According to the School of European Languages and Cultures of Beijing University of Foreign Chinese, Polish translator Mr. Yi Lijun died in Beijing at 4:35 p.m. on February 7, 2022 at the age of 87 due to illness.
Since 1962, Yi Lijun has been teaching at the Department of Eastern European Languages of the Beijing Institute of Foreign Chinese (now the European Institute of Languages and Cultures), and has translated a lot of books in her lifetime, and she has introduced and translated many works of Polish masters of the 20th century with the magazine World Literature, including poems "The Long Poems of Adam Mitskevich", "The Poetry of Che Milosz", "Selected Poems of You Duwym", "Selected Poems of Vy Simbolska", the short and medium stories "My Daughter" of Ta Ruzhević, "In the Diplomatic Representative Office", and ya Ivaszekiewicz's "Chopin's Old Garden" He is also the author of the monograph "History of Polish Post-War Literature". On November 19, 2018, Professor Yi Lijun won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Chinese Translation Culture.
A mourning message sent by the official microblog of the Polish Embassy in Beijing on February 8 said, "Her fall is a huge loss to the Polish-Chinese translation community and the literary community." We will always remember Professor Yi's warm, optimistic, rigorous and straightforward attitude towards life and her outstanding contribution throughout her life. ”
As one of the first translators to recommend Eastern European writers, she has cultivated many young translators in the Chinese translation community, and she is also the first translator to translate the works of the 2018 Nobel Prize writer Tokarczuk. The editor-in-chief of World Literature and a scholar of Eastern European literature happily recalled that when she studied in the Department of Eastern European Languages of the Beijing Chinese College in the 1980s, most of the teachers in the department were engaged in language teaching, Yi Lijun was one of the few teachers engaged in literature teaching and translation, and also published many translations. The study of Romania and other small languages has been sitting on the cold bench for a while, but Mr. Yi, the older generation of scholars, are willing to go all the way to the end, and they have given me a kind of inner encouragement. The extraordinary will and perseverance of the predecessors, their attitude towards translation is worth learning and inheriting. ”
Li Yinan, the translator of "The Collection of Grotesque Stories", the director of the Polish Language Teaching and Research Department of the University of Foreign Chinese in Beijing and a student of Yi Lijun, said in a previous dialogue, "Professor Yi is both my graduate supervisor and my life mentor. Under the influence of Mr. Yi, I embarked on the road of loving Polish literature, and Mr. Yi's lifelong academic pursuit of Polish literature translation and research has always influenced and inspired me. ”
Through the following translation of "Taikoo and Other Times", we can feel the motivation of the quiet spiritual home and literary roots of Taikoo in the novel, and also implicitly coincide with the academic life of translator Yi Lijun, in order to commemorate the long journey of such a cultural old man who has not been engaged in pen cultivation and works.
(This article is reproduced from the public account "Literature Newspaper", and the following is from the translation of "Taikoo and Other Times")
Yi Lijun in the 2020 "Grotesque Story Collection" listing recommendation video
/ Preface to the Translation of Taikoo and Other Time /
A concrete and illusory symphonic poem of existence
Olga Tokarczuk was a shining star in polish literature in the 1990s. She was born on January 29, 1962, in Sülekhov, near the famous city of Green Mountain in western Poland. Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Warsaw in 1985. From 1985 to 1986 he lived in Wroclaw and, from 1986, moved to the southwestern border city of Wałbrzhych, where he worked at the mental health counseling clinic and was also the editor of the psychological journal Personality.
In 1987, she entered the literary world with her poetry collection "The City in the Mirror". Since then, he has published poems and short stories in newspapers and periodicals such as Radar, Literary Life, Oder River, Border District, New Trends, Cultural Times, and Universal Weekly.
In 1993, he published the novel "The Travels of the Characters in the Book", and in 1994 he won the Polish Book Publishers Association Award. In 1995, he published the novel E.E. The following year, she published the novel "Taikoo and Other Times", which was widely praised by Polish critics, and in 1997 she was awarded the "Nike Prize", the authoritative literary award in Poland, and the Kosichelski Foundation Prize for Prose Literature, thus establishing her remarkable position in the Polish literary scene.
The first two translations were co-translated by Yi Lijun and Mr. Yuan Hanrong
In the same year, she gave up her public office and concentrated on literary creation, publishing the short story collection "The Cupboard" (1997) and the novel "The House by Day, the House at Night" (1998), for which she again won the "Nike Prize" in 1999.
