威廉·燕卜荪与中国现代主义新诗运动

William Empson and the Modernization of Chinese New Poetry

英国诗人、评论家威廉·燕卜荪曾于20世纪上半叶介入中国的现代主义新诗运动。在西南联大执教期间,燕卜荪将叶芝、艾略特、奥登等西方现代派诗人引介给学生,同时推行“细读”这一研究方法。燕卜荪强调思辨与矛盾的现代主义诗作,启蒙了穆旦等青年诗人运用相似的现代派技法描绘战时中国的现实。燕卜荪的朦胧诗学帮助确立了语言本体论这一新的批评风向,促使彼时国内的诗歌赏析从印象批评转为语义批评,诗歌创作从偏向感伤的浪漫主义走向强调智性的现代主义。

The British poet and critic William Empson was deeply involved in the modernization of Chinese new poetry in the first half of the twentieth century.As a teacher at Southwest Associated University,he led his students to modern poets like W.B.Yeats,T.S.Eliot and W.H.Auden,while promoting the literary approach of“close reading”.His own writing,with its intellectual intensity and its focus on paradoxes,also enlightened many young Chinese poets like Mu Dan to apply similar techniques to the description of wartime China.His poetics of ambiguity helped to establish a new trend in literary criticism that centered on language itself,prompting literary criticism then heavily depending on impressionism to become more analytical,and turned the tide of sentimental Romanticism to intellectual Modernism.