In November last year, writers publishing house launched the seven-volume Yan Ming Anthology. In the public eye, Yan Ming is a poet, and his editorial status has become a blurred background, often omitted. As everyone knows, Yan Ming himself values the name of "editor" the most, and "gan is a ladder" is the professional rule of his 50 years of professional experience. Although it is already a work, it is all amateur work. In the waters of his time, there was always a clear distinction.
Above: Qiu Yanming (first from right) attends the Second Cultural Congress of Beijing municipality in 1954.
Above: In 1987, Accompanied by the Qinghai poet Shi Ji, Yan Ming (left) climbed Mount Bayankra at an altitude of more than 5,000 meters to find the source of the Yangtze River.
one
Gan is a ladder - he has just stepped into the territory of poetry, and this belief has already taken shape.
In the spring of 1940, the 20-year-old Yan Ming wandered the streets of Chongqing, having just resigned his sought-after professional actor title half a year ago. When the country was in trouble, he resolutely bid farewell to Yunmeng's hometown in Hubei Province and threw himself into the anti-Japanese torrent. He believed that only poetry could completely ignite his love and hatred, and the poems he sent were all sunk in the sea. At the most desperate time, I received a warm letter from the famous writer Professor Jin Yi, whose poem "Spring of The Water" will soon be published in the famous "National Gazette"!
It was Jin Yi who saved himself from the lost, and "editing" has since become the most sacred profession in his mind. In the years that followed, Jin always shone on Yan Ming, whom he had never met, with a caressed gaze, correcting the waddling poetry path. In order to help more people enter the temple of poetry, in 1942, Yan Ming joined hands with several young poets and used the money from the meal to found the magazine "Poetry Series". This was the first poetry journal in Chongqing, the capital of wartime, and as the editor-in-chief, Yan Ming wrote unabashedly in his publication: "'Poetry Series' is the position of young poets, and I hope that their voices will be stronger." "A large number of enthusiastic young people gathered around the Poetry Series because of poetry.
After that, Yan Ming successively served as the editor-in-chief of the "Victory Daily" and the nationally renowned newspaper "Wuhan Daily", although these young poets have rushed to the front line of the anti-Japanese resistance, they are still the core of Yan Ming's firm authorship. After experiencing the life and death experience of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the War of Liberation, they grew rapidly and became the mainstay of China's modern and contemporary poetry. Many names are like thunder: Xu Chi, Sha Ou, Ge Baoquan, Yuan Shuipai, Su Jin umbrella, Niu Han, Peng Yanjiao, Zou Difan, Bi Ye, Wang Chenmu, Gan Yongbai, Xu Fang, Wei Huangbo, Zeng Zhuo, Lü Jian, Chen Jingrong, Tang Qi, Lu Yuan...
In 1942, Yan Ming founded the first poetry magazine in Chongqing during the Anti-Japanese Period, "Poetry Series", at the age of 22.
Above: Liu Shaotang's letter to Yan Ming on July 24, 1981
two
In 1951, Yan Ming was already the editor-in-chief of the beijing "Xinmin Bao" supplement, and in the pile of manuscripts in Rushan, he read a novel signed by Liu Shaotang, "Cai Guizhi", a second-grade student of Beijing No. 2 Middle School junior high school, with young handwriting but pharaohic and fresh writing. If Yan Ming got the most precious treasure, he immediately published a novel. One day Liu Shaotang wore a red scarf and walked into the editorial office as promised, and at noon Yan Ming specially invited him to eat at the famous restaurant "Tongchun Garden" - this is a treatment that his family has never enjoyed, and he likes this literary prodigy too much! Since then, they have exchanged frequent letters, and the year-to-year friendship has lasted for decades. In the late 1970s, Liu Shaotang made a comeback and was the vice chairman of the China Writers Association, and his letter to Yan Ming was still as sincere as ever: "You and I, since we got acquainted, have produced feelings for the eldest brother and the younger brother, which have not faded to this day. This is because you have always cherished me very much, and I have always thanked you for your youthful acquaintance, which is incomparably precious..."
On the occasion of Yan Ming's centenary of his birth, literary critic Xie Mian published a commemorative article entitled "A Letter Has Been Treasured for Half a Century". The article said that in 1960, as soon as he graduated from Peking University and stayed on as a teacher, he received a letter from Yan Ming, who had been transferred to work at the Beijing Publishing House, asking him to write a monograph entitled "A Brief Discussion on Writing Poetry and Reading Poetry", which made Xie Mian sincerely afraid. Xie Mian was only in his early twenties at the time, and after handing over the manuscript, he was even more worried and uneasy, living like a year. Yan Ming wrote back enthusiastically affirming the success of the manuscript and informing him that it had passed the preliminary review. This letter has been treasured by Xie Mian to this day, and he said affectionately in the text: "Now I want to solemnly say that there are many predecessors and friends who guided and encouraged me to embark on the academic path, and I will remember it for the rest of my life, but Yan Ming is the first to thank him, he is the 'first person' who leads the way... This warmth will stay with me for the rest of my life. ”
In the 1950s and 1960s, the poetry of workers in Beijing was very active. Yan Ming went deep into the factories and mines, held workshops, recitations, and revision meetings, and published works and poetry collections for them. Later, a number of leading figures of Chinese workers' poets emerged: Li Xue'ao, Wen Chengxun, Han Yiping, Fan Yiben and so on. Decades later, these young poets have become old men, still expressing their gratitude to Yan Ming in different ways.
