The Surging News reporter Luo Xin
Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem is one of the world's most widely read science fiction writers, whose work has been translated into 52 languages and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. In 1996, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the Polish National Medal, and Poland's first artificial satellite was named after him.
2021 marks the centenary of Lem's birth. In order to commemorate this unparalleled writer, Poland directly named this year "Lyme Year", and Yilin Publishing House also recently launched the Chinese simplified world's first set of "Lyme Collection", including his six masterpieces: "Solaris Star", "Futurology Congress", "The Voice of its Lord", "Invincible", "Fiasco", "Eden". Among them, the Star of Solaris is a new translation, and the other five are the first translations.
Many people know Lemme from "Solaris Star", which is also the original novel of the film "Flying into Space" directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which Dai Jinhua called "a modern philosophical reading". According to Yilin Publishing House, the Lyme Collection was first published on July 29, and the first batch of books on the line was empty, which made the publisher feel mixed feelings that there were even pirated books on the market.
In this collection, Fiasco is Lyme's signature work. It tells the story of the human expedition that pushes a strange alien civilization into a desperate situation step by step, and is the largest work in the Lyme collection published this time.
"After translating Lemme's Fiasco, I never wanted to do translation again!" Chen Zhuo, the translator of "Fiasco", once provoked the translation of Philip Dick's works and translated many science fiction works. He told the surging news reporter that the difficulty of translating "Fiasco" is reflected in the meticulous description of the alien landscape, and Lem uses extremely complex sentences to deal with some special scenes, sometimes a single sentence has hundreds of words. There are also extremely detailed technical details to enrich the reader's imagination of astrophysics, large-scale interplanetary engineering, spacecraft dynamics, and the evolution of the universe, life, and technological evolution with strong speculative properties.
"What I personally appreciate most about Lemme is the dynamic balance he maintains personally. With his knowledge, he could have been a professional philosopher, a cybernetic expert, or a literary scholar of a profession entirely, but he was able to be at ease in both fields and not entirely belong to both fields. Chen Zhuo told the surging news reporter, "He uses his extensive involvement in philosophy, cybernetics, medicine and many other fields to integrate speculation on the fate of mankind into literary creation, but he is completely free from the constraints of modern novel writing genres and theories." In turn, he used the unbridled imagination he brought from writing novels to carry out his comprehensive thinking on technology, society, culture, metaphysics, and non-fiction writing. ”
Born in 1921 in Lviv, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), to a wealthy family of doctors, Lem worked as an automobile mechanic, earned a doctorate in medicine, and founded the Polish Aerospace Association.
The protagonists of his novels are often placed in a novel environment: traveling back and forth in a different time and space, a world of machine rebellion, a planet crowded with strange creatures. He was fond of these programs, not because he believed in the scenes depicted in such narratives, nor did he intend to depict a "real future", but wanted to use them to construct and test his "literary models" as a way to express his views on the whole world and humanity. He said: "I am interested in the fate of humanity as a whole, not the fate of individuals. ”
In Solaris, Solaris is a planet orbiting a binary star with a surface covered by a gelatinous ocean. According to human cognition, the orbit of such a planet should be unstable. But it was only a dozen years later that it was discovered that solaris' orbit did not show the expected changes. This has sparked infinite interest in the planet. Psychologist Kelvin lands on solaris star, greeted not by the warm welcome of his companions, but by the clutter of space stations, the crazy researchers and the dignified dark atmosphere, and he tries to figure out what really happened, until he bumps into his wife who has been dead for ten years in the confusion... In this story, humans are not absolute protagonists, and there is no "alien" existence in the traditional sense. The biggest horror and spectacle in this story is the planet itself: it looks lifeless at first glance, but it can secretly transform countless objects and even human forms, present people's deepest desires, and even use these "non-human" things to crush people's emotions, morals and even life and death defenses. The blue ocean of Solaris star is like a mirror, reflecting human sorrow and confusion, fear and obsession.
In addition to the blue ocean in Solaris, Lem's novels depict a large number of extraterrestrial life, such as the unique mechanical insects in Invincible, the aliens in Eden who live in despair and fear, and so on. Despite describing human contact with alien life, Lem wants to explore human nature: human beings have many weaknesses and limitations, and only when we encounter an identity crisis can we face our own cognitive boundaries.
Previously, many writers had a high opinion of Lyme. Anthony Burgess praised him as "one of the wisest, most erudite, and most humorous of the writers active at the time"; Kurt Vonnegut commented that he was "so good at both the use of language, imagination and the way in which tragic characters are portrayed".
Liu Cixin said: "Lyme has a very great imagination and is truly unique. His works have a deeper description of the relationship between man and the universe, and compared with American science fiction novels, they are more refined in literature, have a more far-reaching artistic conception, and also bring more memories and reflections. Wu Yan said: "Lem can always mock our lives from the core, he can cook together scientific and technological papers, folk tales, fables, myths and legends, etc., and use humorous and powerful absurd language and absurd plots to reflect on our world." ”
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yan Zhang