"Little dear, if you don't love me, I must cry, you will always refuse to play with me."
"Are you afraid of meat and hemp?" If you are not afraid of meat and hemp, I will call you all meat and hemp. ”
"Fool, I love you. I think you want me to be thirsty, so I drink boiled water; I think I'm hungry and have nothing to eat...
Are these fleshy, explicit, childish, and sweet love words very similar to the tone of the current young man confessing to his lover? However, these gentle love words are the pen of Zhu Shenghao, a translator talent from the Republic of China.
Who is Zhu Shenghao? He is a well-known translator, and it is Zhu Shenghao's wonderful translations that have been widely circulated in China, such as Romeo and Juliet's poignant love.
It's just a pity that such a translator and love story king only lived for 32 years.
In a short life, he left behind more than 1.8 million words of Shakespeare's translations and more than 540 "love letters" to his wife Song Qingru.
The most is that shallow smile that warms people's hearts
Song Qingru was born into a wealthy family in Changshu, Jiangsu Province. Full of independent and free thoughts, she deeply despised the feudal society's shackles on women.
The family ordered her a doll kiss, and she protested loudly: "I don't want to get married, I want to study!" In the end, his parents could not help him, so they had to dismiss the doll relatives.
After graduating from middle school, her parents wanted to find a family affair for her as soon as possible, but she resolutely refused, preferring not to have a dowry and insist on studying.
That year, the spirited Song Qing was admitted to Hangzhou Zhijiang University as he wished. Because of her interest in pagoda poetry, she joined the school's "Zhijiang Poetry Club" as soon as she entered the university.
One day, the members of the poetry club held an exchange meeting, and she read out her poems at the meeting, thinking that she would win the applause of the whole hall, who knew that after reading them, the poets were silent and looked confused.
Originally, Song Qingru only cared about studying the trendy pagoda poetry, but did not know much about the pingshu of ancient poetry, in that era, everyone attached great importance to the pingshu of poetry, and naturally felt that her poems were "ignorant".
Just when Song Qingru felt a little embarrassed, her eyes touched a boy sitting nearby, only to see him holding his own poem in his hand, and a shallow smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
This smile made Song Qingru feel warm, sweeping away the haze in her heart, and she remembered this boy in her heart, Zhu Shenghao.
"At the time, he was a complete child. Slender, pale face, kind, innocent, self-satisfied, easy to feel approachable. That was her impression of him.
The poetry meeting is over, but the story between them has only just begun.
A few days later, Song Qingru received a letter from Zhu Shenghao, in which he corrected her poem in a earnest tone.
In this way, the two came and went, became sincere poet friends, and gradually collided with the spark of feelings in the exchange of poetry.
This ambiguity, the two people know it, but they do not break each other, perhaps, it is this hazy feeling that is the most comfortable.
At this time, Zhu Shenghao was already in the last year of college, while Song Qingru was a freshman. This means that in another year, they will face separation.
In 1933, Zhu Shenghao graduated from university, and because of his strong English ability, he was offered the job of editor in the English Department of the Shanghai World Book Company under the recommendation of his mentor.
On the occasion of his farewell, he sent Song Qingru three poems in one breath, "Partridge Heaven", one of which was "No need for ears and sideburns, a smile and a bowed head have fallen", which has already shown his heart.
The carriage is slow, the letters are far away, and the feelings are sincere
In Shanghai, Zhu Shenghao mainly does the work of translating English-Chinese dictionaries, which is naturally slightly boring, but fortunately, he still has a penchant for comfort: writing love letters to Song Qingru.
Zhu Shenghao can be described as a man with "inconsistent appearances", in today's words, a sullen man, this boy who is usually introverted and shy, taciturn, but his inner emotions are as hot as magma.
In his letter, he escaped an infatuated child who fell in love, childish, entangled, tricky, entangled, fleshy, expectant... Careful thoughts in various relationships are at a glance.
His joys and sorrows are always touched by Song Qingru in a different place, and he sensitively captures the other party's feelings for himself from the speed or slowness of her reply, the length or length, and the thickness and lightness of the tone.
When he learned that he had received a letter, he was ecstatic, and he rushed to the room at a speed that could not hide his ears, searched around, and found that there was no letter, he was "unspeakably stuffy, empty, and hungry in his soul." ”
When he did not wait for her letter, he began to think wildly: "I hope you did not believe it for other reasons, busy, lazy, unhappy, angry with me, or married, but not sick." ”
When he received her letter, he was resurrected in blood, feeling "really happy, the wind and the sun are warm, and people are willing to live forever." Everything in the world counts as long as there is you. I am Song Qingru as a supremeist. ”
When Song's letter was only a few crosses, he suddenly felt that "the wind and rain are obscure, the heavens and the earth are discolored, my heart is lonely, and I want to cry", complaining that "reading is equivalent to not reading, but feeling more hungry."
