Generations of "fire thieves" of translation relay
Reporter/Ni Wei
Published in China News Weekly on August 9, 2021, No. 1007
Li Wenjun, 91, and his lover, Zhang Peifen, live in a building near Panjiayuan in Beijing, where he does not travel far, does not have internet access, and does not have a mobile phone. He went downstairs to the market almost every day to buy some bread and fruit, but never went to the bookstore or library again. He said he was out of step with the times and that no one had sent him new books. "I can't catch up with the times, you came to me, you are deceived." Behind the black-rimmed glasses, he revealed a mischievous smile.
Outside this room, the name of the translator Li Wenjun is thunderous. Generations grew up reading his translations of English and American literature. Mo Yan said that after reading the preface that Li Wenjun had translated and written for William Faulkner, he was greatly encouraged, excited to go around in circles, and eager to immediately create his own literary world.
During the conversation, Li Wenjun got up from time to time and pulled out his old works from the bookcase with trembling. From various editions of "Noise and Commotion" to children's literature "The Secret Garden", hundreds of books crowded in the bookcase have brought shock waves to the Chinese literary scene. "Is there that much impact? No way. He repeated several times to China News Weekly: "I am a small person. ”
(Li Wenjun.) Photo / Reporter Ni Wei)
From entering the editorial board of Translation magazine (the predecessor of World Literature) in the 1950s to stopping writing in his 80s, he worked as a translator all his life, mainly after the reform and opening up. He translated writers including Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger, McCullers, Alice Monroe... and he was the first to translate Kafka into The country.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of translators such as Li Wenjun translated a large number of foreign literatures in a very short period of time, inspiring a generation of young writers to turn to modernism. Lu Xun once referred to people who studied translating foreign cultures as "fire thieves", implying that Prometheus thought "heavenly fire" for Chinese thieves. Some people also call this generation of literary translators after the reform and opening up.
Now that Li Wenjun does not ask about the world, Liu Mingjiu lives in simplicity, and Zhou Kexi feels that his energy is not good after translating the three volumes of "Reminiscing Like Water Years" and gives up. A group of old translators have withered away in recent years, and Fu Weici, Wu Ningkun, and Zheng Keru ... The gods of the translation industry have fallen, "Our old friends have gone a lot, and now I am probably the oldest." Li Wenjun said.
Under the guise of criticism
Li Wenjun threw the ballpoint pen on the table, leaned back, and sighed: "It's finally done." ”
It was the evening of February 9, 1998, and after three years, he had finally finished translating Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! 》。 This is the fourth Faulkner novel he translated. "I'm worthy of this master." Exhausted, he vowed, "I will never drill into this self-inflicted siege again." ”
From 1980, he began to translate "Noise and Commotion", and in 1998, he completed the translation of "Absalom, Absalom!" He liked the humanitarianism in Faulkner's novels, and he also liked Faulkner's stylistic innovations, picking works that he liked and were quite difficult to translate. Absalom, Absalom! " is Faulkner's most esoteric and stylistically complex, with many sentences several pages long and intricately structured. Often, he could only translate one sentence a day, and the next day he sat down at the table and changed it again.
Later, the most famous and best-selling "Noise and Commotion" came out in many translations, but "Absalom, Absalom! So far, no second person has launched a challenge. After the book was translated, he had a heart attack and made a trip to the ghost gate. Someone has always used this story to describe how terrible the book is, and speaking of this, he took the initiative to excuse Faulkner: "I can't blame him, it's my own fault." ”
Li's translation of Faulkner set off a whirlwind in the literary world. More than one famous writer recalls the cultural upbringings he received in his youth and dedicates his high praise to Faulkner. Inspired by his "Joknapatafa lineage", Mo Yan created the literary hometown of Gaomi Northeast Township, and Yu Hua recognized him as his only master. At that time, Faulkner was already a hot spot in Western literary research, but it was not until Li Wenjun's translation was introduced that Chinese writers met him and hated him late.
(In 1959, the Translation was renamed World Literature.) )
After bidding farewell to Faulkner, Li Wenjun relaxed a lot, doing some scattered translations with interest, and his vision was still unique. In 2009, his translation of the Canadian writer Alice Monroe's novel collection "Escape" was published, which was the first Monroe work in China, and four years later she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the book suddenly turned red and was repeatedly reprinted.
Monroe's short stories were first translated by World Literature in the early 1980s. At that time, every issue of the "World Literature" catalogue was full of stars, and the old masters of the 18th and 19th centuries, the modernist masters of the first half of the 20th century, and the foreign rookies who were just popular suddenly appeared in the magazine. Among them, many works are braided under pressure.
