Comrade | Guevara
Chen Nian (real name Wang Wei), CEO of Vanke Eslite, is not only a business wizard and a big coffee in the fashion brand industry, but also pays attention to the literary and art circles for many years, and has unique insights into popular culture and stars, but the words are often too extreme and easy to cause controversy. For example, when Chen Fan was a guest on the talk show "Vicious Liang Huanxiu" in 2016, he highly praised the poet Mu Dan, but he tried to belittle the singer Jay Chou, saying, "I think a hundred years later, everyone will definitely remember Mu Dan, and Jay Chou will definitely be garbage."
Jay
As we all know, Jay Chou has sung a series of popular songs with a strong Chinese style, which are well received in the Chinese-speaking world, and most of these lyrics are written by the eccentric Fang Wenshan. The implication of Chen Nian's words is that Mu Dan's talent must "crush" Fang Wenshan, and as for the "masters" who are far inferior to Fang Wenshan, it is even more important. So the question is, who is the Mudan in the old mouth? How talented is he?
01 Poetry Wizards
Mu Dan, whose real name is Zha Liangzheng and who used the pen name Liang Zhen, is a cousin of Mr. Jin Yong, born in Tianjin in 1918, but his ancestral home is Haining, Zhejiang. Like Jin Yong, Zha Liangzheng was gifted and studious since childhood, and was admitted to Nankai Middle School at the age of 11 and tried to compose poetry. In 1934, at the age of 16, Zha Liangzheng split the surname "Cha" and pronounced the first half as "Mu", thus beginning to use "Mu Dan" as a pen name, implying "breaking dawn".
Mu Dan during Nankai Middle School
Although Mu Dan was obsessed with poetry creation, at the insistence of his father, he was admitted to Tsinghua University in 1935 to study geology, and half a year later he changed to the Department of Foreign Languages. After the outbreak of the "July 7 Incident", Tsinghua University was forced to relocate to Changsha, Kunming and other places, Mu Dan in the process of following the school to and fro, witnessed the scene of the mountains and rivers being broken, the scene of life and death, can not help but be full of sorrow and indignation, wrote a large number of patriotic poems, of which "Chorus", "Lyric Poems in Bomb Shelters", "Praise" 3 are the highest level.
Since 1939, on the basis of fully absorbing the western modern poetic style and combining the tradition of Chinese poetry, Mu Dan has created a large number of masterpieces of rich symbolic meaning and spiritual speculation, and together with Xin Di, Chen Jingrong, Tang Qi, Tang Xiang, Zheng Min, Du Yunxie, Yuan Kejia and Hang Youhe, he has become the representative of the "Nine Leaf Poetry School". At that time, the literary circles highly praised Mu Dan's poetry, and often referred to him and Xu Zhimo as "poetry double bi".
Mudan during his studies at Southwestern Union University
Due to the extremely high standard of Mu Dan's poetry, there are endless articles studying his artistic style, ideological tendencies and literary historical significance, and Wen Yiduo, when compiling the Modern Poetry Banknote, once selected Mu Dan's 11 poems, second only to Xu Zhimo. Not only that, Mu Dan's fame also spread to the United States on the other side of the ocean, and the famous poet Crickmore selected two English poems of Mu Dan into it when compiling the "World Famous Poetry Library", and the other Chinese poets selected at the same time were He Qifang.
02 Myanmar years
Although people often compare Mudan with Xu Zhimo, unlike the latter's performance of indulging in the small world of the individual and not asking about state affairs, Mudan has always cared about the fate of the country and the nation. To this end, Mu Dan did not engage in poetry writing full-time after graduating from university, but after working as a teaching assistant at Southwest Union University for 2 years, he resolutely threw himself into the Chinese Expeditionary Force into Burma, and as a lieutenant colonel's interpreter, followed the famous anti-Japanese general Du Yuming (deputy commander-in-chief of the Expeditionary Force) into the Anti-Japanese Battlefield in Burma.
Mudan during his military service
During the burma war, Mu Dan not only participated in the Battle of Savage Mountain, which shocked China and foreign countries, but also personally experienced the great retreat of Yunnan and Burma, helping the sick in the tropical rain forest that covered the sky, stepping on a lot of white bones, and going through nine deaths before he was lucky enough to escape. For this extremely painful experience, Mu Dan will never forget it, and he created a poem called "The Charm of the Forest - Sacrifice to the White Bones on the Hukang River" to commemorate his comrades who have been sleeping in a foreign land for a long time, and they are extremely sad.
03 The old age is bleak
After returning from the Burmese battlefield, Mu Dan retired from the army and worked for several years in Shenyang's "New Paper", the World Food and Agriculture Organization's Relief Agency, and the U.S. Information Service. In 1949, Mudan studied in the United States, studying English and American literature and Russian literature at the University of Chicago, during which time he married Zhou Youliang, an international student at the same school. In 1953, Mr. and Mrs. Mu Dan responded to the call of New China to return to China and both taught at Nankai University. Among them, Mudan served as an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, and devoted himself to the translation of Russian and English poetry.
Mu Dan and Zhou Youliang
At the beginning of Mu Dan's return to China, he still devoted himself to poetry creation and research, but it did not last long, and he was censored and persecuted because of his experience in the expeditionary army into Burma, and he had to interrupt his poetry creation and engage in translation work instead. Including the works of Pushkin, Shelley, Byron and others, many foreign masterpieces have been translated by Mu Dan's hand, and their translations are exquisite in wording, accurate in content, standardized and elegant, and always praised, and even Wang Xiaobo sincerely praised Mu Dan's translation as "the best text" and regarded him as an idol.
In 1975, as the holocaust drew to a close, Mudan, although not rehabilitated, was allowed to resume poetry. Since then, Mu Dan's poetry creation has rejuvenated the second spring, and he has created nearly 30 works such as "Song of Wisdom", "After the Blackout", "Winter" and so on, but unfortunately, there is not much time left for him to create. On February 26, 1977, during the Spring Festival, Mu Dan died of a heart attack at the age of 59 and was buried in the Wan'an Cemetery in Beijing. Two years later, Mudan was rehabilitated.
Mudan family portrait
Before dying, Mu Dan looked back on the past and said his inner monologue in a poem called "Meditation": "And now suddenly facing the grave, I looked around coldly, only to see that its twists and turns of sorrow and joy had disappeared into an ancient desert. Only then did I know all my efforts, but I completed my ordinary life. Today, although Mudan has passed away for nearly half a century, his reputation has not been buried, but has been respected by more people, which shows the high level of his achievements.
bibliography
Mu Dan: The Complete Poems of Mu Dan, China Literature Publishing House, 1996.
Mu Dan: Collected Poems of Mu Dan, People's Literature Publishing House, 2006.
Mu Dan: A Collection of Mu Dan Translations, People's Literature Publishing House, 2006.