Suddenly hearing the news that Mr. Yu Guangzhong, a famous Poet, Essayist, Critic and Translator in Taiwan, died of heart and lung failure due to stroke and heart and lung failure on December 14, 2017, I was shocked and could not believe it. I suddenly found that the bad news or eulogy about his death was spreading like snowflakes in the WeChat group, and I was convinced. Open the relevant webpage and you will know that it is amazing:
Yu Guangzhong graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of National Taiwan University in 1952. In 1953, together with Qin Zihao and Zhong Dingwen, he co-founded the "Blue Star" poetry society. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa (lowa) in 1959. He has taught at Soochow University, National Taiwan Normal University, National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, and Chinese University of Hong Kong, during which he was invited by the U.S. Department of State to serve as a visiting professor at many universities in the United States. Since 1985, he has been a professor and chair professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, including six years as dean of the Faculty of Letters and director of the Institute of Foreign Languages.
Yu Guangzhong devoted his life to poetry, prose, criticism, and translation, and called himself the "four-dimensional space" of his writing. The style of his work is extremely inconsistent, and in general, his poetic style varies according to the subject matter. Poetry expressing will and ideals generally appears magnificent and sonorous, while works describing nostalgia and love are generally delicate and soft. So far, it has been in the literary world for more than half a century, and has been widely involved in it, and is known as "polygamous in art". His literary career is long, vast and deep, and he is a strong contemporary poet, an important critic, a famous critic, and an excellent translator. At present, 21 kinds of poetry collections, 11 kinds of prose collections, 5 kinds of commentaries, 13 kinds of translation collections, a total of 50 kinds. His representative works include the poetry collection "White Jade Bitter Melon", the prose collection "Memory Is As Long as a Railway Track", and the commentary collection "On the Watershed: A Collection of Commentaries in the Afterglow". The literary scholar Liang Shiqiu once gave a high evaluation: "Yu Guangzhong wrote poetry with his right hand and prose with his left hand. ”
Yu Guangzhong enjoys a high reputation in the literary circles of Taiwan and overseas and the mainland of the motherland, and has won all important awards in Taiwan, including the "Wu Sanlian Literature Award", "China Times Award", "Golden Tripod Award", "National Literature and Art Award", and won the 13th Flower Trace World Chinese Literature Award in July 2015.
After going through all this, I can't help but have respect. Looking at his white-haired and elegant demeanor, I can't help but think of his famous work "Nostalgia":
Childhood
Nostalgia is a small stamp
I'm at this end
Mother was over there
Grow up
Nostalgia is a narrow ticket
The bride is over there
Later
Nostalgia is a short grave on one side
I'm outside
Mother is inside
And now
Nostalgia is a shallow strait
The continent is over there
Written in 1971, the poem is a modern poem he composed after he wandered away from home and returned to China overseas. The four wonderful images of "stamps", "ferry tickets", "graves" and "straits" that appear in the poems aptly express the sorrow and hatred of leaving the hometown, drifting, saying goodbye, and hoping to return but cannot return, and the abstract "nostalgia" is truly and vividly presented. To this end, he once explained: "As the days go by, my nostalgia grows, and when I left the mainland for a full 22 years, I wrote "Homesickness" in my former home on Xiamen Street in Taipei in just 20 minutes. The poem was widely included in the textbooks of the Chinese world, which aroused strong resonance in the global Chinese world, and thus gave him the title of "nostalgic poet". For more than 40 years, this poem has been widely recited among Chinese people at home and abroad, influencing generations of people.
Because Mr. Yu Guangzhong was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, his ancestral home is Yongchun, Fujian, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents in 1949, and then moved to Taiwan with his family the following year, so he said that "the mainland is the mother, Taiwan is the wife, and Hong Kong is the lover", coupled with many years of wandering, so the homesickness is the deepest.
