Ai Qing’s life and poetry characteristics

From the introduction of Ai Qing’s life, we can know that Ai Qing was admitted to the Painting Department of Hangzhou National West Lake Academy of Art, and studied in France to study painting, during which he studied philosophy and literature. Such a profound art foundation, as well as the lens-based construction of things and the highly colorful grasp of scenery and images, make Ai Qing's poetic works have an understanding of poetic imagery that exceeds that of any modern poet of the same era. describe. What is even worse is the cutting-edge theoretical system of modern art that Ai Qing came into contact with in the art capital of Europe - Impressionism. This art school, which was born in Paris, the center of European culture and art at the end of the 19th century, overturned the traditional romanticism trend and the tradition of classicism, created a new space for painting art, and transformed human vision from a single focus on lines. Appreciation is enriched to the point of paying attention to the horizon itself. Such a new artistic model mainly uses sunlight and color as the protagonists, that is, it uses the changes of light and color to express the impression captured by the author from a fleeting moment. All objects are dyed shapes. People can recognize the shape of objects based on the different colors of different surfaces, that is, from the boundaries of different dyed surfaces. The basic principle of Impressionist painting technique is the decomposition of color, which maintains the freshness and brilliance of each pure color, thereby creating a more intense luminosity. In other words, it is easier to understand: "Using the angle and intensity of light to layer the original colors to make the picture more three-dimensional and more expressive." This expression of color and gloss has become one of the most important features of Ai Qing's poetic writing. We can make a comparison with a contemporary poet:

Looking Homeward on the Border (Excerpt)

Love

The fog is rising, and we are at a loss I reined in my horse and looked around

The palms of my hands began to sweat

The homesickness in the telescope expanded dozens of times

Chaotically like the emanations in the wind

When the distance was adjusted to a heart-stopping level

A distant mountain flew towards me

Crashing me into serious internal injuries

This is Love's 1979 and Yu Guangzhong went to the border of Lok Ma Chau in Shenzhen and looked at what was happening on the mainland. Let’s take a look at the selection of images—it pays great attention to a sensory thing and abandons an extroverted image. I did not emphasize that such a purely sensory thing is not good. Poetry should be a sensory thing, but the vague expressive power is only limited to a specific aesthetic background, but the visual expressive power can be maintained at all times. A very pioneering state.

1. First, let’s take a look at Ai Qing’s grasp of the sense of lines in his poems:

Lines are the basic elements of the picture. The world we see is composed of a single and Made of complex lines. The grasp of lines is the most basic skill for a painter, and Ai Qing has mastered this skill very well. Let's take a look at several scenes in "Transparent Night":

The drunkards walked to the edge of the village

Enter a lighted door,

and In "Reed Flute":

The violet-colored story uttered by Margaret's trembling lips

which faded away from the makeup.

and

Put my hand into the flesh-burning flames!

It is very difficult to construct the image of "door" in the dark night. If you just simply write about the door, then a very symbolic image will be limited to paper and words. But here the author uses a beam of light from the depth to reflect such a "door". This contrast of light and shadow is just a very rough line structure, so behind the "door" the author listed four groups of images in succession: "the smell of blood, the pile of meat, the hide, the hot and sour...". These four groups of things seem to be concrete, but they are also abstract - smell and sourness. Such a description of human nature is very obvious under the thick lines of the door. At the same time, the structure of thick lines makes the subsequent descriptions of details more detailed.

Similarly, the effect of the "lip" line is the same as that of the "door", except that it is a very small point in the stack of group images. But Ai Qing's handling of this small point is also very clever. This should be a very small detail, but as a painter's pen should be able to reflect a broader meaning in subtle places - this is not an ordinary lip, it is a faded one.

So imagine this: when the lip color was bright, the edges of the lips were of course contrasted by the filling color, but now the filling color has been diluted, so the edges are particularly prominent. Such a contrast can directly make people think It is more extensive, and a novel can almost be derived from a small point. This is the charm of lines. The next line is even more stunning: flames. This should be an invisible image, but such a jumping, deformed line can only be combined with related things when it is expressed - this seems to have the same effect as the first "door", except that Quite the opposite. In the process of changing, the flame will eventually reach the roasted meat on top, thus forming a closed space. In such a blank closed space, the shape of the flame will not become abstract even if it continues to change. .

