Preface by Wang Hongyin

The Yellow River flows by ninety nine twists and turns,

And lakes by thousands spread in the Silvery Valley.

Spread widest, but cluster closest,

Flocks of sheep bleat and bleat everywhere.

Knife of iron, Koran of bronze,

Allah blesses you all the way to the Northwest.

The lines above were written in the airplane, on 7th May, 2015, on my way back from Yinchuan, the Silvery Valley, to Tianjin, where I work and live. I wrote it in the tune of Wandering Chants of Northern Shaanxi, to describe the natural environment and living conditions as well as the believes of the Hui People, whose Flower Folk Song is my favourite, which is again related to love and marriage:

Free flowering love, but favouring fate,

Better Akhoond’s bless than the utterings of go-betweens.

Their freedom in love is contradictory with their traditional marriage, but freedom of love and singing is the highest value for an ethnic group, freedom even in their religious belief, such as is shown:

There is a tree shade of the human world, look up,

And you’ll see a white peony in the nest on high.

The tree shade of the human world is actually the home of human spirit and the white peony is the wife of a good husband of the Hui people, especially in the folk songs of flower and youth, girls and boys, as they sing in pairs.

The poem is thus related to my trip to the Northwest as well as to the Flower Songs there.

I went to the Beifang University of Nationalities in Ningxia last summer, invited by Ms. Wang Dongmei, the president of the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, to give a speech about translating classics of ethnic groups, and I also served to give some advice to the translation group of Flower Songs headed by Yang Xiaoli. And one of the English versions I gave them as a model is as follows:

A fast horse may be fat or thin,

Too much fat ruins a good horse;

A broad-minded lover is my favourite

For too much jealousy ruins a lover.

（马快不在肥瘦上，

马肥了肉坠着哩；

维花儿要宽肚肠，

心窄了吃醋着哩。）

At that time, also, I was glad to meet Ms. Wu Yulin, an expert in Flower Songs, who presented to me her major works Zhongguo Hua’er Tonglun （A Study of Chinese Hua’er）, and another book on the performance and dance of the same kind. I was also glad to know that Ms.Wu has graduated from Shaanxi Normal University, where I had been working for many years, before she went to Japan for her doctoral degree, back with an analytical method of the research and a new journey to Northwest China and even Kyrgyzstan for a wider view of folklore and folk song study. Therefore, her work on this topic is really the most comprehensive survey of the Flower Songs. Actually she includes in this book the proper naming and singing and performing of the Flower Songs with their geographical distribution and logical classification as well as detailed description of each type of the songs. More than that, this book is not only a serious academic contribution, but also a collection of folk songs as examples for each major category, with detailed analysis for each case, thus a large number of materials provided with proper classifications and comments along with the original texts, making it all the way better and proper for readers and singers as well.

That is why this book was chosen to be translated, with some abridging and editing for English readers. Yang Xiaoli told me in the summer vacation last year while I was in the United States with my family, that the translation was coming to a close and preparation for publication was needed. And I was supposed to write a preface for the English version after proofreading it through. I was too glad to agree, for it had been one of my favourite topics of research and translation. One of the beneficent achievements, I noticed, was that the original text of each song was provided with Chinese Pinyin for easier readership, and footnotes and comments for further reference. I highly appreciate the new edition of the Chinese Flower Songs and I hope foreign readers will enjoy it.

Can you guess what I am doing now, at this moment?

Of course, I am reading Professor Wu’s book, reading the songs one by one, comparing the English version with the original text, and making my own judgment about the translation quality, while at the same time, I am thinking of the days gone by when I stayed in the Silvery Valley, Yinchuan as is pronounced in modern Chinese. The silvery moon rose on one of the May flowery nights, and it shone brilliantly over the Ming Lake, or Brilliant Lake on the school campus, as we walked by the watering pond, talking about the Flower Songs with the silvery scene in view. At that time, my creative mind was stimulated by everything around and some words occurred to me so beautifully visualized that could not escape but become a poem later on. And I jotted it down while I was waiting for my flight at Yinchuan Airport the other day:

While Flowers in Full Bloom

While flowers in full bloom, oh,

You stand by the moonlit Ming Lake;

I stand under the willow by Weiming Pool.

While flowers in full bloom, oh,

You sit in the reading room at Hiroshima;

I sit by the sakura in Nankai University.

Perhaps, last time

While flowers in full bloom,

You and I wandered on the Cambrige campus.

Perhaps, next time

While flowers in full bloom,

You and I will twinkle over the Manhattan skyline.

Zhu Mo

7th May, 2015

9:15

At Yinchuan Airport

As poetic imaginations go, images jump from one place to another, say, from Yinchuan to Beijing （Weiming Pool is on the campus of Peking University）, from China to Japan, and then from China to the United States where I would go. Yet shoddy wording in the translation above is obvious against the wonderful word in Chinese “Man Hua’er” （漫花儿）, it could mean that the flowers occur to you as a sea of blooms on the hill slope, or the flowering songs greet your ear as good music to blur with the view, the way the Northwesteners in China talk while they go out, they do not say “go out” but simply “go romance”（逛，浪）and you know how romantic these folk fellows are! Without poem or poetic language, in case of mentioning Flower Songs, it is not up to the expectations of the people and land there, as is in the case of a feast without wine. It is a pity that translation cannot do so well, and the romantic spirit is gone in English.