At that time, the literati were very poor, but they lived very cleanly, and they did not despise giving red envelopes and gifts, and a few words of gratitude were enough to dissolve the hard work that Yan Ming had paid.
Above: In 1950, Yan Ming, cartoonist Fang Cheng (back right) and poet Sha Ou (front right) gathered in Beijing to take a group photo at the Wangjing Stone on the Great Wall to commemorate it.
three
In June 1979, in the poverty-stricken ravine of Suiyang, Guizhou, a peasant son named Li Famo was suddenly favored by the muse and wrote a long narrative poem "In the Snow", which was sent to Beijing's October magazine without knowing the sky. Fortunately, Yan Ming was in charge of poetry. He read it with tears in one breath and immediately wrote a reply of three thousand words. Thereafter, it was revised for half a year and after several rounds, until both sides felt overwhelmed. Around Yan Ming, the manuscript and human feelings were equally heavily backlogged, but he still tried to defy public opinion and made an exception to publish the headlines of the first issue of poetry in 1980 in three hundred lines.
In Hengyang, Hunan Province, there is a teacher Yi Longyun, suffering from not being able to write good poems, several times endured pain away from the muse, it was Yan Ming who helped him adjust the creative path again and again. When he came to Beijing, Yi Longyun simply stayed at Yan Ming's house and talked all night. Today, Yi Longyun is more than eighty years old, and his poetry is still flourishing, and he has published several poetry collections and won the National Poetry Award many times. There are hundreds of letters from Yan Ming in the family, which are the colorful music of his life.
In Yan Ming's hometown of Yunmeng County, Hubei Province, there is a long list of people who have received his help. Zhao Junpeng was once a hot-blooded young man tormented by poetry, and he also said goodbye to his muse several times. Yan Ming's fiery letters burned him, and he finally regained his faith: "I was woken up by a long whip... Reading it over and over again, I shed tears, and I also shed tears. You have guided me, supported me, inspired me, and deeply touched me. You have given me strength and confidence. You say you have to fight, 'you have to lose a few pounds of meat', you have to grow into a material! I want to throw away my grace and resentment, and devote myself to fighting for years, decades, decades, and even the last breath of life. Since then, he has published more than a dozen poetry collections, won awards in Taiwan, and became a leading figure in the cultural circles of the county.
Yan Ming as a guest at Zang Ke's home (1992)
Yan Ming was reciting his own poems
shop
In 1943, Xu Chi wrote a 10,000-word essay on Chinese songs and ballads at the request of Yan Ming. Due to funding and war, the paper was only half published, and the Poetry Series was discontinued. Yan Ming fled with a family of five or six people, and the family's belongings were lost, but Xu Chi and others' manuscripts were quite a lot. In 1950, when he was reunited with Xu Chi in Beijing, Yan Ming specially ran to Xu Chi's house with the manuscript in his hand, bowed deeply, and apologized for not finishing the publication. Xu Chi was surprised that he had long forgotten about the manuscript to Java.
In the late 1950s, Yan Ming worked as a literary editor at the Beijing Publishing House. He curated a series of twelve books, "Collected Writings of Old Writers". The list of authors startled everyone: Guo Moruo, Xia Yan, Zhou Libo, Ba Ren, Zang Kejia, Cao Yu, Ai Wu, Tian Jian, Liu Baiyu, Guo Xiaochuan, Xu Chi, Yuan Shuipai. These people are all top people, and they are all so heavy that they can't even care about publishing books. Someone privately skimmed his lips: "Don't say a set, it's good to be able to produce a book!" ”
But Yan Ming did. This set of books is beautifully framed and atmospheric, which has rarely saved a batch of scattered works.
Thirty years later, at the end of the 80s, Zang Kejia revealed the secret of the publication of the series in an article entitled "Yan Ming in My Eyes": "The articles we publish in various newspapers and periodicals cannot be found by ourselves, but Yan Ming has found all the articles we have lost, which is really a needle in a haystack!" He put together the entire collection of articles, and then the writer himself completed the manuscript. I was amazed. Xia Yan was very excited to see the sample book at that time, and personally called Yan Ming to express his gratitude: "You have done things that even we can't do ourselves." ”
At that time, there was no Internet, let alone e-book libraries in the cloud world, and all operations could only rely on manual labor. How much effort Yan Ming has put in, only God knows!
