What does the poem Self-Portrait mean?

How many lives are there, and how few are the pleasures and sorrows?

Fortune and fame are all in the hands of fate, so why should I be a servant?

Swallowing in the dust, chickens and insects in the shadow, see also chased.

There are a few people in the mountains and under the forests who are really lonely.

Who is like the Yanjun of the day, the old man Longgon, alone holding the sheep fur lodging.

Try to drop the fishing rod, a hundred kinds of thousands of constraints.

The two sides of the smoke forest, half of the stream mountain shadow, here no honor and disgrace.

The image of the deserted platform is still not enough

Self-Portrait by Wang Zengqi, Liaoning People's Publishing House

With regard to Wang Zengqi, people often talk about his novels and prose, but seldom mention his poems. The publication of this collection of poems, Self-Portrait, gives us a chance to appreciate and understand the novelist's poetry.

The author has no knowledge of poetry, but in reading this collection of poems, I found that Wang Zengqi's poems actually share a creative trajectory with his novels.

Whoever is familiar with Wang Zengqi, knows that his poems have been written in the same way as his novels. Those who are familiar with him know that Wang Zengqi studied at the Southwest Associated University in his early years. At that time, modernism had a deep influence on him. The novels he wrote in the 1940s had a very strong stream-of-consciousness coloring. Even his realistic works, such as Down and Out and The Famous House of Ducks and Chickens, were adept at adopting the techniques of modernist novels (such as frequent shifts in narrative point of view).

Poetry written during the same period was also heavily influenced by the modernist school, with some sticking together unrelated imagery to create strangeness: the sound of insects is like a light mist, and the colorful lies float down gracefully and look like old shade. (Autumn Series - Larch, 1942) Some use a few lines to create an incomprehensible mood: life is like a river, dreams are a piece of water. Stooping down to the reflection of my half-trance. The flowers on the curtains shriveled up, and I was like a piece of film taking in two landscapes. (Autumn Series - Private Chapter, 1942)

These new modernist poems resemble both the sighs of a melancholic young man at that time and the reflections of a rational poet on the world. Wang Zengqi's poems are indeed "modern", but they do not feel hard to read. He does not rely on dead learning and imitation, but really melts the flavor and essence of modernist poetry into his own pen. It's hard to do that without a lot of talent.

But if you only see this side of modernism, it is difficult to fully understand him. Wang Zengqi became a classic writer in the 1980s with his popularity of The Precepts and The Story of Danao. This kind of sensational effect is of course related to the success of the works themselves, but it is worth thinking about: what kind of evaluation mechanism defines this kind of "success"? This goes back to the literary environment of the time - the pursuit of "modernism" resulted in the recognition of the formal elements of Wang's novels. When many people saw Wang Zengqi's formal experiments at that time, they directly associated him with the modernist influences he received in the 1940s, and came to the conclusion that "Wang Zengqi = modernism. The imagery of modernism and realism in opposition to each other put a distance between Wang Zengqi's work and reality, aestheticizing and humanizing it. Today, Wang Zengqi has become a "landscape," in the words of Pedro Kasutani, a "landscape" in which we dwell but forget its "origins.

Some scholars have already realized this, such as Luo Gang, who argues that Wang Zengqi's significance in contemporary Chinese literature lies not only in the fact that he brought the "new literary tradition" of the 1940s to the "new-period literature" of the 1980s, but also in the fact that the era gave Wang Zengqi the opportunity to write a new literature for the Chinese people, and that Wang Zengqi's work has been a major contribution to the development of Chinese literature. The significance of Wang Zengqi in contemporary Chinese literature lies not only in bringing the "new literary tradition" of the 1940s to the "new period literature" of the 1980s, but more importantly, in the way in which the era laid the foundation for Wang Zengqi's creativity, and how it ultimately produced his emergence.

Reading Wang Zengqi's later poems from this perspective reveals a different kind of enlightenment: after 1949, Wang Zengqi worked successively as the editor of Beijing Literature and Art, Rap and Sing, and Folk Literature, and experienced rural labor, during which time he collected folk songs and wrote operas. This experience was invaluable to Wang Zengqi himself. He himself confessed, "I have edited Folk Literature for several years, and I know very well that folk literature is an ocean and a treasure trove." He also warned young writers that they should be aware of the importance of folk literature. , and he admonished young writers, "Read a little opera, song, and folk song." In his opinion, the language of the masses is "living" and "rolling", and the opposition between "earth" and "foreign" is not absolute. The opposition between "local" and "foreign" is not absolute, and the methods of folk songs can also be very modern. The influence of the language of folk songs is also clearly shown in the second half of the collection, Self-Portrait. For example:

The geese fly in the sky, their shadows remain on the ground.

Batlle is leaving his home and his heart is full of sorrow.

Bartel lay by the circling river, smelling the fresh scent of the grass.

The Circle River flowed all morning, but it had not yet flowed out of his home.

(Batlle is Leaving Home, 1986)

Compared with the early modernist poems, the language of this poem is more refined, colloquial and spoken, with less skillful craftsmanship and more folk flavor. The beginning of the poem obviously uses the technique of the rising of a folk song, and the whole poem adopts the writing mode of lyricism by narration, which is common in folk songs, so it is not vulgar, but very elegant.

It is also worth mentioning that old poems make up most of Self-Portrait. This is also an interesting phenomenon. It confirms Wang Zengqi's emphasis on the classics. While admonishing young writers to learn folk songs, he also reminded them to "memorize more ancient texts and poems while they are still young". However, just as Wang Zengqi was not a die-hard modernist, his inheritance of the classics was not conservative either. His old poems are not "pedantic", but flexible and eclectic: there are standard old-style poems, as well as songs and bamboo rhymes; the poems contain both elegant and colloquial vocabulary; and they express the life of the intellectuals as well as the joys of the common people in the floating world. It can be said that Wang Zengqi's old poems have bridged the gap between ancient and modern elegance and vulgarity. Looking at his poems and novels, the scholarly spirit is not stronger than the fireworks of the marketplace. Some people say he is the last of the scholars, but to me, he is more like a little old man who likes to record his life in the folk world.

All of these characteristics are inseparable from his penetration into folklore and life in the 1950s and 1960s, which perhaps shaped the Wang Zengqi we see. So it's time to go back and clean up the spiritual legacy of that era, and the poems in Self-Portrait may provide some clues and inspiration for us to find that legacy.