Re-understand Feng Zhi's spiritual life history
——Read "The Complete Translations of Feng Zhi"
Author:Zhang Hui (Professor, Peking University)
Mr. Feng Zhi is a generation of masters of "learning from China and the West", he was once praised by Mr. Lu Xun as "China's most outstanding lyric poet", and he was also the forerunner and founder of the translation and research of Chinese German literature.
Receiving a new edition of the Complete Works of Feng Zhi's Translations and rereading some of them, the feeling of reading through the Complete Works of Feng Zhi many years ago is now even stronger. The feeling is that our understanding of Mr. Feng Zhi's richness and complexity is far from enough, and it is likely that it has just begun.
The Complete Translations of Feng Zhi
[De] Goethe [Austria] Rilke et al
Translated by Feng Zhi
Shanghai People's Publishing House
Almost subconsciously, I thought of the following sentences from the 20th book of the Sonnets:
How many faces, how many voices
It's so real in our dreams,
Whether intimate or unfamiliar:
Regardless of the division of my own life,
But it is fused with many lives,
Blossoming after fusion, bearing fruit?
At the same time, these verses also made me turn to the four large volumes of translated anthology, trying to know "how many faces, how many voices", fused and even melted into Mr. Feng Zhi's own life. Reading these translations coherently seems to be another way to revisit and re-understand Feng Zhi's spiritual life history. These translations allow us to "see" Feng Zhi again from the following two aspects.
Feng Zhi as a poet
The first aspect is that we are more familiar with and are constantly mentioned by many researchers - Feng Zhi as a poet. By reading these translations, we can see more clearly how Feng Zhi gradually grew from an early emotional poet to an empirical poet, and after that, he tried to explore and become a "complete person".
In particular, in the 1920s he translated German-language poems, including N. Lenau's Song of the Reed, published in the Shen Zhong in 1926, and Arvers, H. Leuthold, and others published in the supplement of the North China Daily in 1929. Of course, in The Sinking Bell, he had already published Rilke's Essays on Marte Raulize Brig and On "Landscapes"; it should also be mentioned that in the 1930s he translated Rilke's Ten Letters to a Young Poet (1931), as well as Rilke's Autumn Sun, Leopard, Olvers, and Even If the World Changed, published in Chongqing in 1941 and 1943 in Chongqing. Bielman's Goethe Chronicle in the Book Monthly was an important step in his comprehensive study of Goethe.
From these translations, we can see the important role played by German-speaking poets, especially Rilke and Goethe, in his spiritual transmutation. As Mr. Feng Zhi's daughter Feng Yaoping said:
When he was studying in Germany, he read Rilke's writings and wrote to a friend: "But now I, because of the needs of my heart, I meticulously translate his ten letters to a young poet. In these ten letters I breathe more affectionately in the breath of a great poet. I translated it, I gave it to the youth of China with all sincerity; I only hated that when I was in my 20s, no one translated such a good thing to me. Reading Rilke made him feel that he had finally found the ideal poem, the ideal prose, and also saw the ideal life. After almost 10 years of stagnation in creation, we can see from his works in the 1940s, "Fourteen Elements", "Landscape", "Wu Zixu" and some essays, that his style has changed. He observed, experienced, learned loneliness and patience, took responsibility seriously and seriously, and changed from gentle lyricism to philosophical contemplation. This process, naturally, also reminds us of another parallel spiritual thread from his early years of liking late Tang poetry to loving Du Fu, which is mentioned in his later memories.
Eternal partner, Mrs. Yao Kekun once co-translated with Feng Zhi "The Learning Era of Weilian Meister" Pictures selected from "Feng Zhi's Complete Translations"
Feng Zhi as a translator
Through the translation, we can "see" the second aspect of Feng Zhi, and it is one that we are relatively familiar with and perhaps more obvious—Feng Zhi as a translator.
It is worth noting that Feng Zhi's choice of translation does not seem to be random. It can even be said that his translations are both aspects determined by the atmosphere of the times (such as the translations of Heine and Brecht), but also reflect his spiritual exploration of himself, as well as his reflections on his time, on modernity—and even "overcoming" in the sense of Goethe and Nietzsche. At the very least, these translations are another way for him to see the world and express himself. He said, "I'm not the kind of translator who has mastered the art of translation. Works that are a certain distance from my hobbies, and translating them hard, are often failures. He believes that the purpose of translating foreign literature is to "enrich oneself and inspire oneself" on the positive side and "correct oneself" in the negative aspect. For example, in the preface to Ten Letters to a Young Poet, written in 1937, he said that "people love to compare youth to spring, and this metaphor is correct." But the resemblance is not so much the clarity of the young people as the brightness of the spring sun, but on the other hand, the sorrows of the young people, the growth of the young people, more like the spring that evolves in the dark wind, rain and cold" (vol. II, p. 225). If one were to associate it with Rilke's verse, which he particularly loved: "They will blossom, and the blossoms will be splendid; but we shall mature, and this is called dwelling in darkness and working on our own"... We can undoubtedly see a Feng Zhi who is different from the current of time and different from the mainstream of modern thought. In this context, we may be able to better understand why Feng Zhi translated Schiller's "Brief Book of Aesthetic Education" in the 1940s.
The connection between Feng Zhi and Goethe is also interesting. Together with his wife, Mr. Yao Kekun, he translated The Age of Study of Villien Meister, rather than Faust, which generally seems to be more famous. Although both works, Goethe wrote almost all his life, can be seen as his "conclusion in his later years", but "Meister" is more grounded, closer to real life, but also more complex. Of course, Feng Zhi did not translate Faust. The passage we see from the complete collection of translations is the 1943 translation of Mourning Freon. And mournful Freon, with the shadow of Byron, was born after the marriage of Faust and Helena, or modern greece. However, this fusion of ancient and modern was not successful, the child did not survive, according to Mr. Feng Zhi's translator's note, his death was "due to unrestricted pursuit of death in his early years." Perhaps because of this, his mourning Freon has a word for mourning on his name, but not "Ophrod" as other translators have translated it. This is obviously very different, and it cannot but be said that it contains Feng Zhi's confusion. Of course, these are just individual cases, or some questions that have not yet been answered, but this is some meaningful starting point for us to further understand Feng Zhi, to understand Feng Zhi as a translator, and to understand Feng Zhi who reflects in modern times.
The four-volume "Complete Translations of Feng Zhi" is the first time that Mr. Feng Zhi's translations have been published in the form of a complete collection, which contains several translations that are currently out of print on the market, and many precious pictures that witness Mr. Feng Zhi's academic career are debuting for the first time, which has a high collection value. Finally, I would also like to make a little immature suggestion for this complete translation. I have noticed that all the translations provided here have only one final or final version, but if they are republished in the future, retaining the revised content in the notes will not only be of great help to us to learn translation from Mr. Feng Zhi, but also to understand the evolution of Mr. Feng Zhi's thought, and it is also one of the most delicate reference materials.
Guangming Daily (December 16, 2021, 16th edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily