoted the influence of this long poem. Zhao Luorui's translation absorbed the linguistic achievements of Chinese poetry in the 1930s. Her husband was Chen Mengjia, a poet of the Crescent School, and she inherited the family study of her father, Zhao Zichen, a theologian, and was very familiar with the language of the Bible, especially the language of the Union Version. These make the language of the translation of "The Waste Land" rich, smooth and precise. This is an excellent translation. This poem is of great importance to the poets of the Nine-leaf Poetry School. For them, The Waste Land is a model of depersonalized, intellectual writing.
The Paper : What happened to "The Wasteland" in China since then?
Hussan: After 1949, Eliot, like many Western poets, was thrown into the cold palace. In 1960, Yuan Kejia even wrote an article calling Eliot "the imperial clerk of the British and American imperialists".
Later, Mu Dan re-translated it in the 1970s, but it was not published until 1985, and it was included in "Anthology of Modern British Poetry". Qiu Xiaolong (1983), Ye Weilian (1983), Zhao Yiheng (1985), Du Ruozhou (1985), Tang Yongkuan (1994), etc. have translated many versions. The "wilderness consciousness" in "The Wasteland" slowly faded away, and the neoclassical tendency was revealed. The modern activation of classic texts and allusions has stimulated many Chinese poets to look for modernity in Chinese traditions. A typical example is Yang Lian's "Nuo Rilang". In fact, traces of "The Wasteland" can also be seen in Hai Zi's long poems.
By the 1990s, Chinese poetry was no longer satisfied with grand narratives, whether verbal or spiritual. Routineity and narrative become the direction of change. At this time, the symbolic writing of daily life and the narrative treatment of life fragments in "The Wasteland" inspired many poets such as Wang Jiaxin and Xiao Kaiyu. In Xiao Kaiyu's long poem "Homage to Du Fu" (1996), we can see the refinement of fragments of contemporary daily life in "The Wasteland".
The Paper: When did you first read "The Wasteland" and how did you feel at the time?Hu Sang : In 1997, I read a book of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning poets, "The Brightest and the Darkest," edited by Wang Jiaxin and Shen Rui. It contains some of Eliot's poems. It's just that because "The Wasteland" is too famous, there is no income. The first time I read The Wasteland in its entirety was in 2000, when I came to Xi'an to study at university. In the bookstore, I found a selection of Zhao Luorui's translations, "The Wasteland". Surprisingly, in the preface, I found that Zhao Luorui was a fellow from the same town as me. She was born on May 9, 1912 at No. 1, Siping Road, Guzhen, Xinshi, Deqing County, Zhejiang Province. At that time, she was a rice shop, and the rice shop had gradually declined in the hands of her grandfather. Her house is right next to Pingqiao where I grew up eating wontons. However, I later learned that in 1992, the Zhao family's three-entry courtyard was demolished and rebuilt into a very contemporary brick house by Zhao Luorui's cousin.
After reading "The Wasteland" at that time, due to the lack of knowledge reserves, I was full of doubts about it. However, the darkness, desolation, desire and mess inside left a deep impression on me, especially from the legend of the Holy Grail and the King of Fish in The Golden Bough. Later, in order to study "The Wasteland" and other poems, I specially collected a lot of Eliot's English poems from the Internet and printed them into a book of Eliot's poems. At that time, the printing fee was very expensive. It was one yuan per page, which was the price 22 years ago. After studying the English version for a long time, I gradually understood this long poem better. Its ability to name eras and the richness of its perception of the contemporary world is astonishing. However, due to my personal writing preferences, I am a little dissatisfied with its overly intellectualized and redundant allusions. I didn't devote myself to it, and I didn't learn much skills.
The Paper: Afterwards, did your reading of "The Wasteland" change?
Hu Sang : Indeed, when I returned to Jiangnan from Xi'an. I am more touched by some of the fragments written by Eliot, especially the phrase "I read books most of the night, and I go to the South in winter." ". I especially like Zhao Luorui's translations, and many sentence patterns and intonations will inadvertently permeate into his own poems. For example, Wagner's sentence "The sea is desolate and empty" was activated by him, and Dante's sentence "I didn't expect death to destroy so many people", I deeply felt it and imitated it secretly.
I have been teaching at the university all these years, and it never occurred to me to explain this poem to my students. However, with the continuous study of the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, etc., in fact, I can better understand the magic of the allusions in the poems, and I can better understand the life force nourished by the Western tradition. So I feel more and more that he has a strong creativity and a deep understanding of modern life. These are beyond our poetry. Over the years, I have become more and more aware of Eliot's greatness and the need to reread it again and again.
The Paper : Why didn't you think about explaining this poem to students?
Hussan: I might find it too difficult. Apart from telling at an intellectual level, I don't quite grasp the path to tell this poem. It's like I didn't cover Ulysses in class, even though I've always thought it was the greatest novel of the 20th century. I have always been studying. But I always feel that I am not ready to explain it to the students.
Teaching The Wasteland in a classroom was a huge challenge. For such a rich poem, it would be extremely cumbersome to read carefully. And I like to give lectures by perusal the most. I think undergraduates most need a kind of close reading ability, exercise the ability to understand the work between the lines - sensibility, cognition and imagination.
