In front of the camera, Ye Jiaying told people that she would pass on the recitation of ancient poems, even if it was not accepted now. Just like the blue whale in ancient mythology who can talk to the ocean from afar, this remains of the sea may be heard and moved by people in the future.
Reporter | Ai Jiangtao
Photo courtesy of the film crew of | "Water Moon in Hand"
Life unfolds in poetry
Since 2015, after the completion of the Jialing Academy at Nankai University, Ye Jiaying officially ended 46 years of life in Vancouver, avoiding the pain of running across the sea. At the age of 96, she has continued to work tirelessly in the education and inheritance of classical poetry in recent years, but she has rarely appeared in public. So when I saw Chen Chuanxing's documentary "Water Moon in Hand" for Ye Jiaying, I was still quite curious about how he persuaded Mr. Ye to participate in this shooting plan.
Ye Jiaying
"At the beginning of the shooting, Mr. Ye asked me what my motivation was. The so-called original intention is to go back to the source of poetry, back to classical poetry, and when it comes to classical poetry, Mr. Ye is a center of gravity that cannot be bypassed. Chen Chuanxing said. Previously, Chen Chuanxing filmed two modern poets in the documentary series "They Write on the Island", Zhou Mengdi and Zheng Zaoyu.
"Before filming Zheng Shuyu, I was talking about poetry and history, that is, the relationship between poetry and the historical context of modern poetry; to Zhou Gong (Zhou Mengdi), basically talking about poetry and faith, we know that Zhou Gong himself is a converted layman, and there are a lot of Buddhist ideas in his poems; to Mr. Ye, into a topic of poetry and existence, Mr. Ye's life, almost completely devoted to the study of classical poetry, she herself writes classical poetry, and the teaching and promotion of her classical poetry is equivalent to maintaining the lifeblood and fire of classical poetry. From her, we can see that her personal existence is carried out in poetry. ”
The snow-covered Longmen Grottoes, the colorful Tang Dynasty bronze mirrors, the Tang murals in the tomb of Prince Zhanghuai, the map of Tang Chang'an in the stone carvings of the Forest of Steles... At the beginning of the film, Chen Chuanxing spent a few minutes of video data trying to present the time and space state of the birth site of ancient poetry. These real historical remains still reveal the atmosphere of that era: "The Luoyang Grottoes are still the grottoes of that year, although the front is slightly different from that year, but the wind blows through the bodhisattva, or the snow falls in winter, or the feeling of the Tang Dynasty." ”
The Guanyin statue of the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, covered in heavy snow, is a Buddhist shrine that has appeared in Tang poetry.
Born in 1924 in Beijing in a scholarly manner, Ye Jiaying has lived in the air of ancient poetry since childhood. In a mansion in Beijing's Xicheng Chayuan Hutong, where "Jin ShiDi" is written at the entrance, the young Ye Jiaying studied under the guidance of her father at home and did not go out to school until the age of the fifth grade. Until her old age, she still remembers the loud chants of her father and uncle, and the whispers of her mother and aunt.
In her oral memoir" "The Dream of Red Lotus", she recalled: "Because I have been accustomed to memorizing poems and chanting since I was a child, the sound rhythm of poetry can be said to have not caused me any difficulties, not only when I first became literate, I was already accustomed to the reading of Chinese characters in four voices, but also when I recited poems with my uncle, I recognized some special pronunciation of inaccessible characters. ”
Because of her habit of chanting, at the age of 11, she wrote her first seven-sentence poem "Wing Moon" with the title of her uncle. It was also because she often chanted loudly at home that it attracted the attention of Xu Shiying, a professor at Fu Jen University in Beijing, who was renting her house at that time. Many years later, when Ye Jiaying crossed the sea to Taiwan with her husband, who served in the Kuomintang Navy, and had no career, Mr. Xu Shiying, who was already teaching at National Taiwan University, introduced her to teach at Changhua Girls' High School.
