Cover news reporter Zhang Jie
Why read classics now? What do they have to do with our present? Why can these masterpieces defeat time and endure? What are the characteristics behind it that run through ancient and modern human nature?
On November 9th, Guomai Culture, together with "Feng Tang Lecture Book", invited feng Tang, a writer, poet and speaker of "Feng Tang Lecture Book", to broadcast live on a video number with the well-known translator Li Jihong, bringing online readers a dialogue with the theme of "These writers beat time with words", and in one and a half hours, they had a deep chat on the above issues.
The conversation between the two revolved around Li Jihong's translations of "Walden", "The Old Man and the Sea", and "The Great Gatsby", which is also the bibliography of the "Feng Tang Lecture Book" series. The two talked deeply, and there were many dazzling sparks. Here are some excerpts from the best of the conversation between the two.
Walden inspires us to:
Breeze and moon do not need to buy, simple and cheap can also live a good life
Li Jihong: "Walden" is one of the earliest masterpieces of American literature. The United States is independent, and American literature has not been freed from English literature for a long time, and is considered a branch of English literature. Around 1820, the United States fought a war with Britain. After the Great War they thought of culturally freeing themselves from British control. A man named Emerson called on Americans to speak with an American voice and to create American literature. What exactly is American literature, and what is the difference between it and English literature? Emerson seemed to be more concerned with nature, so he had a famous book called On Nature.
After walden came out, Emerson immediately realized that it was a masterpiece of American literature. It talks about the natural environment around Walden, including plants, animals, and climate changes, which did not appear in literature before Walden, and previous writers who wanted to describe a tree would only say that it was a tree, and a bird would tell that it was a bird.
Von Don: "Walden" I wondered why I wanted to read it, and the first thing was to understand nature. Especially the relationship between modern man and nature. I was shopping in London and saw a saying in a flower shop that said, "City people should be with nature for 20 minutes a day." "Walden" emphasizes from the side that man and nature should form a more benign relationship, even in today's society. Of course, there are many ways to experience nature, such as visiting the park and running. I once saw a person sitting next to the lake with a cigar and a bottle of beer on the Campus of Peking University, and I felt that "luxury" was not to say how expensive the beer in his hand was, but that he could know how to sit by the lake and stay quietly with this lake for 20 minutes.
The second point, by reading Walden, can make us understand a little: the breeze and the moon do not need money to buy, we can live a relatively simple and cheap life. This is not standing and talking without waist pain, but saying that when there is more money, you can spend less, and don't think that more money can bring happiness in daily life. I've also seen a lot of big bosses who spend all day tea instead of tea, wine not wine, rice not rice, and he doesn't know what's going on in his head. The cheapest luxury for human beings is to read a book, and the cheapest thing to enjoy is to drink a beer and smoke a cigarette under the clear moon. I think reading Walden can make you understand that life, even a good life, is not as expensive as you think.
Von Tang: What inspired or moved you the most during the translation of Walden?
Li Jihong: The difficulty in translating this book is that the era in which he lives is a little far from the environment in which we live. But there's an upside, he's a guy who's been dead for more than 100 years and no longer has anything new coming out. All his books were left intact and intact, and we can now know what he read. He didn't read many books, hundreds of books, including Chinese classics. He knew French, went to Harvard, studied Latin and Ancient Greek, he read many translations of foreign classics, including Hinduism and ancient things he would read, and the source of his ideas was certain.
Concise, positive and powerful
The 30,000-word "The Old Man and the Sea" was awarded the Nobel Prize
Li Jihong: The book "The Old Man and the Sea" is more special, he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, everyone turned to the official website of the Nobel Prize in Literature and found that basically its annual award speech rarely mentions the work, generally issued to this writer. For more than 100 years, of the 117 winning writers, only 8 works officially mentioned by the Nobel Prize For Literature Award Committee, such as "Buddenbrooks" or "Forsyth Family" are millions of words. Only this 30,000-word book, The Old Man and the Sea, is mentioned, and this one is strange, winning the Nobel Prize in the second year of publication, because the book has two characteristics: one is that he is particularly suitable for learning English, using the simplest words. One of the characteristics of what I said is that it is concise and profound, and the text is particularly concise, but it contains a lot of very rich and detailed information.
