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Music Composed by Tian Ge
Original Lyrics in Chinese by Zhang Jiayi
Translated by klinsii
When darkness falls on the prairie,
Only me and my guitar linger.
Missing my loved one, deeper and deeper,
But ain't no mailman to send my love to her.
Wait till the sun melts everything frozen,
Till the spring breeze sent from heaven,
Till the green grass again moves like an ocean,
She'll be coming near
Soon my lonely heart brightened.
1959. Early March. Spring hadn't come down in the north.
On the great prairie a few hundred kilometers west of Urumqi, Xinjiang. A troop of soldiers were diligently working on the chilly ice in their bare feet.
Back in that time the infamous Great Leap Forward was approaching its peak. All over the country everybody had one common belife in mind that was as long as we worked really hard, we could catch up the Britons and be as wealthy as the Americans in ten years time.
Director Zhang Jiayi was in charge of the filming of a documentary in the honor of the 10th anniversary of P.R.China. He refused to include the shots of soldiers working on ice into his film as he thought it's such a cruel thing to do although he was supposed to do so. What he truly wanted to shoot was something that can reflect people's inner voice.
He had been so torn until one evenning he sat there in the setting sun listening to the soilders sing, he finally came to understand what should be include in the film.
Most of the soldiers were not natives and came from the far east of China. What they sang were mostly songs of love for the ones they were missing afar. The lyrics touched Zhang Jiayi so much that he wrote a poem immediately which later he had a young musician Tian Ge composed into a song entiltled 'Night Over Prairie'. A song reflected the inner world of the young soldiers and it naturally became the theme music for his documentary.
In the days of fulfilling dreams of socialism, some of the time what people truly had in mind wasn' t the politics or economics or anything else, but love. Among all the things that had been boasted, LOVE was the only thing that would never stay on the wrong side of life.
Original Chinese Lyrics >