用英语讲好中国事故之——Village Abode: An appreciation
Village Abode: An appreciation
In the book of the Record of History there is a tale of Li Si, Premier of the Qin Dynasty, who was sentenced to be cut in two at the waist for political reasons. When he was tied and pushed out of the prison door, he looked back at his second son, who was faced with the same destiny as his father, and said: How I wonder if I, along with you, could take hold of our yellow dog to chase the rabbit out of the eastern door! But impossible now!
Till facing death, human nature revived and he tried to cure him of the grief over death with the recollection of his youth with the taste of his son’s childhood. A happy childhood and adolescence will irrigate humanity and have an everlasting impact on the development of personality. When struggling against the vicissitudes in life, one may become stone-hearted and cold-blooded, but when the darkness of death overwhelms him, and there is no need to mask his true feelings, one will reveal what his childhood and youth have ever grown in his humanity. By this, I mean his childhood and adolescence preserve the attributes that his creator bestowed on him. This is the power that even death can’t beat down.
Another story is about the last emperor in the history of China. Pu Yi, when he was declared to abandon the throne, rushed to the threshold where he had hidden a cage of crickets. The moment he was set free, he returned to his childhood to cure himself of the scars of political life. The taste of childhood was a good dose of medicine for his politically wounded heart. Only when he returned to his childhood and had a taste of his childhood could he recover from the hurt by ruthless political life.
The popularity of the sentence is reasonable that a happy childhood can cure one of the whole life, but an unhappy one can cure his childhood with his whole life. It is universally acknowledged that childhood shapes one’s whole life. It’s a divergence of life, a happy one and an unhappy one.
When we come to realize the importance of childhood in life, we can be prepared to appreciate the poem Village Abode by a not-well-known poet in the Qing Dynasty.
村居
高鼎/清
草长莺飞二月天，拂堤杨柳醉春烟。
儿童散学归来早，忙趁东风放纸鸢。
Village Abode
Gao Ding[Qing Dynasty]
Grass luxurious, oriole flying high, it’s February
The willows upon the levee are in spring mist intoxicated
Children dismissed from school come back early.
And fly glede taking advantage of the east wind.
If he had not written so wonderful a poem, Gao Ding was destined to be unknown to the world. But with this poem, he can be placed in the realm of poetry. And the style of this poem is quite different from the tradition. It can be called psychological poem, which appeared rare in the long history of poetry in China. Poets cured themselves of the agony and grief with nature, Daoism, Buddhism and ration, etc, but only Gao Ding discovered the importance of childhood or childhood taste and mind, or rather, childishness. He was the pioneer of a new writing style, which even he himself didn’t realize.
The ecstasy lurked in the poem is obvious and if we ask why he noticed the happy scene where some children are playing, carefree and innocent, we may hesitate for a moment. Some would say that it happened that he saw the scene and watched it and was touched to write such a poem. But if we go a step further, and ask why such a scene could touch him and inspired him to write the poem, we still will get a little confused.
The answer lies in psychological analysis. He, at that moment, returned to his childhood and tasted his childhood happiness again, which touched him so much that he couldn’t help writing such a poem. In the long history of poetry in China, poems about any subject appeared, but the taste of childhood and its nature of curing hurts in life.
This is the importance and glamorousness of the poem. If we want to decipher and discern the poem, we need to take into account the philosophy and psychology behind the poem.
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