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【Abstract】Bian Zhilin is a pioneering poet of Chinese Modernist literature. He uses the resources of European and American Modernism for reference and carries forward native traditional poetics. During his transferring the otherness and tradition into his literary practice and innovation, we identify his firm footprints of following his ‘teachers’. Among these “teachers” we focus on T.S. Eliot and search out how Bian Zhilin successfully transplants foreign images and discourse style into his literary production.
【Key words】Bian Zhilin, T.S. Eliot, Discourse Style, Images
Among the newly?rising intellectuals of May 4th Movement, Bian Zhilin, as a poet and translator of western advanced thoughts, explores the literary resources in the same way as others do, fighting the ideological way from the original theory and the original works to his own theory and his own works. Thus we can identify the vestiges of foreign translated works and theories, just as Bian Zhilin has said: “I have learned English poem lessons for one year, and French lessons for another year, then I read English Modernist poems and French Symbolist and its later poems.”[1] “I depicts the gray scenery in Peking street in some poems, and you can see the marks inspired by the characters such as the poor, the elderly, and the blind in Boldlaire??s poems. And I am enlightened by the Waste Land and other short poems by T.S. Eliot in my former middle stage of production and also by the ones of Yeats, R.M. Riliq and Paul Valery in my former third stage.” [2] Now we take T.S. Eliot??s poems for instance. Preludes,Morning at the window Rhapsody on a Windy Night all portrayed the hardship and bitterness of life of the lower classes. However, Bian Zhilin casts away the shallow noble?like description by Eliot. He shows sympathy to the average and nonentity and presents certain aspect of the society, thus integrates the realist description into Modernist poems.
In addition, we can figure out some components of Eliot discourse system in Bian Zhilin??s poetic sentences. For instance, in Coming Back to the Village the sentence “the wire pole measure out days” should derive from the famous sentence “I have measured out my life with coffee spoon” in the Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. Here the wire pole is substituted with the coffee spoon in order to be accepted from the expecting perspective of the nation and ingeniously transfer the original mood of the works. Additionally in Return, the sentence “The road stretches into the dusk like a twinge of despair” may be suggested by the one “Streets that follow like a tedious argument” in The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock. In A Monk a dull vacuous old monk whose head is as heavy and hollow as the wooden fish vividly comes to our mind. So we can naturally connect this image with the hollow man created by Eliot—“We are the hollow man/We are the stuffed man/Lean tighter/Headpieces are filled with straw”. The tenors, the wooden fish and the straw man, are characteristic of different national features respectively, but the referring entity is similar to each other, both describing the mental state of people living on the spiritual barren land. Bian Zhilin employs the image of shadow as well to depict the awaking intellectuals in the 1920??s and 1930??s, lonely and vacuous and at a loss to find the way out. In shadow, “A shadow appears besides and walks back and forth, always following you in the descending sunlight.” And we seemingly sense the shadow as the illusionary one of “the third person who always walks besides you” in The Waste Land, which perhaps derives from Eliot??s supernatural experience. This Christian illusion results from Eliot??s adherence to Occultism. However, Bian Zhilin is supposed to incarnate this illusion between Realism and Modernism. This really?sensed illusion emerges in The Longer is—“They stroll and stroll, following their own shadow. ” Further more these hurry passerby are similar to those who “only stare at their own toes” and fike to the commercial center of London. This kind of loose parallelism confirms to the perceptible harmony. Therefore the inner transformation of his written production is not affected by the “literary import”. As for the employment of imagery, Bian Zhilin successfully takes the advantages of the signified image in the context of foreign literature and confines the signifier to the native fore?comprehension by the means of creative absorption and transformation of the foreign quintessence of imagery. Images in Bian??s poems are just the pearls scattered here and there, whose fine luster reflecting the brilliant rays of his nationality. They are easily picked up. However the similar discourse style needs our further efforts to identify.