In the 1950s, When Ye Jiaying was teaching at National Taiwan University, she gave lectures to children
The one who really led Ye Jiaying on the path of classical poetry was her teacher Gu Sui at Fu Jen University in Beijing. Poetry was well followed, not only like many people of that era, learning through Chinese and Western, but also giving wonderful lectures. In front of the camera, Ye Jiaying, who is more than 90 years old, recalls that the scene of the teacher's lecture in that year is still vividly remembered: "In the sophomore year of Gu Sui's class "Selected Poems", he was only forty or fifty years old, but he looked very old. In the winter, he wore a cotton robe inside, a leather robe on the outside, and then a tweed hat and a very thick scarf, and when he got to class, he took off his hat, took off the scarf, and then gave a lecture. He never had any manuscripts in class, no lecture notes, never these things, he started talking in class, and he wrote while talking, so he went from this side of the class to that side. Mr. Gu goes to class, writes four or a few words, which has nothing to do with poetry, and then plays from then on, going to heaven and earth, triggering everywhere, and seeing things rise. ”
In 1948, when Ye Jiaying left Beijing to get married in Shanghai, she carried several of her teacher's class notes in her luggage. Gu Sui was quite appreciative of this disciple, and in his diary dated December 4, 1948, he also lamented her hard work when she first arrived in Taiwan: "Ye Jiayingjun wrote a letter from Zuoying in Taiwan, reporting on the recent situation, saying that he was watching children, cooking rice, and doing miscellaneous work, and he was not accustomed to it, and he could not help but sigh that he was jealous of his creation. Soon, the two broke off contact, and when Ye Jiaying returned to the mainland in 1974, she learned that her teacher had died in 1960.
If classical poetry is more of a beautiful infiltration and edification for Ye Jiaying in her youth, then it has become a way of comfort and liberation for her later life of suffering.
Soon after arriving in Taiwan, in the white terror of the time, Ye Jiaying's husband and herself were successively imprisoned, and her husband was detained for three years. While raising young children, while teaching in several schools, after her husband was released from prison, she had to endure his changeable and irritable temperament, at that time Ye Jiaying often imagined herself as the Yang Flower in the Kingdom Wei Words, "when it blooms, it does not look at people, how to fall in a flash", feeling that she has never opened at all, and has been withered and crippled.
Fortunately, the classical poetry course she taught was warmly welcomed by everyone. Later, at the recommendation of Mr. Hsu Shi-ying, Dai Junren and others, she taught at National Taiwan University for 15 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the period of the boom of modern literature in Taiwan, and the young writers who rose up during that period were mostly influenced by Ye Jiaying. In the documentary, the novelist Bai Xianyong recalls that he skipped other classes at that time, but listened to Mr. Ye's poetry selection class for a year.
In 1969, Ye Jiaying got the opportunity to teach in North America, experienced short-term teaching at Michigan State University, Harvard University, and finally received a lifetime letter of appointment from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Just when she felt that the world was safe, she received bad news in 1976 that her eldest daughter and son-in-law had been in a car accident and both had died.
"Sometimes you have to talk about poetry, and it is really you who have to go through trouble, and you will have a deep understanding of the word. There is a saying in Wang Guowei's "Words and Sayings on Earth", "Heaven has achieved a word man with a hundred evils". "When the documentary was filmed, everyone was careful not to touch this experience, but the old man in front of the camera was already calm.
Chen Chuanxing told me that Mr. Ye is a strict person, "every time I shoot, I am actually worried, the reason is that Mr. Ye may give us some questions before we leave a month or two in advance to decide the content of the visit, a bit like giving a class to a college student." During the more than two years of filming, the film crew sorted out 950,000 words of interview content. In this rare relationship, Chen Chuanxing found that "Mr. Ye actually shows the most rare point is that he does not complain about the sky, is not special, and truly embodies a kind of Confucian style."
From "for yourself" to "for others"
In the film, Chen Chuanxing interviews the modern Taiwanese poet Yan Xian. She specifically talked about Ye Jiaying's contribution to communicating with Taiwan's new and old poets: "Now that I think about it, Ye Jiaying's article on old poetry, traditional poetry, and traditional songwriting has had a great impact on us. The new poets and the old poets are not very much in contact. The Dragon Boat Festival is a poet's festival stipulated and stipulated by the government, but we do not eat zongzi together between the two groups of poets. You eat your rice dumplings, I eat my rice dumplings. You commemorate your Qu Yuan, and I commemorate my Qu Yuan. Later, I told Mr. Yu about this situation. Yu Outline said, yes, this is a thing, new poetry, old poetry is a thing, why do you seem to have a vendetta. He said you read Ye Jiaying's article. You suggest that your friends read more of Ye Jiaying's articles. At that time, I was editing "Lion Cub Literature and Art", so I opened a column for her. ...... These three things (published by Mr. Ye) made new poets and old poets slowly start eating rice dumplings on a table during the Dragon Boat Festival. ”
In the book "Red Lotus Dream", Ye Jiaying also specifically talked about the transformation of her own style of governance. When she first arrived in Taiwan, in addition to teaching, Ye Jiaying wrote some poetry appraisal articles for magazines such as "Young Lion" and "Literary Magazine". Both magazines are publications founded by young people, "Young Lions" is a taiwanese group specializing in youth culture, Young Lions founded publications, and "Literary Magazine" is a famous journal founded by a group of teachers and students of the Department of Foreign Languages of National Taiwan University, among which a number of young writers such as Bai Xianyong, Chen Ruoxi, and Ouyang Zi have emerged.