Since the mid-1990s, she has settled in the countryside not far from Wałbrzhyh, becoming a watchman for nostalgia and folklore, but not isolated. She is a pleasure to socialize with people and prefers to travel. The success of the writer so far is not a criticism hype or a lucky coincidence, but because of the various cultures she has been influenced by, formal and systematic psychological education, and a broad and rich life experience. All of this laid a solid foundation for her creation, allowing her talents to be fully utilized.
Tokarczuk delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
In the 1990s, many changes took place in the Polish literary scene. The obvious distinction between official literature and opposition literature below no longer exists. Common literary themes of the past, such as patriotism, heroism, and the spirit of rebellion, were once a vivid part of Polish social consciousness.
With the change of system, the above themes have weakened. In the 1970s and 1980s, the primary condition for the independence of writers was the courage to maintain criticism, the courage to speak the truth, the courage to expose the alienity of the regime and the shortcomings of totalitarian rule, and the courage to expose the dark side of social life.
This critical spirit demonstrates a condensed Polish character, acting as a protective armor against alienity. But while this Polishness condenses the symbolic meaning of the Polish nation's love of freedom and dare to resist power, it also prevents the Poles in the work from becoming flesh and blood, with seven passions and six desires.
Under the influence of the ideological struggles of the Cold War, this critical spirit was inevitably tinged with factional overtones, and the simplistic standard of values made some literature that was considered noble, but not necessarily outstanding.
The younger generation of writers dilutes history, they no longer need to put on a black veil for the unfortunate fate of the country, and they do not engage in literary creation with the same serious attitude as the previous generation of writers, and pursue "literature to carry the road" and "shock effect".
They have a more relaxed and free mentality, and regard literary creation as a pleasure for the soul, not only allowing themselves to enjoy the pleasure in the process of making up stories, but also allowing readers to accept it effortlessly and easily.
They disdained the task of liquidating the wrongdoers in polish reality for nearly half a century after the war. Moreover, in the past underground publications, liquidation literature has been full of sweat, and in their view, repetition inevitably means the poverty of thought and art.
Therefore, when they look back on the past, they also replace the angry accusations with a humorous and ridiculous tone. They want to expand their horizons and forge new creative themes. The object of their interest is shifted from the "big motherland" to the "small motherland"—that is, the homeland, from the "big society" to the "small society"—that is, the family, from which they explore the novel, ordinary, but also dramatic and lasting values of social life.
They are good at constructing mysterious worlds in their works, and while summoning gods and ghosts, they also create their own myths. Their works are often a mixture of real life and legends, epics and myths from various sources.
They are free to use myths and folklore as they please to express all the life experiences they want to show—childhood, maturity, marriage, old age, illness and death. They deliberately conceived of a world full of whimsy and in opposition to contemporary material civilization.
Such novels often depict mysterious kingdoms formed by idealizing childhood memories, or mysterious kingdoms in the stories told by the author's old grandfathers. The space in the novel—very different from today's barren, polluted land and the hustle and bustle of the city, or the reinforced concrete forests of the metropolis—flows through a breath of life, a fusion of the life realm of man and heaven and earth.
Each land is full of meaning, smiling at its own inhabitants. It is wonderful and makes people and nature live in harmony. Its beauty is very concrete, but also teaches people to deal with the universe, to explore the meaning of life and the mystery of the existence of all things in the world, just like giving people a magical prism, through which they can see through the heavens, see God, and see eternity.
Olga Tokarczuk's novel "Ancient times and Other Times" is one of the most representative works. Some of the writing changes mentioned above are specifically reflected in this novel. This work is both a complete realist novel and a poetic fairy tale, a realist novel that combines the connotations of mysticism.
The fictional world in the novel by the writer is called Taikoo. It is an ordinary Polish village on the edge of a forest, far from a big city. The author tells the story of this village with lyrical brushstrokes, focusing on the changes in the fate of several families and generations.
The novel uses humane feelings to mix the faces of sentient beings in remote villages, creating a vivid and vivid daily survival landscape for readers. A group of characters of different personalities, different ages, and different family backgrounds, living and crying in the ancient world, they bear the fiddling of fate, the troubles of life, old age, illness and death, and the tempering of the catastrophe of war, and live intuitively and authentically in the Yongdao of life.