Li Ling is the founder of modern and contemporary Chinese music theory, the first director of the China Symphony Orchestra, and later the president of the China Conservatory of Music. With the advice and help of Yan Ming, he published a monograph "Music Miscellaneous", which received surprisingly good responses, and then published the second, third and fourth episodes of "Music Miscellaneous". Recalling this period of cooperation with Yan Ming, Li Ling wrote an article lamenting: "He has a high level of understanding and policy, such as talking about the national style of music in my book, nationalization and nationalization... On issues such as the evaluation of light music art, he can give me a more comprehensive opinion from the perspective of dialectics. "In particular, sometimes, people pay more attention to ideological situations and political content, and pay less attention to the diversification of artistic styles, and he can boldly put them forward to me in a timely manner, so that I can consider it more comprehensively." Indeed, he is relatively broad and comprehensive in this regard. In view of Yan Ming's knowledge and rigorous style, Li Ling hoped that he could go to the China Conservatory of Music as a professor of poetry, but yan Mingwan thanked him, and he thought that he was still the most suitable editor. At the insistence of Li Ling, Yan Ming was eventually hired as a special researcher of the college and taught part-time.
At the end of the 1970s, there was a protracted debate in the history of poetry, and the representative figures of obscure poetry, Such as Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, and Jiang He, were pushed to the cusp of the storm. Yan Ming published the poems of these people in "October" and recommended these young people to join the Beijing Writers Association. This series of actions became the excuse for being attacked: "Yan Ming supported obscure poetry", "The poetry layout of "October" has a directional problem" and so on. He had just resumed his work at that time, and he did not have full confidence, but he made his point of view unabashedly stated at poetry seminars many times: "Obscure poetry has existed in China since ancient times, and it is beneficial to learn from the artistic techniques of foreign symbolism, imagery and modernism to make poetry have hazy beauty." He hoped to give more help and guidance to these young people's explorations, and opposed the rash description of a poetic style as what kind of body and what school.
Gu Cheng was only twenty years old at that time, introverted and timid, and revealed his heart in a letter to Yan Ming: "I am very excited, you are not for me, for us, but for many young people like us, and even for generations. You treat everything fairly and passionately, all green life, and you do not think about yourself. ”
On December 2, 1986, a letter written by Yan Ming to Wang Meng was published in the Shanghai Literature Newspaper. Wang Meng was the Minister of Culture at the time, at the peak of his career. Yan Ming greatly appreciated the novelist Wang Meng's ability to write poems, believing that the poetry was novel in conception and novel in imagery, but put forward opinions on the group poem "Summer Song" published in the "Stars" poetry journal: some "sentences are too long, the longest thirty-one words, can not be read in one breath, and it takes many pauses to continue." "The language, image, and mood of your poem are very beautiful, but long sentences will affect the reader's enjoyment of beauty." Wang Meng was very generous, and wrote a reply to Yan Ming on August 18, 1987, which was also published in the "Literature Newspaper", and Wang Meng humorously said: "How did I write poetry in a vacuum?" "Let the reader judge." The open dialogue between the two poets has left a good story for the literary world.
In the mid-1980s, Lu Yuanchi was then the secretary of the party group and editor-in-chief of the Beijing Publishing House, preparing to publish a monograph interpreting the "Twenty-Four Poems", and he wanted to come and go or invite Yan Ming, who had retired, to be the most assured editor. The Twenty-Four Poems are masterpieces of late Tang dynasty poetic aesthetics and poetic theory, full of the philosophical ideas of Taoists and metaphysicians, and are difficult and jerky to read today. After the publication of the book "Poems of Philosophical Philosophy of Poetry", Lu Yuanchi actually spent most of the space in the afterword to express his sincere gratitude and respect for Yan Ming: "The original manuscript of this book, when handed over to the editorial department, can only be a semi-finished product. In fact, Comrade Yan Ming spent a lot of painstaking processing and completed it. In particular, the vernacular interpretation of each of the general meanings of the Twenty-Four Poems, after he polished it, can be said to be close to the 'present translation' of the new poem. Then Lu Yuanzhi sighed: "Unfortunately, people's understanding of editors is much worse than that of poets, writers, actors, singers, and journalists." We don't pay enough attention to editorial work... Editors eat grass and milk every hour and year after month. In the end, he came to the conclusion that Yan Ming's achievements in editing were not under poetry.
Musician Li Ling's "Music Miscellaneous"
five
Yan Ming, of course, longed for more time to write poetry, and perhaps there would be more wonderful surges in that water. In the 1950s, the Beijing Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature ran to beijing daily several times, hoping to transfer Yan Ming as a professional poet. The newspaper was reluctant to let go of the good editor of gan as a ladder, and Yan Ming continued to dedicate his editorial post to 1957 without complaint.
At that time, three generations of the family were in the same room, and even a desk could not be set. In order to write, Yan Ming could only move to the staff dormitory of the unit, which was converted into dozens of large rooms with an auditorium, and he chose to hold the bunk at the door tightly. Every day after work, I spread out the manuscript paper in the office until late at night, and a beautiful hymn flew into the homes of ordinary people.
Every minute and second of Yan Ming's life and even every flash of thought was handed over to the poem. Family members, children's studies, work, marriage, children, etc., were infinitely condensed in Yan Ming's mind. Some children like literature, but he turns a blind eye. He could enthusiastically run to tutor strangers, ignoring his children and being dazed in the literary wasteland.
The famous writer Chen Zufen was deeply moved by Yan Ming's spirit of the ladder, and published a long reportage "When We Praise roses" in the sixth issue of Shanghai Wenhui Monthly in 1981, which caused great repercussions in society. Newspapers, radio, and television stations followed suit, and Yan Ming received thousands of letters from readers— "ladder spirit" became a hot word.
After retiring, Yan Ming finally had his own time, and in the past twenty years, his poetry has exploded and more than a dozen poetry collections have been published, and he seems to be racing against life. He wrote 650 poems in the 11 years from 1981 to 1991, five times more than in the previous 30 years. It is said that poetry belongs to young people, but the adolescence of Yan Ming's poetry creation appeared at the age of sixty or seventy, and this kind of reverse growth does not know how much hardship and pain it will take more than others!
China's landscape poetry has a three-thousand-year heritage, starting from the Book of Poetry, and contemporary poets have the responsibility to bring it to life. He took the lead in holding high the banner of landscape poetry in the domestic poetry circle, and the group poem "Huangshan, Qimei Mountain" was composed into a large-scale chorus suite by the famous Hong Kong composer Qu Wenzhong, and has toured in Beijing, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and even San Francisco, usa, etc. "Huangshan Love" has become a shared feeling of Chinese people in the world. In order to find the source of life of the Chinese nation, at the age of 67, he ventured to the source of the Yangtze River at an altitude of more than 6,000 meters, and exchanged his life for a collection of poems "Dong'e Wrong Dream".
He had too many elevations to climb and felt deeply remorseful for not writing satisfactory poems. When the light was gradually flowing out, the inspiration of the poem always drifted in the distance, making it difficult for him to touch. Reluctantly, he reduced his poetry and rewrote literary memoirs. The 300,000-word memoir reveals many little-known historical facts in the literary world.
More than once he sat alone in his study, silently shedding tears, whether he was happy or sad, no one knew. The muse gave him years and made him often fall into the mud.
At the end of his life, he was bedridden all day, unable to hold a pen in his hand or speaking, but still conceiving a new work. In June 2006, he completed the last two poems of his life, "The Reproduction of History" and "Monument to the Poetry Country", and three months later, the whistling life stopped singing, and the 86 rings were frozen forever.
He Jingzhi, Li Ying, Chen Jiangong, Gao Hongbo and many other poets have inscribed poem inscriptions to mourn this outstanding poet and editor. The inscription poem of Chen Jiangong, vice chairman of the China Writers Association, has the following two lines:
Candle torch ashes fly youth dreams,
Happy to help the peers soar into the sky.
At the end of the poem, Mr. Chen Jiangong made a special note on these two poems: "Yan Ming burned like a candle torch in his life, and cultivated and supported countless poets. ”
Before his death, Yan Ming wrote reportage, interviews, poetry reviews, and filmed many TV features for him. In his view, all he did was to follow the footsteps of his predecessors and follow the trajectory laid by the literati of previous generations.
Searching history, the spirit of the ladder has never been absent in the Chinese literary world, even if it is sometimes submerged or forgotten, its flame has never been obscured.
I open my heart for you,
Naked, plasma-like naked,
I greet you, greet your pure waterfall.
Even if I am in your madness,
Overwhelmed by the love of your waterfall,
Sink into the deep pool and perish without regrets! ......
- "Snow Lotus Waterfall No. 2"
This is a searing poem dedicated by Yan Ming to the mother of the motherland, from which the code of the poet's life can be unlocked: he converted to the muse and became willing to be a ladder, and the ultimate motivation came from his love for the motherland.
Mr. Yan Ming has a collection of poems called "The Harp of Spring", and the five thousand poems left behind, together with the spirit of the ladder of gan, like the harp of spring will never be dumb.
(Original title: The Harp of Spring Never Mutes: The Poet Yan Ming as an Editor)
Source: Beijing Evening News
Author: Guo Xin
Process Edit: L020
Copyright Notice: The text copyright belongs to The Beijing News Group and may not be reproduced or adapted without permission.