Due to the painful state of mind at that time, Ye Jiaying's early articles such as "Speaking of Jing'an Words [Huan Xi Sha]"," "A Few Poems of Yonghua and Some Words About Poetry", and "From Li Yishan's 'Chang'e' Poems", all had strong personal emotional overtones. It is a kind of learning based entirely on personal feelings.
At this stage, Ye Jiaying's liking for Wang Guowei and Li Shangyin was more immersed in a subjective association and feeling. In her memoirs, she talks about calling Wang Guowei "Mr. Jing'an" as a sign of respect; calling Wang Wei "a Maha layman" as a sign of alienation; and calling Li Shangyin's character "Yishan" to show closeness. In the film, Ye Jiaying recited two poems by Li Shangyin, "Chang'e" and "Jinse", and the tone of the vicissitudes still carries the deep feeling in the memory.
The late Professor ke Qingming of the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University summarized Ye Jiaying's identification with poets in his research into three stages in the film: "In the stage of Li Shangyin, it is to go deeper, in the stage of Tao Yuanming is to establish his personality, and to the stage of Du Fu is to begin to become extensive fraternity, and then to the stage of extensive care." ”
Since the 1960s, Ye Jiaying's way of writing articles has slowly shifted from "for herself" to "for people", and the landmark change is du Fu's "Eight Songs of Autumn Xing" that she spent a lot of effort to write. She recalled: "In the 1960s, 'modern poetry' was all the rage in Taiwan's literary scene. Many people criticized the works of the time, which were beautiful in terms of syntactic inversion and obscure imagery, which sparked a debate between the traditionalists and the modernists, and a pen war began. At that time, I was teaching Du Fushi at National Taiwan University, and I had some views on the controversy. ”
Ye Jiaying deliberately cited the sentence "Fragrant rice pecking at the rest of the parrot grain, Biwuqi old phoenix branch" in Du Fu's "Eight Songs of Autumn Xing", indicating that as early as Du Fu's time, there was this syntax upside down writing. The obscurity brought about by this reversal is precisely the aftertaste of poetry left for the reader to be felt, and the shortcomings of early vernacular poetry are that they are too vernacular and have no poetic flavor. Ye Jiaying's solidarity with Taiwanese modern poetry is quite similar to the defense of obscure poetry by Xie Mian and others in the mainland 20 years later, but this solidarity comes from a researcher of classical poetry, but it is quite interesting. Perhaps it is in this sense that we can understand what He Xian said about Mr. Ye's communication with old and new poets.
After teaching overseas in 1969, Ye Jiaying found that there was a popular trend in Taiwan at that time, believing that it was better to use Western literary theory to study Chinese literature, but in their research, there was often a phenomenon of distorting classical poetry. This gave her a sense of responsibility for cultural inheritance: "I think since we have accepted this cultural tradition from our elders and our teachers, it is a guilty thing for our generation not to pass it on." 」 ”
In 1979, when Ye Jiaying returned to China for the first time to give poetry lectures, this awakening of cultural inheritance made her have a more urgent mood and a broad stage. In her memoirs, she said: "Because since the mid-80s, I have returned to China many times. It was found that the classical cultural level of young people in China has become increasingly low, many people only pay attention to materialistic pursuits, and the social atmosphere is declining. I think that if we can set up a 'ancient poetry singing tour' course in kindergartens to teach children to sing ancient poems in the form of singing and playing, we can cultivate and improve the moral character and cultural level of our next generation of children by teaching them to recite and chant ancient poems. ”
Or it is Ye Jiaying's strong sense of mission of cultural inheritance that makes her be evaluated as a "taxi in a skirt". Chen Chuanxing believes that this has inherited her teacher Gu Sui. "There is a passage in the movie, when she drifted from Shanghai to Taiwan, she did not bring any luggage, but Mr. Gu's class notes. Then, throughout her life, from the perspective of Mr. Gu's successor, the sower and educator of Mr. Gu's poetry, she has been sorting out and promoting Mr. Gu's works in her later years, so that Mr. Gu can be more deeply understood by the world. ”
In order to express the theme of "poetry and existence" in Ye Jiaying, Chen Chuanxing deliberately tried a poetic structure in the film: "I basically reconstructed an imagination, from the relationship between words and poetry, the structure of the words themselves in the small order and the long tone, to conceive the narrative and editing structure of the whole film." The narrative line of each chapter in it is not linear, and there will be repeated jumps, a bit like the swirling correspondence in the words. Inspired by Ye Jiaying's floor plan of an old mansion in Beijing, Chen Chuanxing narrated the story with the titles of the main gate, the pulse room, the inner courtyard, the courtyard, and the west wing room to establish a poetic residence.