In 1979, World Literature was officially revived after 13 years of suspension, and the first issue published Li Wenjun's translation of "Metamorphosis". Kafka was already touted as a literary prophet in the West, and Chinese readers knew the name for the first time.
"I have a better eye." When recalling to China News Weekly, Li Wenjun felt that the matter was really beautiful. He joined the editorial board of Translation magazine in 1953, which was renamed World Literature in 1959 and was supervised by the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Foreign languages have a little privilege, you can subscribe to the latest foreign publications, he found in English publications, Kafka in foreign countries highly evaluated, so he took matters into his own hands, from English to translate "Metamorphosis", Engaged in German translation of his lover Zhang Peifen helped proofread it.
The loneliness and despair in Kafka's works are very different from the political climate in China at that time, and they are quite different from those in World Literature, which is based on the style of Soviet literature. In order to publish it smoothly, an article was distributed in the current issue to criticize the Metamorphosis.
Criticism is false, introduction is true, and a number of foreign modernist literary works have entered China under the guise of criticism. In order to publish the Soviet novel "Here the Dawn Is Quiet", the editorial board put it in the preface hated "revisionist literary specimens" and declared it "for critical use". Because this novel depicts the cruelty of war, especially the tragic fate brought to women, it does not blindly promote the bravery and fearlessness of war and sacrifice for the country.
The trend is irreversible, and reform and opening up have begun. The Publishing House in Shanghai published the "Twenty-second Military Rule" with "black humor", and the superior leader called and asked: Why publish such a book? The publishing house hastened to explain that it was for the writer's reference, and it was prevaricating. "We all start from an artistic point of view." Li Wenjun said, "Some leaders themselves want to see that the times are changing. ”
"World Literature" is an important city for the translation of new Chinese literature, and was once the only window for the translation of foreign literature. Li Wenjun is the only surviving founding father, who has worked in the magazine for 40 years, from a small editor who "handles chores" to editor-in-chief.
Savage growth
When the French literary translator Yu Zhongxian went to college, "Metamorphosis" was one of the few Western modernist novels that could be read.
In 1977, Yu Zhongxian, as the first college student after the resumption of the college entrance examination, was admitted to the French major of the Department of Spanish Languages of Peking University. In those years, the class was still talking about the classic writers of the pre-20th century, the writers of the 20th century rarely entered the room, and Western modernist literature was considered capitalist and had to be criticized. In addition to Soviet literature in the 20th century, the only reading article provided by the teacher was Li Wenjun's translation of "Metamorphosis".
During his college years, works by 20th-century masters such as Joyce, Faulkner, and García Márquez entered China one after another, and some of them were not yet able to translate the full text, and the excerpts were first published. The first French works to enter, mainly the existentialism represented by Sartre and Camus, set off a "Sartre fever".
Unbeknownst to these college students, some of the wrestling behind them determined what they could read.
A book published in 1981, "Sartre Studies", provided an important ideological resource for this "Sartre fever". The book was edited by Liu Mingjiu, a young researcher at the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He plans to edit a series of "French Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Materials" to introduce the modern trend of French thought, break through the closed atmosphere of the domestic cultural circles, and thus "re-evaluate" Western modern and contemporary literature.
(Li Wenjun's translation of Faulkner's novel.) )
He intended to have Sartre help him fire the first shot. In 1981, Liu Mingjiu visited Paris, and took the opportunity of academic exchanges to consult with simone de Beauvoir and Yusenard, two masters of contemporary French literature, and Sartre's lifelong companion Beauvoir was very happy with this idea, Yusenaar also thought it was very insightful, and Liu Mingjiu's confidence was greatly enhanced.
Sartre Studies selects works representing Sartre's philosophical ideas, including novels such as "The Fly" and "Nausea", as well as Sartre's theoretical articles and an introduction to the whole picture of his work, and it is not surprising that after publication, it quickly became popular among young people. However, the east wind wrestled with the west wind, and the wind direction was deflected from time to time, and the following year The Sartre Study was criticized and banned. In the climax of the criticism, Liu Mingjiu took a photo and sat on a wicker chair and calmly read "Sartre Study", without any panic. He recalled that the subtext of the photo was: what can stand, in the end can always stand.
Sartre became an explosive for young people to open their minds. In the happy memory of the current editor-in-chief of World Literature, when college students held a copy of "Existence and Nothingness", formed various groups, read and discussed paragraph by paragraph, and did not know that they thought they were reading the Bible. "It's fascinating to let us know that there's another way of understanding the world." Happy to say.
Liu Mingjiu was Camus's translator and a well-known editor-in-chief, compiling several books. Launched in the 1980s, the 70 -- French Literature Series of the Twentieth Century basically includes the most important works of French writers of the 20th century, most of which landed in China for the first time. With great endurance and professionalism, he wrote an introduction to each book. "I believe that in the 1990s, I am afraid that no country in the world's cultural circles have achieved such a large scale and depth of cultural translation from another world cultural power."
