Spring of the Tiger, re-read 'The Tiger's Words at the Zoo'
(Baonghean.vn) - I like reading “Remembering the Forest” by Thế Lữ starting with the epigraph: “Words of a tiger in the zoo”. This is a way of speaking without speaking. An announcement that at first glance seems indifferent and emotionless but inside contains a strong emotion about the resentment of a “tiger lost from the forest”!
Poet The Lu (1907 - 1989)
It seems that all the messages about resentment have been expressed in the most concise, general and painful way in the above dedication, so I really do not want to pay much attention to the narrative, descriptive or argumentative interpretations about the sadness, anger and resentment that follow. I want to pay more attention to the appearance of the system of images expressing nostalgia for the forest, and in the contrast of spatial states.Obviously, without much explanation, everyone understands that the contrast here is the contrast between the glorious and free scene of the king of the jungle in the old days, and the scene that he must have been fed up with to the point of being able to bitterly conclude that it was "a scene of fake and mediocre renovation". The two words "trivial" express an attitude of contempt, echoing the will of romanticism of which Thế Lữ was one of the pioneers in Vietnam, because from the original root, the appearance of romanticism was a reaction of the youth to the mediocrity, narrowness and dullness of the life they were enduring.
According to the perspective of poetics theory, the two spaces described here belong to two categories: closed space and open space. Closed space is the layer upon layer of encirclement surrounding the fate of the victim. First of all, it is the space of the iron cage. Of course, first of all, it is a realistic image and in another context, it is truly unpoetic. But here, from that unpoetic, the poetic nature is expressed in a poignant way that only those who have been to the zoo to see the gentle tigers in a situation of being stripped of all value and think of the state of mind of those whose freedom is deprived can understand. That is a common state of mind of the youth class in Vietnamese society at that time. It seems a little more spacious, a little more airy than the scene of the zoo. That is the feeling obtained from the outside view.
But unfortunately, that scene, that person is described by performing a look from the inside, from the depths of despair and indignation, and is of someone who is always conscious of his value and class as well as his current situation. That scene is“The black water strip pretends to be a stream without a clear flow/ Sneaks under the armpits of low mounds/ A few sesame leaves are gentle and not mysterious/ Also try to imitate the wildness/ Of the thousand-year-old lofty and gloomy place”.
It is indeed a very petty and silly scene. The remarkable thing is that those things only stop at the level of pitiful, even normal, if they stand alone, knowing themselves. But when they have"trying to imitate the wildness of the sublime and gloomy thousand-year-old place"then it becomes pathetic. That is the result of the intentional view of the subject - the tiger in disguise in the poem - if speaking in the philosophical, phenomenological spirit.
The tragedy of“the scenes of trivial and false repairs”that is pushed to the extreme when in the poem appears the majestic, magnificent scene of"terrible forest scene"in an open space. Here, the reader can enjoy a masterpiece of poetry and painting by Thế Lữ. From the perspective of the lord, the ruler of the jungle, each colorful detail connects to create a masterpiece of the extraordinary. It seems that this is an important and touching moment in the tiger's memories.
Where are the golden nights by the stream?
I'm drunk on bait, standing and drinking the moonlight
Where the rainy days move in all directions
I silently watch our country change.
Where are the green trees at dawn, bathed in sunlight?
Birds singing, my sleep is joyful
Where are the afternoons filled with blood after the forest?
I wait for death in the harsh sun.
 |
The four pieces of the tetraptych (not exactly four tetraptych paintings as people often think) represent four important moments of a day in the life of the king of the jungle. There is a mixture of emotions, a feeling like a cycle from passionate beauty to fierce beauty, from the mindset of the connoisseur to the mindset of the ruler and conqueror. The ferocity thus increases gradually in each question content, which has a very rhetorical meaning.
If in the ancients' four-panel paintings, readers can only describe the combination of virtue categories or the four seasons... in a somewhat rigid normative nature (pine, bamboo, chrysanthemum, apricot; spring, summer, autumn, winter; fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, herder...), then in The Lu's four-panel paintings, people can see the subtle movements of color tones to feel the subtle movements of mood, and therefore, the continuous nature of the painting becomes very clear.
Of course, the poem used a very common natural phenomenon, that is, when the sunset falls, the sun falls, the afternoon color shines a terrifying red. The important thing is that the tiger knew how to seize that moment to express on one side his wild imperial character, on the other side his resentment of being deprived of all values - the tragedy of the usurper. The movement of colors in the four-panel painting ends in the climax of sadness and hatred.
By opening up two opposing spaces of closed and open and the subtle use of the majestic four-panel painting of wild nature in contrast to the condensed, gloomy tones of “the fake, trivial, repaired scenes”, Thế Lữ, with his poem written in 1936, was a pioneer of romantic New Poetry, becoming a pioneer representing the Vietnamese youth at that time to express his thoughts on the human condition. This is a universal mood that would later be expressed passionately and enthusiastically in thousands of poems by hundreds of authors in the period 1932 - 1945.
