湖南翻译名家 || 库库君：《陈逵中英诗文选》：序及Introduction
弼猷先生诗语出自然,不拘绳墨,然佳句连篇,警句屡见,无不耐人吟味,启人深思,颇得魏晋风骨。
司马迁作《史记》,屈原与贾谊合传,实独具慧眼,别出心裁。后人因之,常屈贾并论,共祀一祠。二人皆才调绝伦,遭逢谗佞,而忧国忧民,九死不悔,骚赋流传,光照万世。弼猷先生对此景仰备至,每于朝霞醒眼,陡忆汨罗,清宵展卷,犹见长沙,其受屈贾启迪之深,于斯可见。
作者深恨“两可”,多所“不堪”,举目人生,则历历创伤,抚摩心痛,则催诗似箭,宜乎“句句残诗带血痕”也。
予于六十年前,始识先生于北平,当时常闻师辈称道,先生曾创作英语诗文,发表于美国《日晷》、《民族》等著名刊物。英语诗辞句精练,扬华夏之心声,文则笔墨生动,传祖国之文化,深受彼邦评坛重视。不意几度沧桑之后,如今中美学人互访,美方颇不乏人念及先生当年之英语诗文,仍赞叹不已。现先生中英诗文将合集问世,二者交相辉映,堪称双璧。
予有幸得于付印前拜读其中大部分诗稿,如见其人,如闻其声,先生一生耿介,风度超群,皆跃然纸上矣。
冯至
1992年5月15日
Chen Kwei is a man who sacrificed his creative potential to the hope of doing good for his country. He was a young man when he made the irrevocable decision; he might have become a world-class poet in America, but he chose to return to China to serve his people. There are many such men who love(d) their country, but few with the gifts that Chen Kwei possessed.
In many ways, his life is the material of myth, and we can read it as allegory. He was born in Hunan in 1902 in the last gasp of Empire, and at ten, he must have cut his queue, and turned in his pao to put on, literally and figuratively, the garments of the West, a moment whose significance must have engraved itself on his mind, like characters on a stele (shi bei). He was among the creme de lacreme of young men and women sent abroad to study early in this century. That first generation of liu-xue-shen was, in the most honorific sense, innocent, filled with the rhetoric of the young Republic and believing in its idealism. Of course, those were heady times——we would have joined in too, made our own private covenant to do what we could for our motherland on the verge of a glorious future. No one could have guessed the devastation of World War II and its aftermath. Liberation must have seemed yet another new beginning.
陈逵先生年轻照
Most Chinese studying overseas, then and now, concentrated in the sciences where immediate and pragmatic ends can be quickly gained and then put to use in China towards building an industrial nation fit to enter the arena of modern powers. Chen Kwei was one of the few whose talent was in the humanities, specifically writing poetry. He came to America in 1920, graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1926, went on to the University of Wisconsin for graduate work in philosophy. He took up the joyful, dare-to-be-new, make-it-new spirit of individualism that is modernism. He wrote for and edited The Chinese Students’ Monthly, a magazine in English published in the States. More important, in terms of a wider, elite circulation, he contributed both poetry and prose to The Century, The Bookman, The Nation, and most important in terms of prestige to The Dial. One has to understand that The Dial had been founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in 1840, had had several lives between then and the incarnation of the 1920's. It was considered in Chen Kwei’s time "the most distinguished American magazine fostering contemporary arts and letters,” rivaled only by The Little Review, renowned for its courage in publishing a serialization of Ulysses, that great watershed in modernist literature. Both had high aesthetic standards and were liberal and cosmopolitan as well. The dial's stable of regulars included e. e. cummings and Marianne Moore who later became editor; Ezra Pound was its Paris Correspondent, and T. S. Eliot its London Correspondent. The "house advertisement" for the magazine (May 1921) begins by noting that the great visionaries Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman were all seen as strange and “queer”:
THE DIAL
is queer——to all lovers of the commonplace...
It doesn't like what everybody likes simply because everybody likes it——which is why discerning people like it. “The vivid and various Dial,” as the New York Evening Post describes it, is queer——in the same way that all things of distinction are queer.
Queer things do differ from the divine average of mediocrity.
Clearly, a magazine proud of the individuals who contributed. The contributors list reads like a who's Who in the literary and art world, and Chen Kwei was among them. a peer among peers , though it is highly unlikely that any of the others were writing in a second language. (One thinks of Conrad’s wrestle with English and Beckett's with French.)
The American establishment certainly thought of Chen as a comer. In his writing, in his poetic Autobiography as in his poems, he retains a profound sense of China, its tradition and its moods. He knows intimately, and he conveys, its scenes, what is heard and said, the smells and tastes and textures. The imagery he uses expresses the delicacy and tact of his poetic roots. His love of beauty in particular reveals poignantly his Chinese sensibility. At the same time, one hears echoes of the T'ang poets in exile from their beloved Chang-An, longing for home, a place of the mind that haunts one's dreams. Nostalgia knows no age limits; the young feel its pangs at least as distinctly as the old. Like the eponymous characters from Romeo and Juliet that he alludes to, Chen's work evokes youthful sentiments and aspirations.
The person who answered the call of the far-out foreign Muse of modern poetry would be precisely the person to respond to the adventure of participating in the forming and fortifying of a new nation. Chen admired Byron; he would have been justified to think of his own life and times as Byronic. The Republic of China was in crisis after the split between the Kuomintang and the Communist wing. The threat of war with Japan hung in the air. Whether or not there was an official recall of liu-xue-shen, under the circumstances Chen Kwei would have returned, as many of the other overseas students did.
We do not know if Chen Kwei would have fulfilled his promise if he had continued to be in the center of modernist art. Lack of an audience and of other poets with whom to share ideas, lack of encouragement because he wrote in English ——these must have taken their toll. There is no question in my mind that we are influenced and inspired by what is around us, by the very air we breathe. But among variants, ideas that are viable to one man may be uninteresting to another. "Readiness is all," said the archetypal modern man Hamlet, and there is no way to secondguess what might have been. Chen’s life was no less difficult to resolve. He seems to have been fated to be split between China and America, distance lending the enchantment to wherever he was not. But then, he might not have been moved except insofar as there were distances to be recovered. The richness and rare opportunities might only have existed under these conditions. We know he continued to live and work in China. His family and friends will attest to his vitality and energy, his strength and fortitude in trying times. The memory of the man lives on as much as the memory of his work, and in ultimate terms, whether Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, is the true measure.
We rejoice that Chen kwei's poems will be available again for a new generation of readers. His work tells us about taste and values in a specific period of time, a particularly interesting moment, and we have a first-hand notion, an intimate glimpse of an exceptional human spirit.
Dr. Phebe Chao
Bennington College
May, 1993
菲比·赵简介
菲比·赵女士系美国贝宁顿大学( Bennington College)文学系主任，哈佛大学博士。1982年教育部在北京大学主办全国高校外语师资培训班，赵博士作为 Fulbright基金会来华讲学学者，主讲美国文学史和美国戏剧。她对中国文化十分推崇，并热心致力于中美两国之间的文化交流工作。
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