Cover news reporter Zhang Jie
The French writer France said: "Life is too short, Proust is too long." This sentence refers to Marcel Proust, the author of "In Search of Lost Time" (also translated as "Remembrance of The Age of Water").
He was born into a wealthy bourgeois family in Paris, France. Her father was a health care practitioner and her mother was the daughter of a securities broker. Proust was frail and sickly since childhood, sensitive by nature, full of fantasies, and suffered from asthma at the age of ten, dragging down his life. After graduating from high school, he entered the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the University of Paris. Soon, he began to get involved in high society, went in and out of literary salons, and had extensive contact with celebrities in the literary and artistic circles, becoming a fashionable young man with a gentle demeanor. Proust, who wrote In Search of Lost Time, was a man who spent half his life lying in bed with a medicine jar. Relying on the spoiled childhood and the short, normal memories of the rebellious youth, he completed a large number of his works. Proust was still working on his deathbed, and in his books, the memory is instantaneous and eternal, and this set of books is still regarded as one of the great novels in the history of Western and even world literature in the twentieth century.
Recently, the People's Literature Publishing House published an illustrated edition of "In Search of Lost Time" translated by the famous translator Zhou Kexi, volume I, volume II and V, as well as selected editions.
Why is the seven-volume edition only out of the first, second and fifth volumes?
The remaining four volumes, the translators have decided to abandon
Translator Zhou Kexi graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Fudan University in 1964, then taught at East China Normal University, and in 1980 went to Paris, France to study Riemannian geometry for two years, and after returning to China, he served as an associate professor and master tutor. He has been a literary editor since 1992 and has served as an associate editor and editor successively. Literary translation began only after he was more than half a hundred years old. Previously, the seven-volume "Remembrance of The Age of Water" co-translated by 15 translators came out, and Zhou Kexi was one of the translators. After the publication of this set of seven volumes, he had a wish to translate the entire seven books on his own.
However, translating the entire seven-volume Quest for Lost Time is quite a challenge for a translator. There are several "special" places in the history of literature: they are particularly famous, particularly large, and particularly long Sentences in French. You can imagine how difficult this is for translation. Beginning in 2002, Zhou Kexi finally spent more than a decade translating the first volume of "Going to Swan's House", the second volume of "Under the Shadow of the Girl Flower", and the fifth volume of "Female Prisoner". While the remaining four volumes, he decided to give up. He once said: "Not a vocabulary, not a long sentence, but every day I encounter problems, mainly his thinking, and I don't know what he is going to say." "As a result, we are now able to publish these three volumes.
Is the seven-volume book only three volumes?
There is a chronological and emotional context that does not affect the reading experience
Readers must have such a question, choose three volumes from the seven volumes to read will not be able to pick up the plot characters? In fact, there is no need to worry at all. Because these three volumes are intrinsically linked. At the beginning of the first volume of the novel "Go to Swan's House", "I" wake up and lie in bed. Memories of childhood, life scenes in Aunt Gombré's house, are clearly reproduced. Then go back more than a decade and see a relationship between "my" friend Swann and Odette. Swann's daughter Gilbert, who was the object of "my" unrequited love affair while in Paris.
"I" often went to Swan's house, but Gilbert was cold and hot to "me", and gradually "I" also became cold to her. In the second volume, "Under the Shadow of a Girl's Flower", the protagonist begins to experience the taste of love, the revelation of art, the joy of friendship and socialization as a teenager and a young man with an independent personality. The depiction of the love of young boys and girls also has negative emotions such as anxiety, suspicion, and jealousy from time to time, but at the same time it is full of romantic fantasies, youthful vitality, and a certain ignorant and obsessive, naïve and naïve but pretentious interest.
In the fifth volume, "The Female Prisoner", the protagonist imprisons his girlfriend Albertina in his home until one day he wakes up to find that she has escaped. Although Albertina has appeared in the second volume of "Under the Shadow of the Maiden", it is only in this volume that she comes to life and stands out, becoming the central character throughout the fifth volume of "The Female Prisoner" and the sixth volume of "The Missing Albertina", and even continues to the last volume of "Time Found". Therefore, these three volumes have a chronological sequence and emotional development, and will not affect the reading experience.
Why did you change the title of "Remembrance of the Watery Years"?