My attention had been paid to Hua’er for quite some years, but it wasn’t until recent years that I began to translate one or two of them. And I put my translation in the newly published book entitled Chinese Folk Songs and Their English Translation published by The Commercial Press in 2014. I noticed that the basic pattern of Hua’er in Hehuang Area is a four-line pattern, as is shown below:

The Flower Songs in Hehuang

A walnut tree in bloom, none has seen it.

But the walnut is already this big.

We two talk and talk, none has seen it.

But our fame is already this big.

The first two lines and the last two lines have a similar sentence structure, which makes a contrast and a point of interest for the readers, the English as well as the Chinese.

核桃树开花是人没有见

核桃树开花是人没有见，

绿核咋这么大了？

我两个说下的人没有见，

空名声咋这么大了？

Another folk song is more complex and difficult to express, especially in English. Judging from the shape of the three-line pattern of each stanza, one may have an image or impression that it takes the form of a shoulder pole with two buckets at the ends, indicated by the two parallel longer sentences in each stanza. But that shape is impossible to keep in the English translation, that is to say, we translate the meaning not the form. The following is the song in both languages:

青石头根里的药水泉

青石头根里的药水泉，

担子担，

桦木的勺勺子舀干；

若想叫我俩的婚缘散，

三九天，

青冰上开一朵牡丹。

Hot Spring Wells up

Hot spring wells up from behind the Greensickness Peak,

To carry it （in buckets）, with a shoulder pole,

And drain it with a birch wood spoon.

Our marriage wells up from behind the Greensickness Peak,

To testify it, in the frigid weather of winter,

And see the peony grows on the icy cliff.

It is of great interest to us how the native speakers of the English language translate Chinese folk songs, and how much different their translation is from Chinese translators’ version, or how much foreigners know about the Chinese Hua’er from the Northwest.

The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature edited by Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender is an example, in which a whole chapter is devoted to introduce the Flower Songs from Northwest China. They have a group of people working together for a better result since the songs are collected by Ke Yang （Han）, Ye Jinyuan （Hui）, and Kathryn Lowry and translated and introduced by Kathryn Lowry.

Here is a paragraph introducing Hua’er in the book:

Flower songs （Hua’er）, a type of folk song common in northwestern China, are sometimes classified by Chinese researchers as shan’ge （mountain songs）. Flower songs are sung at local festivals held in rural areas of Gansu and Qinghai provinces and in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, an area of over sixty thousand square miles1. The Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, located in southwestern Gansu Province, is an area where flower songs and so-called flower song festivals （hua’er Hui） are especially prevalent. The area is home to approximately sixteen ethnic groups, including Han Chinese, Hui, and Dongxiang. There are also a number of Bao’an, Salar, Tu, Tibetans, and others. As song traditions that involves people of many ethnicities in the region, flower songs employ local Han Chinese dialects （though most participants are not Han）, intermingling vocabulary and grammar of the Tu, Salar, and Tibetan languages. （p. 93）

花儿是中国西北地区常见的一种民歌，中国研究者有时将其归入山歌。花儿经常在当地乡村的节日演唱，遍及甘肃、青海和宁夏回族自治区（面积为六万平方英里）。临夏回族自治州位于甘肃西南地区，这一带的花儿和花儿会特别流行。这一地区居住着大约十六个民族，包括汉族、回族、东乡族。还有保安族、撒拉族、土族、藏族等。由于这一带许多民族都有歌唱的传统，花儿采用了汉语方言（尽管多数演唱者并不是汉族），其词汇和语法则结合了土族、撒拉族和藏族的语言。（笔者译）

The following are two Hua’er songs quoted from the same book:

[Example one]

The moon shines, this bright lamp, how is it so brilliant?

Who hung it high up over the Southern Heaven’s Gate?

Dear sister is the peony, ruler of the flowers.

Compared with a bird in flight,

She outdoes the phoenix up in the clouds.

（Ye Jinyuan, to the tune “Major
Melody of Xunhua”, p. 97）

[Example two]

Oh—half the sky is clear, and half is cloudy.

Half it’s cloudy, half’s got the sun coming out.

Oh—this Young Man, listen clearly.

I shall instruct you:

Mu Guiying, she originally defended King Song [of Liao].

（同上，p. 97）

Occasionally, notes and comments are provided to help readers understand Chinese names of persons or places, and historical or legendary figures, at other times even Hua’er and Shaonian themselves become confusing and need clarification: Young Man （Shaonian） is capitalized because it refers to the song type, not to a person. As noted, in Qinghai the terms shaonian and hua’er are used interchangeably for “flower songs”.

I highly appreciate this kind of translation of Chinese folk songs.

At last, I hope that the translators from China and from other countries could work cooperatively in the translation and study of the Chinese Hua’er, and we also hope that the English version of A Study of Chinese Hua’er could be a success in introducing the Chinese folk music to the English-speaking world.

Let the voice fresh from the flowering folk songs from China be widely heard through out the world.

Wang Hongyin （Zhu Mo）

Nankai University, Tianjin, China

First draft on 25th May, 2016

Revised on 11th June