On May 18th, Prof. Wang Hongyin of CFL was invited to guest in the formal academic activity of “Communicating with Tutors”. In the special occasion of memorizing Mu Dan’s 40 years of departure from us, he delivered a lecture entitled as “The Poetic Life of Mudan” in that afternoon, which was hosted by Song Shizhen, one of his PhD students. Prof. Wang is currently also the president of the Research Institute of Chinese Classics Translation,vice-president of Research Institute of English-Chinese Comparison,and he is widely acknowledged by many other famous scholars who have been focusing on translating classics.
In 2000, Prof. Wang composed a poem with the title of “Green Flame” based on his personal experience at that time. He then told us how he gradually got to know the poet named Mu Dan, and said this: “Many things just happened there by chance.”
The poem “Spring” was a masterpiece created by Mu Dan in his green days of youth. When interpreting it, Prof. Wang believed that the image of the “window” there was actually a mental let-out for the poet himself who was not just limited by his personal puzzle in youth; more specifically, Mu Dan has sublimed the theme of pain into a higher level of exploring humanity revival, thus showing the precociousness of him.
Lines in different poems indeed can reflect the poet’s turning point in life. As for Mu Dan’s literary works on love, Prof. Wang displayed some authentic records picked from Diary of Wu Mi. Apart from that, Mu Dan also wrote many poems on war. As a matter of fact, war exerted a great influence on him, for he had witnessed plenty of cruel scenes of life and death on the battle field. Nevertheless, his poetry has covered a wide range of topics, from the mass population, the whole nation, to the war, the nature and even to the artic creation itself, presenting a rich mentality of him. Readers can see a trinity of the physical body, the environment and the psychology on Mu Dan himself, according to Prof. Wang.
Mu Dan is also an expert at translating both English and Russian poems. Though having undergone the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, he made great efforts and presented us a precious “legacy”——a Chinese translation of Don Juan.
At last, Prof. Wang showed us a re-created version of Wordsworth’s poem “London” to express his deep admiration for the greatness of Mu Dan.
The serial activity “Communicating with Tutors” is regularly held by the Graduate Office in the Party Committee of Nankai University and undertaken by the Graduate Association of the College of Foreign Languages, serving for academic communications between students and teachers.
Reported by: Gao Mengyan
May 19th, 2017