"Resurrected" Li Jinfa: Bringing Symbolism Back to China
China News Weekly reporter/Qiu Guangyu
Published in the 990th issue of China News Weekly on April 5, 2021
In April 2016, Yibin College teacher Chen Xiaoxia received a request from her college teacher and Sichuan University professor Chen Houcheng: I hope she can take over the subsequent compilation of "The Complete Collection of Li Jinfa Poems" and Li Jinfa's anthology.
Chen Xiaoxia completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in the Chinese Department of Sichuan University. She has studied modern Chinese literature for a long time and is quite familiar with Li Jinfa's poems. She will also explain Li Jinfa's poems to students in class.
Usually, she will choose the "Tenderness" suitable for young people at the stage of enlightenment to explain, and she can also recite the sentence casually: "I / Conqueror of Everything / Broken Shield and Spear."
But for the public, the name Li Jinfa is still unfamiliar.
The poet, educator, sculptor and diplomat formerly named Li Quanxing died in the United States as early as 1976.
Since the publication of the first collection of poems "Light Rain" in 1925, Li Jinfa and his poems have been constantly faced with misunderstandings, criticisms and controversies.
He moved to the United States after the founding of New China, and almost no poetry appeared.
In the literary and artistic trend of the 1980s, Li Jinfa's poems were once again remembered by later generations and discovered new connotations.
As the first successor of "symbolism" poetry in China, he not only influenced the "modern" poets of the same period, but also influenced the "obscure poems" of the 1980s, and even Lu Xun's collection of prose poems "Weeds". It is closely related to Li Jinfa's poems.
In December 2020, thanks to the efforts of Chen Houcheng, Li Weijiang, Chen Xiaoxia and others, the 700,000-word, 1,000-page "Complete Collection of Li Jinfa Poems" was officially published on the 120th anniversary of Li Jinfa’s birth, causing this to be misunderstood. The writings of the indifferent poet are seen again.
"Poetry Monsters" Who Work Hard to Die
Most people's first reaction to Li Jinfa's poems is "difficult to understand", even those who have received literary training.
Chen Xiaoxia recalled that in the process of compiling "The Complete Collection of Li Jinfa's Poems", she had to face a large number of French, German, English, Italian vocabulary in the manuscript, and even Japanese, Latin and Cyrillic.
In addition, Li Jinfa’s poems contain a large number of ancient texts and rare words. These puzzle-like words made her spend a lot of time inquiring and consulting related scholars, and sometimes holding a magnifying glass to confirm some words from the books of the Republic of China. , And learn to recognize traditional characters proficiently.
Everything can be traced back to the poet's childhood.
Li Jinfa was born in a rural family in Meizhou, Guangdong in 1900. His father and elder brother were in business in Mauritius and had strict tutoring. Because the family needed a scholar, he finished high school and went to Hong Kong to study for a while.
In Li Jinfa's mixed reading experience, there are allusions learned in the old-style private school at a young age, and the popular novels of the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School" at that time, as well as a certain English foundation.
In 1919, when Li Jinfa went to Shanghai to continue his studies, he joined the sixth group of work-study students in France. There were many celebrities in the same group, including Li Lisan, Xu Teli and Wang Ruofei, who later became celebrities of the Communist Party, a few months later than him. Also arriving in France was Lin Fengmian, a fellow painter and a classmate of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts.
Because he likes stone statues, Li Jinfa chooses sculpture as his specialty.
"Blond", the most widely spread pen name, also originated from the dreamland of an exotic blonde who wandered him.
Outside of school, literature and western music gradually attracted Li Jinfa.
He read a lot of poetry and romantic works of "decadent" and "symbolist" poets.
Symbolism was popular in Paris, France at the end of the 19th century, represented by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Lambeau. The exhaustive description of ugly things, the obscure hints and musicality are the outstanding features of these poems.
Li Jinfa once stated that he "composed poems under the influence of Boutellé (Baudelaire) and Verlaine", and this interest in reading continued into his later years.
After arriving in the United States, he will also read Baudelaire's "Flower of Evil".
Li Jinfa thinks that his only character advantage is "extremely willing to work hard", and he treats sculptures and poetry creation in this way.
In 1923, Li Jinfa, who was studying abroad in Berlin, Germany, compiled two original collections of poems, "Light Rain" and "Dinner and the Fierce Year", and sent the poems to Zhou Zuoren in China, which was praised by Zhou Zuoren.
At the end of 1924, he wrote a collection of poems "Sing for Happiness".
