诗的绿音

谢冕

        还是那个绿音，还是我当初见到的她。她还是那么青春、秀丽，而且聪慧。当初她临风而立，长发飘动，写着轻轻浅浅的诗，抒着淡淡浓浓的情，很感动了一些人。我不记得我和绿音第一次是怎么相见的，也许是在家乡垂挂着浓密的三角梅的一座院落里，在同样浓密的榕荫底下，她来看我。诗是先前就读过的，人是第一次才见到。绿音有一种淡淡的不求装饰的风格，她的诗也一样。

        和我认识的许多诗人特别是年轻的女诗人一样，绿音似乎只生活在自己的诗里。而她的诗大抵也只是属于一个年青女子的那份情，那份爱，还有一片充满幻想的天空。世上有很多事，绿音也许知道，也许不想知道。她把在相当多的人看来是应当竭力争取的诸多琐碎的世俗情节都忽略了，只留下那种单纯。但即使是这些单纯，也被她灵动的思绪点化而为那些浅浅的、淡淡的、然而内里却包孕着让人感动的质素的诗句。

        绿音的诗，和她的人一样清纯。情感真挚，不事装饰，有一种热情，却是非常内敛而节制的。多半是短句，不华丽，很简约。她的诗有一种类似平淡的清雅，她不想从外面添加些什么，很本色。现在的诗多半奢华，有很多的装饰，或者是故作深奥，或者是故作粗鄙，但都具有一定的表演性。而在绿音的理念中，写诗是一种快乐，是一种剥离了虚伪与世俗的自我释放。她追求的是让心灵温暖明净的纯粹和真实。

        她只为爱而生，把属于个人的情感看得比什么都重要。所有的诗作，大体总围绕着这样的题目。绿音自己说，生命、死亡、爱和永恒，这是她经常想要表现的诗的主题。所谓永恒，其实就是一个字：爱。生命是不会永恒的，一旦死亡降临，生命也就终止了。而爱是超越时空的，当一切都终止了的时候，那曾经存在着的刻骨铭心的情，却始终飘浮着、游动着，在曾经爱着的心灵中。当然，这一切都必须借助于诗的翅膀。

        绿音总是那么清纯，她是永远为爱而生的女人，是诗给了她这样一串绿色的音符。从我初识绿音直至今日，时光是流走了很多，但绿音依然清纯。她似乎不愿长大，一直留住了她的纯真。每次遇到她，或是通过越洋电话的攀谈，她只有一个话题，那就是诗。从八十年代到现在，人们说，诗已经落潮了。许多写诗的人，或是做起了生意，或是写起了小说或电视剧，而像绿音这样，信守着最初的承诺，坚持着最初的理想，专注地爱着，审美地写着的人，实在是不多了。这就是绿音让人感动的地方。这种对于世事的“无知”的单纯，在今日这种浮嚣而又恶俗成癖的世道中，实在是罕见的。

        还是当年我在故乡的榕荫下认识的绿音，还是当年在香港同游铜锣湾的绿音，当年诗一样单纯的诗歌青年其实是成熟了。的确，她依然还在为永恒的爱情而写作。但她对她所皈依和膜拜的，已有了深切的感知。绿音不是不认识当今世界的复杂，她只是宁可要把那复杂表现得单纯。她一如既往，拒绝浓重的修饰，更拒绝恶俗的夸张，她的诗还是清清的、浅浅的、淡淡的。但岁月还是留下了它的印痕，我们从中看到了深沉和浑重：我向火焰寻求燃烧的定义，火焰不说话；我在黑暗中寻找光坠落的方向，黑暗不说话；这是绿音现在所拥有的无论是冷雨还是寒风都不能阻挡的“沉默的世界”。