To summarize, Ai Qing’s handling of lines is characterized by using thick lines to create an overall effect, using fine lines to reflect color differences, and finally when facing images that cannot be expressed in a single language. Just use another closed line body to describe it.

2. Next, let’s take a look at Ai Qing’s choice of colors:

Impressionist painters have a unique and rigorous approach to the distribution of colors in the picture. They basically decompose light. into a single primary color, and then fill in every subtle square, finally achieving a three-dimensional feeling with no color difference in light.

Ai Qing is also looking for such a subtle visual sense in poetic language, but the limitations of poetic text bring difficulties to such an ideal expression. Because it is impossible to describe the color between the lines in too detailed a way, the color difference of light can only be expressed in large lines.

Let’s first look at the “door” part we mentioned in the previous point.

The light is emitted from the inside of the door - so that the intensity of the light is expressed by a color difference. Because of the thick lines of the "door", such a strong light background is weakened into a diffuse panoramic effect. The entire picture becomes three-dimensional. Not only are the lines made three-dimensional by the light, but the light is also dispersed by the lines into a whole.

Let’s look at the second section of "Towards the Sun" again:

Good morning

You are standing on the crossroads

When the vehicle passes by

Policeman holding hands in white sleeves

Good morning

You are from outside the city

Carrying a basket full of green Vegetable vendor

Good morning

You cleaning the road

Scavenger in red vest

Good morning

You carried the basket and were the first to go to the market

The brown-skinned young housewife

I believe it

Last night

You are by no means like me

Traced by the constant wind and rain

Tangled up in endless nightmares

You all sleep better than me Well done!

The choice of color is unique. The picture is originally colorless, but if it is directly converted from a colorless picture to a full-color picture, it will be unacceptable to the eyes. It also creates an overall sense of confusion and unnaturalness. Ai Qing did this very well (compared to other poets - colors are stripped away from images). He just chose very representative colors and used colors to embody the ideological aspects of poetry. "The white sleeves of the policeman", "the green basket of the vegetable vendor", "the red vest of the scavenger", "the brown-skinned housewife" - all are juxtapositions of a single solid color, which is another typical feature of Impressionist paintings . Here white and green are single colors and light colors. And red and brown are dark and dark tones. And the key is the stacking of colors. The transitions in between are clever-white, green, red, and brown. There isn't a huge gap. Then we are talking about the political things in between - the white of the policeman is the reactionary terror, the green of the vegetable vendor is the melancholy psychology, the red vest is the gradually rising flame of revolution and the rhythm of the heart, and finally the brown skin color ——Typical oppressed group (see Repin's "Trackers on the Volga").

Another extremely clever thing is to use the transformation and fusion of color levels to find light in dark colors.

How to understand this sentence? Let's take a look at an example: "Dayanhe - My Nanny"

Dayanhe, today, your nurse is in prison

Write A hymn to you

To you the purple soul under the loess

The key is here: the purple soul under the loess. These two colors were originally dim tones, but after such a combination, a qualitative change occurred. We found that a faint light sprouted under the text. Purple is composed of red and blue, so yellow can break such a combination, and yellow itself can also become a point of light. Then at this time the overall color becomes rich and has a bright component, and this light is still a strong process.

3. Finally, let’s take a look at the overall effect of the composition:

On this point, let’s take a look at some scenes in the middle of “He Dies the Second Time”:

After the burning pain

His heart is now quiet

It is as if it has just gone through the battlefield of a terrible fight

Now it is also quiet

However, his blood

seeped through the gauze from his arm

still dripping drop by drop

On the winter road of the motherland

...

On that night

Towards the opposite direction to his bed

That night The solemn procession that was ten times bigger before

With the footsteps of ten thousand people

wiped away the purple stains left by his blood drops

...

Freedom, sunshine, the world has come to spring

Countless people on the street

Made him feel strange yet friendly

The sun shines strongly on the street

Awakened from a long slumber

Life is leaping in the light

......

