(1) Phoenix Bath Fire (Liushahe)
1966 On a cold night, Yu Guangzhong, a poet from Taiwan Province Province who was employed as an associate professor in the English Department of Michigan State University in the United States, was depressed and looked out of the window, thinking of the distant motherland. It has been seventeen years since Qiu Feng 1948 left the mainland and moved to Hongkong (to study in Taiwan Province Province the following year). I went abroad at the age of 20 and missed my hometown at the age of 37. I don't know when I will return to China. Sentimental Yu Guangzhong thought about the time limit of his life, hoping to be buried in the "most beautiful and motherly country" between the Yangtze River and the Yellow River after his death, lying there listening to the flowing water of the rivers on both sides and "sleeping peacefully" in the requiem of the rivers, so he wrote this song "I am dead". He remembered Yuelai Field in Jiangbei, Chongqing, Sichuan, where he went to middle school during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression period. There are many mountains, trees and partridges. In spring, partridges cry in the foggy forest, "Can't you, brother!" " This reminds him of Xin Qiji's famous sentence in the Southern Song Dynasty, "The river is worried at night, and the mountains are deeply heard of partridges." Yu Guangzhong was born in Nanjing, 1928, claiming to be from Jiangnan. In this poem, he misses Chongqing, not Nanjing, a mountain city full of partridges. Is it the crow that tells people to go home?
Yu Guangzhong's poems, such as When I Die, are quite strange in sentence patterns. You can read a sentence and translate it into English without any difficulty. However, as far as its connotation is concerned, his poetry is an ancient national tune. He doesn't agree with the extinction of his own tradition in Europe and America, and he doesn't agree with the so-called "horizontal transplantation" of Taiwan Province modernists, that is, blindly emigrating to foreign countries.
(Selected from Twelve Poets in Taiwan Province Province, Chongqing Publishing House, 1983).
(2) Song of Eternal Sorrow (Liu)
Wandering poetic soul
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Yu Guangzhong, who has traveled overseas for many years, is well known, but he didn't expect that the richness of material life could not fill the shortcomings of spiritual life anyway. Entering middle age, with the passage of time, our homesickness becomes more and more serious, and it is more and more difficult to get rid of it. That distant and vast continent has become the place where our souls are placed. Every time I look back, I often feel at a loss. With the passage of time, I left one homesick song after another, like sparkling pebbles, shining with the glory of years. He wrote in the preface of the poem "Fang Baiyu Melon": "When I was in middle age, I was worried and sad, and my feelings began to deepen. That pen knows how to reach back to that continent, touch the sad waves of Miluo and the cold waves of Lishui, sing for Chen Chu, mourn for Hanjiang, and lift a handle with the most sensitive heart in ancient times. " Remembering the past and praising history is a major theme of China's classical poetry. In this kind of poetry, the memory of the whole nation is equivalent to introspection in the mirror. This sense of history is one of the ways for modern poetry to re-recognize tradition. Poets in ancient and modern times often write homesickness, are good at writing homesickness, mourn for the motherland and the times, and write down many excellent systems. In the late Tang Dynasty, Li Yu said: "How much sorrow can there be, just like a river flowing eastward." Li Qingzhao in the Southern Song Dynasty wrote: "I am afraid that the boat can't carry it, and there are many worries." Xin Qiji said: "Now I know what it's like to be sad. I want to say that I'd better take a rest, but I want to say that it's cool in a good autumn!" The reason why they touched the world and spread endlessly is probably because this feeling of missing the motherland and cherishing their hometown is a historical emotion with the simplest, purest and most touching characteristics.
Therefore, Yu Guangzhong's homesickness poems, like a hammer with a handle ringing a bell, struck the echo wall of history and aroused a wide range of strong * * * sounds from overseas wanderers.
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In fact, it's not just them. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in China have been enjoying the warmth of our motherland, reading poems and appreciating sentences, and appreciating their meanings, but haven't our hearts been stirred up like waves?
Structural art of good beginning and good ending
The beginning comes straight to the point, the middle turns naturally, and the end is just right, which shows the poet's meticulous artistic conception and painstaking structural treatment.
Yu Guangzhong's attainments in structural art are inseparable from his consistent creative ideas. He said, "the first poet wins with sentences, but often there are sentences without articles;" If a great man wins with chess pieces, then this sentence is alive, which shows that he is good at structure. "When we analyze and appreciate his short poems and understand the poet's mood, don't we get vivid impressions and profound enlightenment?
(Selected from Appreciation of Contemporary Famous Poems, Straits Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986)