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中文、翻譯及語言學系
學術硏討會

The Geographical Scale of Traditional Poetic Language: On the Use of Allusion in  Huang Zunxian's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in Japan (舊詩語的地理尺度──以黃遵憲《日本雜事詩》中的典故運用為例)

講 者

鄭毓瑜博士

國立臺灣大學 中國文學系教授及系主任

日期: 2009年2月27日 (星期五)
時間: 上午10:30 – 12:00
地點: 香港城市大學 教學樓藍區七樓B7603室 語言: 普通話

摘 要

Although Huang Zunxian's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in Japan are written in a form of zhuzhi ci similar to popular songs, and are not strict in their tonal prosody, they are still rich in historical allusion. But how can one use a semantic range bound closely by allusions to confront the circumstances of a new age? If what we would like to discuss is Huang Zunxian's poetry, and not just his biography, his poetic language may be more relevant than his personal experiences: though the first level of poetic language describes contemporary people and events, at another level his poetic language is a multilayered web of meaning that one comprehends only by means of allusion. Allusions relate events, times, and places from past and present (at least two but sometimes more). They relate one fact from previous knowledge, the content of the allusion, to another fact previously unknown, using this analogy to "name" a new event or object. This allusion is not merely a translation or reference for a single fixed object: behind an allusion, properly understood, lies a whole set of different ways of understanding the world, and relations that make sense of disparate events. When the writer selects an allusion, he has actually already chosen the relevant site where some foreign historical event, institution, or custom "occurs," and this is not necessarily a site that one can identify on a map. Since the site where new objects or events are enacted must be determined by a pre-existing body of knowledge, there will almost certainly be some cases of discretionary translation, or even mistranslation, in the process, but at the same time, the translation of these new concepts can also conflict with the prior body of knowledge, and end up reinterpreting the "untraditional" components of "tradition." Huang Zunxian served as an intermediary who created new links between the traditional poetic language and the new age he lived in. Traditional poetic language was like a set of measuring equipment, convenient for sketching whatever "conformed to scale," but sometimes the scale provided by traditional poetic language could be too short or too long, too wide or too narrow. Distinctions that lay beyond the scale could in turn invest traditional poetic language with new significance.

講 者