We read several English poems this week. From those poems I realized that English poetry have a lot differences with Chinese poetry which lead to the learning methods are quite different.
Some spirits English poets and Chinese poets want to express are alike, but some thought English poets may present never appeared in a Chinese poem. The love should be a common idea of both English and Chinese poems. However, I have never read a Chinese poem about the slangs in our daily life, but the English poem “Totally like whatever, you know” show the slangs by list them down. It is new to me for a poet list down slangs in his poem, and strange to me as well.
Even if Chinese poets and English poets are show the same feeling, the way they do it will be quite different. We read one English love poem which tells a man fell in love with a black woman in the Laundromat. The poet writes down his thinking about the scenario directly and that the poem is. But if a Chinese poet is going to do this, he might spend many words on describing the surrounding scene and things with special meaning. For instance he might depict some plant that have the hidden meaning of love in Chinese. Then the readers must deduce that he describe the scene for expressing his fancy for the black lady because he won’t say it straight.
Chinese poetry has its beauty of indicating while English poets make it patent, that why the way we learn poem in the two languages are different. Most of us started learning Chinese poem when we were very young some started even as young as three or four years old. And at that time we could not have any idea what the poems are trying to tell or even do not know words in the poem. What we could do is listen to the pronunciation and try to remember and recite it. It is the unique way of learning way of learning Chinese poems because even if you have no idea about what the poet express, the rhyme and rhythm are enough for one to appreciate, and because to dig the deeper meaning in Chinese poems require rich background knowledge, this way is needed. But for the English poem, based on the few English poems I have read today, I do not see any rhyme or rhythm in them, and for me the poems are like narrative so there is no point to read them without knowing the idea of the poems. Fortunately, most of the meanings are clear.
Chines poems are more like poetry for me because of the rhyme and rhythm, and the deeply hidden meaning in the poems.
english and chinese poetry are really quite different not only because of the different cultrual background but also the structure of the language. maybe when we are more influent with english ,we can also appreciate english poetry a lot
ReplyDeleteTo be honest , i prefer the style of English poets just because they express the innate meanings directly, quite different from Chinese poems. and i think it is easy to understand though sometimes the words are not beautiful enough.
ReplyDeleteThe poems we learned in the class are modern ones, in which the requirement for rhyme and rhythm is not strict. However, as far as I know, old fashioned English poems require it. And they describe a lot about surroundings like Chinese poets, too. If we look at modern Chinese poems, we will find they are far more plain and don't pay much attention to rhyme and rhythm, either. So I think evolutions of poems in both languages are similar in terms of content and style.
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about English poems, or to say exactly, I don;t fully understand Chinese poems, either. However, I once read an article written by Qian Zhongshu. He described Chinese poems to be more reserved while English poems tend to be more direct. Qian used the metaphor" the silence of pregnance " to describe Chinese poems.En.....Nothing more to comment...
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