Learn to sing Chinese song – 齐豫 – 橄榄树 Olive tree Qi Yu – Gan lan shu: song, lyrics, pinyin, English translation, biography of Sanmao San Mao 三毛, and quotes of trees

• 齐豫 – 橄榄树 Olive tree
  Qi2 Yu4 – Gan3 lan3 shu4

• 不要问我从那里来
• bu yao wen wo cong na li lai
• Don’t ask where I come from

• 我的故乡在远方
• wo de gu xiang zai yuan fang
• My hometown is at far away place

• 为什么流浪
• wei shi me liu lang
• Why I am wandering

• 流浪远方 流浪
• liu lang yuan fang liu lang
• Wandering at far away place, wandering

• 为了天空飞翔的小鸟
• wei liao tian kong fei xiang de xiao niao
• For the flying birds in the sky

• 为了山间轻流的小溪
• wei liao shan jian qing liu de xiao xi
• For the lightly flowing little stream between the valleys

• 为了宽阔的草原
• wei liao kuan kuo de cao yuan
• For the broad grassland

• 流浪远方 流浪
• liu lang yuan fang liu lang
• Wandering at far away place, wandering

• 还有还有
• huan you huan you
•  moreover, and moreover

• 为了梦中的橄榄树 橄榄树
• wei liao meng zhong de shu shu
• For the olive tree in the dreams, olive tree

• 为什么流浪远方
• wei shi me liu lang yuan fang
• Why I am wandering at the far away place

• 为了我梦中的橄榄树
• wei liao wo meng zhong de shu
• For the olive tree in my dream

• Translated by Shu

The lyrics were written by Sanmao 三毛 Three hair:

Sanmao (三毛) (March 26, 1943 – January 4, 1991), literally “three hairs” though it is not considered to have a meaning, was the pseudonym of the popular Taiwanese author Chen Ping (陈平). She adopted her pseudonym from the acclaimed caricaturist Zhang Leping‘s most famous work “Sanmao“, which tells the story of a Shanghai street child named “Sanmao”. In English she was also known as Echo, the first name she used in western European languages, or Echo Chan, based on the homonymous Greek nymph.

Sanmao was born in Chongqing (重庆), China, and the whole family moved to Taiwan later. She is said to have read the Dream of the Red Chamber (simplified Chinese: 红楼梦; traditional Chinese: 紅樓夢), a famous Chinese classic, at the age of five and a half years. In elementary school, she read a great deal of literature. Throughout her education she had conflicts with her teachers, including an incident in which she said she wanted to be a garbage collector when she grew up, which her teacher said was unacceptable. During her second year of high school, she shut herself up due to a traumatic incident, and refused to go to school. Her father bought many books for her to read at home, and allowed her to take piano lessons and practice painting.

From 1965 to 1969, she studied philosophy in Taiwan, and it was during this period that she experienced her first love. Things didn’t work out, so she planned to go as far away as possible, and ended up in Spain.

Between 1967 and 1970 she studied in Spain, and then in Germany, and later found work in a law library in the state of Illinois in the US. Eventually, she returned to Taiwan and began working as a German teacher. Her fiance, a 45-year-old German man, died of a heart attack, and she again left Taiwan and returned to Spain.

In 1974 she went to the Colonial Spanish Sahara desert (in what is now Western Sahara) and married a Spanish man named Jose Maria Quero Y Ruiz (荷西), whom she met in Madrid seven years before when she was a student. She writes that when she first met Jose in Spain she thought he was very handsome, but too young for her. Jose had been waiting for her since she had returned to Taiwan, although they had not been dating at the time.

In 1976 she published her first work, the fictionalized-autobiographical The Stories of the Sahara (《撒哈拉的故事》). With its immense success, her early writings were collected in a second book, published under the title Gone With the Rainy Season (《雨季不再来》). Her writings continued to be published from that point on, and her experiences in the Sahara and the Canary Islands were published in several more books.

In 1979 her husband drowned while diving. In 1980 she returned to Taiwan, and in November of the same year, she traveled to Central and South America, on commission from Taiwanese publishers. These experiences were recorded in subsequent writings. From 1981 to 1984, she taught and lectured at a university in Taiwan. After this point, she decided to dedicate herself fully to writing.

Sanmao’s books deal mainly with her own experiences studying and living abroad. They were extremely well received not only in Taiwan but also in mainland China,^[1] and they remain popular reads today. From 1976 to the time of her death in 1991, Sanmao published more than 20 books. She also translated the comic Mafalda from Spanish to Chinese.

In 1991, at the age of 48, Sanmao died in a hospital in Taipei, having hanged herself with a pair of silk stockings. This took place days after a cancer scare and losing the Hong Kong movie award for her script to the film Red Dust (滚滚红尘), a loss which she took poorly. Some fans, most notably Zhang Jingran, claimed her death was a murder. Her apparent suicide came as a shock to many of her readers and was accompanied by public expressions of grief throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

This article comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmao_%28author%29

Quotes of trees:
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. ~Henry David Thoreau

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night. ~Denise Levertov

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. ~Henry David Thoreau

The trees are God’s great alphabet:
With them He writes in shining green
Across the world His thoughts serene.
~Leonora Speyer

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! ~John Muir

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Woodnotes”

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. ~John Muir

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. ~Willa Cather, 1913

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing “Embraceable You” in spats. ~Woody Allen

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. ~Jack Handey

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
~Ogden Nash, “Song of the Open Road,” 1933

The groves were God’s first temples. ~William Cullen Bryant, “A Forest Hymn”

Trees are your best antiques. ~Alexander Smith

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself. ~John Muir

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. ~Welsh Proverb

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. ~Martin Luther

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~Minnie Aumonier

It is difficult to realize how great a part of all that is cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our own life is associated with trees. ~Wilson Flagg

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. ~William Shakespeare

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men… trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings – many of them not so much. ~John Muir, Scribner’s Monthly, November 1878

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

Alone with myself
The trees bend to caress me
The shade hugs my heart.
~Candy Polgar

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk? ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
~Lucy Larcom, “Plant a Tree”

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. ~J. Lubbock

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~Kahlil Gibran

To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them – the whole leaf and root tribe. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. He doesn’t eat much and doesn’t read much, but listens well and is a most gracious host. ~Terri Guillemets

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
~Robert Frost

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now. ~Chinese Proverb

These quotes come from: http://www.quotegarden.com/trees.html