In February 1925, Li Jinfa's "Abandoned Wife" was published in "Yusi" magazine. In November of that year, the collection of poems "Light Rain" was edited and published by Zhou Zuoren. The poems are different, they are unique works in the poetry world." And the first poem in the "Wei Rain" poem collection is the famous "Abandoned Women": "The hidden worries of abandoned women are piled up on the action / the fire of the setting sun cannot control time. Bored/turned to ashes, flying away from the smoke/long dyed in the feathers of the wandering crow/will stay together on the tsunami stone, and listen to the song of the boat.” The mixed style of the white and the white made an impact on the literary world of popular vernacular poetry at that time.
In the 1920s when vernacular writing and vernacular poems were strongly promoted, Li Jinfa, who had lived abroad for a long time, was not inspired by the atmosphere of the domestic "literary revolution". Therefore, although he brought new ideas and unique works, he was unable to Completely integrate into the torrent of the times.
Since the day when Li Jinfa was on the stage, the literary circles have criticized his poetry as "difficult to understand". For example, Hu Shi, who created vernacular poems in The Attempt Collection, called Li Jinfa's poetry a "stupid mystery", which is actually a kind of "stupid mystery". criticism.
Liang Shiqiu accused him of "imitating a part of degenerate foreign literature", and the left-wing poet Pu Feng criticized his poems for "every piece of poetry is indispensable with a few "Zhi" characters."
The second half of my life no longer writing poems
There are still people who are willing to develop the value of Li Jinfa's poems.
In 1935, Zhu Ziqing pointed out in "The Department of Chinese New Literature·Poetry·Introduction" that Li Jinfa was the first to bring symbolist literary techniques to China: "What he wants to express is not meaning, but feeling or emotion; The little red, green and green beads are a string of beads, but he hides the string. You have to wear it yourself. This is the French symbolic poetry method. Li was the first to introduce it to Chinese poetry. Many people complained that they couldn’t understand it. Many people are imitating." He also pointed out that Li Jinfa's poems are full of imagination, but maybe because of the eagerness to create a new language, it has caused dyslexia.
After returning to China in 1925, Li Jinfa specialized in sculpture, translation, and education. At the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, he served as secretary of the Secretariat of the Republic of China University. He taught at the National West Lake Academy of Arts and Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He went to various places to make bronze statues of celebrities. Invited to Soong Ching Ling's home.
Although he has interacted with many celebrities, Li Jinfa still maintains an out-of-group character. After joining the "Literature Research Association", most of the people inside did not know each other.
However, Li Jinfa has a sincere patriotic sentiment. After the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, Zeng Gong wrote and criticized Zhou Zuoren, who promoted him, for "no literary man". He also wrote a large number of poems "singing for the War of Resistance" with positive style and published in the media.
Since 1941, Li Jinfa, who was struggling to make a living, stopped publishing poems. In order to pursue the favorable treatment of expatriates, he joined the European Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at that time, and was sent to Iran in 1945, and later served as the first class of the embassy in Iran. Secretary, transferred to the charge d'affaires of the embassy in Iraq two years later.
In 1951, Li Jinfa, who was unsatisfactory at work, decided to move his family to the United States.
When he arrived in the United States, he first ran a farm to raise chickens, and then a clothing business, but he was unsuccessful. Finally, he returned to his profession and worked in an engraving company.
In fact, after he published "Sing for Happiness" at the age of 26, Li Jinfa's career as a symbolist poet basically ended.
In his later memories, he mentioned that he felt that the era of symbolism had passed, "can't find a right path, feel self-deception", and the pressure of life has also wiped out his inspiration.
In his later years, his essays published in magazines in Hong Kong and Malaysia were mostly memoir articles. After he was a little older, he didn't even bother to write essays.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Li Jinfa’s poems, who had served the National Government, almost disappeared on the mainland. Only in some literary textbooks, they were dismissed as “backflow” because of the style of learning from the West.
His works are only privately popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The only time he appeared was when he accidentally acted as a "target" in the controversy initiated by Taiwanese "modernist" poets in the 1950s: In 1959, he once commented on Li when he was on the mainland. Su Xuelin of Jinfa Poetry suddenly criticized Li Jinfa's poems as "the ghost of symbolic poetry", which has been passed down to countless disciples in Taiwan.
Regarding all this, Li Jinfa, who was living overseas, did not respond, but in 1973, in the "Twenty Questions to Mr. Yaxian" written to the Taiwanese poet Yaxian, it was mentioned that others said his poems could not be understood, he was Don't care, just think they are shallow.
Re-excavated after the "80s"
After the reform and opening up, the "modernist" that has been suppressed since the "May 4th Movement" resurfaced, and new poetry schools including "obscure poetry" continued to emerge. The expansion of academic research space provided opportunities for Li Jinfa's poems to reappear. Some well-known scholars worked hard to "excavate" Li Jinfa.
