Teach me how not to think about her.
There are several clouds floating in the sky.
There is a breeze blowing on the ground.
Ah!
The breeze blows my hair,
Teach me how to miss her.
Moonlight loves the ocean,
The ocean fell in love with the moonlight.
Ah!
Such a honey-like silver night,
Teach me how to miss her.
The fallen flowers on the water flow slowly.
Fish swim slowly downstream.
Ah!
Swallow, what did you say?
Teach me how to miss her.
Dead trees shake in the cold wind,
Wildfire burns in the twilight.
Ah!
There is still some afterglow in the west,
Teach me how to miss her.
Liu Bannong, London,1August 6th, 920.
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Teach me how to think of her is a vernacular poem written by Liu Bannong/kloc-0 in London in 1920, and set to music by Zhao Yuanren in 1926. This is a popular China art song among the educated youth in China in 1930s.
These two poets have a lot in common. They are all Jiangsu people and linguists, who have made special contributions to phonetics.
Liu Bannong is a linguist, poet, novelist, translator and a pioneer of the May 4th New Culture Movement. His achievement in phonetics is mainly the experiment of Chinese four tones. In philology, his outstanding contribution is to create the word "she" as the third person pronoun of women in Chinese characters.
He is the leader of China's vernacular poetry. I have read his collection of poems Yang (teaching me how to miss her). Some of them are very popular and common people. Many sentences are written in the daily spoken language of ordinary people, and even poems and recorded folk songs are written in the dialect of Jiangyin, my hometown.
There is an interesting legend about Liu Bannong's poem "Teach me how not to think about her". Zhao Yuanren's wife, Yang Buwei, has a narrative in her memoir Miscellanies of the Zhao Family. 1930 or so, Yang Buwei teaches at Beijing Women's College of Arts and Sciences. Her female students love to sing "Teach me how not to think about her". Later, the lyricist Liu Bannong was ordered to take over the college, and Liu Bannong came to the school wearing a Chinese blue cotton gown. Female students whispered to each other: "I heard that Liu Bannong is a very elegant scholar. How can he be an old man?" When Yang Buwei heard this, he said to the female students, "You have been singing his" Teach me how not to think about her "all day. This is him. " The female student got up and said, "Isn't this person like it?" Others said, "Didn't your teacher Zhao write this song?" Yang Buwei said: "Mr. Zhao composed music, but he wrote the lyrics."
Later, Liu Bannong knew about it and chimed in:
Teach me how not to think about him. Please come and have a cup of tea. I saw such an old man. Teach me how to think about him again. Zhao Yuanren, the author of Teach Me so hard to forget, was the most famous linguist in China in the last century. When I was young, I used to work in linguistics in colleges and universities. It is said that Zhao Yuanren's hearing is very good. He went out to inspect dialects, and it took him only three days to sort out the phonetic rules of local dialects when he went to a new place.
Composing and singing were Zhao Yuanren's hobbies, and his amateur music level was higher than that of ordinary professional musicians at that time. Especially in chorus writing, his level is above average. His chorus Hai Yun (Xu Zhimo's Ci) is still a masterpiece even by modern standards. His solo is also different. Take "teaching me how to think about her" for example. The melody is beautiful and full, which not only accurately conveys the spirit of the lyrics, but also enhances the artistic conception of the lyrics. In this song, Zhao Yuanren skillfully arranged the tone sandhi, which was rare in China's works at that time. This song is composed in the western way, but the melody is entirely China's, and it is not an ordinary folk song transplant or adaptation, although Zhao Yuanren himself said in "Song Note": "It is a bit like the last words of Xipi original board in Beijing opera." But I think this is a brand-new piece of music.