Collection of Shen Yi Shi's Works

Author: Seamus Heaney
Translator: Wu De'an et al.
Country: Ireland
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-01-01
Features: This book is part of the "Century Beidou Poetry Series." Seamus Heaney is the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. The book consists of two parts: a poetry selection and essays/criticisms. His poems blend lyrical beauty with profound theoretical depth, extracting magical imagination from daily life and reviving history. His works are both lyrically expressive and deeply reflective, capable of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and bringing history back to life. – 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech
This mindset is perfectly understandable. In the case of Chekhov visiting a prison isolation ward in the 1890s, the same psychology is at play. Chekhov wanted to document the lives of prisoners, live among them, interview them, and then publish a book about these experiences. Here, Chekhov also sought to establish his right to imaginative writing, using the hard facts of his sociological reports to win the freedom of artistic pleasure. He wryly called this trip "a duty to medicine," thereby reclaiming a typical form of humility and prophetically exposing the modern guilt of creative writing itself. Clearly, the doctor within him was someone he believed had a claim to a certain space in the world, and the writer had to earn that space, to gain the right to have leisure to pursue his art. All of this is vividly embodied in the scene where Chekhov, upon arriving at the night of Sakhalin Prison Island, drunkenly consumes a bottle of brandy.
Several months earlier, in Moscow, his friends were shocked by his terrifying decision to travel: Sakhalin was then an island of sin, filled with exiled subversives, criminals, various degenerates, and other politically unacceptable prisoners and agitators. Despite his recent success in establishing himself as an artist in society, Chekhov strangely (at least the Moscow literary circle thought so) decided to complete this investigation. Part of the reason was his conscious adherence to the belief that working for a better, just future was necessary, and part of it was undoubtedly his unconscious attempt to confirm some connection with his serf grandfather in his inner self. It was this repressed shadow self, along with everything he was forced to struggle against, that he hoped to bury on Sakhalin Island. He once declared that he had squeezed out the last drop of serf blood from his body, finally awakening as a free man. If you will, you can see this as a clear indication of the intent behind his journey. The Sakhalin trip was partly an exorcism ritual to drive out the slave blood within him, as well as a practical attempt to achieve psychological and artistic freedom; it was an attempt to gain "inner freedom," as his compatriot Osip Mandelstam would say 40 years later, to gain "the right feeling."
Regardless, to the surprise of his bewildered friends in the capital's salons, Anton Chekhov set off in the summer of 1890 on a long journey to Sakhalin Prison Island. As a farewell gift, his friends gave him a bottle of brandy. During his six-week arduous journey by ship and horse-drawn carriage, he kept the bottle until the night he arrived on the island, when he finally drank it. I often regard that moment as symbolic: the writer derives his pleasure from the amber brandy, savoring the intoxicating aroma and fleeting luxury, remaining composed amidst the overpowering stench and the jingle of shackles. The brandy not only represented the gift from his friends but also a gift to his art. Here, we have an image of a contented poet who is not ashamed of the suffering around him, because he can bear responsibility without hesitation.
In Chekhov, Owen, and Sol McLean, we find an impulse to place truth above beauty, an impulse that mocks the highest demands art makes of itself, as humorously depicted in the figure of Nero—a singer and musician who remains immersed in his beautiful music while his city burns around him. In them, we discover a typical awkwardness, symbolized by David Hammond's refusal to sing, which poets who exercise their freedom of talent in the face of existential unfreedom and harm also experience. When I say "freedom of talent," I mean that poetry, however responsible, always retains an element of unbridled freedom. Within inspiration there is always a certain joy and an escape from responsibility. That sense of liberation and abundance stands in contrast to any limitation or loss. For this reason, lyric poets psychologically feel the need to justify their existence in a world that is clearly one of limitation and loss. The awkwardness caused by the artificiality of poetry is particularly evident in post-war poetry in Eastern Europe, especially Polish poetry.
If Wilfred Owen, in relatively innocent trenches, felt that poetry was an offense—"especially since I have nothing to do with poetry"—then for Poles who survived the Nazi terror, the Holocaust, and Soviet cynicism, poetry would seem even more repulsive. They were prepared to deal with anti-poetry. As Z. Herbert (Zbigniew Herbert) put it, the poet's task now is "to save at least two words from the disasters of history, without which all poetry would be a hollow game of appearance and meaning—the words are: justice and truth." It is no surprise, then, that Z. Herbert is writing a lyric poem whose public function is to renounce lyrical qualities. This poem (which I will discuss on pages 99–100) is simply called "The Visitor," and it endorses a life in opposition to frivolous, intoxicating artistic delusions. Moreover, Herbert is very aware of the limits of artistic rights. "In tranquility," his poem says, "enjoy poetry, as long as you do not use it to escape reality." It grants the same forgiveness to both the poet and the reader, offering a true repentance—renouncing poetry as a decoration for self-indulgence. In other words, I tend to think that if Herbert had been with us in the recording studio in 1972, he would have encouraged us to stay and record the tape.