During the period of May 4th Movement, the literary avant?couriers advocate to abandon the classical Chinese writings. This tendency imposes many writers at that time upon the writing of the colloquial style and some go to the extreme. By contrast the poetic movements in another continent demand that poems should desert the classical poetic writing from the last few centuries. Many outstanding poets, such as Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Whitman, attach more importance to the colloquial style in poems. Eliot can be esteemed as one of the members. In his critical article the melody in poems he also stresses the importance of employment in the spoken language in poems—“Compared with a variety of fashions as well as the influence from the ancient times and the foreign nations, one natural law out of these is more powerful, to be precise, the poem should not excessively deviate from the ordinary language heard and used in our daily life. Whether or not it is with accents or stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed, verse or free verse should not depart from the varying language in which people communicate with each other.”[3] And this point is in harmony with Eliot??s poetic technique when representing the westerners?? spiritually empty life with repeated questioning in a hasty tone as if flowing under subconscious currency. A vacuous upper class lady in The Waste Land has the words:“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak/What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/I never know what you are thinking. Think.” This kind of language style obviously indicates the psychological state of the speaker. What??s more, the relating monologue and conversation can arouse the imagination of the expression and bearing of the characters. The personal voice is embodied in the real oral, but not written language. Obviously inspired by this expressive way, Bian Zhilin employs the colloquial style of language in some poems with regard to the form of questioning and self?questioning, corresponding with the Modernist introversive style. In The Evening, we can hear an echoing voice in an awaking poet??s heart: “What are you planning to do?/That??s a real problem, and what am I planning to do?” “Can you tell me where I am going?/That??s a problem, and where are you going?” Merely an indifferent answer responds to the absentminded questioning. Here the transferring language style not only arouses people’s imagination about the daily?life setting, but reveals the intense self?conscious of the speaker. “Since the 20th century that the western literature focus their attention on exploring the psychological state results in quite a development of the employment in the colloquial language… They consider the flexibility and the brevity of the colloquial language as a kind of signals accessing to the secret of general writing. It is because logic and grammar in spoken language is looser and more elastic than the written language.”[4] Bian Zhilin realizes that the oral words are conductive to reveal the secret and obscurity in psychological description. In order to present the complex thoughts and emotion he is able to record the vocal quality to disclose the inner world of people under the surface structure of language. As to the comprehension of the original foreign artistic essence only the poet??s genius can digest both the western and eastern literature. Bian Zhilin undoubtly proves this. No matter how Bian Zhilin transforms the foreign image into his poem, his poems are established in the native aesthetics experience and somewhere overlapped by the acceptable elements of the otherness. Apparently Bian Zhilin??s poems tend to embody the national features and custom. And there lies the compatible specific quality of the occidental and the oriental literature on the surface structure of Bian Zhilin??s poems. Therefore we can summarize the analysis of images and discourse style in Eliot and Bian Zhilin??s poems by one sentence, i.e. “Transmission and acceptation are not sheer unidirectional linear course, but one of coexistence of acceptation and feedback.”[5]
Reference:
[1]卞之琳譯 《英国诗选（序）》 湖南人民出版社 1983 P2
[2]卞之琳著 《雕虫纪历（自序）》人民文学出版社 1984
[3]王忠恩编译 《艾略特诗学文集》国际文化出版公司出版 1989 P178
[4]郑敏著 《结构—解购视角：语言·文化·评论》清华大学出版社 1998 P114
[5]乐黛云 陈跃红 王宇根 张辉著 《比较文学原理新编》北京大学出版社 1999 P104
【Key words】Bian Zhilin, T.S. Eliot, Discourse Style, Images
Among the newly?rising intellectuals of May 4th Movement, Bian Zhilin, as a poet and translator of western advanced thoughts, explores the literary resources in the same way as others do, fighting the ideological way from the original theory and the original works to his own theory and his own works. Thus we can identify the vestiges of foreign translated works and theories, just as Bian Zhilin has said: “I have learned English poem lessons for one year, and French lessons for another year, then I read English Modernist poems and French Symbolist and its later poems.”[1] “I depicts the gray scenery in Peking street in some poems, and you can see the marks inspired by the characters such as the poor, the elderly, and the blind in Boldlaire??s poems. And I am enlightened by the Waste Land and other short poems by T.S. Eliot in my former middle stage of production and also by the ones of Yeats, R.M. Riliq and Paul Valery in my former third stage.” [2] Now we take T.S. Eliot??s poems for instance. Preludes,Morning at the window Rhapsody on a Windy Night all portrayed the hardship and bitterness of life of the lower classes. However, Bian Zhilin casts away the shallow noble?like description by Eliot. He shows sympathy to the average and nonentity and presents certain aspect of the society, thus integrates the realist description into Modernist poems.