When he smelled that the tone of Song's reply was too light, he was full of grief, "Your cold tone gave me too miserable nightmares, I would rather you curse me and vomit blood." ”
It is said that girls in love will be overly sensitive and delicate, and this Zhu Shenghao is not inferior to girls.
However, this is enough to prove how deeply he invests in this feeling, and it is the depth of love that will care so much about the other party's words and deeds, every move, and work hard to please the other party.
Zhu Shenghao even changed the nickname of the other party in the letter: "Song Song, little sister, little relative, baby, heart and liver, her majesty the queen, lover, angel, good person... There were a number of people, and he thought of more than 70 nicknames alone.
Song Qingru's affection for Zhu Shenghao cannot be described as unmoved, but she is an unmarried person and does not like to be bound, so although she and Zhu Shenghao have maintained correspondence for many years, they have never moved towards the threshold of marriage, and the two are more like a pair of spiritual lovers.
In this regard, Zhu Shenghao also expressed respect and did not be aggressive, he only gave her pertinent advice: "An independent and strong woman, even if she is married, will not become an ordinary person." ”
The spiritual world of the two people is very rich, but the reality is very bone, at that time, it was a chaotic situation, Zhu Shenghao's unit was in a depressed situation, successive layoffs, salary cuts, and the remaining employees were also demoralized, and they resigned and left.
His monthly salary dropped from 70 yuan to 50 yuan, but due to the compulsion of life, there was no way out, he could only continue to guard this rice bowl, he also complained to Song Qingru in the letter: "I believe that I will starve to death in the future", which shows the bleakness of the status quo.
Soon after, Zhu Shenghao began to translate Shakespeare's works, you know, Shakespeare's works as a world classic, without deep translation and literary skills, it is difficult for people to be competent for this job.
Zhu Shenghao was hesitant at first, but with the encouragement of Song Qingru, he decided to do this well.
He devoted himself to the project of translating Shakespeare's works, consulting the dictionary every day, deliberating on the words, and often spending the night in painstaking translation.
And Song Qingru's side, the situation is not optimistic. In 1937, Jiangsu and Zhejiang fell, and after graduation, she had to leave her hometown and teach at a private school in Huzhou, Sichuan.
From time to time, Zhu Shenghao would send his translations to Song Qingru and implore her to give advice. And Song Qingru, who is busy with school affairs, often picks up the lamp to read at night to help him proofread and correct.
The two supported each other in difficult times, and in the blink of an eye, several years flew by in their correspondence with each other.
At the end of 1940, Song Qingru's mother urged her to return to Shanghai. Seeing that her daughter is getting older, one person has left her hometown, and her marriage has not fallen, you can imagine how anxious this old mother should be.
Song Qingru had to quit his job in the summer vacation of the following year, and then went all the way to shanghai after more than half a year.
Zhu Shenghao and Song Qingru, who had been in a different place for many years, were finally reunited. Song Qingru found that Zhu Shenghao was still "inconsistent in appearance" as always, and he was not as hot and numb as in the letter.
In reality, he is still introverted and reticent, but with years of interaction and understanding, Song Qingru knows that he is due to personality, so this does not prevent the two from continuing to communicate.
Although the two have come to meet for thousands of miles, due to the deteriorating situation, they have not been able to stabilize in Shanghai and have a peaceful birthday.
Talented and beautiful, Chaimi marriage
At the end of 1941, the Pearl Harbor incident broke out, and the Japanese army simultaneously occupied the Shanghai Concession. One day, the fierce spirit of the Japanese army rushed into Zhu Shenghao's newspaper office, causing panic among the crowd.
Zhu Shenghao, who was immersed in work, suddenly saw the Japanese army coming, and fled with his colleagues in a hurry, and in the chaos, some of his translations and many materials fell into the newspaper.
The next day, when he returned to the newspaper office to retrieve the writing, he was shocked by the scene in front of him: the translation he had painstakingly completed, and the translation materials collected over the years, had been burned to ashes by the Japanese army!
Looking at the mess in front of him, Zhu Shenghao's heart could not help but sigh and resent, and in desperation, he had to re-translate.
Under the fire of war, the people can't even live a peaceful birthday, so why talk about keeping their jobs? Zhu Shenghao soon lost his job, and then Song Qingru also lost his teaching job.
Seeing that Shanghai could not stay any longer, Song Qingru decided to return to Chongqing to work, and before leaving, she invited Zhu Shenghao to go with her.
At this time, both of them have passed the age of establishment, and the relatives and friends around them are also worried about their life events, and they have suggested that they should go together anyway, it is better to do the marriage first, and it is more appropriate to be a chaimi couple.
