小说与文学2021newcriterion.com
如何读懂诗
On getting poetry
导读
这篇《论读懂诗》讨论的是：为什么许多人觉得诗歌难以「读懂」，以及格律知识、诗歌史如何帮助我们进入一首诗。对写作者来说，它提醒我们诗歌首先是声音与语言的游戏，而不是等待破解的谜题；评论区也贡献了「背诵」「共情想象」等具体可操作的读诗方法。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把诗当作语言的游戏来写、来读，不必强求每首诗背后都藏着一个必须被破解的深意。
- 02
试着背诵你喜欢的诗，只有背下来才真正体会得到它的音韵、节奏和隐喻的省略之美。
- 03
写作前先练习「把自己想象成他人」：坐在别人的处境里看世界，这是进入抒情与叙事的入口。
- 04
读诗时留意自己当下的情绪和生活经验，那些是你能与作者对接的参照物；诗不是孤岛，它有语境。
HN 评论精选
诗歌教育把「隐藏含义」强加给读者，其实诗的本质是语言游戏。
我觉得我们之所以觉得必须「读懂」诗，很大程度上要归咎于教育：课堂上教诗，总预设有一个隐藏含义，你找不出来，读这首诗就毫无用处。到了大学，我在一门创意写作课上听到完全不同的说法——诗是玩。它不必激发某种深刻的意义，有时只是把词语摆弄得悦耳有趣。再加上「诗必须押韵、必须符合格律」这个从小被灌输的观念被打破，你会发现诗被推销成了与它本来面目很不一样的东西。这并不是说不能从诗里寻找深意，或写作时有意义追求，但诗的核心是玩，严肃程度由你决定。对我来说，正是这个认识让我比高中时更「懂」诗了。
kibleopard查看英文原文
Just my 2 cents: I think a lot of the reason why we feel we need to “get” poetry in the first place comes from our education system. When poetry is taught in the classroom, it is always done so under the guise of there being some hidden meaning that, if you are unable to discover, makes reading the poem feel utterly useless. Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is. That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.
用「假设显然为真的事为假」的想象练习来培养共情力，是进入诗歌的入口。
对普通读者来说，一个不错的入门方法是：先假设一件显然为真的事是假的。比如「法官不过是不懂 LISP 的蹩脚程序员」这个显然为真的陈述，现在想象它是假的。然后顺着这个错误结论推演下去，看它席卷出什么后果。比如 HN 上出现某条法院裁决的新闻时，别急着从第一原理写檄文骂那个不懂 LISP 的法官判错了；就坐在那里，看着自己的双手，想象这是一双远方的法官的手，他和你一样也有手，但不知怎的，那双手和你正看着的这双不一样。这样练上七年，你会开始闻到让你想起年少轻狂的气味，看到恋人相视而笑的场景，而你正痴痴望着公园长椅上刻下的字句。到那时，才可以打开一本诗集开始读。
jancsika查看英文原文
A good way in for the common HN reader is to start by considering that an obviously true thing could be false. Like, take the obviously true statement, "Courtroom judges are simply inept programmers who don't understand LISP." Now imagine it were false. From there, wrong warp through all the consequences of that false conclusion. E.g., when a story on HN appears about a court ruling, don't do the right thing of immediately writing a screed from first principles about what the wrong LISP programmer should have ruled. Just sit there, looking at your hands, imagining them to be the hands of a judge in a far off land who, like you, also has hands, but somehow, some way, they are different hands than the ones you're looking at. After seven years of this you'll begin to smell odors that remind you of the impetuousness of youth, and see scenes of lovers laughing as you stare longingly at words scrawled into a park bench. Only then is it time to open a book of poetry and begin reading. There's probably also some good poetry subreddits where you can get started.
背诵诗歌能让人真正体会其音乐性与隐喻，而音乐录音的普及抢走了诗歌的这部分功能。
我认为人们对诗歌的热情很大程度上被唾手可得的音乐抽干了。诗最初的形态是一种助记手段——古典时期诗常被吟唱，即便不唱，诗也比散文好记。文章谈到「诗歌的音乐性」，但只是比喻意义上的，不是字面意义。录音音乐的出现把这些功能都转移给了音乐：过去人们梦想背下一堆诗，流落荒岛也能背华兹华斯自娱；现在你哼首歌就行了。我个人经验是，强迫自己背诗时反而更能「懂」诗——背诵让你真正体会到好诗的抒情性，以及隐喻与省略的运用，它们本是为凑节奏和韵脚而生，后来却有了自己的生命。
andrewla查看英文原文
I think a lot of the enthusiasm for poetry has been sapped by the availability of music. Poetry, at least in its initial incarnations, was a mnemonic for memorizing. Classically, poetry was often chanted or sung, but even without that help, it is easier to remember then prose. The article talks about the "music of poetry" but only in metaphorical terms rather than literal. Now the advent of recorded music means that all of that has been moved to music instead. People used to dream of having a bunch of poetry memorized -- if you were stuck on an island you could always recite Wordsworth to entertain yourself. Now you'd just hum or sing whatever music strikes your fancy instead. I have personally found myself slightly more able to "get" poetry when I force myself to memorize it -- to me that really lets you appreciate the lyrical nature of good poetry and the use of metaphor and shorthand, which both arose from a necessity of fitting some rhythmic or rhyming scheme, but took on a life of their own.
「读懂」诗靠的不是分析，而是情绪自觉、人生经验、声音敏感与把诗放进语境的能力。
作者认为，了解诗的规则以及诗人如何打破规则的历史，能帮人「懂」诗。我怀疑单靠理智上的理解起不了多大作用。我难得「读懂」一首诗的时候，从来不是靠推理；如果边读边分析，我大概根本读不进去。我觉得培养这种能力大概与以下几点有关：一是觉察自己当下的情绪状态，这是与诗人写作时状态对接的参照点；二是觉察自己积累的人生经验，那是你理解诗所用的材料；三是对词语声音和节奏的敏感；四是一种包含死亡这一终极框架在内的广阔生命视角——西班牙诗人洛尔迦谈到一种名为「duende」的创造力，源于对生命阴暗面的体验，我认为这种体验也会让人更容易接受诗与其他艺术所传达的重要东西；五是把诗的内容与其他事物联系起来的意愿和能力，无论是其他诗、历史，还是诗人个人经历。诗不是孤岛，它有语境，而你读它的那一刻也有语境，包括你的知识积累和当下的心理与情绪状态。
tangerine_beet查看英文原文
The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get" poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I don't think the getting could have happened at all. As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.
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