Looking back at foreign literature in the 1980s and 1990s, Yu Zhongxian believes that France and Latin America have the strongest impact. In 1982, the editors of World Literature published an excerpt from "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and at the end of that year García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Yu Zhongxian's view, this was a landmark event in the cultural circles in the 1980s, after which a number of Latin American "literary explosions" were published, triggering a second explosion in China.
Mo Yan once recalled that in the 1980s, Chinese writers were almost collectively reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and his mood when he read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was like Márquez's reading of "Metamorphosis" in Paris: "The original novel can be written like this!" Chinese readers and writers read Metamorphosis and One Hundred Years of Solitude at about the same time.
Novelists such as Mo Yan and Chen Zhongzhong read "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and poets such as Kitajima and Munch read Black and Baudelaire, and their writing took a noticeable turn. After that, these writers tried to get out of the shadow of the master and make their voices heard.
At the same time, Yu Zhongxian also read another important work: "Selected Works of Foreign Modernists" edited by Yuan Kejia and others. Like a textbook, this book toures the representative works of Western expressionism, symbolism, absurdism and other genres. Li Wenjun's first translation of Faulkner was an excerpt from the book's translation of "Noise and Commotion." Yu Zhongxian recalled: "It was a textbook work that young writers and poets must read. ”
After the warm-up of "World Literature", the climax of foreign literature translation is coming. Publications such as "Foreign Literature and Art", "Yilin", "Translation of the Sea", "Chinese and Foreign Literature", "Foreign Literature" and so on have been launched one after another, and publishing houses in various places have also entered foreign literature.
China acceded to the Berne Convention in 1992, and the publication of foreign works thereafter must be authorized. Until then, translation and publishing were not bound by copyright, which objectively enabled literary translation to grow rapidly and savagely.
Divided territories
Diligent translators make up for the lessons they have fallen behind at an astonishing rate. At the beginning of the reform and opening up, not only did the modernist literature of the 20th century miss class, but the translation of foreign literature from the Renaissance to the 19th century was not systematic. By the time Yu Zhong finished his phD from France in 1993 and returned to the editorial board of World Literature, almost all of the world's masterpieces had already been divided.
"Liu Mingjiu's generation first had to make up for the missing things, from the Renaissance to the 19th century." Yu Zhongxian said that a generation has a generation's task, "The generation after Liu Mingjiu, including me, is more to translate the works of 20th-century writers." My colleagues and I will continue to track the best works of the 21st century, while discovering forgotten or neglected writers, as well as works that have not been pioneered by those who have been afraid of the difficulties of their predecessors. ”
Yu Zhongxian also wanted to fill in the blanks, and the beginning of the translation road was the French writers who had not yet been translated in China at that time, such as Naival, Claudel, and Girodeau. Later, he specialized in translating "new novels" writers such as Beckett, Simon, Rob Grillet, and Milan Kundera. In recent years, he has translated some award-winning works such as the Goncourt Literary Prize, and in the blink of an eye, it has passed the age of flower armor.
He could also take Les Misérables and The Outsider and translate a version of it, but it was not necessary. Translators have formed a tacit understanding: books that already have excellent translations do not need to be translated, but more works that have never been translated. After the painstaking cultivation of the predecessors, the remaining beads are either niche or particularly difficult, in short, the readership is limited. This is a problem given to them by contemporary translators, giving up the opportunity to bind to classic masterpieces and instead opening up a new frontier of Chinese translation literature.
"Three or four translations of a classic are enough, too many editions of quality can not be guaranteed, and readers do not know how to choose." Now as long as any famous artist's work enters the public edition period, the publishing house 'buzzes' to find someone to translate, and suddenly more than a dozen translations come out. "Yu Zhongxian has never been keen on retranslating classics.
(Yu Zhongxian translated the works of the French writer Beckett of the "New Novel.") )
Literary translation entered a new era, and the boost of commerce was also pulled in reverse. At its peak, the circulation of World Literature reached 300,000 or 400,000 copies, and literary youth read each other, and a magazine could pass dozens of hands. The current editor-in-chief of World Literature is happy to go to college in 1979, and he experienced that era of literature, "with an air of motivation."
At present, nature is no longer the era of literature, and "World Literature" has long left the list of literary youth. However, the magazine still plays the role of a watchtower. Happy to say that World Literature has been exploring new works by newcomers abroad, and the works of writers published have soon become the topics of publishing houses. In recent years, the highly regarded "post-90s" Irish writer Sally Rooney has launched an album introduction before the work "Normal People" has been adapted into a popular TV series.
