Zhao Ruihong in his youth
Translation of "The Red and the Black"
Group photo after the meeting of the UN General Assembly
◎ Zhao Yun
A young poet who was praised by Mr. Zhu Ziqing
It is said that people are brilliant, Wenzhou businessmen, but also literati, guarding Yandang Mountain, Meiyutan, and xie Lingyun, such a great poet of landscape, cultivated his father's lifelong pursuit of beauty and poetry. A seed of literature was planted in his heart early, accompanied by compassion, love for his hometown and Chinese culture, and righteous indignation against injustice and darkness. Therefore, when the July 7 Incident occurred and the news came that the three universities in Beijing and Tianjin had been relocated to Changsha, he and two classmates from the same village resolutely decided to defect to this temporary national university.
Coincidentally, my mother Yang Wei and my father took the same route, but her departure place was Tianjin. They took a boat to Shanghai, then to Hong Kong, taking a detour through Haiphong, Vietnam, and finally back to Kunming. When the stuffy tank truck opened the door of the car, I saw the Chinese flag and the Chinese soldiers, and everyone was excited to "tears" and sang anti-Japanese songs one by one. In 1938, the Southwest United University was officially established, and my parents were fortunate to become students of the United Nations University, which was also the beginning of their life.
On the way to Kunming on foot, Xiang Changqing and Liu Zhaoji of the Department of Foreign Languages told Mr. Wen Yiduo about their desire to organize a poetry club and publish poetry periodicals after arriving in Kunming on a snowy night in Yuanling, Xiangxi Province, and asked Mr. Wen to serve as a mentor. Mr. Wen said that he had not written poetry for a long time, but he still cared about the creative activities of young people, and readily agreed, and Mr. Zhu also expressed his support. After arriving in Mengzi, they named it after Nanhu, and about 20 students who loved poetry set up the Nanhu Poetry Society.
The cover photo of the book is a group photo of some members of the South Lake Poetry Society. According to my father's recollection, teachers and students often discuss new works together. Once, my father wrote a lyrical poem "The Dream of Yongjia Garden" that remembered his relatives in his hometown, and later changed the title of the poem to "Dream Falling Back to Xiatan". The original manuscript has been lost, and only the first four stanzas remain. Mr. Zhu knew that the garden was in Wenzhou Sunset Pond, so he was very interested in this poem, saying that it was a "masterpiece", which made his father very excited.
I saw an old photo in the Mengzi Customs Exhibition Hall, Mr. Zhu Ziqing went to the railway station to send the grammar school students to Kunming. The old railway station of Bisezhai is still preserved. I have been there twice, and each time I will imagine the scene when the teachers and students of the United Nations University entered Vietnam from Vietnam, got off from here, and changed to Mengzi, the kind of wartime study, youthful, with the tragic songs of heroes, just like the movie picture.
And Mudan was good enough to change clothes and wear
As my mother recalls in the film, she and my father first met at a welcoming party at the Highland Literary and Art Society. She and a few female classmates knocked on the door and went in, just in time for those present to blame the meeting host for being late. After a while, the man came, embarrassed, and said in English, "Sorry!" Sorry！ "My mother said that this was Zhao Ruihong, which left a very funny impression on her. My father said that the first time he met my mother was when he took a few graduate students to Wenzhou to give lectures, and at a literary and art evening, my mother "wore a cheongsam with flowers on a black background and a red short-sleeved sweater, which was very beautiful." I never checked this with my mother, and I don't know if it was my father who exaggerated it. My mother always said that she was not like-minded with my father, which meant that they both had literary ideals and later were all translators, but the writing styles were different, and the poets they liked were different, such as my father liked Milton, my mother didn't like it, she thought it was too classical, she preferred to be more modern.
In this way, my parents and more than three thousand young people from all over the country braved enemy fire and came from all directions to begin their study careers at southwest United University.
On August 13, 1940, my parents got married in Kunming newspaper, which was to commemorate the first shot fired by Wusongkou in Shanghai. They had no wedding receptions, no witnesses. During the period of national calamity, everything came together from Jane and two patriotic young people to establish our family.
His father and Mu Dan met in 1937 at a temporary university in Changsha. For this outstanding genius classmate, he wrote a long poem during the United Nations General Assembly. After Mudan's death, his father wrote many sincere memories in his later years.
He wrote about their first acquaintance: The Faculty of Letters officially held classes on November 18. I read Mr. Liu Wuji's "History of English Literature" and Mr. Luo Haolan's "Western Novels" and Mr. Wu Dayuan's "French Lessons". Mu Dan went on Mr. Wu Mi's "History of European Literature"... We also took Mr. Ye Gongchao's "Sophomore English" class together. In addition, Mu Dan listened to Mr. Feng Youlan's "History of Chinese Philosophy" and I audited Mr. Luo Yong's "Du Shi" class. As for the two courses "Shakespeare" and "English Poetry" taught by Mr. Yan Busun, almost all the students of the Department of Foreign Languages listened to them. His father believed that the English poet Yan Busun's lessons had a profound impact on Mu Dan's future poetry.
