The TV series "Flowers" directed by Wong Kar-wai is on the air, and the original work of "Flowers" written by Kim Yucheng has also attracted attention.
Among the many editions of "Flowers", "Flowers: Annotated Edition", annotated by writer Shen Hongfei and co-typeset and designed by designer Jiang Qing, is particularly noteworthy.
Flowers: Annotated Edition
The annotations full of personality make "Flowers" more flesh and blood
The form of annotation is very "classical", and the "commentary" on the novel began in the Wanli period of the late Ming Dynasty. Due to the flourishing publication of novels, the "Four Strange Books" of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", "Journey to the West" and "Golden Vase Plum" appeared, and in order to meet the needs of the public for reading and understanding, novel annotations came into being.
It's just that in modern book publishing, the form of "annotated version" rarely appears, and the appearance of "Flowers: Annotated Edition" is related to the "particularity" of Jin Yucheng's original "Flowers". The story of "Flowers" is interspersed between the 60s and 90s of the last century, and the characters are staggered in two time and space, and Jin Yucheng writes a prosperous legend of Shanghai with a unique Shanghainese and script-style expression. The refinement of the language, the regional and dialect characteristics of Shanghai, make it difficult for ordinary readers to read "Flowers". On the basis of the original work, Blossoms: Annotated Edition annotates and appreciates the dialect vocabulary, special expressions, and key plots in it, and deconstructs the structure and details of Blossoms.
There are four types of annotations in Flowers: Annotated Edition: Sandwich Batch (batch between the lines), side batch (batch on the side of the paragraph), paragraph batch (batch at the end of the paragraph), and end batch (batch at the end of the chapter). In order to not only express the annotations without affecting the coherent reading of the original text, the text and the annotations are first distinguished by color, the text is black, and the annotations are orange-red, simulating the color of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Pi, and the illustrations are considered to be two-color printing; secondly, they are distinguished by fonts, the text is in Song style, and the annotations are in italics; and then they are distinguished by font size, and all the annotations are smaller than the text. The marks of the side batch are marked with solid black dots, hollow black dots, solid triangles, and hollow triangles, and they are almost never repeated on each page. Underscores are used to sandwich batches and mark the corresponding explanations of certain nouns.
Inside page of Flowers: Annotated Edition
This time, probably to echo the tradition of "annotated editions", from form to content to the publishing process, Jin Yucheng injected the entire "retro meaning" into the book—its time span is so large that it is indeed a little procrastinating in today's high-efficiency and fast-paced world. From the signing of the contract to the completion of printing, it took 6 years and 8 months for "Flowers: Annotated Edition" to be published.
The most unique thing about "Flowers" is that it has created a set of discourse systems that are isomorphic from the script, Shanghainese, and white descriptions. The novel takes the dialogue of the characters as the main structure, but does not use a quotation mark, question mark, or exclamation mark, no matter who is "speaking", only leaving a sound and leaving no trace, which is intentional by the author. At the same time, the author Jin Yucheng introduced traditional Chinese characters and different fonts (Songti, imitation Song, Kaiti) to distinguish them, as if he was painting with Chinese characters.
Shanghainese has a threshold, and the language of the novel is minimalist and provincial, only dialogue without explaining the background, and there is not much description, which leads to a lot of blank space. Some people have compared "Flowers" to the contemporary "Dream of Red Mansions", where the character sketching and story progression are all hidden in the details.
Eco, who liked to annotate and open books during his lifetime, found that "there is nothing completely personal in literature, and books will talk to each other." "Blossoms is the kind of book Eco is talking about. The author is silent throughout the whole process, and everything is left to all kinds of people to talk to themselves and do their own thing. Men, women, and children, all talkative.
Shen Hongfei said with a smile: "The annotator is in the middle of the toilet, interjecting in his own words, adding oil and vinegar, which is equivalent to the storyteller engaging in external flower arrangement, and the head of the gang blossoms." It's like what Beijingers say, 'talk in a hurry', and where you go...... In the author's dense intervals between the lines, the darkness of the first and second shadows is revealed, and the wind and waves are stirred up in the turbulence of wild horse dust, so that they can be blown by breath. ”
The perception of the book also confirms this statement. In the complex character dialogue, there are a number of annotations, or interpreting the background of the times, or gags, or translating dialects, or commenting on the characters, or commenting on the plot. Shen Hongfei is humble as "an interjector, a coaxing person, and the next stubble, filling in the science of the last technique", but for readers, the annotations full of personality supplement to the original work make "Flowers" more flesh and blood.
A Shanghainese translation dictionary
There are a lot of Shanghainese dialects involved in "Flowers", and Jin Yucheng has revised several drafts in the process of publication, and has done the greatest degree of consideration, and those characteristic dialects that are more critical to the portrayal of characters and plots, Shen Hongfei has annotated them one by one, playing a role in dredging the meaning of the text, such as "These shaved turtles (the old Shanghainese were contemptuous of the barber, and the chef was called 'rice turtle')", "Luo Song Qisan (the old Shanghainese called the poor White Russian)", "I am free (Shanghainese, the tone is negative, 'free' means 'not available'). It became popular in the 1990s)" and "Banana seats in the middle of the carriage (face-to-face longitudinal seats with curved front and rear connections)" and so on.
Thus, Blossoms: Annotated Editions can first be seen as a transliterated dictionary of Shanghainese, and such examples abound in the book.
For example, the line "foreign plate", Shen Hongfei commented:
Shanghainese dialect refers to laymen, wronged leaders and deceived people. The opening of Shanghai port, the daily opening of goods at the 16 Pu Wharf, often opens a high-priced order for foreign buyers. Do "feints" again.
For "have a cup of tea". Shen Hongfei commented like this:
Point out: This "tea" is not the tea that everyone understands, the so-called "tea" in the old Shanghai dialect generally refers to the cool white open, and the tea leaves are called "tea tea".
For "Xia Qi is good, the customs is good", Shen Hongfei commented:
Both words mean "very". Xia Qi is evil again, and the traffic is faint from contemporary Shanghainese. In the 1960s, for example, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra was criticized for ignoring the working people and playing only the "symphony of music".
A microcultural history of material and emotional substances
Shen Hongfei wrote in the afterword to "Flowers: Annotations" about the logic of his annotations:
Therefore, the annotator circulates in the "Flowers" bush, and every time he encounters a wonderful word, he bows his head; he wanders around the long banquet of "Flowers", or chooses the palatable one and stretches out a chopstick to eat the flowing water table into a one-person buffet
The author pulls the window and pierces it with a layer of window paper and uses his little thumb; the rows of "dolls" drawn by the author draw thick and thin intestines that can be broken by blowing; the author turns around repeatedly at the author's pause and makes a big splash when the author is not sounding; the story acts as an atmosphere group in the cold scene, and makes a circle when the characters are embarrassed; and next to the Chinese character marathon track where "10,000 good stories rush to start and rush to the finish line", bring tea, hand water, wave a flag, shout, and do not forget to secretly make a trip and poke the tire.
The form is extremely free, but also very detailed.
Chen Jianhua, a distinguished chair professor at Fudan University, believes that "Flowers" is originally a scroll of "Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival", which vividly reproduces the contemporary vitality of the "script" tradition. Focusing on the depiction of Shanghai in the second half of the 20th century by Hu Sheng, Ah Bao and Xiao Mao, and their relatives and friends, the material and spiritual world of Shanghai is scanned in all directions, and the details of the cityscape and everyday objects are laid out in detail, such as the Huxi factory in the 70s, the changes in the road name or a street corner in the Luwan District in the 40 years, and all kinds of stainless steel openers made by the people. Kim Woo-sung claims to replace the great camera lens with a paintbrush to record" the historical city that remains in his memory.
The task of annotation fell to Shen Hongfei, who annotated the encyclopedic vast words one by one, not letting go of a road name, a person's name, a commercial building, and a brand...... Salvage memories, such as archaeological operations on historical sites, add immeasurable texts to the original work, and connect with various documents without time and space, and the result is a micro-cultural history that historicizes the original work and weaves it into a cultural network, containing various materials and emotions.