        “海枯石烂之后，是否我们还会站在美丽的废墟上，彼此凝视？”（《倾城》）“悲哀是沙漠上永恒的骆驼，有着永远走不完的行程，幸福是骆驼背上的那只水壶，而坟墓就在我们脚下。”（《时间》）这样的感受显得深远缅邈，当然是对于早期创作风格的超越。在浅淡之外，她无疑有一种沉郁在诞生。绿音是精心的，她能在别人觉察不到的地方，让技巧创造出语言的奇迹——这里是《空海》：任你的航线一千次切割我，我是海，只有泪水没有伤口！绿音以我们难以觉察的成熟带给我们以欣喜。但即使如此，我还是不得不说，绿音依旧，她依然有她的摒弃一切的坚定——

        今夜我在你掌中
        不说前生
        也不问来世

                                                                                                                                   2003年8月24日于北京大学畅春园

注:《诗的绿音》一文为谢冕教授为《绿音诗选》（2004）所作的序言。原载《厦门晚报》（2004年6月16日）、《海内外文学家企业家报》（2004年5月31日）、美国《东方》（2004年5月号，第46期）、菲律宾《世界日报》（2004年5月4日）。

谢冕：1932年1月生，福建省福州人。北京大学中国语言文学研究所所长、北京大学中文系教授、博士研究生导师。中国作家协会全国委员，中国当代文学研究会副会长，并兼任诗歌理论刊物《诗探索》主编。著有学术专著《湖岸诗评》、《共和国的星光》(1983)、《文学的绿色革命》(1988年)、《诗人的创造》(1989年) 《地火依然运行》(1991年)、《新世纪的太阳》、《大转型——后新时期文化研究》（合著）、《1898 ：百年忧患》(1998年)、《论二十世纪中国文学》(1998年) 、《文学评论：方法与实现》等十余种，以及散文随笔集《世纪留言》、《永远的校园》、《流向远方的水》、《心中风景》等。他还主编过《中国当代青年诗选》(1986年)、《中国新诗萃》(合编，1988年)以及大型丛书《二十世纪中国文学》（10卷）、《百年中国文学经典》（8卷）(1997年)、《百年中国文学总系》（12卷）(1998年)等。1986年列名于英国剑桥国际传记中心名人传第12版；1991年列名于美国传记委员会ABI国际杰出人物传记辞典第3版，同年10月被ABI授予杰出成就奖证书、聘为ABI名誉顾问。

Poetic Green Voice

By Xie Mian

                She is the same Green Voice whom I met the first time: young, pretty, and intelligent. Back then with long hair flying in the wind, she wrote gentle and ethereal poems which touched a lot of readers with passion. I cannot remember how we met then. Maybe in the yard with dense plum trees in my hometown, in the same dense shadow of banyan trees, she came to see me. Before that meeting, I already read her poems. She had an ethereal and plain style, same as her poems.

                As many young female poets I know, Green Voice seems to live in her poems only. And most of her poems belong to a young lady's feelings, love, and a sky full of dreams. The world is full of matters that maybe she knows, maybe she does not want to know. She has turned away from trivial and materialistic things most people struggle to have, in order to attend to purity which, with the touch of her spirits, turns to some plain and ethereal poems filled with affecting qualities.

                Poems of Green Voice, same as herself, are pure, sincere, unostentatious, passionate, and refined. Many of her verses are short, unadorned, and succinct. Her poems have an elegance similar to plain nature since she does not embellish them on purpose. Nowadays, many poems are flamboyant, over-adorned, or deliberately abstruse, or rude on purpose, and to certain degree, shown off. To Green Voice, writing poetry is a simple happiness, a self-liberation from a world full of pretense and mercenariness. What she has pursued is a truth and simplicity which purifies mind and warms heart.

                She is born only for love, valuing her own feelings more than anything else. All of her poems have a similar theme. She says that life, death, love, and eternity are always what she wants to express. Eternity, simply put, is love. Life is not everlasting and ends as death falls. But love transcends space and time, floating and drifting in loving hearts even when everything ends. But all these depend on the wings of poetry.