Discard the gorgeous translation name and replace it with a translation that is close to the author's original intention
The 1991 Chinese translation is "Remembrance of The Age of Water". The English translation, published in 1934, is titled Remembrace of Things Past. More than half a century later, Penguin changed its name to In Search of Lost Time when it published a revised edition in 1992, and retained the title when it launched a new retranslation in 2003. According to the translator Zhou Kexi, they are also "cutting love", abandoning the gorgeous translation name and replacing it with a title that is closer to Proust's original meaning.
Chowkers had discussed the title of the book in person with Jean-Yves Tatier, an expert on Proust studies. Jean-Yves Tatier felt that "the search for lost time" or "the search for lost time" was closer to the original meaning of A la recherche du temps perdu than "memories of the past". And the loss (lost) in the English title, he thought it was better to use past (deceased).
In addition, Zhou Kexi believes that Proust was influenced by the Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher Bergson when he decided on the title, and he believed that "just as space has geometry, time has psychology" Everyone has spent their whole lives battling time. We want to cling to a lover, a friend, some faith, but forgetting slowly rises from the darkness, obliterating all our good memories. But our ego does not disappear completely after all; time seems to disappear completely, but it is not, because it is one with ourselves. This was Proust's dominant motivation: to search for time that seemed to have passed away, but was still there, ready to be reborn. Proust's use of A la recherche du temps perdu ("In Search of Lost Time"), a philosophical and rather Bergsonic title, could not have been clearer in identifying the theme of this voluminous work.
Writer Wang Anyi helped polish it
The "Fauvist" painters specially illustrated the book
After completing the translation, in addition to his own careful words and repeated revisions, the translator Zhou Kexi also found his friends to help polish it, including the writer Wang Anyi. When Wang Anyi talked about "Tracing the Lost Time", he said, "It was Mr. Zhou's translation that made me read it." Zhou Kexi once gave an example: "Gombré" Part II begins with the sentence: "Looking out from the train ten miles away, all you see is a church, and this is Cambrai, announcing its existence to the distance, telling its wind."
At first, he translated it this way: "... All you see is a church, which summarizes the whole city and represents its ,......" Wang Anyi suggested that "this church summarizes the whole city and represents it" when reading the first draft" to "This is Gongbuy". In this way, it is closer to the feelings that Proust wants to express. In addition to the elaborate translations, volumes I, II and V, as well as anthologies, contain a total of 32 full-color original illustrations. The illustrator is the twentieth century "Fauvist" painter Van Donn, who pays attention to the formal sense of the picture, refuses to use chiaroscuro to shape the three-dimensional effect, and forms the picture with a clear and strong large color block close to flat painting, fully showing the independent expression of color. The back of each illustration has a detailed illustration, as well as the corresponding page number in the text, which is convenient for the reader to compare, and the text and the picture complement each other.
The full translation is too long to read?
There are also selections that provide excerpts from the essence
"Tracing the Lost Time" uses the means of recollection, with the help of the latent consciousness beyond the concept of time and space, from time to time to recount the lost years, from which to express the infinite nostalgia for the deceased and the past and the sadness that is difficult to discharge. This is a long novel different from the traditional novel, with the narrator "I" as the main body, which integrates what he sees, hears, thinks and feels, which not only has a true description of social life and human conditions, but also a record of the author's inner experience of self-pursuit and self-knowledge.
In addition to the narrative, it also contains a large number of feelings and arguments. The whole work has no central characters, no complete story, no ups and downs, only plot threads throughout. It is roughly based on the narrator's life experience and inner activities as the axis, interspersed with a large number of character events, like a tree with intertwined branches, which can be said to be derived from many other novels that are independent of a major novel, or it can be said to be a huge symphony intertwined with several theme songs.
Reading "In Search of Lost Time" will give people a wonderful experience, the reader will resonate with the people in the book when reading, and feel that they are living in the time depicted in the book. Proust's writing technique was not only a breakthrough in the traditional mode of novel writing at that time, but also had a profound impact on the emergence of various new genres of fiction in the future.
For literature lovers, if you think that it is a small regret not to read "In Search of Lost Time", but you have not finished reading this set of books, you can also read the selected books published by the People's Literature Publishing House. In order to let readers appreciate the charm of Proust's unique style as much as possible, Zhou Kexi and Tu Weiqun, a proust research expert, cooperated, and Tu Weiqun first selected the essence of paragraphs in each volume of the entire novel, and the text of each large paragraph was not easy to read, completely retaining the appearance of the original book, and then Translated by Zhou Kexi, and then Tu Weiqun connected these paragraphs with as concise a text as possible, and made some necessary explanations, so that readers could read this huge work more easily.
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