From the perspective of material history, an example is the description of clothing fabrics, leather shoes, and cheongsams, including buttons, in Chapter 6, when Rimeiri deals with the clothing fabrics, leather shoes, and cheongsam styles, including the buttons, on three or four pages (pp. 133-136). The detailed description of these clothes and ornaments not only outlines most of Mei's mother's life, but also deliberately records the material memory of the citizens.
Chen Jianhua also noted that most of Shen Hongfei's annotations were related to the collective memory of citizens, such as the article "rocket launch site": "This scene should have been seen in the newsreel "Warmly Cheering the Mainland's Launch of Missile Nuclear Weapons Test" released on October 28, 1966, and again in the newsreel "The Mainland's First Artificial Earth Satellite Goes to the Sky" the following year. "Implanted with the private memories of the" critic ".
"Integrating personal memory, with emotional factors, and collective memory deepened and thickened the psychological texture of "Flowers". Chen Jianhua said that when annotating the "silver-like pewter gun head" in Chapter 6, of course, he introduced the "classical" of "The Legend of the West Chamber" and "Dream of Red Mansions", but the wonderful thing is that it fits the context of the original work "Miss Mei thinks this is 'Shanghainese speak'", and is related to Wang Wenjuan and Xu Yulan's Yue Opera film "Dream of Red Mansions", which uses the interpretation method of "modern classics", which also depends on the life experience of the critics.
And Shen Hongfei's literary reserve also expands the volume of the text, accurately pointing out the beauty of the use of a certain word. For example, when the word "swinging the road" appears in the book, Shen Hongfei commented:
Swinging the road, that is, "shopping on the road", the former has more of a meaning, no purpose, no heart, no restraint, and drifting with the flow. Yu Dafu's "Diary of a New Life" recorded that on a sunny day in 1927, he and Ms. Wang Yingxia "ate a pot of very good fish and a pot of eel, and after the meal, accompanied her to buy clothes and books, and ran for a long time. This vigorous love back then was not so much about "talking" as it was "swinging" on the road in Shanghai. The short "wandering history" is full of paper in Yu Dafu's diary.
At the moment when Citywalk is popular, the point-to-point writing embedded in the story in the text of "Flowers", with Jin Yucheng's hand-drawn memory of Shanghai's historical map, supplemented by Shen Hong's non-detailed annotations, or referring to the film and television presentation in Wong Kar-wai's "Flowers", according to the map, search for the change and preservation of a certain building in the depth of history, there is a unique interest.
For example, the most important scene in the memory of the young Po is to "climb on the roof, the tiles are warm" with Betty, "in his eyes, half of Luwan District has been abolished, and it was merged into Huangpu District in 2011, with Xiangshan Road in front, Fuxing Park in the east, and north in the east, and I saw a corner of my grandfather's single-family house, and behind the west, Nicholas Orthodox Church on Gaolan Road. ...... The southeast wind was strong, and I heard the sound of the Huangpu River boats, and the broad hum of the horn soothed the young man's mind. ”
Kim Woo-ching hand-painted this scene, and Wong Kar-wai's "Flowers" restored this scene, and the Orthodox Church has become an important check-in place.
Hand-drawn by Jin Yucheng
Stills from Wong Kar-wai's "Flowers".
Shen Hongfei used his own youthful experience to annotate the experience of "the broad hum of the horn soothes the young man's mind", and his marginal note reads: "When the critic was young, his family lived by the Huangpu River, and in addition to the 'broad hum' of the ship, he could also hear the port superintendent shouting loudly in the loudspeaker to command and reprimand the ship. ”
The role of annotation is now gradually replaced by scoring, barrage, book reviews or new evaluation systems, and the publication of "Flowers: Annotated Edition" is the inheritance and innovation of this retro form of annotation, which may inspire new inspiration for other literary works and make more new attempts. In recent years, the stage play and art exhibition of "Flowers" have attracted a lot of attention, and in the near future, "Flowers" TV series and movies will be released.