Siegfried Lenz' masterpiece "The Youth and the Sea of Silence", known as one of the "Three Great Masters of German Literature after the War", was first translated and published in mainland China, and was published in January 2022 by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. KEY- Can Be Culturally Launched, with a precious interview with Lenz and a detailed chronology at the end of the book. In a melancholy tone of remembrance, the book tells the story of a sensitive and melancholy teenager struggling to get out of his trauma, and interprets the introverted affection of Lenz to the extreme. As former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said of Lenz: "It is the epitome of the nation of our time." Anyone who wants to know about Germany should read his book. And whoever wants to know About Lenz can start with This Book of Youth and the Sea of Silence.
The Boy and the Sea of Silence
By Siegfried Lenz
Translated by Ye Huifang
Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House· KEY- can be culturally published
Great German writers who influenced Mo Yan and Yu Hua
Mo Yan once said: "Grasse and Lentz, their attraction to me is even greater than the attraction of Germany to me, if I can meet them, I think it will become my grand festival." And Yu Hua also told an interesting story about "stealing books": he borrowed a copy of Lenz's "German Lesson" from the library, because he did not want to lose it after reading it, he lied that he had lost the book, and paid a fine of three times the price of the book, so that he could always take it with him. After the film of the same name of "German Lessons" aired, Lenz was known to more Chinese readers, but it was not enough to know the legendary writer who was more loved by the German people than Heinrich Burr and Günter Glass, two Nobel laureates in literature.
Lenz was born on 17 March 1926 in Luc City (present-day Ełk, Poland) in the Masurian region of East Prussia, to a family of customs officials. In 1943 he was drafted into the German Navy and served on the armored ship General Scheer. After the ship was bombed by the RAF, he was stationed in Denmark with his troops. On the eve of Germany's surrender in World War II, Lenz fled his troops and was captured by the British, becoming an interpreter for the Prisoner of War Repatriation Committee. In 1945 he was repatriated to Germany to study philosophy, English language and literature and literature at the University of Hamburg. In 1951, the young Lenz published his first novel, "There are Goshawks in the Air", which caused a sensation in the German literary scene, and the book won the René Schiller Prize in 1952 and the Lessing Prize in Hamburg in 1953 as "a unique symbol of the persecuted people of our time", and Lenz became a professional writer ever since. In 1955, After Lenz's first collection of short stories, My Little Village Is So Sentimental: The Story of Masuria, was published, 1.6 million copies were sold that year. Germany's "Pope of Literature" Marcol Lech-Lanski commented that he was "both a natural sprinter and a proven long-distance runner".
Siegfried Lenz
Lenz has achieved astonishing success in a variety of literary genres, with his works translated into 22 languages, sold more than 25 million copies, and adapted several works into films. He has also received more than thirty major literary awards, including the Goethe Medal of Gold, the Thomas Mann Prize for Literature, and the Lessing Prize. (He jokingly calls his most important medal "Honorary Administrator of the Ulster Locks Administrators Association.") "The Boy and the Sea of Silence" is a must-read for German high school students, and the 2013 film of the same name won three international awards, including the Günter Straker Television Award.
Professor Luo Wei of Peking University summed up Lenz's creative journey in life: "The basic themes that run through All of Lenz's works are: experiencing unfreedom, being involved in guilt and persecution, experiencing loneliness and incompetence. His early works focused on confronting Hitler's dictatorship and its aftermath, while his later works focused on human survival and morality. "The Boy and the Sea of Silence is a masterpiece of Lenz's mature period, and in this book he touches on issues with a strong universality, which can cross the times and borders and reach the reader's heart.
Stills from the movie of the same name
A book of memories, a book of fetishes
The Boy and the Sea of Silence is a novel by Lenz written in 1999, the original German translation should be "Ana's Relic", and the translated title Chinese highlights the characteristics of marine novels. The novel tells the story of a 12-year-old boy Ana in calm, restrained and sentimental words, showing the inner struggle and pain of a sensitive and delicate boy.
The novel is told in the first person that "I" am Hans, the eldest son of Ana's foster family, and although he and Ana have only been together for two short years, they have developed a deep friendship between brothers and friends. The story jumps between memory and reality, opening a month after Ana's death, and Hans is caught in memories while sorting out his belongings. As the memories unfolded, Hans became more and more into Ana's inner world.
Lenz said in the interview: "Narrative is as important to me as learning how to live. To give yourself a clear understanding of this strange and strange life, narrative is a kind of self-liberation. Narration is a better way to understand! Storytelling provides me with an opportunity to have a clearer understanding of certain troubles, certain experiences. My purpose is not to liquidate, but to be able to see through. "Many people and things are lost in time, while others shine because of the distance of time. This is the light of silence, the unspoken words no longer need to be said, all misunderstandings have disappeared, and finally what remains is the unconcealed sincerity of the bland narrative, and the long dull pain hidden in the heart. This is both the worldly heart of Lentz's pen and the imprint he left on the history of literature.
Excerpts:
Magic knots
All that Ana knew about the calm, rugged Karuk was all I told him. One evening, we looked out the window at a desolate shipbreaking yard and suddenly saw the bright light of a flashlight flickering, and the highlights crossed the bottom of the ship from somewhere in the shipbreaking yard to the lifeboats facing the sky, through the forge to the factory. I said, it was Kaluk, the guard hired by my father, and he was starting to patrol the field again. I told Anna all this, and that night I told him that Kaluk had been in jail for several years, that he had come straight to us after he had been released, and that after a long night of talking with his father, he was hired as a guard. As for the rest, I didn't say much, and perhaps I also implied that Karuk was talking to my father alone.
