The Japanese edition of Mao Dun's literary award-winning work and Shanghai writer Jin Yucheng's novel "Blossoms" was recently launched by The Hayakawa Study Room in Japan. The Cathay Cinema and Shanghai Street Scene on the cover clearly mark the Shanghai urban nature of this novel.
Originally published in Harvest magazine in 2012, Blossom was later published in a single edition by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. The story focuses on Shanghai from the 1960s to the 1990s. The novel fully draws on and absorbs the advantages of the novel, showing the historical memory and cultural background of the city of Shanghai. "Born out of nowhere" of "Blossoms" not only won many awards in the field of literature, but also became the source of different types of literary and artistic works, the stage drama version, the commentary version of "Flowers" continues to be popular, wong Kar-wai supervised and Hu Ge starred in the TV drama version of "Flowers" has released the first trailer.
In 2018, the novel "Blossoms" has successively exported English and Japanese copyrights, of which the Japanese version has fallen into Hayakawa Shobo, which is one of the publishing houses with the most translated literature in Japan, and is also a Japanese publishing house that publishes the works of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, which is unique in the field of science fiction and mystery novels. In recent years, Hayakawa Shobo has increased the introduction and publication of Chinese literary works, and the Japanese edition of Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem" was launched by Hayakawa Shobo, setting off a reading boom among Japanese readers.
Due to the unique Shanghainese expression in the novel, the translation of "Blossoms" has always attracted attention. Uramoto Rika, who translated the Japanese version of "Blossoms", is a professor at the Department of Chinese at Osaka University of Economics, and at the master's level, he studied the Chinese writer Xiao Hong's work "Ma Bole", the protagonist of the novel who fled from Qingdao to Shanghai during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and thus developed a strong interest in the culture of the city.
Hayakawa Shobo's introduction to "Blossoms" mentions that the Japanese translation was "a bold attempt to translate Shanghainese in Kansai." Pu Yuanlihua also said that the dialect issue is the most concerned by readers and scholars, and it is also the biggest difficulty in translating "Blossoms". In this regard, the original author Jin Yucheng's view is that there is no need to stick to dialects, and he hopes to use fluent spoken translation to make it easy for readers in the target country to accept. In order to highlight the characteristics of this novel, Pu Yuanlihua decided to present the Shanghainese part in Kansai dialect.
In Japan, when it comes to dialects other than standard languages, people first think of Kansai. In the eyes of Uramoto Rika, a native of Kyoto, Kansai is more undulating than standard Japanese, a bit like the melody of a song, and sounds more intimate and interesting. Many of Japan's counterparts, "Manga", are spoken in Kansai dialect, which makes Kansai and Shanghainese feel somewhat similar — Kansai has manga, and Shanghai has its own burlesque.
In an interview with Jia Haitao, a researcher of speech and society at Hitotsubashi University in Japan, Uramoto Recalled that when she first visited Shanghai in the 1990s, the city streets and spaces were vastly different from the appearance xiao Hong depicted in "Ma Bole", but she still imagined that she was following in Ma Bole's footsteps, and this experience of walking the city seemed to coincide with the feeling of reading "Blossoms" later. Pu Yuanlihua also translated the short story "The White Horse in the Alley" by Shanghai writer Wang Anyi and The Horse Language by Jin Yucheng. By chance, after reading "Blossoms" published by Harvest, Uramoto-rihana wrote a book review article introducing Kim Woo-cheng and Blossom in the Japanese "Oriental" magazine.
Long before Hayakawa Shobo signed a contract for the publication of the Japanese edition of Blossoms, Uramoto Rika began translating the work in his spare time. She describes that in the past, most of the novels she translated were a protagonist and a main line of plot that continued to advance; "Blossoms" is very different, it is an all-encompassing melting pot, the two main lines go hand in hand, and there are countless characters. Therefore, in the translation process, it is also necessary to rely on the help of various types of professionals, and this process is also like "blossoming" - in the understanding of Puyuanli flowers, "blossoming" means a variety of stories, all kinds of debut characters, which makes people can't help but be funny, sad and happy.
Pu Yuanlihua once said that the translation of "Blossoms" was purely out of liking. She has many friends in Shanghai and Suzhou, and when she is with her Shanghai friends, she will learn some Shanghainese by the way, "For me, Shanghai is the spiritual hometown in my heart." ”
In the end, the Japanese version of "Blossoms" issued by Hayakawa Shobo directly adopted the word "Blossom" in the original title. The words "fan" and "flower" are commonly used in Japanese kanji, but when combined into one word, it is not common. Jia Haitao believes that the japanese translation of "Blossoms" uses the original title, showing the confidence of the translator and the publisher in this work - as a vocabulary unfamiliar to the target language market, the task of giving meaning to this vocabulary is entrusted to the novel itself.
In Jia Haitao's observation, the reason why Japanese publishers are interested in "Blossoms" is inseparable from the theme of "Shanghai". In the novels of contemporary Chinese writers, japanese readers are previously more familiar with the vernacular works of Mo Yan and others, and Japanese readers undoubtedly want to know more about Shanghai, a chinese urban symbol that is very influential in Japan. The advent of the Japanese translation of "Blossoms" is inseparable from the enthusiasm and efforts of the translator Urawa Rika for many years, and also takes advantage of the East Wind of Japanese translation of Chinese literature. It remains to be seen whether the advent of the translation of "Blossoms" can further open up the situation of overseas audiences of Chinese literature. ”