Zheng Juzheng: A Biography

Author: Zhu Dongrun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-12
Features: When the author wrote Four Essays on Reading Poetry and other books, he used classical Chinese because these many books were full of classical Chinese citations. For the sake of coordination between the text and the citations, it was naturally more appropriate to use classical Chinese. However, while writing, he often felt a new artistic conception that required a new style of writing to avoid the regret of failing to express his thoughts adequately. Later, when writing An Overview of Biographical Literature from the Han to the Tang, he used vernacular Chinese for this reason. There were also two difficulties when writing in vernacular Chinese. The text and the citations are clearly two different styles, and readers are likely to feel a dissonance in the language, which is an unavoidable difficulty. Second, the vocabulary of vernacular Chinese is relatively, so there is often a need to borrow classical Chinese terms or create new ones when narrating. This difficulty is equally unavoidable. However, in recent years, such writing style has become undeniable. "The future will judge the present as the present judges the past." Perhaps in another twenty years, there will be another change. Let everything be left for future generations to judge."