The magazine has also responded to the latest realities by setting up a "Scene of the Epidemic" column since last year, with each issue publishing works by writers from various countries on the epidemic. In the latest issue, an American poet used humorous words to record the feelings of insanity after contracting the new crown pneumonia. "Every editor is keeping track of the latest developments in each country, and if they had to come up with a list of the most active writers, they could come up with it right away."
Liu Mingjiu once compared the achievements of literary translation in different periods of New China, and he believed that after the founding of New China, the results of foreign literary translation and research criticism were very fruitful, especially for classical literature before the 20th century. Of course, the scale and scope are not the same as after the reform and opening up.
"It is often said that our generation is a generation that has been delayed and sacrificed, but in fact, we are a generation that is talented, talented, hardworking, and idealistic. It's just that the birth is not timely, so that its behavior is greatly discounted, even if it has been scorched by the fire, but as soon as the spring breeze blows, it is full of vitality. He said in a reminiscence article.
"It may be said that the performance and achievements of this generation are generally inferior to those of the older generation before it." With a hint of pride, he said, "As for the new generation that follows, it will probably take a while to create such a scale and weight of labor in this generation." ”
The cause of poverty
Outside of literary translation, the current editor-in-chief of World Literature is happy to be passionate about cultural exchange, having had the opportunity to work as a diplomat but eventually returned to literature. Around 2000, Happy was seconded to the Romanian Embassy as a consul, and the diplomatic service intended to keep him. He spent two years on the Black Sea, earning six or seven times more than the newsroom, but returned to the small office of the newsroom as soon as his term expired, and literature was always the profession he most wanted to devote himself to. "I think the people in the world who can really do what they like should be a minority, and I am willing to be one of these minorities."
Happy to enter the editorial department of World Literature in the 1980s, according to him, the newsroom was very charming, everyone was a staunch lover of literature, talking about their favorite things, and several editors-in-chief had an artist's temperament. The old editor-in-chief is omnipotent in translation, writing, and painting, but in his later years he needs to take care of his bedridden mother and blind wife at the same time, which is extremely hard and extremely hard. "They are all people with light in their hearts." Happy said, "If I still have a little literary flavor in me, it is because I am particularly deeply influenced by them." ”
Translation is a poor cause. A few years ago, Happy increased the translation remuneration of "World Literature", which can reach about 180 yuan in a thousand words, although it is still a high investment and low return compared with other industries, but he hopes to comfort the translator a little.
At that time, Li Wenjun translated "Escape", only printed 10,000 or 20,000 copies, and the translation fee was settled according to a one-time payment of 1,000 words and 100 yuan. Monroe sold well after winning the award, but the publisher did not inform him. He later protested with the other party, who gave him 30,000 yuan in translation fees. And how much Faulkner brought him, he did not count, anyway, not a lot.
Nowadays, there are very few full-time translators, and it is gratifying to find a group of excellent young translators everywhere, who are difficult to make a living from this, and all rely on love. In the literary translation circles of major languages such as English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and other languages, there are currently a number of young translators he is optimistic about, and the small languages of Eastern Europe and Northern Europe are a bit green and yellow. In fact, small languages are becoming more and more popular, but outside of literature.
"I always think that the remuneration is low, and the evaluation system is difficult to reflect the recognition of the value of literary translation." "Mr. Li Wenjun's translation of Faulkner, Mr. Gao Mang's translation of Pasternak, and Mr. Ye Tingfang's translation of Kafka have influenced generations of people, and the impact of even hundreds of papers may not be comparable." ”
However, Li Wenjun did not have such a high evaluation of himself.
When he was over ninety years old, his back was slumped, his hair was about to fall out, and he saw everything lightly. Talking about Faulkner, he said that looking at this old man now is almost outdated, and there is no need to say too good things for him; when it comes to literature, he says that literature always follows the development of society and will not play a leading role; talking about the "Sater fever" of that year, he waved his hand and said, I don't understand that, I will engage in a little British and American literature.
Regarding the translation, he said that compared with the original, his translation is not glorious. Only once did he show some confidence: "Translating Faulkner, it has not been easy to translate much better than I have lately." But he immediately added, "I don't care about what happens in the future, I will always surpass mine." Just admit that I was a good translator. ”
A generation has a generation of languages, and he knows very well that Lu Xun's translation of "Dead Souls" and Guo Moruo's translation of "Faust" are now eliminated, and he will eventually be replaced by a new language. I heard that in recent years, some people have translated "Noise and Turmoil", "How is the translation?" His eyes lit up, flashing a moment of concern, "He must have turned better than I did." Hopefully he succeeded. ”
(Intern Luxi Yang also contributed to this article)