"The Old Man and the Sea" saw that the eyes and eyeballs of the old man were blue, which everyone may not have noticed, if you have been to the Caribbean and found that the eyes of the natives are not blue, there is only one place in the world where the eyeballs are blue, that is, near the Mediterranean, this sentence indicates the identity of the old man, is an immigrant from Spain, not a native of Cuba. Although the book is only 30,000 words, there are many papers and monographs related to research, all of which are excavating the information hidden behind the concise text.
Second, what is the reason why it won the award? Because we are now living in an era of peace, World War II is far away from us, and we have no way to experience the panic that World War II brought to the people at that time. There is a famous writer Kerouac who wrote a book called "On the Road", which is called "The Beat Generation" in China, which is actually not right, it should be called "Decadent Generation". Many of the works are more decadent, decadent, and negative. But Hemingway advocated a particularly positive and optimistic spirit, and the award speech given by Sweden at that time wrote that it was a sweep away the decadent atmosphere in Europe and the United States after the war, and to celebrate the moral triumph in failure, which was a bit like a stimulant for Europe and the United States. It is very important that its status is very important for its publication to win awards. There is a lot to say in this book, including the description of the life of Cuban fishermen, accurate encyclopedic description, which is actually very difficult, and it must be a lot of "stupid work". Hemingway lived in Cuba in his later years, often chatting with fishermen, and he must have done a lot of "stupid kung fu" in writing this.
"Hemingway is the equivalent of their Lu Xun to the United States"
Li Jihong: Hemingway has a nickname, called "the father of modern American literary style". Before Hemingway, English novels were not so concise. One of Hemingway's most important contributions was that he broke the English novel from the original complicated way of writing. Charlotte Brontë would write novel sentences that long, because life was slow, most people had never been to school, and reading was almost their only entertainment and pastime. But by Hemingway's time, broadcasting had emerged, and writing novels had to compete not only with other novels, but also with newspapers and magazines, and with radio, so the way of writing had to change. Like we have a lot of words in online literature now, before we Chinese write novels to write very short, it is difficult to write with a brush, typing is fast, and network writers type a lot of thousands of words every day. Changes in production technology and changes in the social environment promote stylistic changes.
Hemingway stood right at that point in time. Hemingway was to the United States their equivalent of Lu Xun. Lu Xun is very important to write the first writer to write a vernacular novel, before the "Diary of a Madman" no one knew that Chinese novels can be written in this way, and at this point, Hemingway's role is equivalent to Lu Xun's role.
One of the most important aspects of modern literature is simplicity, the different genres of modernist literature, Hemingway influenced all english writers after that, and his status was one level higher than other writers. If you want to talk about the two most powerful American literature of the 20th century: one is Hemingway and the other is Faulkner.
Feng Tang: Why did Hemingway do what he did just now, be able to applaud and applaud, and be able to beat time? 50,000 words A novella writes such a simple thing as a sea, an old man and a child catching a fish, why can it be raised to its current status? At least in academia or within the scope of public reading, it is the use of words to beat time, what are people doing right? Jihong has Jihong's answer, I have my thoughts, I hope you think deeply.
Li Jihong: Fitzgerald and Hemingway are good friends, once spent some time together in Paris, and the two can be regarded as gemini stars in the American literary world. "The Great Gatsby" can become a national novel in the United States, the most beloved novel, it symbolizes that era, and it grasps all the characteristics of that era well.
We know that the United States in the 1920s was the so-called Jazz Age, an era of rapid wealth, and all the characteristics of the era can be seen in "The Great Gatsby". A good novel can define an era individually. Another American book, The Age of Innocence, defines the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. A very important point of "The Great Gatsby", more eternal and more universal, is the heart knot that Feng Tang just mentioned. His own emotional experience is not so tortuous and rich, he and his wife are married very early and very loving, I admire him a little. He spoke particularly well, breaking a very important point in the relationship between the sexes or the relationship between the feelings: the old dream can not be relived, the past is past, don't think about coming back, this love failed, don't try to continue don't try to relive the old dream, what you get is a tragedy.
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