Father said that in the South Lake Poetry Society, when everyone copied their poems to the poster, Mu Dan always carefully wrote word by word on the paper, and the handwriting was correct and beautiful. When he arrived in Kunming, his father and Mu Dan shared a dormitory. Bunk beds, my mother said they also exchange clothes to wear.
Have the best teachers and alumni
I was amazed that my father, as a student of the United Nations University, was able to recall in detail the sounds and smiles of his teachers in his later years, the teaching materials and teaching characteristics he taught at that time. The imaginative text describing Mr. Luo Yong's story of Du Fu in the movie "Post-90s" came from his father's pen.
My father recalled Mr. Wu Mi's class: This was one of the most "popular" courses in the College of Letters at that time. Mr. Wu Mi's memory is amazing, and he blurted out many major events in literary history, even during the writer's birth and death, without error. Another characteristic of his lectures is that he makes some appropriate comparisons between the development of Western literature and China's classical literature, or tells us that the creative activity of a foreign writer is equivalent to that of a certain Chinese writer, such as Dante and Wang Shifu, Ma Zhiyuan, Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu. He wrote the chronology of Chinese and foreign poets and writers and major works on the blackboard neatly, and it was clear at a glance. I later used this method when teaching the history of foreign literature in the Department of Chinese of Nanjing University, which aroused the interest of my classmates and received better teaching results.
On the eve of graduation from the United Nations General Assembly, my father asked Mr. Wu Mi to write a few words on the title page of one of his original English editions of Tennyson's Collected Poems as a souvenir. A day or two later, when my father picked up the book, Mr. Wu said that the collection was very good and asked where he bought it. His father told him he had found it in a used bookstore while passing through Hong Kong in 1938. The gentleman instructed him to read Tennyson's poems carefully, copied a few words from the book, and told him to look back and look carefully. When I returned to the dormitory, I opened the book and looked at it, and I was very excited, and it turned out that Mr. Wu had neatly excerpted the original three lines of Matthew Arnold's "Sweetness and Light" with a red fountain pen. Father thought, "One hundred and fifty years ago, when Goethe was dying, he said that before he died, he asked someone to open a shutter and let the light from outside shine in, so that the house would be brightened. ”
It is normal for a foreign literary masterpiece to be translated by many people. His father had the privilege of being the first to translate Stendhal's famous book The Red and the Black, which was inseparable from his early influence by his middle school teacher, Mr. Xia Yitian. This teacher is very obsessed with Lian, and his father also advocates a life of personal struggle. But at that time, he did not have the conditions to see the original book, until he saw the original in the library of the National Central University Branch, and he had the opportunity to start translating it in Baixi on the banks of the Jialing River. It was first published in 1944.
On September 18, 1998, I accompanied my father to attend jiangsu Yilin's "Ge Baoquan Translation Literature Award Award Ceremony". He sat down at the podium and made a short but meaningful statement. His memories take me back to Moscow in the 1950s, where he taught himself Russian to keep up with the new era. He said: "Translation is always indispensable and meaningful work, as long as there is human existence, there is communication. There are 4 billion people on the planet, more than 3,000 languages, and our work will be done forever. He also specially congratulated the award-winning female authors, which made my half of the foreign illiterate envious. On the evening of the 20th, my father set up a banquet for the graduate students who were about to work in France. The invited students were all colleagues from the Department of Foreign Literature of the Department of Chinese of NTU. During the banquet, he sighed that the years were like shuttles, and 45 years ago, Yang Xiufeng, minister of the Ministry of Higher Education, gave him a trip for the young. Now the hair is gray, and the wind candle is dead. However, he wants to tell everyone that he has completed a literary memoir, a golden wish of late autumn!
My father and mother, as well as my uncle, have always adhered to the principle of "faith, da, and ya" in their translation work, which is also a criterion that I have known since I was a child, and I have never doubted it. I have also heard the elders talk about the differences in the translation industry, but always believe that the parents are right. Until Xu Yuanchong's name became popular with the "Reader", my mother's rejection made me feel that there were still many differences in their generation.
