精华阅读：《葬花吟》中英对照赏析(5)

　　The poet and the background note: Cao Xueqin (? ~1764) was one of the most famous novelists and poets in the history of Chinese literature. Born in an influential Manchurian bureaucratic family, he had high cultural accomplishments and outstanding competence for art. During the reign of the Qing Emperor Yongzheng, his father was involved in a political struggle within the ruling class, defeated, so his family suffered a heavy blow both politically and financially. Thereafter, his family circumstances deteriorated. However, adversity brought talent in return. It was when he was plunged in such an embarrassing circumstance that he had the chance to contact himself with the underprivileged of the then society, thus giving him specific, intense experience, and enabling himself to see better of life. He spent as was recorded, at least ten years busying himself with the production of the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, in which, through a detailed description of the rise and fall of an influential noble family of that time, he created a great number of typical characters, conducted in-depth analyses and criticisms of the then evil society and, at the same time, sang ebullient praises of both the male and female youths who were considered heretical in pursuit of love. The Dream of the Red Chamber is seen as a great realistic masterpiece among the Chinese classic novels. But the novel reveals a kind of pessimism and sentimentalism past cure. With the tone of Lin Daiyu, one of the heroines in The Dream of the Red Chamber, the author Cao Xueqin blended human feelings with nature in this novel as if in confirmation of man’s helplessness in the presence of the change of nature and the flight of time. As is known to all that have read it, Lin is a sentimentalist who, taking as part of her life the enjoyment of flowers and moonlight, tends

　　To shed tears at the sight of flowers falling,

　　And feel sad when finding the moon waning.

　　In fact,

　　Flowers bloom and then flowers die,

　　There’s no need for her to give a sigh.

　　It is the very law of nature,

　　She ought not to take pains to bother.

　　Relentless away time flies,

　　Over the natural loss she cries.

　　She was born frail and tender,

　　Or because she’s a teenager.

　　The author intended his novel to be a tragedy, around the theme of which he spread all the plots in it. Here, in this poem he had his heroine Lin utter his aspirations to achieve the artistic effect.