García Márquez said: "The discovery of Juan Rulfo, like the discovery of Franz Kafka, is undoubtedly an important chapter in my memory. "As the source writer of Latin American literature and even world literature, Juan Rulfo's work has inspired the creation of countless literary classics, including One Hundred Years of Solitude. Beginning with the "pioneer generation", Chinese writers have also benefited greatly from Rulfo.
The new Juan Rulfo trilogy (Burning Fields, Pedro Paramo and The Golden Rooster) was recently published by The Translation Press and contains all of Juan Rulfo's fictional works currently available for licensing. Among them, the "Golden Rooster" translated by Zhao Zhenjiang and Jin Candi is the first time that the centenary edition of Juan Rulfo's birth was introduced in Chinese world.
On March 28, the "Sharing Meeting of the Last Men and Women in Latin American Lands – The Works of Juan Rulfo" was held in Beijing. Zhao Zhenjiang, a famous translator and former professor of the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at Peking University, Zhao Zhenjiang, the famous poet Ji Di Maga, the famous writer A Yi, and the Argentine writer Mustard talked about Juan Rulfo and his literary world.
Zhao Zhenjiang: Translating Juan Rulfo was an accident
"As a translator for Juan Rulfo, I am not a regular army, I am a guerrilla. Because I myself mainly translate poetry, I translate very few novels. Zhao Zhenjiang said at the sharing meeting.
The scene of the new book sharing meeting
He recalls that between 1979 and 1981, he went to the Mexican Academy for further study. In 1980, "Golden Rooster" was published. At that time, Juan Rulfo's main masterpieces had already been published, and "The Golden Rooster" was actually a film literary script. Zhao Zhenjiang saw the book in a Mexican bookstore, bought it out of curiosity, and translated it into Chinese after reading it. This translation was published in the second issue of "Chinese and Foreign Films" in 1984, which is considered to be the earliest translation of Juan Rulfo in China.
"My translation of Juan Rulfo was a very fortuitous opportunity." Zhao Zhenjiang said. He teaches the history of Latin American literature in the Spanish Department of Peking University, and magic realism is an unavoidable topic. "Magic realism is not the main literary genre in Latin America, and even those authors themselves do not admit to being magic realism, they think that is reality."
Zhao Zhenjiang pointed out that for example, when Chinese readers read "Dream of the Red Chamber" and read the illusory realm and the Treasure Book of the Wind and Moon, they know from the beginning that it is not reality, it is a dream. The story of the ghost fox in "Liaozhai", the reader also knows that it is not reality. But Latin American magic and reality seem to be the same thing, and even the reader does not know that magic is not magical, which is the biggest feature of magic realism.
Gidemaga: His influence on minority writers was more direct
In the early 1980s, Gidimaga read Juan Rulfo's collection of short stories and felt very intimate. "Many of the writers we live in places like Liangshan and Tibet, our social environment, our past way of thinking, including the things in our traditional culture, are actually very close to Latin America."
Similar to the world in Juan Rulfo's novel, the life of the Yi tribe to which Gidimaga belongs is also "coexistence of man and god". "There is a lot of common consciousness, a sense of life, a perception of life, which is conceived in such a special life experience."
Therefore, he pointed out that although Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and other Latin American literary works, it has deeply influenced important contemporary writers including Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Ge Fei, Su Tong, Ma Yuan and so on. However, since the 1980s, a number of important ethnic minority writers in China, including Tibetan writers Tashi Dawa and Alai, and Tujia writer Cai Zhihai, have had a more direct impact on them in Latin American literature.
"This kind of directness I just want to say is that it is true that these lives they have written and presented reality have a lot in common with us."
Guidimaga also talks about Juan Rulfo's influence on García Márquez, arguing that One Hundred Years of Solitude is in a sense an amplification of Pedro Paramo. He said: "Between writers and writers, there is sometimes a hidden thing, and this hidden thing will arouse the creativity of another writer, and even make him climb to a higher literary peak." ”
A: Juan Rulfo is the source of magic realism
In the view of A B, Juan Rulfo is the founder of the Latin American magic realism genre, or legislator, in layman's terms, "the boss behind the scenes".
In the early days of writing, Ah Yi also learned the writing techniques of magic realism. At that time, someone ridiculed: "If Juan Rulfo's apprentice is García Márquez, García Márquez's apprentice is China's pioneer generation, and the chinese pioneer generation's apprentice is A B, then why should I look at you A B, I just look at Juan Rulfo? ”
Unexpectedly, Ah Yi was very excited to hear this statement, and felt that he was included in the sequence of a writer, a literary system.
"We should read the best and best in this field." Juan Rulfo is the crown of magic realism, and the work in his work is Pedro Paramo. A B said.
He believes that there is a custom in the works of Juan Rulfo, and there is a culture of the Indians. The reason why Chinese writers are intimate with Latin American literature and Mexican literature is because the land environment is similar, and we are also a magical land here.
"But then I discovered that the core of magic realism is in reality." A B said. In the case of Pedro Paramo, the core of the novel is not to express magic, because magic exists in reality, and behind it reflects the order of the countryside: the relationship between the landlord and the sharecropper, the ruler and the ruled.
In literature depicting the countryside, there are two narrative traditions. One is more romantic, such as Shen Congwen and Wang Zengqi, and Mu Xin wrote "Once Upon a Time Slow", which has aesthetic tendencies; the other is Juan Rulfo, directly expressing the tragic reality of the countryside, that is, there is a bully, he has his love, he has his cruelty.
A B said that his writing trend is consistent with Juan Rulfo. Juan Rulfo has a novel called "All Because We Are Poor", and A B wrote a "All Because it Rained" to pay tribute to Rulfo.
Mustard: Convey the voice of the people in a poetic way
Mexico is a kingdom of poetry, and Mustard believes that Juan Rulfo was also a poet in a sense, and his work was somewhere between poetry and fiction. The publication of Pedro Paramo has hailed Juan Rulfo as the pinnacle of Latin American fiction.
He once joked that ghosts are better to write than to write people. That's what Pedro Paramo is all about. In this book, there are ghosts that can swim freely, breaking through the limitations of time and space. ”
Death is a common theme in the works of Juan Rulfo, and mustard says that death is also a very critical cultural phenomenon in Mexican society. "Many people died in the Mexican Revolution, every Mexican had family members lost their lives in that era as a result of historical events, and Juan Rulfo's father died accidentally in a violent incident." As for the differences in the concept of life and death between China and Latin America, Wasabi believes that it is difficult to have a definite answer to this question, because "we may feel the same anxiety, pain and fear when we face the unknown thing of death." ”
"A lot of people think of Juan Rulfo as a writer of the vernacular world, a spokesman for the voice of the people. What I want to say is that what he did was not just to convey the voices of the people as they were, but what he did was to understand these voices and present them in an artistic, poetic way, in a tone of voice. Mustard said. Quoting a Spanish female scholar, he said that Spanish literature gradually declined after the Golden Age because it was far from the people.