Mr. Shi Jicun and others

Mr. Shi Jingcun is in the North Mountain Building. (Shen Jianzhong/Photo)

A few years ago, Shi Shoujue, the eldest grandson of Mr. Shi Jingcun, an old colleague who had recently retired, sent the newly published manuscript of Shi Jingcun's posthumous manuscript "Beishan Lou Suili" (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2020). This is based on shi jing's surviving notes on his reading and excerpts for the study of ancient literature and history, and there are more than two hundred articles with rich content, which shows the breadth and erudition of his academic interests. This book evokes my memories of Mr. Shi Jingcun.

Before and after the publication of "A Hundred Words of Tang Poems"

I had only met Mr. Shi Jicun once, more than twenty years ago; but it was even earlier to know his name and to read his writings. The earliest time I knew Mr. Shi's name was probably in the early 1980s when I was in the "History of Modern Chinese Literature" class at the department of Chinese of Fudan University, and I heard the teacher talk about Shi Jiecun, a famous novelist in the 1930s, the "Modern" magazine he edited, and the story that he had an argument with Lu Xun because he persuaded young people to read "Zhuangzi" and "Anthology of Literature" and was denounced by Lu Xun as "a few evil people in the foreign field". The earliest masterpiece of Mr. Shi was the first volume of the "Lexicology" collection edited by East China Normal University Press in November 1981, in which he published articles such as "Reading Wei Zhuang's Notes on Words". I did not expect that Mr. Shi, as a famous modern literary master, was still a famous classical literary artist, so I began the process of paying attention to Mr. Shi and reading and collecting his works.

In September 1983, I began to study Tang and Song Dynasty literature with Mr. Wang Shuizhao. A year later, Mr. Wang went to Japan to give a lecture, and the department ordered me to follow Mr. Liu Jigao to study. For the next year, I basically went to Mr. Liu's house every Other Week on Saturday afternoons to listen to his lectures. Mr. Liu has extensive knowledge and unique research on the literary history from the pre-Qin to the Ming and Qing dynasties. He is an old friend of Mr. Shi Jingcun. Once, Mr. Liu asked us to change the class time, because Mr. Shi invited him to participate in the defense of his master's thesis, and Mr. Shi's graduate student's thesis was about Wu Meicun. In July 1986, after graduating with a master's degree, I went to work at the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, and after half a year of internship in the proofreading department, I was placed in the second editorial office, and the director of the room was Mr. Chen Bangyan, who was 67 years old at the time. The eldest in the editing room was Mr. Wang Mian (Kunxi), who was just over 70 years old, and I was just in time to send him off for retirement and take over several manuscripts that he had not yet reviewed. The youngest person in the editing room was Wang Xingkang, who joined the company a year earlier, and I took over the work of editorial office editor from him. Coincidentally, Brother Xingkang was the graduate student under Mr. Shi who wrote the paper on Wu Meicun. Fifteen years later, Wang Xingkang became the president of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. In January 2013, I took over the responsibility of president from him again.

When I entered the newsroom, Brother Xingkang was editing Mr. Shi's book "Hundred Words of Tang Poems". This book is a draft of Chen Bangyan's appointment with Mr. Shi in 1977. Mr. Shi began writing in 1978. Mr. Shi said in the preface to the first edition of "Hundred Words of Tang Poems", written on July 5, 1985: "In the winter of 1977, Mr. Chen Bangyan, the editorial department of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, came to visit, and after a few words of greeting, he went straight to the point and said that he had come to assemble a manuscript for the publishing house. He wanted me to compile a manuscript of classical literature for their publisher. ...... At that time, I suggested to Mr. Chen Bangyan that I spend a year writing a book on the appreciation of Tang poetry. Mr. Chen Bangyan agreed with my proposal and hoped that I would deliver the manuscript within one year. When he returned, he made my plan the subject of his publication in 1979. Mr. Shi went on to say that he began writing his first one on January 2, 1978, with the initial idea of selecting dozens of Tang poems so that they could represent the three hundred years of poetry of the entire Tang Dynasty, writing a total of sixty poems, and the title of the book was set as "Tang Poetry Series Lectures". He plans to write five times a month and finish it by the end of the year. He completed his first "Wang Ji: Wild Hope" on January 4, and wrote eight in the next month, which shows that his literary thoughts are gushing and he is familiar with the famous poems of Tang Dynasty. Mr. Shi assumed that the reader of the book had the cultural level of a liberal arts college student. In the process of writing, Mr. Shi mobilized his rich accumulation of literature and history, and integrated his profound understanding of poetry, but to deal with the era, political background and social customs reflected in the poem, to talk about the literary history and literary basic knowledge of poetry, to distinguish between the predecessors, to do proofreading and examination, he could only constantly look for information, and as a result, he only completed sixty articles in June 1979, and only wrote about Liu Yuxi in the Middle Tang Dynasty. In the following years, he was busy and sick, until october 1984, after he was discharged from the hospital, he restarted the stove and changed to talking about Tang poems in the form of ramblings, until June 1985, when he completed a hundred articles and changed the title to "Tang Poems and Hundred Words".