The last chapter, without a name, is designed to create an empty realm: "This emptiness has several layers of meaning, one is on a realistic level, her old house in Beijing is gone, it has been demolished, the house in Canada has also been demolished, and the house where Taiwan lived, although it is also very dilapidated and inhabited by others." That is to say, the people and things that Mr. Ye has experienced have disappeared, and for her, through poetry, she has penetrated these levels, not trapped by these things, and has reached the realm of emptiness. ”
"The rest of the world will be paid for oh"
In Ye Jiaying's ideal of inheriting ancient poetry, the study and inheritance of chanting is a very important part. Compared with the lively landscape with the nature of intangible cultural heritage protection in the recent year of Traditional Chinese Studies, Ye Jiaying's admiration for chanting is based on her in-depth understanding of the characteristics of classical poetry in decades of creation and teaching.
In her later years, Ye Jiaying repeatedly said that in her decades of teaching career, the most regrettable thing was that she did not really lead students to review the chanting of traditional poetry: in the early years of teaching in Taiwan, she was still young and shy, and she was embarrassed to take students to recite publicly in the classroom; later, when teaching abroad, she had to teach classical poetry in English, and chanting naturally could not be talked about; and then when she returned to China to teach, what she thought about at that time was still how to teach her understanding of poetry.
Why is Ye Jiaying so concerned about the chanting of ancient poems, or how should we understand the chanting of ancient poems? For many people after the "New Culture" movement, the chanting of ancient poems seems to be positioned as something pedantic or outdated when it appears. In his essay "From the Hundred Grass Garden to the Sanwei Bookhouse", Lu Xun vividly described the chanting in the private school at that time: "Later, our voices went down and quieted down, and only he read aloud: 'Tie Ruyi, commanding The Servant, is shocked to sit down; Jin Rinluo, upside down, a thousand cups are not drunk... 'I suspect that this is an excellent article, because when I read this, he always smiles, and he raises his head, shakes, and throws his head back and throws it over. ”
Song Hong, editor of the People's Literature Publishing House, learned the chanting tune for the first time after graduating from the Chinese Department of Peking University and working in the Humanities Society. At that time, Mr. Lin Donghai, director of the Classical Department of the Humanities Society, grew up in a small mountain village in southern Fujian, and the Hokkien language was originally a living fossil of the Middle Ages, where the chanting custom was very popular, and he learned to chant when he was a child. Once we talked, I asked him to recite a listen, which was very good. Later, I felt that I should keep it, so I let him record it. It was also from then on that Song Hong began to consciously collect and sort out the old man's ancient poems and chants. What exactly is chanting? "The chanting between singing and recitation is a very special form of traditional poetry. The characteristics of chanting, the chanting tune has no score, and currently only lives in the mouth of the older generation of scholars over the age of 70, which is the intangible cultural heritage of the Chinese nation that needs to be excavated and protected urgently. ”
In her 1992 essay "On the Characteristics of Moving and the Tradition of Chanting in Classical Poetry," Ye Jiaying discussed in depth the inextricable relationship between chanting and classical poetry, and why people today still want to inherit the tradition of poetry chanting: "I think that the life of classical Chinese poetry originally grew up with the tradition of chanting. The characteristics of the stirring in classical poetry are also closely integrated with the tradition of chanting. Moreover, this ancient tradition of valuing chanting is not conservative and outdated as the average conception suggests, and it is still important even in the light of the latest literary theories in the West today. ”
When Ye Jiaying borrowed Western critical terms to study classical Chinese poetry, she found that it was impossible to find the corresponding term "Xing", and inspired by this, she found that "Xing", a writing style based on direct feelings, is the characteristic of Classical Chinese poetry. The tradition of chanting Chinese poetry was formed as early as the time of the Book of Poetry. In the next part of "Zhou Li Chunguan Zongbo", there is "Great Sile... According to the account of teaching Guozi in music language, Xing, Tao, irony, recitation, speech, and language, Ye Jiaying analyzed that the training of "irony" and "recitation" is to require the sons of the country to memorize the poems and learn the tone of the chanting of the poems. Although this kind of chanting training in early poetry was originally for the practical purpose of "giving poetry and speech", after it was detached from this practical purpose, it showed the characteristics of classical Chinese poetry in attaching importance to the rhythm of ups and downs in terms of form, and the characteristics of attaching importance to the role of xingfa and moving in essence.
