以经典化为问题——闻一多的《现代诗钞》与新诗评估坐标重建

Classicization as a Problem——Wen Yiduo’s Modern Chinese Poetry: An Anthology and the Reconstruction of the Evaluative Coordinate of New Poetry

闻一多生命晚期编选的《现代诗钞》,其选录的诗人、诗作,总体而论经典化“成效”不高,但就其所推崇的诗人而言,成为经典的比例却相当大。这一症候性现象,与闻氏取舍新诗的原则、百年新诗经典化特征相关。他一方面以“昨天”视野和古典文学名著标准取舍新诗,承传中国抒情诗“情”的传统,置重抒写家国、人民情感的诗作,选录体现了现代抒情方式的诗作。另一方面,以“今天”观念和外译意识审视新诗,看重那些立足战争语境、表现民主观念且具有中国情怀和世界元素的诗作。《现代诗钞》所选取的大量诗人在后来史述中销声匿迹了,而未选的某些诗人又成为今天公认的经典,构成历史疑案,这背后闻氏选诗的现代性标准与百年来新诗评价尺度及其“经典”观相颉颃,彰显了重建新诗评估新坐标与原则的可能。

Modern Chinese Poetry: An Anthology was edited by Wen Yiduo in his last years. The “efficacy” of the selected poets and poems becoming classics was not positive. However, when it came to the poets truly celebrated by him, quite a few of them were classicized. This phenomenon was related to his principles of evaluating new poetry and the characteristics of classicization of new poetry in the past hundred years. On the one hand, he evaluated new poetry with a view of “yesterday” and the standard of classical literature. Inheriting the tradition of “feelings” in Chinese lyrics, he prefered the poems that wrote about family and state, and people’s semtiments, and thus, selected poems that embodied a modern lyrical approach. On the other hand, in a sense of “today” and with the consciousness of translation, he attached importance to those poems that were set in the context of war, and expressed the idea of democracy with Chinese feelings and international concerns. The fact that a large amount of the poets included in Modern Chinese Poetry: An Anthology became obscure while the unselected poets became classics has constituted a historical mystery. It reflects the modern standard of Wen’s selected poems and the evaluation scale of new poetry in the past century counteract the “classical” view, which reveals the possibility of reconstructing a new coordinate and a set of new principles for evaluating new poetry.