"30" and so what
The Reader Season 3 · Issue 5
Director Shi Jingshu communicated with Zhou Kexi
Director's Note
by / Shi Jingshu
Mr. Chow Kexi, I am so memorable as a guest this season. A lot of people in the group joked with me that "hours, it's worth it for you to be a guest like this this season." I agree with them.
Entanglement, trade-off, joy, excitement, horror, touching, loss, worth it. As a character director, it is generally not easy to gather on the same guest to experience all of the above feelings, but Zhou Kexi is a French translator who made me feel all of these feelings.
Zhou Kexi spent 12 years translating "Tracing the Lost Time"
"Grass Color Remote Look" and "Translation of Edge Grass" These two essays on Mr. Keshi's translation career these weeks are two green-covered books that I put on my body and read at any time before I met him. The book has been circled and drawn by me to make flowery notes.
I dare not take it lightly, after all, a nearly 80-year-old translator must meet with him with a sincere heart in order to respect literature and translation.
French literature is always romantic in my heart, and the French city has always had such an atmosphere. A Shanghai translator is so inextricably linked to French literature.
He also always said that he was a person who had no story
Before I left, I always wanted to appear in front of him for the first time. We met in a café opposite the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and I took a bouquet of orange-red tulips that were very plainly packed.
The tulip is the most beautiful flower in my heart, elegant and noble but never displayed, I think it should be worthy of Mr. Last Week's temperament.
Mr. Zhou is very humble and an overly modest person. In the previous collection, he was always repeating a sentence "Teacher Shi, I don't know if this matter of mine is a story", I always want to encourage him, he is willing to say, because he always feels that his life events are actually some small things that are not enough to worry about, and he always says that he is a person without a story.
On the first day we talked for four hours, and Mr. Zhou was not satisfied with his answer.
At the end of the first day of meetings, he asked me to assign him a few assignments, i.e. the next day he wanted me to hear what he answered. He took out his pen and wrote quietly at the table, saying he was going to go back in the evening to get ready and let me "torture" him the next day. His earnestness made me feel indescribably moved.
The next day, we met at another Western-style café that he frequented. We sat by the second-floor window where the sun was shining in and continued to talk for four more hours. So in total, Mr. Zhou's front pick, we talked for eight hours. Oh, yes, plus a 1-hour phone call back to Beijing.
It's very laborious to keep talking, and I once had the experience of talking non-stop for more than 4 hours in the afternoon, and after the end of the whole person was like a falling apart.
You can imagine the physical strength and energy expended by an ancient old man in his almost uninterrupted narration with me for so long. When I was last separated from Shanghai, I watched mr. Zhou's back as he turned away from the café, and I stopped for a long time until I couldn't see him.
He carried a cloth bag that old people loved, and his gait was slow and tired, and he gave me all the strength of the day.
His story is still worth savoring
After returning to Beijing, I struggled with whether Mr. Zhou's story presented on the stage of readers could really make so many audiences intuitively moved.
Mr. Zhou's mathematical career is 33 years, and his translation career is more than 30 years, in my previous concept, there must be stories of ups and downs in a life like this, or like Mr. Xu Yuanchong in the previous program of "Readers", there is a passion for translation that anyone can feel.
Zhou Kexi recounted the experience of changing careers at the age of 50
But Mr. Zhou is restrained, he is emotionally restrained, his love of translation is restrained, and even his language expression is restrained.
His restraint is not because of the low concentration, but because of the low-key humility of the low-key humility of the pursuit of everything too perfect and then neutralized restraint.
It was an elegance and decency that belonged to his time and could only be possessed after experiencing the combination of Shanghai culture and French culture.
After returning to Beijing, the writing work and communication work still maintain close contact with Mr. Zhou at any time. He still worked very carefully with me to complete whatever preparation he needed to do on every show. We had contacts almost every day.
The writing of the script is actually very smooth, because Mr. Zhou's life story is really good, but unfortunately, the reader's presentation time is limited, even if the 30-minute interview is still worth savoring.
Therefore, the previous entanglement was put down after I finished writing the script.
I believe that the audience of Readers is cultured and patient. Mr. Zhou Kexi is a guest who needs to taste slowly.
As Mr. Zhou's content director, if you can patiently read my director's notes, I believe that in the third season of "Readers", you can also taste Mr. Zhou's wonderful life and the faint sadness that he put down but could not put down for Proust - life is too short, Proust is too long.
Because of the length of the program and out of my selfishness, I would like to write a plot that cannot be presented in the program here in the director's note - about Mr. Zhou's translation of Proust's magnum opus "Remembrance of Watery Years" in his translation to "Tracing the Lost Time".