Thinking about the future, the two accepted the suggestions of relatives and friends, and in this way, after nearly ten years of love, they finally entered the palace of marriage.
They held a simple and warm wedding in Shanghai, at which a generation of poets, Xia Chengtao, who was also their friend, gave them an eight-character inscription: Talented Beauty, Chaimi Marriage.
Xia Chengtao's gift can be described as a portrayal of their lives after marriage. After getting married, the two began to plan a trip to Chongqing, but their trip was repeatedly delayed due to the obstruction of travel due to the war.
After much deliberation, the two finally decided to abandon their trip to Chongqing, knowing very well that the current situation, even if they went there, might not be able to stabilize, and they might continue to travel elsewhere.
In this way, the two people temporarily stayed in Shanghai, during this time, the two people who were unemployed at the same time, squeezed into a small rental house, life was very poor, and soon could not support it.
Fortunately, at this time, Song Qingru's mother reached out to them both. She rented a house for the young couple in Changshu and let them come back to live.
In order to make a living, the couple had to return to Changshu, where all the expenses were provided by Mother Song, and their lives finally improved slightly.
During this period, Zhu Shenghao did not dare to relax, he devoted himself to the translation of Shakespeare's works, because some of the previous translations were burned, he re-translated again, and Song Qingru also helped him do some transcription work.
Because the husband and wife are intellectuals with strong self-esteem, they are not willing to be "nibbling on the old people" all the time, and accepting the help of the elders is only a temporary measure forced by helplessness.
A few months later, after the Spring Festival, the couple returned to Zhu Shenghao's hometown of Jiaxing and began to live independently. Without the support of their elders, the lives of the two fell into difficulties again.
In order to earn the manuscript fee as soon as possible, Zhu Shenghao desperately put into work, and the translation volume increased from the original 3,000 words per day to 8,000 words per day, and the work intensity can be described as extreme.
He stayed at home every day, working day and night to translate, and his wife Song Qingru understood his hardships, so she silently assumed the responsibility of taking care of the family, buying vegetables and mopping the floor every day, cooking and washing, and taking care of her husband's daily life.
At that time, prices soared, the economy of the two people was often stretched, in order to help make up for the family, Song Qingru went to tutor, as a tailor and other small workers to earn pocket money.
Although Zhu Shenghao was calm and calm on the surface, Song Qingru noticed that he was becoming more and more reticent, and sometimes he would wet his towel in tears in the middle of the night, and she knew that Zhu was actually carrying heavy psychological pressure.
At that time, a neighbor saw that they were having difficulties in life, and kindly reminded him that there was a college classmate of Zhu Shenghao who was the director of education in a certain county, and suggested that he go to the other side to find an official and a half-job, which should not be a problem.
When Zhu Shenghao learned that the area was controlled by the Japanese puppets, he resolutely refused to go, saying that if he wanted to go to the Japanese puppets to ask for food, it would be better to follow his mother who had died.
Although a proud bone is admirable, the harsh reality has further pushed him into the abyss. Originally weak, due to overwork and painstaking efforts, coupled with the embarrassment of life, his heart was exhausted, and his body gradually collapsed.
At the beginning, it was all kinds of physical problems that came out, waist pain, dental disease, etc., due to busy translation, and economic embarrassment, and his wife had just given birth to a son, Zhu Shenghao had no time to take care of his body, and could only delay again and again.
Who knows, the disease is getting worse and worse, and finally, it is dragged out of tuberculosis!
Like a storm, Zhu Shenghao felt the menacing of the disease, and he was bedridden, he could only interrupt all the translation work, and his heart also flooded with a sense of desolation that he was powerless to return to heaven.
Unable to let go of his wife and newborn child, nor could he let go of his translation career, lying in bed, he was sometimes awake, sometimes unconscious, and once awake, he took Shakespeare's work and recited it.
He said to his wife with regret that there were still 5 works left untranslated by Shakespeare, and if he knew that the illness was so turbulent, he would have desperately tried to finish translating Shakespeare's works.
The illness dragged on for too long, coupled with the limited medical level at that time, Zhu Shenghao's condition quickly took a sharp turn for the worse, and one day soon after, he fell into a state of dying, and before leaving, he took Song Qingru's hand and left a sentence: "Xiao Qingqing, I am gone." ”
With regret and reluctance, Zhu Shenghao completed a short 32-year life, leaving behind a lonely wife, a one-year-old son waiting to be fed, and more than thirty translated Shakespeare manuscripts, as well as works to be translated.