As a monophonic language, the formation of the rhythmic sense of classical Chinese poetry mainly depends on the rhythm of the combination of words and words in the verses when recited. This kind of setback, in simple terms, is the beat and the flatness. This is also the most important place to pay attention to in the oral and systematic chanting.
The reason why chanting is important is because ancient poets not only accompanied the chant to compose poems, but also accompanied the chants to change the poems. In Tang poems, sentences such as "Yin'an a word, cut off a few stems and whiskers" and "Cultivate the spiritual base, the new poem is changed from the long chant" and so on. Ye Jiaying believes that it is in this chanting that the poems both the author and the reader. "As far as the author is concerned, it is a kind of 'emotionally moving' concern for everything in nature and in the human world; and as far as the reader is concerned, it is through the inspiration of poetry that this 'emotionally moving' care can be given a kind of endless continuation."
The charm of chanting also lies in the fact that it is different from the songs that have been fixed, and it is the individual interpretation of the poem made by the reader with his own feelings, which is exactly what Ye Jiaying said in the film: "The chanting is mainly your own experience of the connotation of the poem, its feelings, and its artistic conception, and there is a resonance, so that the poet's life is resurrected in your voice." ”
In addition to chanting and chanting, Chen Chuanxing also invited Japanese dubbing master Sato Toei in the film to express Du Fu's "Eight Songs of Autumn Xing" in the form of gagaku and modern music, creating a unique sound space through a soprano and baritone chanting. "Interweaving these three ways of sound with each other, a bit like a tapestry, closely intertwined with each other." Chen Chuanxing said.
Although chanting is the vitality of classical poetry, it is not easy to pass it on. Song Hong told me that she had also heard Ye Jiaying's chanting and felt that Mr. Ye's official tone of chanting had changed too much and was difficult to learn; in addition, she noticed that Mr. Ye sometimes did not care about the length of the chant. To this end, she suggests that the tune of Hokkien can be chanted in Mandarin, which is both a demonstration of the law of ping and easy to learn.
However, for the situation that sometimes violates the length of the chant, Ye Jiaying specially explained in the course "Teaching The Guozi in Music Language: Ancient Poetry Recitation Class" opened by Douban: "Many people who do not know how to chant, because they do not know how to chant, are too free to find a rule. So they figured out a rule for themselves: whatever was flat was long, and whatever was muffled shortened. It's too simple, it's not so simple, depending on the emotion and content of the poem, sometimes the slang can be lengthened. There are also sound words, there is a p, t, k ending, in principle, the sound should be stopped immediately, can not be lengthened, but in the location of poetry chanting, although the sound is short, but there is a cavity outside the sound, the sound can be shortened, the cavity can still be lengthened. So in fact, there is no absolute musical rule to follow in terms of the length of chanting. The only thing that can be followed is the natural rhythm of the grammar itself. ”
In the film, Ye Jiaying recited a poem she created, "Partridge Heaven": "Guangle Jun tianshi is unknown, and Linglun blows bamboo to become a fool." There is no one in the snow in the middle of the country, and the blue whale outside the territory has dreams. Under the bright moon, the night tide is late, and the microwave delivers micro-words. If the sea of relics can be met, it is the time of the thousand autumns. Her friend Shen Binghe explained the story behind the blue whale, which is said to be in ancient mythology, two blue whales can be thousands of kilometers apart, by call.
Ye Jiaying then explained: "I said 'older than a few years', I didn't know how many years I could live, maybe it was a matter of time. I'll teach everyone to chant poetry, and I think this will be passed on, so 'the rest of the world will be spent chanting'. I said ' if there is a blue whale in the sky', the blue whale that Mr. Shen said can speak across the ocean, and the sound of this bit of the sea that I left behind, maybe someone will hear it in the future and will be moved. It doesn't matter if people don't accept it now. I just stayed anyway, that's it. ”
(This article was published in Sanlian Life Weekly, No. 37, 2020, with reference to Ye Jiaying's oral description, Zhang Houping's writing of "Red Lotus Dream - Ye Jiaying's Poetry Reminiscences", Ye Jiaying's "Multi-faceted Refraction of Light and Shadow: Ye Jiaying's Self-Selected Collection" and other books, thanks to Xu Wenwei and Zhang Ming for their help in the interview)