When researching Lu Xun's "Weeds", Sun Yushi, a professor of Peking University, felt that the articles in "Weeds" might have some use in symbolism, and the poet who must pay attention to Chinese symbolism is Li Jinfa.
Sun Yushi began to offer the "Li Jinfa and the Early Symbolism Poetry Research" course for students in September 1981, hoping that more people would understand the connotation of poetry.
In 1990, he used a chapter in the book "Introduction to Modern Chinese Poetry (1917—1938)" to appreciate "The Abandoned Wife", thinking that Li Jinfa's work made up for "the lack of novelty and complexity of imagery" at the beginning of the new poem. Defects.
In addition, Peking University professor Xie Mian pointed out in the book "The Sun in the New Century: Chinese Poetry Trends in the 20th Century" published in 1993 that Li Jinfa’s "more prominent contribution is to openly and bravely blend the Western sentiment The exotic art methods are introduced into the new Chinese poetry that has just become self-reliant."
Only at this stage did people discover that Li Jinfa's poems had not been published in mainland China for more than 30 years.
As the city that first held the "Chinese Poetry Festival" in 1986, Chengdu has naturally become an important town for poetry publishing and dissemination.
According to Zhou Yi, director of the editor-in-chief of Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, in 1987, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, which had just been established for more than two years, exhausted all the materials they could collect and published "Li Jinfa Poems". This collection of poems can be said to be at that time The "thickest and most comprehensive book" of Li Jinfa's poems published in China has more than 800 pages. Today's "Complete Collection of Li Jinfa's Poems" is also partly based on this book.
When Chen Houcheng, a professor at Sichuan University, was studying the topic of "20th Century Chinese Literature and Western Modernism Thought" around 1985, he began to come into contact with Li Jinfa's poems. He also felt that Li Jinfa was an inevitable poet in the history of Chinese new poetry.
Since then, Chen Houcheng began to accumulate information about Li Jinfa and made contact with other scholars and relatives of Li Jinfa in the United States and his hometown.
In 1995, Li Jinfa's biography "The Smile on the Lips of Death-Li Jinfa" written by Chen Houcheng was published. This biography is still one of the most detailed materials for studying Li Jincheng's peaceful works.
In the 1990s, Chen Houcheng and Li Weijiang, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University and a researcher of Cantonese writers, came up with the idea of co-editing the "Complete Collection of Li Jinfa Poems" and collections of essays.
In October 2000, Meizhou, Guangdong held the "Centenary of the Birth of Lin Fengmian and Li Jinfa and Academic Symposium". At the meeting, Li Jinfa was confirmed to be the first person to introduce French symbolic poetry, and because the symbolism is modernism The first genre in literary thoughts, so Li Jinfa is also known as "the pioneer of Chinese modernist poetry."
In the second month after the meeting, Professor Li Weijiang passed away due to illness, and his research on Li Jinfa was transferred to his daughter Li Tao.
During that period, publishing houses continued to express interest in "The Complete Collection of Li Jinfa's Poems", but due to the need for self-financing, Li Tao and Chen Houcheng both went abroad to settle and other reasons, the publication of this set of books has not yet proceeded.
Until 2016, Chen Houcheng decided to hand over all the materials of "The Complete Collection of Li Jinfa Poems" collected by him and Li Weijiang, as well as the compilation of future collections of poems and essays, to Chen Xiaoxia, a student living in Sichuan, for execution.
In 2017, Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House decided to publish the "Complete Collection of Li Jinfa Poems" based on the 1987 edition of "Li Jinfa Poems" and existing research materials. Zhou Yi, director of the editor-in-chief of Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, contacted Chen Houcheng in the United States. After learning that he had the full power to publish Li Jinfa's works, he finally settled the matter.
Because of the teacher's entrustment, Chen Xiaoxia has been with this pile of materials related to Li Jinfa in the study from 2016 till now.
She remembered that when she first brought these materials back to Yibin, several suitcases were full and one trolley case was broken.
Today, 52-year-old Chen Xiaoxia still loves poetry as she did when she was young, and she can also write poetry.
Although the Li Jinfa poems she taught in class are still a bit obscure for the 18 or 9-year-old students, she thinks that even if the students can only read one of the fragments, it is better than not feeling anything at all.
She used her favorite Li Jinfa’s "You Feelings" to explain the complex and subtle feelings of life expressed in symbolist poems: "'If the remnant leaves splattered blood on our feet/life is the smile on the lips of death.' We may I’ve all had this experience, but you may not have this feeling of life: life and death are dependent on each other, as if there is life in the red leaves, like human blood vessels. I like such verses very much."
(Intern Xu Ying also contributed to this article)
China News Weekly, Issue 12, 2021
Statement: The publication of the "China News Weekly" manuscript is authorized in writing