Before Cui Jian 崔健 rocked the Mainland, Lo Tayu 羅大佑 was making himself heard on Taiwan.

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In the 1910s, during the early years of the Chinese Republic, advocates in favour of replacing Literary Chinese 文言文 with the Vernacular Language 白話文 summed up the older written form of expression with a shorthand: zhi-hu-zhe-ye 之、乎、者、也. These were four ubiquitous traditional grammatical particles. Reformers declared that, for China to be a modern country, the hard-to-learn, hard-to-write and hard-to-undersatnd language of the past must be eradicated; zhi-hu-zhe-ye 之、乎、者、也 should be replaced with de-le-ne-ma 的、了、呢、嗎.

In China’s revolutionary twentieth century (1900s to 1995), the expression zhi-hu-zhe-ye would repeatedly be used to lambast the literature and culture of the past, as well as its champions. The four-character saying remains a handy, colloquial way to make fun of obscurantism, pedantry, party thinkers and media hacks, as well as postmodernists and their theory-laden parole. Third Sister Liu 劉三姐, a Mao-era musical released in 1961, famously used songs and riddles to satirise the empty book-learning of the literati and vilify the predatory landed gentry.

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The rock singer Lo Tayu (Luo Dayou 羅大佑, 1954-) used the classical Chinese grammatical particles zhi-hu-zhe-ye 之、乎、者、也 to mock cultural repression and compliance in early 1980s Taiwan.

As a youthful iconoclast in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tayu was famous in Taipei for his look: dressed entirely in black with long hair and dark glasses, which he wore even at night. To a jaded Western eye Tayu’s image smacked of tired rock cliché, but in Taiwan his was a striking pointed-middle-finger aimed at the prim and repressive society of late-authoritarian Republican China.

In his songs Tayu mocked the KMT authorities as well as their fusty Confucian values. ‘Pedantry’ 之乎者也, the title song of the 1982 album of the same name, is the most famous of these works. We introduce it here as part of Nouvelle Chinoiserie 奇趣漢學; these are works that combine the strange or odd with the delightful translated for the diversion of our readers, as well as for the delectation of students who seek pleasure, and meaning, in a unfettered China.

Tayu employed those same four Literary Chinese particles — 之、乎、者、也 — when offering a comment on what at the time was a controversial song:

At the time many creative figures in Taiwan tried rebelling against government censorship; for some the free port of Hong Kong provided an outlet, while one rare individual, the famous balladeer Hou Dejian 侯德健, ‘defected’ 叛逃 to the Mainland in search of artistic and patriotic possibilities.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
2 July 2018

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Related Material (in Chinese):

• The Origin of zhi-hu-zhe-ye 宋 · 文瑩《湘山野錄》之乎者也成語典故的由來
• Evaluating ‘Pedantry’, 如何評價《之乎者也》
• Hou Dejian on Lo Tayu 侯德健評羅大佑
• Xu Zhiyuan Interviews Lo Tayu in 2018 許知遠對話羅大佑
• Lo Tayu: How many people remember this 64-year-old man? 多少人還記得這個64歲的男人？
• On Cui Jian in 1988 搖滾翻身了?
• Third Sister Liu 劉三姐, 1961 (film)

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Pedantry 之乎者也

Lo Tayu 羅大佑

 

 

知知知知知
乎乎乎乎乎
者者者者者
也也也也也

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