Also, Eliot himself was an excellent critic. But in my reading vision, the more classic ones, except Helen Gardner's "The Art of Eliot", the criticism and interpretation of Eliot in Western academic circles are not rich. Teaching in a university class requires a knowledge base. Without the interpretation basis of first-class Western scholars and critics, I dare not interpret it without authorization. The reason why I dare to talk to my students about The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's tragedies is because I can draw on a large number of Western classics of Dante and Shakespeare to expound. After all, we have a contextual gap with Western literature. I believe more in the accuracy of the elaboration of scholars and critics within their context.
Of course, another important reason may be that Eliot annotated the poem too much, which limited the way the reader could read it. To read it, there is no joy in reading Dante and Shakespeare, which is constantly making new discoveries.
Elliott People Visual Infographic
The Paper : Have you discussed this poem with your poet friends?Hussan : Not too much. For my friends and I, The Waste Land is like a gigantic peak, standing there silently. We may climb silently alone, and it is not suitable for a group to climb together. In fact, among the poets we have talked about in the past 20 years, Eliot's poems are often absent. We may often talk about his literary theories, especially his Tradition and Personal Talent, or his expositions of Dante, Shakespeare, metaphysical poets. Due to Eliot's conservative tendencies, the "modernity" of his poems, although characteristic, is not particularly pronounced. Nor is the verbal and emotional passion of his poetry strong. So, in terms of foreign poetry, we are probably talking about poets like Brodsky, Heaney, Walcott, Bishop, Celan, Milosz.
The Paper: How do you think The Wasteland has influenced you and your generation of Chinese poets?
Hu Sang : At the beginning, I didn't quite understand the grand naming ability, the ability to refine experience, and the complex insight into contemporary life in "The Wasteland". It takes too much wisdom, or a mature mind, to understand it.
Eliot has little influence on the specific writing of the poets of my generation, because what we initially entered into the poetic world was to rebel against the grand narrative, to establish the immediacy and physicality of specific life, and the authenticity of personal experience. Sex is intensely desired. Eliot, on the other hand, advocated the importance of tradition and history and demanded that the poet be "depersonalized". In this respect, in fact, his literary theory has a greater impact on me. At that time, I was in the class of Mr. Chen Yue when I was an undergraduate, and I was deeply inspired by listening to him explain Eliot's "Tradition and Personal Talent". Since then, I have continued to re-read this article. I also frequently quote Eliot in my own critical writing. Eliot had a profound influence on me when it came to the poet's reconnection with tradition. My poetry also begins to reprocess the appropriation and activation of certain elements of Chinese classical poetry. For example, when I wrote the series of ancient poets, "Meng Jiao: Chebu", "Zhao Mengfu: Allegorical Form", "Jiang Kui: Self-Reliance", "Wu Wenying: Xu Breaking", "Ye Xiaoluan", etc., I always thought of Eliot's teachings.
After I came to Shanghai, I gradually stopped caring about how to build the writing style of a generation, but more concerned about the construction of individual voices and the future of Chinese poetry. At this time, Eliot's ability to name the experience of the times, to cite and update the historical memory and textual experience greatly inspired me. I started with the poem "The Book of Disturbance", and the "wilderness consciousness" in the poem was actually strengthened. Whenever I write about Shanghai, I always think of London as the "disembodied city" in Eliot's poems. But how to understand the contemporary nature of Shanghai is still very difficult. In recent years, I have been concerned about the influence of digital media on contemporary people, and I have been trying to name the experience of this city, trying to write poems such as "The Age of Inner Volume", "Empty City" and other poems. It's a tribute to The Wasteland.
Of course, our generation of Chinese poets has actually changed in recent years. They have lost the traces of personal writing. They all have a certain understanding of the huge naming ability of "The Wasteland", and even the writing style that transcends the individual. Distilling and naming history and reality is indispensable for poets who are opening up.
The Paper : In April, many people like to quote "April is the cruelest month". How do you see The Wasteland's relationship to the present? What do we need to commemorate today when we commemorate The Waste Land?Hu Sang : "April is the cruelest month" is Qiu Xiaolong's translation. The translation in my memory is still from Zhao Luorui: "April is the cruelest month". The specificity of "one month" is startling to me. The cruelty of the beginning of the poem is that it is based on the "one" specific thing "April" that we are accustomed to. Does this "April" have that much tolerance?
In the huge context of pandemics, international wars, refugee waves, nuclear crises, energy crises, and food crises, how do we view a month, a week, a day, and the specific people around us? I feel that the sense of emptiness and crisis in The Waste Land has dominated this century. Once, in the neoliberal context of my youth, I thought that "The Waste Land" was just a poem with a strong symbolic sense. But it took me two years to realize that this poem is our reality, it has been floating in our air. It stimulates the imagination of present life by viewing fragments of contemporary life by referencing the classics. What we need is this "seeing," or, in Benjamin's parlance, citing texts, citing history. To cite history is to illuminate our present life. When we are in the wasteland, we need mirror devices of history to help us rebuild our ability to "see". "The Wasteland" has always reminded us how to cite the past, how to see that history lives in the eternal present, and how to see that our records of the times will become memories of the future. At the same time, we fear that our words will become frivolous, and we will let our memories go where they go, stolen, smeared, and blocked. To borrow a phrase from Eliot's "The Waste Land," we fear that our words will become "savage silence."
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