Those who are alive, life will go on
Zhu Shenghao's sudden death was a surprise to Song Qingru. During the ten years of love with Zhu, it was basically a long-distance love affair, and the two of them had a hard time getting together and starting a family, and as a result, the married life lasted only for a short period of two and a half years.
Song Qingru has not yet returned to God, she and the child became orphans and widows, and this year, she is only 33 years old, the next long road of life, where will she go?
Fortunately, she is an independent intellectual woman, and after the grief, she regains the burden of life. After all, her son, who had just turned one year old, needed her to raise, and her husband's unfulfilled wishes needed to be fulfilled.
While she was teaching and raising her family in the local area, she squeezed out time to sort out Zhu Shenghao's translation before his death.
In order to fulfill her deceased husband's wish, she contacted Zhu Shenghao's brother and hoped that he would work with her to complete the translation of Zhu Shenghao's unfinished Shakespeare works during his lifetime.
Zhu Shenghao's younger brother tried to translate part of it, but because his style did not reach Zhu Shenghao's master level, the sample manuscript was rejected after it was sent to the publishing house.
Song Qingru did not want her husband's "life" to be exchanged for the effort in vain, and she decided to take on this translation responsibility herself.
In this way, sorting out Zhu Shenghao's translations and translating Shakespeare's works became Song Qingru's daily routine. Outside of work, she rarely goes out and spends most of her time reading, organizing materials and translating.
After three years of painstaking efforts, she finally translated the remaining Shakespeare works. However, when she sent the translations to the publisher, she said that she had received other translations.
Song Qingru felt sorry for her deceased husband, but there was no other way but to silently put away these translations.
Fortunately, soon after, things took a turn for the better, and Zhu Shenghao's translations of his lifetime were published one after another. Song Qingru breathed a sigh of relief and finally fulfilled his last wish.
According to people's assumptions of the perfect love in the world, Song Qingru should spend the rest of his life alone in the time of thinking about his deceased husband.
However, the living, life still has to go on.
Although Song Qingru misses her deceased husband, but life is long, she is still young after all, if she has been living alone like this, it is tantamount to a flower withering prematurely, and it is not too regrettable.
Her son once revealed in the book that after the death of his father, there was an emotional interlude in his mother's life.
At that time, Song Qingru was teaching at Hangzhou Senior High School, and Luo Yunzhi, the school's general affairs director at the time, was her classmate at Zhijiang University, and Luo took good care of her lonely and helpless in both work and life.
After that, the two of them got better for a while and had a daughter together, but in the end, they could not come together for some unknown reasons.
The reason for this is only the most clear to the parties, but for this story, Song Qingru rarely mentions it in front of outsiders, perhaps, she regards this as an episode that cannot be hidden on the long road of life.
After this experience, Song Qingru left Hangzhou Senior High School and transferred to another school to teach. After that, her emotional world has no waves.
Perhaps with that life episode, she woke up to the fact that what she really couldn't put down was Zhu Shenghao. For the rest of her life, Zhu Shenghao's manuscripts and letters became her spiritual sustenance.
After drifting outside for decades, Song Qingru has seen through the earthly world and his heart is as quiet as water. In her later years, she returned to Jiaxing and lived in Zhu's old residence, reminiscing from time to time about her short and dreamy past with Zhu.
I still remember the gentle boy who bowed his head and smiled lightly; the boyfriend who was emotionally hot and unrestrained in the letter; the husband who was silent because of the pressure of life; the patient who clinged to him when he was critically ill...
All this, with the passage of time, became a flower in the mirror, a moon in the water, and only the yellowed letters that swayed with the wind recorded the entanglement of their lives.
Just as Zhu Shenghao said in his letter: When people go to the empty building, they can never hear the song of "Lover, don't come back."
The love between Zhu Shenghao and Song Qingru is pure and loyal, without mixing with worldly desires and conditions.
This kind of pure love can withstand the test of the world, so that they can support each other and help each other in the cumbersome marriage and the embarrassment of material conditions.
In contrast, in the modern materialistic society, the relationship between men and women is often attached with too many external conditions: to talk about love, you must first talk about the house and the car; when you get married, you must first see the bride price and heavy money... Instead, feelings have become appendages.
The relationship between men and women, which has too many external conditions attached, once stripped of the outer layer, only a fragile shell remains inside, which is naturally vulnerable.
Therefore, when you are in love, if the conditions of the house and the car are not met, you can immediately shoot and scatter; when the bride price is not negotiated at the time of marriage, you can also temporarily repent, and the wedding is in vain; even if one party has difficulties after marriage, the other party may also leave the scene without authorization...
It is precisely because of this that the love between Zhu Shenghao and Song Qingru is so precious and fascinating in contemporary times.
. END .
【Text| Wen Shiyue】
Edit | Daniel Lee]
【Typography | Drizzle】
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