In 2018, I attended the 80th anniversary celebration ceremony of Yunnan Normal University, which is also the original site of Southwest United University, met Elder Xu, who was sitting in a wheelchair, I went forward to greet him, and introduced myself as the daughter of Zhao Ruihong and Yang Jingru. He was amazed, shouted that they were his classmates, classmates, and immediately spoke out in public about his differences with my parents on translation, which surprised me with his bluntness. The first time I saw him, he was like a kid. Later, I went with the museum staff to visit him at his accommodation, and he once again raised his and my father's different views on translation. He said he advocated beauty, and everything should be beautiful.
After returning to Beijing, he entrusted someone to send me a copy of "Madame Bovary", and on the title page I wrote in large characters "Zhao Yushi's sister Rui Hongjing is like a beloved daughter Xu Yuanchong", which greatly touched me. At the beginning of 2020, Xu Lao's diary of the United Nations General Assembly was first published in Yunnan, and I was invited to attend the press conference. After the meeting, we went to Peking University Changchun Garden to visit the old man, he was really crazy, proud of the wonderful translation of his translation, that kind of confident eyebrow flying dance expression, made the people present laugh haha. This is the last time I see the old man. His sudden death gave me the opportunity to get to know him and where the differences between him and his father's group of translators lay. At the same time, I reread my father's letter to Elder Xu in 1997, and I was deeply moved by my father's mind and serious attitude towards learning, he is a father who deserves my pride!
Not seeing this book published is the biggest regret
The older my father reached his old age, the more he wrote, the longer he wrote. He had a strong sense of urgency, a nostalgia for life, a review of the past, a discussion of poetry, a discussion of writing, especially the remembrance and review of the Southwest United University, all of which were eagerly expressed in the letter. Fortunately, my father cherished the letters he sent, and there was already a copy shop at that time, and he would copy them before sending them out. So after his death, my daughter with a heart got a considerable number of copies of letters.
When editing this book, I deliberately singled out correspondence between my father and his U.S. teachers and classmates. For example, Mr. Feng Zhi, who taught him, they have always kept in touch, every time they come to Beijing, they will go to see Mr. Feng, and he also took me once, which is the only time I have seen Mr. Feng.
It should be said that from the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, my father and mother began to write articles recalling the Southwest United Congress. They all won the commemorative medal of the China Writers Association, and like a competition, they each wrote a lot. My father liked to write one article and publish one article after another, and then publish it in a collection. It started out as a prose, and there was a long process of brewing a book. I feel that in his later years, he would like to make a review of his literary path.
My father always wrote things repeatedly and revised countless times. The book dragged on for years, and I advised him several times not to add it anymore, and it was time to hand over the manuscript. Finally, one day in September 1998, I was in Nanjing, accompanied him to the post office, personally sent this stack of manuscripts to the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, which was the first edition of "Reminiscing about the Old Journey of The Song of Chaos", and the editor-in-charge was Xu Jianzhong. Xu Jianzhong is also a very serious person, and he and his father have corresponded a lot to edit the book, but he has never met his father.
From the end of 1998 to the beginning of 1999, several master-level old writers died in the Chinese literary circles, Bing Xin, Qian Zhongshu, and Xiao Qian. My father was very sad, and every time he went, he wrote articles to mourn and remember. By the time He wrote Xiao Qian, he was in poor health, writing only eight hundred words, entitled "China Has Lost a Strong Translator." A week later he was gone. Xu Jianzhong rushed to Nanjing and saw the author's remains. Some people say that Mr. Zhao was written to death. It was his greatest regret that he had not been able to see the publication of this bloodthirsty book he had written at the end of his life!
In this book, my father quotes the scriptures and repeatedly gives examples and expositions in order to tell readers and future generations what is the spirit of Southwest United University and why such a school works. I was deeply influenced by it as a descendant, and when I was young, I was educated, then I was intentionally absorbed, and now I am consciously inheriting.
This manuscript continues his academic rigor, meticulous writing, including punctuation and careful writing. Father liked to use a fountain pen and dip it in ink, so his handwriting was full of deep and shallow ink. I even think of his glyphs as his flowing white hair, his lines like his steps, slow and weighty, as if he were longing for the content of every footprint, like his lifelong pursuit of perfect and pure literary ideals.
Before my father's death, computers were not yet widespread, and he had long begun to classify his life's manuscripts, but he had no energy to organize them. Each cover of the manuscript is marked with a description of the content in red and blue pen, and some are written in large letters: Important Letters! Don't save! This is clearly for me to see.
I have always believed that my family is not a person, and as a descendant, I cannot choose what kind of family I was born into. My parents' family situation is very different, commonly known as the wrong door, but Zhao Yang and the two families advocate culture, which is always a wealth that I want to remember and inherit. Whether it is rich or poor, whether it is famous or ordinary, we do not have to show off or inferiority. What kind of road to take and what kind of person to be is up to us to choose. Courtesy photo/Zhao Yun