也斯 告別人間滋味
著名文學家也斯，2013年1月5日離世，告別人間滋味，享年63歲。也斯，原名梁秉鈞，生於1949年3月12日，是香港最重要文化人之一。也斯擁有多重文化身份，包括詩人、散文家、小說家、文化評論家、比較文學講座教授、教育家。
也斯是香港戰後本土出生第一代最重要作家之一，自1960年代開始創作，多年來作品涉獵詩作、小說、散文、文化評論，屢獲殊榮。作品多年來榮獲香港文學雙年獎，包括《布拉格的明信片》（首屆）、《半途：梁秉鈞詩集》（第四屆）、《後殖民食物與愛情》（第十一屆），2006年獲香港政府頒授紫荊榮譽勳章，2010年獲香港藝術家年獎，2012年獲香港書展年度作家，2012年誠品選為香港十大作家之一等。也斯多年來獲世界多個機構或院校邀請為訪問作家或學人，其中1989年獲邀為駐柏林作家，見證東西德合併歷史時刻。
也斯是香港少數具有世界視野文學家，瑞士蘇黎世大學去年頒授榮譽博士榮銜予也斯，表示歐洲對他的肯定。也斯喜歡旅遊，周遊列國，經常與世界不同學者、作家交流或朗誦詩歌，他筆下作品與世界不同城市對話，並先後譯成英、法、德、葡、韓、日等多國語言。同時，也斯興趣廣泛，他的文學作品具有越界特色，他讓文學與攝影、現代舞、音樂、時裝、裝置藝術等不同媒界互相輝映，打破文學框架與界限。進入也斯越界遊戲的藝術家，包括攝影師李家昇、朱德華、王禾㡅、梁家泰、高志強、黃楚喬，設計師兼藝術家又一山人，音樂家龔志成、黃仁逵、梁小衛，舞蹈家梅卓燕、時裝設計師黃惠霞、凌穎詩等。
也斯喜歡飲食，經常從日常平凡飲食中看到人生哲學。他的藝術生命並非高高在上的象牙塔，而是親近民間生活。他是一位教育家，桃李滿門。他曾任教香港大學英文系及比較文學系，離世前服務於嶺南大學中文系，卻又經常活躍於民間文化活動，在報刊雜誌上寫專欄或發表文章。也斯是嶺南大學比較文學講座教授，同時是嶺南大學人文學科研究所所長，學術研究興趣廣泛，包括比較文學、香港文化、香港文學研究、現代主義與現代抒情等。
也斯2009年不幸患上肺癌，多年來與病魔搏鬥，依然熱愛生命，不忘創作，其間出版無間。2013年1月5日上午，在仁安醫院平靜的陽光中，告別人間滋味。他臨別遺願，寄望香港文學能得到本地以至世界的廣泛關注，香港文學多年來處於邊緣地位，其實本地有很多優秀作家受到忽略，希望香港文學地位將來得到平反。
嶺南大學人文學科研究中心 提供
Dear colleagues and students,
We have learned with deep sadness that Professor Leung Ping-kwan, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Chinese and Director of the Centre for Humanities Research, passed away on 5 January 2013 at Union Hospital at the age of 63.
As a distinguished poet, prose writer, novelist and cultural critic, Professor Leung has created a rich and varied literary repertoire over the years. His achievements earned him the acclaim of the local and international literary community.
Professor Leung joined the Lingnan family in September 1997. Throughout his fifteen years of service with the University, Professor Leung was a dedicated and conscientious teacher. He was the Head of the Department of Chinese, Dean of Students, Chair of the Institute of Humanities & Social Sciences and served on various University committees.
Prof Leung was well loved by his students. He initiated the “Creative Writing in Chinese” course and the “Writer-in-residence” programme at Lingnan, which have benefited many students over the years.
His contributions to the University will continue to be appreciated by his colleagues and students alike. He will be remembered with great affection and respect by all of us. We express our sincerest condolence to the family of Professor Leung.
The date and venue of the memorial service will be announced in due course.
Office of Communications and Public Affairs
Lingnan University
http://www.ln.edu.hk/chr/
The Death of a Poet Who Defined Hong Kong
BEIJING — Leung Ping-kwan, the poet and intellectual who celebrated and defined Hong Kong, had just been released from the hospital and sat, surrounded by spilling boxes of books, his trademark flat cap on his head, in his home in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district the last time I saw him, on Dec. 9.
I knew that P.K., as friends called him, had been fighting the lung cancer that ultimately killed him Saturday, yet when I saw him last month I was taken aback at his appearance. Below the cap, his mouth and jaw were drawn tight, as were his hands. And yet his bright chuckle, his wide-ranging mind, his enormous appetite for discussion, were still there.
We talked about the recent changes in Beijing, where Xi Jinping had become the new leader, and about the author Mo Yan, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He gave me his latest book, a Chinese-language collection of poems titled “Dong Xi,” which means “East West” but also means “Things,” a clever and fitting title for a poet who excelled at what he called “things” poetry, a “unique ‘poetics of quotidianism,’ of the everyday,” as Esther M.K. Cheung writes in her introduction to his latest English-language book, “City at the End of Time,” republished in 2012 by Hong Kong University Press.