After the manuscript was handed in, Huang Ping, the deputy editor-in-chief in charge of the second editing room at the time, volunteered to serve as an external editor, and she graduated from Zhejiang University in her early years and studied under Mr. Xia Chengtao. Huang Ping mainly processed the manuscript as follows: unify the style of the whole book, check some of the quotations, and ask the author to make revisions if there are doubts. Because Huang Ping was busy at work, the editorial office made Wang Xingkang the responsible editor of the book. It was published in May 1986 and published in September of the following year. After the publication of "A Hundred Words of Tang Poems", it received rave reviews. For more than thirty years, it has been reprinted repeatedly. Mr. Shi's book, written at the age of eighty, has become a masterpiece of his academic research.

Prior to this, in 1983, Mr. Shi published the "Collected Poems of Chen Zilong" in Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, which he and Ma Zuxi, a student who taught at Xiamen University in the 1940s, and the responsible editor was Zhou Shao. Zhou Shao was a famous magazine editor in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, and an old friend of Mr. Shi, who was a special editor in the first editorial office of Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, and Zhao Changping, The first graduate student of Mr. Shi, was also an editor in the first editorial office. Zhou Shao and Mr. Shi have a common hobby of smoking cigars, and often visit Mr. Shi in their later years. When he rested after work, Zhou Shao often chatted with young people in the corridor outside the door of the newsroom, and would also talk about Mr. Shi's recent affairs. Every year after the Spring Festival, when work resumes, Brother Xingkang will also talk about visiting Mr. Shi during the festival. In those years, Mr. Shi, who was 80 or 90 years old, became a prolific writer, and old translations of old books were reprinted one after another, and new works and new editors continued to come out. I also bought a lot of Mr. Shi's writings, and some of them were brought by Brother Toxing Kang to ask Mr. Shi for signature. Through the introduction of Brother Xingkang, I met Mr. Liu Ling, the responsible editor of the "Shi Jiecun Anthology" of East China Normal University Press. Thanks to Mr. Liu's enthusiasm, several of Mr. Shi's works he handled were sent to me after publication, and He specially asked Mr. Shi to sign for me.

The Study of the Golden Tablet

Mr. Shi once compared his life's career to opening four windows: "The east window refers to the study of oriental culture and classical Chinese literature, the west window refers to the translation of Western literature, and the south window refers to literary and artistic creation." ...... In recent decades, I have not been able to do other things, and I have turned my interest to the Golden Stone Tablet, which has opened a north window, which is an unpopular science. (Ding Yanzhao, "Beishan Loutou "Four-sided Window"-Visiting Shi Jingcun") In his later years, Mr. Shi devoted a lot of energy to the collection and interpretation of the golden stone tablet. At the same time as the publication of "Hundred Sayings of Tang Poems", Mr. Shi published "Records of Notes on Water Classics" (Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House, 1987), "Beishan Collection of Ancient Records" (Bashu Book Society, 1989), "Golden Stone Cong Dialects" (Zhonghua Bookstore, 1991), "Selected Tablets of Tang Tablets" (Shanghai Education Publishing House, 2001) and other research works on golden stone tablets. At the beginning of 1999, when Brother Xingkang paid his respects to Mr. Shi, Mr. Shi asked about the situation of such topics selected by the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. Xingkang was already the vice president of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House at that time, and I succeeded him as the director of the literary editing office. Xingkang told Mr. Shi about the topic selection and could talk to me. When Xingkang returned, he told me about seeing Mr. Shi. Mr. Huang Ping also came to the company and said that he also wanted to visit Mr. Shi. Therefore, I asked Huang Ping to report to Mr. Shi and go to see him together.