                Green Voice is always pure, a lady born for love. It is poetry that gives her a string of green musical verses. Many years have passed since our first meeting, and she remains pure, seemingly unwilling to grow up, keeping her purity and sincerity. Every time I meet her, or we talk over overseas phone calls, she has only one topic, poetry. Some people say that poetry has lagged behind the trends since 1980's. Many poets have started businesses or have turned to novels or TV screen writing. There are few like Green Voice who still insists on her earliest promises and dreams of poetry, devoting herself to love and writing her own aesthetics. That is why we are inspired. Her simplicity is rarely seen in a world full of ravenous noises.

                She is still the same Green Voice I met in the shadow of banyan trees in my hometown and the girl I saw in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, but she has matured like her poems. She still writes about eternal love but with a much deeper understanding about what she belongs to and worships. It's not that she does not know the complexity of the world but that she wants to simplify it. Like before, her poems are without much decoration or exaggeration. Her poems are simple, gentle, and ethereal. But Time has left its trace in her writing, dark and somber:

                I ask flames for the definition of burning,
                Flames never answer;
                I look for the way in which light falls into the dark
                Darkness never answers;

                This is her Silent World that chill rain and cold wind cannot stand in her way.

                After seas go dry
                and rocks crumble,
                will we still
                stand on the beautiful ruins
                with eyes only for each other?

                                (The Fall of a City)

                Sadness is the eternal camel
                traveling without end.
                Happiness the canteen
                on the back of the camel.
                And graves are beneath our footprints.

                                (Time)

                The feeling in her poems is profound and vast, transcending her early writing style. Besides her original simplicity and ethereality, we can find the darkness and heaviness in her poems. Green Voice is thoughtful and can see beyond what others see, creating the miracle of language with her skills. In Empty Sea she writes: Let your route cut me a thousand times, I am the sea, only with tears but woundless! Green Voice has brought us surprise with her unobservable maturity. Even so, I have to say, she is same as before, but with a strength to discard everything——

                Tonight I am in your palms
                Neither telling of my previous life,
                Nor asking about the next one.

The preface was written in Chang Chun Garden of Beijing University.
August 24, 2003

(Translated by Ying Yun, Edited by Timothy Liu)

Poetic Green Voice was published in Xiamen Evening News (June 16, 2004), China & Overseas Writers and Entrepreneurs (the academic newspaper by Fujian Writers' Association, May 31, 2004), Eastern (May 2004, Vol. 46) and World News (May 4, 2004). Green Voice is the pen name of Yidan Han.

Xie Mian: Born in January, 1932, in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. He is a professor at Beijing University, Ph.D advisor, director of Chinese Language and Literature Institution at Beijing University. He serves as one of the key members of China Writers' Association and the vice chairman of Chinese Contemporary Literature Research Association. He is the editor-in-chief of Poetry Exploration—a journal publishing critical articles on contemporary Chinese poetry. Xie Mian began to write since 1948. In 1950s, he began to do research on modern and contemporary Chinese literature as well as poetry criticism. His major literary works include Poetry Critique by the Lake, Starlight of the Republic (1983), Green Revolution in Literature (1988), Poet's Creation (1989), Fire of the Earth Still in Motion (1991), Sun of the New Century, Great Transformation---Literary Study of Post-New Era Literature (co-author), 1898: The Hundred-Year Turmoil (1998), Chinese Literature in the 20th Century (1998), Literary Critique: Methodology and Practice. His prose and essay collections include Messages to the Century, Everlasting Campus, Water Flowing to Distance, Landscapes in My Heart, etc. He was the editor-in chief of Selective Works of Contemporary Chinese Young Poets (1986), Chinese Literature of the 20th Century Series (10 volumes), Classical Chinese Literature of One Hundred Years (8 volumes, 1997), Anthology of One Hundred Years' Chinese Literature (12 volumes, 1998) and a co-editor of The Best of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (1988). In 1986, his name entered Biography of the Eminences (12th edition) at the Oxford's International Biography Center. In 1991, his name was listed in American Biography Institute's (ABI) Dictionary of Biographies of International Eminences (3rd edition). He was awarded by ABI the Certificate of Outstanding Achievement and also invited to be an honorary adviser for ABI in the same year.