The door to Kaluk's living room and studio was open, and a half-tamed wildcat sat on the threshold waiting to be fed by its owner. Ana stood up and tried to call the cat over, but she hid behind a rotten sampan. Ana hesitated, as if he had found something in Kaluk's hut, and without Asking For Karuk's permission, he went straight inside. I'm sure Kaluk will definitely call him out, and he'll make gestures to let Ana know that there's nothing to look at inside. But to my surprise, Karuk finished the weaving at hand, put the finished product on a chair, and then calmly walked to Ana. They didn't come out immediately, but stayed inside for a long time, longer than I expected, and I couldn't imagine that they hadn't said anything for so long. In the meantime they appeared by the window, and Kaluk picked up something that looked like a colored rag. As soon as I looked, I knew that Karuk was presenting his efforts to Ana by recreating the ancient knotted rope script and incorporating it into the weave and presenting it to the world.
He also once showed me the results of his painstaking research. It was a thunderstorm day, and I was sheltering from the rain in his cabin, and he beckoned me to go into the house. There was only one ornament on his wall, a diagram of a commonly used nautical knotted rope. A taut rope was nailed to a chest-high wall, and the rope was hung with a colored cloth of the same size, at different distances, each tied with knots, and some even tied a string of knots. In addition, some of the cloth was also tied with glass beads or faded shells. He allowed me to touch the cloth, but when I tried to remove one from the rope, he made an impermissible movement. On his workbench were small pieces of plywood and bundles of waxed ropes, which were used to weave boat knots on small decorative boards and then sold in the Puno shop. I know that Kaluk is trying to recreate the Peruvian knotted rope script, which used to be a complete set of communication tools. However, this is not what he told me, but what my father told me. He didn't explain anything, just asked me to look with my eyes, and when the time came, he told me with his movements that the rain had stopped outside. But he didn't say he would welcome me again.
Ana never came out, and I can imagine that with someone as experienced as Kaluk, there are many things worth seeing and hearing. After a while, the cat returned, looking inside with an encouraged look, standing on the threshold, listening carefully, and then stepping into the house, sitting cross-legged and waiting, as if to prove its patience. The longer I waited, the more uneasy I felt. My fear came inexplicably, and I even wanted to go near Kaluk's hut and go to the window. It was getting dark, and the two of them finally came out. Ana had something in his hand, and he kept looking at it and murmuring goodbye. Instead of the small plywood that Karuk had given him earlier—a gift he had received at Easter—he was holding, he was holding a gray cloth that resembled leather. As soon as he came out, he couldn't wait for me to see: "Look, Hans, you see what I have, you must not guess!" ”
You're so excited, it's incredible, you didn't notice my surprise at all. You hand me the cloth and gently touch the unique knot fixed to it, and you want to tell me that it is a knot with magic, but this is what Karuk told you: as far as he knew, these magic knots were bought from the saints by sailors in the north before, and it was said that the knots hid the wind in them, and it was said that they could also release the wind tied inside the knots. But Kaluk didn't know what he had bought.
Ana's surprise with the gift itself was far greater than the knot magic described by Karuk. He repeatedly brought the cloth to the light and touched it against the knot, and his curiosity made him unable to idle for a moment. It seems that he cherished this cloth and had to find a place for it to be well preserved--sure only the triangular cabinet with the passbook could be selected. He opened the window and held out his water-stained index finger into the air; he stared at the water of the tributary, the towering crane lights silently reflected in the water; he bent outward, letting a note fall, and watched it fly slowly into the darkness. I knew what he was trying to do, and I was right. He was immersed in the silent twilight of the windless silence, and after a while he sat down beside me and looked at me with a request. "Do you want to try it?" He whispered, "We don't have to take the magic knot completely apart, just a little, a little bit." I asked, "What if there really is a wind?" Ana replied, "Then tie the knot tightly at once." "Well, I'm okay with that!"
The knot was hard to untie, and we couldn't use our fingers, so we had to go get my pushpins to help. I carefully inserted the tip of the sharp iron nail into the knotted place, exerted force, and slowly loosened it. By this time Ana was already leaning against the window, full of anticipation. Suddenly he shouted, "Come on, Hans, the lights under the crane!" You see, it's moving, it's swinging gently. "I walked up to him and he grabbed my hand and I could feel his surprise." You see! He asked me to pay attention to the chandelier on the surface of the water, "Did you see the little waves?" He took the cloth and tried to see how far I had untied the knot, measured the extent to which I had loosened it, and then whispered, "Yes, Hans, there is really wind hidden in this magic knot, and we have released a small part." Then he looked up and asked, "You saw it too, didn't you?" "I don't dare let him down, at least not at this time. It was the first time I had lied to him. I confirmed to him that I had also seen the results of the wind's release. I said, "You have to put it away." "I also advise him not to let the winds go, especially when Russ and Vicker are there. I confess that I just grudgingly accepted his fantasies and everything he felt at the time, which was the part that I couldn't touch and couldn't get in. After he put the cloth away, he walked back to the window. I asked him, is there a return to calm in the air and in the water? He said: "Now everything is still. ”
Author: Zhou Si
Editor: Zhou Yiqian