In addition, we can figure out some components of Eliot discourse system in Bian Zhilin??s poetic sentences. For instance, in Coming Back to the Village the sentence “the wire pole measure out days” should derive from the famous sentence “I have measured out my life with coffee spoon” in the Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. Here the wire pole is substituted with the coffee spoon in order to be accepted from the expecting perspective of the nation and ingeniously transfer the original mood of the works. Additionally in Return, the sentence “The road stretches into the dusk like a twinge of despair” may be suggested by the one “Streets that follow like a tedious argument” in The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock. In A Monk a dull vacuous old monk whose head is as heavy and hollow as the wooden fish vividly comes to our mind. So we can naturally connect this image with the hollow man created by Eliot—“We are the hollow man/We are the stuffed man/Lean tighter/Headpieces are filled with straw”. The tenors, the wooden fish and the straw man, are characteristic of different national features respectively, but the referring entity is similar to each other, both describing the mental state of people living on the spiritual barren land. Bian Zhilin employs the image of shadow as well to depict the awaking intellectuals in the 1920??s and 1930??s, lonely and vacuous and at a loss to find the way out. In shadow, “A shadow appears besides and walks back and forth, always following you in the descending sunlight.” And we seemingly sense the shadow as the illusionary one of “the third person who always walks besides you” in The Waste Land, which perhaps derives from Eliot??s supernatural experience. This Christian illusion results from Eliot??s adherence to Occultism. However, Bian Zhilin is supposed to incarnate this illusion between Realism and Modernism. This really?sensed illusion emerges in The Longer is—“They stroll and stroll, following their own shadow. ” Further more these hurry passerby are similar to those who “only stare at their own toes” and fike to the commercial center of London. This kind of loose parallelism confirms to the perceptible harmony. Therefore the inner transformation of his written production is not affected by the “literary import”. As for the employment of imagery, Bian Zhilin successfully takes the advantages of the signified image in the context of foreign literature and confines the signifier to the native fore?comprehension by the means of creative absorption and transformation of the foreign quintessence of imagery. Images in Bian??s poems are just the pearls scattered here and there, whose fine luster reflecting the brilliant rays of his nationality. They are easily picked up. However the similar discourse style needs our further efforts to identify.
During the period of May 4th Movement, the literary avant?couriers advocate to abandon the classical Chinese writings. This tendency imposes many writers at that time upon the writing of the colloquial style and some go to the extreme. By contrast the poetic movements in another continent demand that poems should desert the classical poetic writing from the last few centuries. Many outstanding poets, such as Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Whitman, attach more importance to the colloquial style in poems. Eliot can be esteemed as one of the members. In his critical article the melody in poems he also stresses the importance of employment in the spoken language in poems—“Compared with a variety of fashions as well as the influence from the ancient times and the foreign nations, one natural law out of these is more powerful, to be precise, the poem should not excessively deviate from the ordinary language heard and used in our daily life. Whether or not it is with accents or stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed, verse or free verse should not depart from the varying language in which people communicate with each other.”[3] And this point is in harmony with Eliot??s poetic technique when representing the westerners?? spiritually empty life with repeated questioning in a hasty tone as if flowing under subconscious currency. A vacuous upper class lady in The Waste Land has the words:“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak/What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/I never know what you are thinking. Think.” This kind of language style obviously indicates the psychological state of the speaker. What??s more, the relating monologue and conversation can arouse the imagination of the expression and bearing of the characters. The personal voice is embodied in the real oral, but not written language. Obviously inspired by this expressive way, Bian Zhilin employs the colloquial style of language in some poems with regard to the form of questioning and self?questioning, corresponding with the Modernist introversive style. In The Evening, we can hear an echoing voice in an awaking poet??s heart: “What are you planning to do?/That??s a real problem, and what am I planning to do?” “Can you tell me where I am going?/That??s a problem, and where are you going?” Merely an indifferent answer responds to the absentminded questioning. Here the transferring language style not only arouses people’s imagination about the daily?life setting, but reveals the intense self?conscious of the speaker. “Since the 20th century that the western literature focus their attention on exploring the psychological state results in quite a development of the employment in the colloquial language… They consider the flexibility and the brevity of the colloquial language as a kind of signals accessing to the secret of general writing. It is because logic and grammar in spoken language is looser and more elastic than the written language.”[4] Bian Zhilin realizes that the oral words are conductive to reveal the secret and obscurity in psychological description. In order to present the complex thoughts and emotion he is able to record the vocal quality to disclose the inner world of people under the surface structure of language. As to the comprehension of the original foreign artistic essence only the poet??s genius can digest both the western and eastern literature. Bian Zhilin undoubtly proves this. No matter how Bian Zhilin transforms the foreign image into his poem, his poems are established in the native aesthetics experience and somewhere overlapped by the acceptable elements of the otherness. Apparently Bian Zhilin??s poems tend to embody the national features and custom. And there lies the compatible specific quality of the occidental and the oriental literature on the surface structure of Bian Zhilin??s poems. Therefore we can summarize the analysis of images and discourse style in Eliot and Bian Zhilin??s poems by one sentence, i.e. “Transmission and acceptation are not sheer unidirectional linear course, but one of coexistence of acceptation and feedback.”[5]
Reference:
[1]卞之琳譯 《英国诗选（序）》 湖南人民出版社 1983 P2
[2]卞之琳著 《雕虫纪历（自序）》人民文学出版社 1984
[3]王忠恩编译 《艾略特诗学文集》国际文化出版公司出版 1989 P178
[4]郑敏著 《结构—解购视角：语言·文化·评论》清华大学出版社 1998 P114
[5]乐黛云 陈跃红 王宇根 张辉著 《比较文学原理新编》北京大学出版社 1999 P104