卪｜卪
为什么用英文读周杰伦/方文山诗？在其作品《独映成双》(Love and Revelation in Modern Poetic Chinese)，法籍台湾学者乌海客(Haimrik Wu)解释了用英文而非中文解读周杰伦/方文山诗的必要性：
“The conclusion that the book should be written in English rather than in Chinese is an obvious one: There is a clarity of the beauty of modern Chinese achieved by the poetry of Jay Zhou - Fang Wenshan, which makes any attempt to analyze such a beauty a wrap that obscures this clarity.
It’s kind of clarity that isn’t the result of having bright light shined upon something, but rather a clarity that one perceives when seeing an object through a clean glass bottle that contains it, regardless of the clearness of the appearance of the object itself. It is but the bottle’s transparent veiling that imposes this clarity on anything. This explains the effortlessness that is seen in Zhou/Fang poetry when they achieve the impossible by seamlessly transitioning from worldly objects to otherworldly affections and then again making the transition backwards in the very same line.
For example, in lines like 雨轻轻弹，朱红色的窗，我一生在纸上，被风吹乱,
with the image-making sound of rain knocking on the window, the bright red color of the window’s frame, while serving to anchor the listeners’ attention to a seemingly realistic setting, invites them to look inside a traditional Chinese scholar’s study. Though the listeners will feel no displacement when seeing that scholar’s pages of writing are blown away by the incoming wind and carrying with them the storm weathered life of the scholar’s early years, in a secondary reflection, listeners realize what they just heard was literally saying that those papers are carrying a person’s life on their surfaces and are being blown away by wind. A careful listener could wonder how bizzar it would be to have a piece of paper carrying one’s life physically on it but in fact listeners have no time to accomplish this since the next transition to a completely different scenic and emotional setting is brought about again by this perfect merging of what is concrete with what is abstract.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could manage this level of symbolic complexity and fluidity if he or she hasn’t experienced what Sufism authors term ‘alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, where space isn’t covered by time-consuming effort but is shortened by the intensity of desire, just like in Zhou/Fang’s song the desire of having one’s life put down (and left behind) in words could make one’s life actually carryable by papers flying away in the wind.
It’s against this clarity that one feels almost a shame of his own deprivation when his use of Chinese is put side by side to how Chinese is used by Zhou’s music and Fang’s lyrics. Only in the clumsiness of scientific English, one could hunker down and have his dignity shielded. “