The soil sandwiched with spring grass

After covering his body

What he left to the world

are countless stars scattered across the wasteland on

One of those poor mounds

On those mounds

People never mark the names of the dead

is marked, what’s the use?

Let’s look at the first section of the quote: Blood drops on the road in winter; the feet of thousands of people have wiped away the traces of purple-red

The color is the main color The method used - please refer to Monet's "Sunrise" - the entire picture is dyed with color, and several simple bright tones are all blended together to achieve the effect of harmonizing the light. Although Ai Qing did not make the whole picture so bright, the dyeing process was fully demonstrated - blood, thick red, on the winter road - pale with gray - was completed after dripping Completely enlightened. It is precisely because of this dye that the rich red turns into purple. This unique color expression looks a bit romantic, but it is so realistic at heart.

Second Section: Sunshine, Life, Rhythm

This is a complete intersection of light and sense. It can be seen that the entire picture is supported by a huge and intense light - this panoramic light has changed from a dazzling light to a kind of power. The entire picture was completely swallowed up by such a force, but the author did not become frightened by this swallowing. On the contrary, it constantly aggravated the atmosphere, turning him from a simple three-dimensional to a four-dimensional.

Section 3: Mud, Corpse, Starlight

The romanticism we mentioned before returns again - what a dreamy picture it is. But such a dream comes from death. This contrast is all caused by the spread of starlight. The entire picture has changed from being single on each land to integrating the stars in the sky. The faint light has turned the originally gray tones into a wonderful and infinite one. This sense of light is different from the intensity of the sun. It is a hidden force - its tension makes every inch of the land depicted become vivid and three-dimensional, giving the composition a unique flavor.

It can be said that Ai Qing was successful both as a painter and as a poet. This integrated impressionism made the original rigidity more lively and changeable. The world is changing, and this picture that changes with the rhythm of life is the real life.

2. Impressionist music in Ai Qing’s poetry

Impressionist music uses texture, color and loudness to replace the dull self-confidence and intoxication in classical and romantic music. Music It can only imply or provide an image or state of mind, and it is not necessary to paraphrase the literal meaning. The specific method is to use various new combinations of sounds in harmony (ninth chords, thirteenth chords, chords with additional sounds such as adding unresolved second notes, and various augmented chords, etc.) and these very complex chords The connection (the juxtaposition of dissonant chords) creates a constant flash of intense color, just like the juxtaposition of solid colors in an Impressionist painting. It can be seen from here that the progression of harmony is completely subject to the timbre effect. The orchestration is handled in a very elegant way: brass instruments often use mutes, woodwind instruments often use their mysterious and moving low range, string instruments are also very detailed, and percussion instruments include glockenspiel, piano and triangle. , and Harp played a big role in the treatment of color. Closely related to the timbre effect is also the factor of dynamics - in order to highlight the tranquility, delicacy, charm, and even a little sad mood of the music, the Impressionist composers like to use pianissimo and pianissimo. Most of the dynamic climaxes in the music are just A brief flash. As for the melody, it is a momentary free-floating of short disconnected motives, in which there is more change than stability. As Debussy said, the continuous progression of the melody is never interrupted by anything and never returns to its original nature. This creates a reciprocating variation effect. Rhythmic patterns that generally avoid beat accents, various modal scales, whole-tone scales and oriental pentatonic scales, as well as rich and complex textures, have all become important components of the Impressionist musical language.

The information of many experts and scholars shows that "Ai Qing's poems are too prose-oriented and have lost all the unique phonological sense of poetry." There is nothing wrong with prose-oriented, but It is a bit exaggerated to think that the "sense of phonology" has been lost, because the so-called phonology of poetry does not simply come from the expression of words, or the attention to tonal rhymes in ancient poetry. The phonological beauty of modern poetry should be more closely integrated with the musical beauty of its era. In other words, the phonological beauty of Ai Qing's poetry does not come from the words themselves, but from the structure built by the words, which is hidden underneath the text carrier. It has a unique rhythm like a symphonic poem.

Here I will take Ai Qing's masterpiece "Dayan River - My Nanny" as an example to analyze the harmony and transformation in this multiple variations. Because the whole poem is very long, only specific parts of it are quoted from the original text.

