发动群众依靠群众斗群众不受制肘永远做权力的主人玩弄人于股掌他不如湖南毛泽东
行军打仗临阵决机难免最终败亡他不如湖北林彪
研究学问见微知著见识卓越他不如安徽胡适
激流勇进全身而退他不如四川郭沫若
他经受了常人的苦难
矢志不渝
用嘶哑的喉咙
发出真诚的声音
纪念艾青 天霸qq864056788
In Wuhan in the winter of 1937 a young poet with a fierce love of his motherland turned an angry eye on the horizon of snow that smothered China--a land being ravaged by the Japanese invaders,frozen by the cowardly lack of risistance of China.
"Cold blockades China,"he wrote."The wind,like an old woman with many grievances,closely follows behind,stretches out her claws,tugs at clothes of passing people,her words as old as the earth,comlaining,never ceasing..."
Twenty years later,in a compaign against "rightists"<1957--1958>in the new People's Republic,Ai Qing was labelled a Rightist.Poems such as Snow falls on the Chinese land,some critics said,were gloomy and pessimistic.They deliberately distorted the meaning of these verses,ignoring those with which the poet had closed his poem---lines that belied their charge:
Oh China,
On this lampless night
Can my weak lines
Give you a little warmth?
Ai Qing and his poems disappeared from public life after these attacks.The silence surrounding him lasted so long that foreign admirers began to believe him dead.In a sense,a new snow was falling on China.Forces trying to undermine the society were slowly stifling demorcracy,working their way into high positions and creating the havoc with which they thought they could seize power from the masses whom Ai Qing had always served.In late 1978 the charges previously against Ai Qing were declared false and he was officially exonerated.Of these two long decades of silence Ai Qing says only,"following the spring of 1958,I went to work on a state farm in Heilongjiang Province for a year and a half and then in the winter of 1959 to a state farm in Xinjiang,wher I lived for 16 years."During this period ,though he continued to write poems,publication was denied to him.
Ai Qing,thoughtout his long life,has asked only one thing of his poems:that they "give a little warmth",a stiffening of will and courage,to the victims of injustice,the disinherited of China.Pessimism has not been a main factor in his life.Even in The Trumpeter<1939>,when his hero,no more than a boy,falls in the smoke and flame of battle,he writes:
No one saw him fall
down to earth he loved above all things,
His hand still grasping the trumpet,
......
Listen!
The trumpet is still singing!
Born Jiang Haicheng in 1910,Ai Qing came from a landlord's family in Jinhua County,Zhejiang Province.Because a fortuneteller had declared that it was his fate to harm his parents,he was sent away to be brought
up by a poor peasant woman.This poor women did not even have a name,so people called her by the name of her village,Dayanhe.When he was 5 years old he was brought back home.As a further guarantee against the interference of fate,he was not allowed to call his parents "father"and "mother"but had to call them "uncle"and"aunt".for the rest of his life he was to detest fortune telling and all other superstitions.In his home,he remarked later,"I grew up in a milieu of indifference and disdain."..."My childhood and the relations between me and my family weae portrayed in my poem Dayanhe---my nurse and My father,The first written in 1933,the second in 1941.Yet in these works his memories of both are so vividly expressed---the one glowing with love,the other sadly scornful of a man who passed his life"the most tranquilly in an epoch the most troubled"."Dayanhe,"he says to his foster-mother,"I an the son of a landlord..."and in the same breath finishes the line with "and I drank your milk to the last drop"."My father,thrash his children to train them and became the tyrant of the family."Whatever else this training did for Ai Qing,it was a school for rebellion.His father thought that book knowledge gained in regular school was useful"first,to ornament the facade,second,to safeguard the family patrimony".Worse still to a youth in a time of fervent national patriotism:
My father,unmoved before the revolution,
Waited,indifferent,for progress.
He knew that this was the wave
but strove to avoidthe torrent,
Keeping his distance and watching it...
He was a most ordinary man,
Poltroon enough to stick calmly to his duties.
The" middle way",conservative,greedy,complaisant,
......
As did innumerable landlords of China.
He considered his tiny lost village
As his immutable kingdom.
He had received from his ancestors a patrimony
That he would pass on to his descendants,
Neither larger nor smaller.
That was hie entire life---
And it was for this that I pitied him.
It was in primary school during the May 4th Movement in 1919 that he first heard of such ideas as "democracy"and "science",In middle school he read some works of Lu Xun,he first heard of the idea of class struggle and read a mimeographed copy of Introduction to historical materialism in his home district.In 1928 he entered the National West Lake School of Art ih Hongzhou,where the artist Lin Fengmian《林风眠》was then the principal.Lin recognized his talent but told him,"You won't learn anything here.You'd better go abroad."One evening in 1929 ,now no longer able to hold his son in this"decrepit village",Ai Qing's father dug up 1000 Mexican silver dollars from under a plank in the floor and,"with trembling hands and a sombre mien"said,"return in a few years.Don't let any pleasure make you forget to come back."Thus he left to study in France.Here he read widely,supporting himself by working in a small factory making Chinese lacquer ware.He became familiar with the poems of Rimbaud,Yesenin,Blok and Mayakovsky and especially those of the Belgian poet,Verhaeren.In January 1932 Ai Qing return to Shanghai where he promptly joined the Left-wing Artists Association and organized a group of painters.In July of the same year he was thrown into prison for being opposed to Chiang Kai-shek《蒋介石》.His three years in prison were productive years.Here he wrote Dayanhe---My nurse and a number of other poems,for the first time using the pen name Ai Qing.The poems were published as a collection in 1936 and mark Ai Qing's turn from to literature.His time behind bars carried him closer to the poor and the oppressed.His release in October 1935 began what one writer has called"a wandering,fighting life",a poet-soldier sharing the life of millions of Chinese patriots in those years.When the war against Japan broke out in 1937 he left Shanghai,went to Wuhan first,the went back to the north,to Shanxi and Shaanxi,the went to south again,spent some time in Guilin as editor of The South,a supplement of the Guangxi Daily,taught in a teacher-training school in Hunan and went to Chongqing in 1940.Finally with the help of Zhou Enlai《周恩来》，He arrived in Yanan.working for communist work.Here he witnessed"Zhengfeng Movement"sponsored by Mao Zedong to extinct his political opposers.In early 1949 he entered Beijing with the PEOPLE'S Liberation Army,He took part in the Congress of Literature and Art Workers.At Liberation he was given the task of taking over the Central Art Academy and at the same time became the vice-editor of People's Literature.
The mirror<1978>,which he thinks is one of his best poets:"It loves truth deeply,/never hiding defects./It is honest with those who seek it./...Some avoid it/because it is too frank./There are even some/who hate it and wish to smash it."marks his straightforward,uncimplicated honesty.Like most Chinese they grope and trample in darkness,sometimes struggle and enduring are not enough,without checks and balances to prevent abuse of public power,the so-called liberaters might have turned into oppressers far more quickly than we might think.without ballot papers,commom people,although far outnumbered,have little influence on public decisions and conmsequently cannot command our own fate.
By Robert C. Friend《中国文学》英文月刊1979年第6期
Adapted by黄天霸
Apr. 30 2009