P.K. was a loyal person. It was when my father, Antony Tatlow, was head of his comparative literature department at Hong Kong University that his seminal collection was first published, in 1992 — before the tumult of Hong Kong’s handover to China, an event that lies at the core of a collection that probes the thrilling, reverse temporality of nostalgia for a future that Hong Kong was about to lose; skepticism about colonialism; the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and much more. “I have to thank Antony for publishing that book,” P.K. said.
I demurred, saying I knew my father had been proud to publish it, that the credit was entirely due to the writer. Yet with sorrow I sensed he needed to say it, that he hadn’t long to live. P.K. was a man with many friends, a kind and humane man who touched many lives personally or through his writings, which inspired a generation of Hong Kong residents to see their city as a place with an identity, a place with a future. P.K., who was 63 when he died, was the city’s most prominent literary voice.
Born on the Chinese mainland in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was founded — he found this significant — P.K. was brought by his parents to Hong Kong as a child. Early on he found its — and his — voice, starting in the ’60s.
He loved the Cantonese language, a rich Chinese brimming with color and puns; he loved Cantonese food (as he loved all foods), and he loved the high-spirited humor when a group of Hong Kong friends was together.
“We treat everything with laughter,” he once said to me, in Frankfurt in 2009, where we were on the Hong Kong writers’ delegation — the overlooked, freer, “younger brothers and sisters” of China’s Guest of Honor delegation that year. “It’s a way of dealing with things,” he said.
Hong Kong people need their humor. On the edge of China, with a different language, political system and social values from those of the mainland, politics has grown tough in recent years, and P.K. was depressed at the increasingly shrill nature of political discourse as positions drifted apart with seemingly no mechanism for resolution: Resentment was growing at the influx of people from China and the impact of enormous amounts of mainland money, often obscure in its origins, on the fragile, postcolonial, sociopolitical ecosystem of the small territory, to the point where he didn’t really want to speak publicly about it any more.
I had interviewed him last October — about writing, not politics — and he repeated the call that marked his life: that Hong Kong and other Chinese places, inheritors of pre-Communist Party Chinese culture, with important regional characteristics that represented the real varieties of China, should be given their place in the sun and not overshadowed by the giant mainland. As The South China Morning Post wrote in an obituary, “Award-winning writer and poet Leung Ping-kwan’s dying wish was for Hong Kong literature to receive the respect it deserves.”
His poetry speaks for him. A multiple prize-winner, P.K. was also a path-breaker.
“As a student, I knew his writing,” Chan Koonchung, the author of the novel “The Fat Years,” said in a telephone interview in Beijing.
“Later, in the 1990s and after the handover, a lot of people began talking about Hong Kong’s identity. But he had already started a long time ago.”
Caught between its former colonial ruler, Britain, and its new owner, China, Hong Kong, with 7 million people, had always struggled to know and express itself.
“He was an early one to use the Hong Kong point of view to consider Hong Kong. He often felt that outsiders used very simple metaphors to judge Hong Kong. For example, they called it a ‘cultural desert,’ a ‘prostitute,’ ” said Mr. Chan. “Very early on he protested against this.”
The result was unpretentious, profound, sometimes humorous, poetry.
P.K.’s oeuvre was enormous and he was widely translated — for a full list, see this from Lingnan University’s Web site, where he was professor of comparative literature — but another collection stood out, “Traveling with a Bitter Melon,” published in 2002, by a writer who was seriously interested in food — another Cantonese trademark.
In the poem “Images of Hong Kong,” the narrator searches for a postcard to send a friend overseas. Yet he finds mostly “Exotica for a faraway audience / Entangled with what others have said / Why is it so hard to tell our own stories?”
P.K. told Hong Kong’s own story through homely images of food, buildings, traffic, fish and much else, in poems with names like “Papaya” or “In an Old Colonial Building.” He spoke of how a city functions, of what is lost as it develops so rapidly. Of the human spirit that wanders, looking for its home, while finding welcome overseas. P.K. was both profoundly local and international; he was as likely to be reading something by a Czech writer as a Chinese poet. He studied in San Diego and traveled widely, liking Berlin especially. There, in the strange tale of East-West division and unification, he found echoes of Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and tumultuous political changes.
In “Bittermelon,” he compared the ugliness of the vegetable’s “lined face” with time: “Wait until this moody weather is over / That’s all that matters… / The loudest song’s not necessarily passionate / the bitterest pain stays in the heart. … / In these shaken times, who more than you holds / In the wind, our bittermelon, steadily facing / Worlds of confused bees and butterflies and a garden gone wild.”
P.K. also wrote about the 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown on student-led democracy protests, which frightened Hong Kong. In a series of three poems he compared Beijing to a room, a metaphor that alluded to the cut-off nature of Chinese society that he believes persists to this day, he told me in our last conversation, and that is reflected in writing from there.
After the massacre, with the Communist Party in total control once again, he wrote in “Refurnishing,” “Well, they returned with their grand old tables and chairs / The solid stuff, the elegant, classy stuff that has / Symmetry, unmistakable aesthetic appeal… / They hung their paintings and calligraphy where you couldn’t not see / Couldn’t not honor the good old snows, the flowers and birds smiling again / Though one crimson beak seemed forced by the artist’s hand.”
“Hong Kong was always being described using other people’s words,” said Mr. Chan. “But he understood Hong Kong’s changing culture. He very early on spotted that Hong Kong needed its own voice. He had that special voice.”
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes. ... -defined-hong-kong/
R.I.P. |
