When it comes to foreign literary masterpieces, we always admire and awe, admiration because of the unattainable high and low spring and white snow, and awe because it is difficult to digest the smell and chew wax, after all, most of the audience is a Xia Lima people, who do not like tomes and long speeches, and do not like psychological descriptions and dialogues that often cost tens of thousands of words. The most unbearable thing is that sometimes it takes thousands of words to describe a fallen leaf, and it hasn't fallen yet.
It is difficult for the lower riba people who love "Little Apple" to understand and accept Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. If you have a pair of elegant and professional ears, playing the violin is a great pleasure for you, otherwise it is a blunt saw, sawing wood, no matter how you keep sawing, it is simply torture.
Of course, if there is a person who can connect the past and the next, and turn the elegant and professional into popular or semi-popular, such as Richard Clayderman, the prince of piano, then the audience will definitely increase greatly. Turning the elegant and professional into popular or semi-popular, and gaining more audiences, is not a low-level pandering, but a great ability that ordinary people cannot have.
In the field of world literature, I am afraid that the only thing that can play such a role is translation.
I'm ashamed to say that since "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I have hardly read through and intensively read any Nobel Prize works, and I have not finished reading Monroe's "Escape", Pamuk's "My Name is Red" and "Museum of Innocence", Alekseevich's "Secondhand Time", "I Am a Female Soldier and a Woman", etc.
The reason is very simple, mainly because we are in awe of foreign literary masterpieces, and most of them taste like chewing wax, not because people don't write well, but because our translation level is too smelly. This time, although I plucked up the courage and cheered up, I gritted my teeth and gritted my teeth, and finally I couldn't read it, for the simple reason that the translation level was not good.
I began to believe the words of Ma Yueran, a member of the Nobel Prize in Literature jury of the Swedish Academy: "There are many good writers and good works in China, but there are too few good translations!"There are only two people in Sweden who translate Chinese works, one is me and the other is my student Chen Anna. In the past 100 years, China has given birth to many outstanding artists and poets, many of whom are fully qualified to win the Nobel Prize, but these works have not been accepted by the West more or less because of translation.
For example, he said that in order to meet the needs of American readers, an American translator actually revised the last chapter of ** when translating Lao She's "Camel Xiangzi", completely subverting the tragic ending. How can such a translation let the reader know the true level of the writer?”
In the same way, because there are too few good translations, we can no longer read good foreign literary masterpieces. After the reform and opening up, there was an English fever, many people have passed English level 6 or even 8, but English writers who have passed level 6 and 8 are as rare as pandas, that is to say, in today's China, there is too much lack of masters like Lu Xun, Fu Lei, Zhou Zuoren, Lao She, Mao Dun, Guo Moruo, Lin Qinnan, Chen Zaidao, and Lin Yutang who can both write and translate.
Those literary triangle cats, as well as those foreign language editors who are eager for quick success, even if their English level reaches level 8, their translated works are only at the level of electrical manuals, a little stronger, that is, the level of online literature: the preface does not match the afterword, and they don't even understand the minimum rhetoric.
To be honest, when I am over half a hundred years old, I have not read many foreign classics. But the classics I have read have left an indelible impression on me and have had a great impact on me, they are: Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "Love in the Time of Cholera", Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", "The Brothers Karamazov", Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Life", Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence", Hugo's "Notre Dame", Brontë's "Wuthering Heights", Joyce's "Ulysses", Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls", Proust's " Reminiscences, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Sholokhov's Silent Don, Danner's Philosophy of Art.
There are also some short and medium-sized stories**, so I won't list them one by one, otherwise it will be a suspicion of being a joke. By the way, I have never been interested in Tolstoy, although I have always looked up to him.
Among the above works, my favorite works are "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Moon and Sixpence". In particular, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", since I bought it in 1992, I have read it five times, and I often read it and always new, and many plots and sentences are almost memorized. Okay**, always at the beginning or at the beginning, it grabs your eyeballs and goes straight to your heart, "For a long time, I was lying down early." Sometimes, the candle goes out. My eyelids closed and I didn't have time to mutter, 'I'm going to fall asleep.'" It was only after half an hour that it occurred to me that I should go to bed;At this thought, I came to my senses. (Reminiscences of the beginning of "Reminiscences").
Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will recall the distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice: "The classic beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, like the wind of my hometown, opened the window of my soul and allowed me to enter a distant and strange and intoxicating landscape.
And "in the sixteenth century, when the pirate Francis Drake attacked Rio Acha, Ursula Igualang's great-grandmother, frightened by the sound of sirens and the roar of cannonballs, lost control of her nerves and sat down on the blazing fire." Because of the burns, she became a lifeless and useless wife", such a quiet and cold humor made me laugh.
Okay**, not only makes you tempted, but also allows you to write - when you see the temptation, you can't help but take the pen and outline or record the wonderful sentences and paragraphs. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is so much that people can write about it, such as "as long as a person does not have a dead relative buried in the ground, then he is not a person from this place", "Ursula is eager to take out his heart to comfort him", "Sometimes in the face of a Venetian watercolor, nostalgia can turn the smell of rotting crustaceans in the ditch into the delicate fragrance of flowers......”
When I read "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I was like a gourmand who had been hungry for a few days, facing a table full of delicacies that I had never seen before, and I couldn't put down my chopsticks as soon as I picked them up, and the pen in my hand was like the chopsticks.
The Moon and Sixpence" is a book that I can't sit still. One day in 1989, I came across "The Moon and Sixpence." I'm ashamed to say that, as an avid lover of literature, I didn't know anything about Maugham before. After reading this **, I simply admired Maugham to the ground.
In 1987, I met a somewhat neurotic painter in our factory, and he left the factory within half a year of acquaintance. From then on, we began to correspond diligently, and I was deeply moved by his legendary experience and persistent pursuit of art. In 1989, he sent "The Moon and Sixpence" from distant Kunming, and said to me in the letter: "Although my blood is destined for my wandering, you may not believe it, but what really prompted me to go on the road was this **."
Of course I didn't believe it, but when I read it in one sitting, I was convinced and couldn't sit still, and soon I set out on a journey of poetry and wanderings in distant places. Throughout the reading, my heart was in the midst of a sharp storm, a strange and magical voice, constantly calling in the depths of my blood. Maugham's sprawling pen is as beautiful as a poppy and **, which makes me intoxicated and irresistible.
I had an unhappy childhood, and when I grew up, when this misfortune became a part of my memory, it became my greatest wish to wander like a poet, and I really wanted to be a poet who was shrouded in romance and magic. I read some prose, those sentences full of magic, often make me fall into the mysterious and distant scenery and can't extricate myself, become a melancholy or problematic teenager who quietly constructs his inner world all day long, I long to wander as a teenager, but I lack the courage to wander as a teenager, I have been wandering around the station in my hometown, looking at the distant train to give new words and say sorrow, strong and fierce and empty sadness.
After reading "The Moon and Sixpence", I could no longer sit still, and under the light of that "golden moon", I went out alone for the first time. Along the way, like Chekhov, I "spent the night in a remote post station and in a peasant's thatched hut, exactly like in the Pushkin era......."Like Shen Congwen, "although go to the distance, go deep, and go to a strange world......”
In an air-raid shelter on the top of a hill on the outskirts of a remote county in Guizhou, I met the painter and embraced each other for a long time. We smoked low-quality cigarettes and drank high-grade liquor, talked all night long, and recited or recited the shocking sentences from "The Moon and Sixpence" at length
……I've always felt like most people spend their lives like this, as if there was something missing. I confess the social value of this normal life, and I see its orderly happiness, but there is a strong desire in my blood for a more wild and uninhibited journey, this serene and serene happiness, as if there is something that frightens me, and my heart longs for a more thrilling life, as long as there is a change ...... my lifeI was the ...... ready to step on the rocky cliffs and run to the reef-filled beaches
The average person is not the kind of person they want to be, but the kind of person they have to be.