On the afternoon of March 4, 1999, I went with Huang Ping to Mr. Shi's apartment on Yuyuan Road to see him and pay his respects to his old man's home. Mr. Shi lived with his wife, who was a year older than him, and was reading a newspaper when he went. He has a clean face, and at the age of 94, he is still very mental. Huang Ping first asked about his physical condition. He said to himself that he felt old this year, one was that his heart beat slowly, and the other was that his memory was poor. But when it comes to the past, he still remembers clearly. I said to him, your memory is still good! He laughed and said, "This is my foundation!" "He lives a very regular life. He told me he ate a boiled egg in the morning with a meat dumpling. He said that Qiao Jiazhai's meat dumplings were now rotten, and he had changed to eating the Huzhou dumplings bought in the alley, and there was a chewing head. Eat some food at noon. Drink a cup of milk powder plus coffee in the afternoon. Porridge in the evening. He wakes up at 9 a.m. every morning, falls asleep at 9 p.m., and falls asleep on his pillow. He does not eat supplements, and the next day he eats a Western medicine Duxil that relieves cerebral neurosclerosis, which he said is made in France and costs more than 3 yuan. Except for the use of hearing aids on the back of his ears, he has no other diseases, his eyesight is good, and he needs a magnifying glass to see small characters. He said that during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he often walked fifty or sixty miles while teaching at Yunnan University and other places. He believes that before a person is forty years old, there is nothing wrong with the three major systems of heart and lungs, liver and gallbladder, and gastrointestinal tract, and there is no problem in living to the age of eighty. When it comes to the selection of topics, Mr. Shi suggested that a set of "Chinese Stone Carvings" could be compiled, which could be compiled into several series according to dynasties. Talking about his old friends, Mr. Shi joked: "Zhou Shao is the elder of the Three Dynasties!" When it comes to living environment, he is very dissatisfied with the uniform matchbox appearance of high-rise buildings now. Afraid he was tired, we sat for an hour and then said goodbye.

In the years since, Mr. Shi has published new books every year. On October 17, 2003, the Department of Chinese of East China Normal University held the "Celebration of Professor Shi Jiecun's 100th Birthday Professor Xu Zhongyu and Shi Jiecun Xu Zhongyu Academic Thought Seminar" in the Science Hall of East China Normal University. At that time, Mr. Shi was already admitted to the ward of Huadong Hospital. Out of admiration for Mr. Shi and the friendship of cooperation with the department of Chinese of East China Normal University, shanghai ancient books publishing house has driven out the "Collection of Essays Celebrating the Centenary Birthday of Professor Shi Jingcun" compiled by the department of Chinese of East China Normal University, which contains 680,000 words of congratulatory messages, reminiscence articles and academic papers written by Mr. Shi Jingcun's friends and students. This collection of essays was contacted by Chen Dakang, then head of the Chinese Department of East China Normal University, with our company. Chen Dakang told me that the Department of Chinese of East China Normal University has also compiled a collection of essays celebrating the ninetieth birthday of Professor Xu Zhongyu, which is to be published by East China Normal University Press. At that time, Wang Xingkang was already the director of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, Zhao Changping was already the editor-in-chief, and I was the deputy editor-in-chief at the time, and I was appointed to be responsible for the editing and publication of the book. Mr. Shi saw the book and the video of the celebration in time. More than a month later, Mr. Shi passed away.

After Mr. Shi's death, he spent his life collecting and studying more than 2,000 tablets and rubbings in his apartment and turning them into the overall collection of Taiwanese collector Pan Siyuan. After Mr. Pan took over, he compiled two books, "Selected Inscriptions of Shi Jingcun North Window" and "Selected Collections of Tang Zhi of Shi Jingcun North Window", which were published by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House in 2012 and 2014. The former selects more than 200 fine works from Mr. Shi's collection, many of which are rare books by the hands of well-known collectors throughout the ages; the latter selects unpublished Tang Dynasty epitaphs. The compilation and publication of these two books is a systematic arrangement and the best commemoration of Mr. Shi's inscription collection.

When it comes to Mr. Shi's study of the Golden Stone Tablet and the publication of his later works, it is impossible not to mention Shen Jianzhongjun. Shen Jianzhong, who is two years older than me, is engaged in business work at the Shanghai branch of China Construction Bank, has a hobby of photography, has taken portraits of Mr. Shi, was appreciated by Mr. Shi, and became Mr. Shi's "apprentice" and assistant. He has compiled many of the works published by Mr. Shi in his later years, such as "Hundred Selected Tang Tablets", "Beishan TanyiLu", "Beishan TanyiLu", "Beishan Tanyi Record Continuation", "Yunjian Quotations", etc.; at the same time, he is engaged in the research of Shi Jingcun's life deeds and works, and has compiled and published "Residual Rhymes: Shi Jiecun's Travels" (Wenhui Publishing House, 2007), "Shi Jingcun Chronicles" (Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2013), "Beishan Lou Jinshi Relics" (East China Normal University Press, 2021) and other works.