In fact, as early as the 1960s, he created a lot of nostalgic poems, among which people chanted for a while: "When I die, bury me, between the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, pillow my head, white hair covered with black soil, in China, the most beautiful and motherly country, I will sleep calmly, sleep the whole continent." ”
In addition, homesickness is even stronger, and what I really like is his "Four Rhymes of Nostalgia":
Give me a scoop of Yangtze River water ah Yangtze River water
Wine-like Water of the Yangtze River
The taste of drunkenness
It's the taste of nostalgia
Give me a begonia red ah begonia red
Blood-like begonia red
The burning pain of boiling blood
It is the burning pain of nostalgia
Give me a snowflake white, snowflake white
Letters like snowflakes white
Home letters waiting
It's nostalgic waiting
Give me a plum fragrance
Mother-like plum incense
The fragrance of motherhood
It is the fragrance of the countryside
The whole poem adopts the form of one chant and three sighs, and the two long sentences at the beginning and end of each chapter are repeatedly recited, echoing each other from afar, like the echo of the valley, the feeling of homesickness, just like the fireworks are about to burst out, so that the children of the heavens feel empathy.
The author in turn selected four images with Chinese characteristics and personality styles to express the nostalgia complex that the poet has accumulated for a long time and is unforgettable. The poet's fiery homesickness and patriotism are like a red line, organically organizing the four groups of images rich in national characteristics, "Yangtze River Water", "Begonia Red", "Snowflake White" and "LameiXiang". The poet chooses the "Yangtze River Water" that feeds the Chinese nation and symbolizes modern civilization as the first image, and thus extends to the "begonia red" of the home scene, which constitutes the overall thought of home and country, and then from the real to the virtual, longing for a piece of "snowflake white" and "a plum fragrance", which constitutes a full range of homesickness. The cleverness of the situation fully reflects the author's wandering state of mind of longing for unity and returning to the mainland. The poem was later composed and sung by the famous Taiwanese singer Luo Dayou. Yu Guangzhong said that Luo Dayou's "Four Rhymes of Nostalgia" is a "Chu Song" that wanderers dare not open easily. "The guitar is leisurely, the intestines are full of sorrows, between the lines of this short word, how many late nights have cried bitterly, and how many hopes to wear autumn water waiting." 」
The reason why there is such a fiery homesickness complex in the afterglow is inseparable from the special era and personal extraordinary experiences he lived in at that time. As Wang Zhong wrote in the article "Death in the Afterglow, The Retreat Is Always Nostalgia":
"In the historical context of the separation of the mainland and Taiwan for political reasons, many Chinese who have suffered from parting have taken nostalgic literature as their spiritual sustenance and maintained the spiritual world across the rivers and seas. As a representative figure of Taiwanese nostalgia literature, Yu Guangzhong innovated the expression form of 'nostalgia' in traditional culture, occupying a unique position in the history of Chinese literature.
"The life in the afterglow is a true portrayal of a generation of Chinese and displacement. In 1928, Yu Guangzhong was born in Nanjing, the capital of the Nationalist government at that time, and after Japan launched a war of aggression against China, Yu Guangzhong moved to Chongqing with his parents and spent his middle school years there. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Yu Guangzhong studied at Jinling University and Xiamen University, and then lived and studied in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States. Such a rich life history, even in the current situation of frequent population flow, is rare, but it belongs to the ordinary generation in the afterglow.
"Despite his lifelong migration, the poet has always maintained a hometown complex. Where a person is, his home is where he is, but there can only be one hometown, and to understand the afterglow, you must understand the 'cultural nostalgia' in his eyes. Nostalgia is not necessarily a real reference, not necessarily a specific city such as Nanjing, Chongqing, Xiamen, Hong Kong, etc., but a kind of virtual nostalgia for the homeland. In the process of escaping from war and suffering, the more homeless you are, the easier it is to stimulate nostalgia, and suddenly a yearning for a spiritual homeland. ”
It is reported that in October 2017, Mr. Yu Guangzhong celebrated his 90th birthday, and on the same day, he expressed his mood with Ouyang Xiu's last sentence "Then to Ruyin": "Yellow chestnuts are beautiful and mulberry, and purple cherries are ripe and the wheat is cool." Zhu Lun was ashamed of his love, and the white head came back to look like his hometown. His "nostalgia complex" is evident from this. Therefore, he is a well-deserved "nostalgic poet".
The Slovaks have passed away, but his "nostalgia complex" is haunted by dreams and will never fade, and it will always accompany people to cherish their homeland and look forward to a beautiful spiritual homeland.