Literature is the art of language, and ** is the art of language. Language is like appearance for a woman, as long as a woman is beautiful, no matter what she wears, she will look good;As long as the language is beautiful, no matter what is written, it is good-looking. The great Márquez was a master of linguistic magic, able to easily depict a grain of sand as beautiful as a diamond (translation is indispensable).
The same is true of Kundera, Maugham, Danner, Proust, Joyce, Solzhenitsyn. Every great work that is transformed from a mother tongue into another language, and which is welcomed by readers who use that language, must be inseparable from a great translator.
Philosophy of Art was translated by Fu Lei, "The Quiet Don River" was translated by Jin Ren, "La Traviata" was translated by Lin Qinnan, "Ulysses" was translated by Jin Di (later translated by Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo), "Reminiscences of the Years Like Water" was translated by Shi Kangqiang, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was translated by Lin Yi'an, and "The Moon and Sixpence" was translated by Fu Weici. These are all translators for everyone.
Not reading foreign literary masterpieces for many years often puts me in an embarrassing state of having no books to read. Not long ago, I started reading the Bible, and the Bible is so well translated and beautifully written that it can be read as a literary masterpiece. It's a pity that I don't have "Capital" at hand, otherwise I would have read it carefully, because Chen Zaidao's translation level is very high, and the beauty of "Capital" is by no means inferior to any classic literary work.
On the one hand, the level of Chinese literary translation is too stinky, so that I cannot appreciate the charm and essence of contemporary foreign literary masterpiecesOn the other hand, the level of many contemporary Chinese writers is also too stinky, and the writing is too poor to read. My reading principle is that it must be interesting and nutritious, otherwise, no matter what master you are, you will refuse to read.
Therefore, most nights, I am just like Proust, going back to the past, constantly revisiting and rereading the classics, which is both a kind of helplessness and a kind of happiness. Proust said, "The only true paradise is the paradise that people lose, and the happy years are the lost years, and the people look forward to suffering in order to work." Proust added: "People knocked on all the doors and found nothing, and the only door that led to the target, which they had been looking for for a hundred years and did not find, came across by accident, and it opened ....... of its own accord."
Blessed readers, go and knock on this door, and with your piety and courage, it will bring you joy and happiness. Nostalgia is to re-read the past life, reincarnate along the old path, pick up the gold that was once regarded as a stone, and abandon the stone that was regarded as gold in the past.
Nostalgia needs to be introduced, such as a yellowed **, an old-fashioned love song, and a house in disrepair, and classic literary masterpieces such as "Reminiscences of the Past" translated by translators are the most effective nostalgic secret recipes.
Recently, I turned my attention to the Booker Literary Prize, and unexpectedly read a favorite ** - Jamaican writer Marlon James's "A Brief History of Seven Killings", which is not only strange in content, but also in language, especially suitable for my appetite. The most peculiar thing is the narrative rhythm, which feels like playing and singing a rock song with ups and downs, and the author uses the rock narrative rhythm.
This ** is written about seven gunmen who broke into the home of a national rock singer and shot wildly, the singer escaped, but was seriously injured, and the gunmen all escaped. Set against the backdrop of this bewildering reality, recreated through the mouths of seventy-six fictional characters. Slum kids, drug dealers, gunmen, Rolling Stone magazine reporters, prostitutes, mob bosses, the CIA**, all started to tell.
And the first one to tell is a ghost: "The dead will never shut up." Maybe because death wasn't death at all, just a stay after school. You know where you've come from, and you still have to go back there. You know where you're going, but it just doesn't seem to get there, and you're just dead. ”
Again, feel the charm of language: "The first child, he screamed so that his tonsils flew out, but the cry only reached the teeth, because they gagged his mouth, and the taste was like vomit and stones. "Walk into a situation where you're either holding a syringe or a gun. There are things you can cure, and there are things you have to kill. "There is a kind of child in the slum who runs to the sea every day, just to plunge headlong somewhere and forget everything".
It is important to remember the name of the translator: Yao Xianghui. I think this translation is very awesome, quasi-master level.