1. The overall structure of a reciprocating loop:

The whole poem "Dayan River - My Nanny" has an obvious feature, which is a reciprocating structure that is consistent from beginning to end.

"Dayan River, is my nanny", "Dayan River, my nanny", "Dayan River, the snow I saw today reminds me of you"..."Write a more "A hymn to you", "To Dayan River, who loves me as his own son"

The whole poem is connected in such a structure, and this connection is not Simple things that never change. Like in the first and second sections, the connection between the beginning and the end presents an inclusive shape. The content in the second section does not exist alone, it is contained in the first level. Secondly, in the middle part, which is consistent from beginning to end, a kind of firm and still images like photography are placed side by side. Like in the third stanza - "Your, your, your...", in the fourth stanza - "In you, in you, in you, in you..." Although there is only a trace of this intentional flashback impression, but in such a gradually deepening process, the overall final effect is highlighted.

The most prominent artistic effect of the cycle is to add a combination and layering effect to the inconspicuous and independent images, so that the overall prose culture and the dullness of the narrative disappear, and the author's Inner wishes are magnified and expressed.

2. The layered effect of independence and integration:

The beauty of Impressionist music lies in the three-dimensional integration of a single musical language and elements. This method breaks the original romantic music The overall advancement technique of the Baroque music school. Such a sense of hierarchy is also fully reflected in "Dayan River":

In the seventh, eighth, and ninth stanzas, the reading rhythm and tone that readers were used to before are broken.

What should have been a complete composition of the paragraph was divided into two subsections, and the spatial construction of these two subsections has many differences.

The consistent parts at the front and back have already highlighted such a combination factor:

Dayan River, for life,

As she flows After using up her lotion,

she began to work with her arms that held me;

The ending was still the same combination. The middle part "She is smiling" is divided into two parts, two parts of four parts. This short paragraph does not need to be separated when reading aloud, because it is originally one section. However, there is a slight difference in the combination of images - the first two bars are closely connected with the first part, while the following four bars form independent paragraphs. This kind of changing rhythm and structural dislocation makes the whole picture very natural when switching scenes, and the multi-layered description has an inherent sense of jumping. This sense of jumping prevents readers from being distracted during the reading process. The simple juxtaposition of scenes makes people tired of aesthetics, but on the contrary, it continues to be more appreciative.

In the ninth section, it breaks the previously established pattern and uses a looser layout to push the atmosphere of the poem to a small climax. And just as this climax atmosphere continues, the indifferent ellipsis and the sentence "Dayan River, deeply in love with her breast" connect the sentence pattern of the first part, completing this small climax.

After independence, it is integrated again, and the integration contains independent paragraphs, such as twelve sections, and the following thirteen sections are integrated together, making them inseparable.

The combination of variations, the use of polyphonic effects, and the new three-dimensional level of the structure - all make the prose narrative poetry full of jumping rhythm and add new vitality.

3. Selection of independent and overall images:

The selection of images in the overall chapter of "Dayan River" has been carefully considered, and the result of this consideration is The combination of independent intentions and group objects has the characteristics of integration but independence. I take the third and fourth stanzas of the poem as an example:

The four images of "grave", "wafi", "garden" and "stone chair" in the third stanza. They seem to be very independent, but they are integrated together in one picture, creating a sad atmosphere that contrasts with the desolation of the snow at the beginning and end. What’s even more interesting is the subtle changes in composition, which give rise to an intricate rhythm that feels like a panoramic painting. In addition, the combination of natural transitions does not feel stiff at all, and it completely revolves around the main color of gray and white.

In the fourth stanza, "stove fire", "charcoal ash", "rice", "black sauce bowl and table", "tattered clothes", "injured hand", "lice" and "egg". This is the image of separate and independent existence, traced and arranged in the order of the viewer. The overall sense of rhythm is not very strong, it is just an independent musical instrument singing in a low voice, soothingly showing ordinary life scenes. However, the restoration and reproduction of this scene is somewhat of a classical single-mode presentation, which seems rigid and boring, but to a greater extent, it lays the foundation for the integration of the following chapters.