Shi Jianzhong presented Shen Jianzhong's "Continuation of the Art Record of Beishan Talk".

Let the boys go to the world

Mr. Shi's student Zhang Wenjiang once wrote: "The four-window theory cannot fully summarize Mr. Shi's main achievements. In addition to being a representative of the Shanghai school culture, he has at least one identity, that is, the editing career he has been engaged in all his life. In his early years, he became known as the editor of the magazine "Modern" and influenced the trend of literature. In his later years, he edited the Lexicology series, as well as the Selected Foreign One-Act Plays, which also promoted the development of culture. When guiding students in employment, he often recommends editorial and publishing directions. As a result of his guidance, several students went to the publishing house and made outstanding achievements. In fact, Mr. Shi has been engaged in education for a long time in his life, teaching at East China Normal University for half a century and cultivating countless students; at the same time, he has not forgotten the editing and publishing career, from young to old age have engaged in editing and publishing experience.

Here we only take the two first master's degree students brought by Mr. Shi Jingcun as an example to supplement Brother Wen Jiang's views. In 1979, he enrolled 5 master's degree students majoring in ancient Chinese literature: Zhao Changping, Yan Shouyi, Li Zongwei, Chen Wenhua, and Huang Ming, the latter two of whom were female students, all engaged in Tang Dynasty literature research. When they graduated, the quota was given to two girls. Chen Wenhua stayed in the department of Chinese, and later became a professor, authoring the "Case of the History of Tang Poetry" and so on. Huang Ming stayed in the ancient books department of the school library, and co-authored with Zhao Changping and Yan Shouyi the "Notes on the Collected Poems of Zheng Gu", and the selected notes "Gui Youguang Anthology" and so on. It is said that Mr. Shi Jingcun jokingly said, let the boys go to the world. So Zhao Changping and Yan Shouyi went to the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House and the Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House as editors respectively. Zhao Changping is a well-known expert in Tang poetry, and later served as the editor-in-chief of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, and is an outstanding representative of scholar-type editors. Yan Shoulian served as the responsible editor of the Books of shanghai Dictionary Publishing House, such as "Appreciation Dictionary of Song Poetry", and then left his post to study for a doctorate at Indiana University in the United States, and after graduation, he taught at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore, where he ruled the history of Chinese academic thought and classical literature, and wrote "The Hidden Choices of Chinese Academic Thought in Recent Times". After graduation, Li Zongwei returned to his alma mater, Suzhou Railway Normal College, to teach, and later transferred to East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai to teach, and wrote "Legend of Tang Dynasty" and so on. In 1982, Mr. Shi Jingcun recruited 3 master's degree students majoring in ancient Chinese literature in the second class: Wang Xingkang, Gong Xiaowei and Zhang Wenjiang, all male students, engaged in the study of Ming and Qing dynasty literature. After graduation, Zhang Wenjiang first engaged in research at the Institute of Literature of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and then transferred to the College of Humanities of Tongji University as a professor, and authored "Qian Zhongshu Biography" and "Guan Cone Compilation and Interpretation". After graduation, Wang Xingkang and Gong Xiaowei went to shanghai ancient books publishing house and Shandong Qilu book company as editors, and the two of them later became the presidents of their respective societies, making great contributions to the ancient book collation and publishing cause in the mainland.

In 2012, Wang Xingkang was transferred to the Shanghai People's Publishing House until his retirement. Under his impetus and participation, the Complete Works of Shi Ji Cun entered the editing and publishing process. A few years ago, the Complete Translations of Shi Jiecun and the Novel Volume were jointly published by the Shanghai People's Publishing House and the East China Normal University Press. "Complete Translations of Shi Jiecun and Novel Volumes" brings together nearly 60 kinds of foreign novels that Shi Jingcun has translated and published since the 1920s, with a total of 12 volumes and a total word count of more than 4 million, which is the first comprehensive and systematic centralized display of the results of his novel translation. The Complete Works of Shi Jiecun's Translations also includes poetry volumes, prose criticism volumes, drama volumes, and historical biographies. If the completed collection is completed, it is estimated that more than 30 volumes and 10 million words will focus on the fruitful results of Mr. Shi's "Four Windows", which will not only amaze Mr. Shi's huge creativity, but also provide a solid foundation for Shi Jingcun's research.

Gao Keqin