Their joys and sorrows are very direct, their family entanglements are very emotional, and the way they pursue happiness or ignite desires exudes a primitive atmosphere, which is a natural portrayal of the polish people's food life. Obviously, the author is ingesting the natural ecological picture of the survival of rural residents that she is very familiar with, but it is not simply a naturalistic reproduction.
The author strives to go deep into the inner world of the characters and grasp their true disposition, not to bluntly deny the characters, praise and denigrate right and wrong, but to show the various forms of life in an eclectic way, or the beauty and ugliness, or the mixture of good and evil, or the combination of gain and loss, or wisdom and mutilation twins, all of which are mutually exclusive and interesting in the process of continuous development and change.
The realistic pictures and mythological meanings in the novel complement each other perfectly. Swire, though small, contains everything it needs to be a complete world. Swire is not only a backward village somewhere in Poland, but also an enclave in the universe "at the center of the universe", or arguably an enclave of the universe that has existed since time immemorial.
It is the reproduction of the kingdom of heaven—although it is a heavenly kingdom that has changed its taste, where the order of human existence directly borders nature and the supernatural order, where it is a vibrant organism composed of people and animals and plants, and it is a symbol of the cycle of life and death and endless circulation of all things in the universe.
Swire is both a spatial concept and a time concept at the same time. Taikoo is the ancestor of time, and it contains the time of all people, animals and plants, even the time of the god who is super-time, the time of ghosts and monsters, and the time of daily objects. There are as many kinds of time as there are. Countless moments of individual time, as short as a moment, merge here into a powerful, eternal rhythm of life.
Ancient time consists of a three-layered structure: the time of man, the time of nature (which also includes the time of various products of man's consciousness and imagination (such as the time of the drowning ghost Prushchi and the time of the Obaizhi who became a beautiful man and the wheat ear), and the time of God.
These three layers of temporal structure interweave all the images mentioned by the narrator, all the forms of existence of reality and non-reality, completely and evenly, and together constitute a symphonic poem of existence that is both concrete and illusory. Ancient time, like the time of the universe, has no beginning or end, but is constantly changing new forms, from formation to decomposition, from decomposition to formation, from birth to extinction, from extinction to birth, endless.
As a concrete ordinary village, Swire is a mysterious country far away from the hustle and bustle of ancient, primitive, harmonious coexistence between man and nature, where people who thrive and live in almost isolation have stuck to their own unique traditions, their own customs, their own beliefs, and their own standards for distinguishing between good and evil since ancient times. In their imagination, there is an invisible boundary that is an insurmountable obstacle to the outside world, and the vast world beyond this boundary is only a vague and illusory dream for them. For them, it is a natural logic that Taikoo is at the center of the universe.
The symbolism of the ancients is that people are watching over a mysterious kingdom that they regard as the center of the universe in the depths of their minds. In a world of rapid change, historical catastrophe, mass migration and shifting borders, people often long for some kind of stable corner, a spiritual home that is quiet enough to resist the chaos of omnipresence.
Olga Tokarczuk, in response to a question from a reporter from the Polish "Political Weekly", said that she seemed to have written the novel out of a desire to find her roots, out of an attempt to find her own source, her own roots, so that she could anchor in reality. It was a way for her to find her place in history.
Taikoo seems to include the eight-tiered world created by God, in which all living things are consciously or unconsciously involved. It has happened many things that can only happen in heaven, and it has an angel guarding each of its four borders, southeast, northwest and southeast.
The surnames of the Taikoo people also have symbolic meanings: Bosky means "God's", Nebezki means "heavenly", Seraphin means "six-winged angel", and Hirubin means "God's guardian angel". However, whether they are the holy family of heaven or the angels who have fallen into the dust, they have not been able to transcend history, their lives have left a deep mark of the times, and their fate is as tragic as the fate of people in other parts of the world, but the people of taikoo have almost endured their misfortunes with the calm mentality of heaven and the spirit of perseverance and indifference.
The writer examines her characters in the context of history, and firmly grasps the "imprint of the times" and "historical setbacks" through the encounters of people living in the ancient times. The historical process from the First World War to the 1980s, although it is as lightly as possible in the novel, it runs through the work and affects the fate of the characters in the novel in a cruel and ruthless way.
The angels guarding the four-sided border of the ancient world failed to protect this earthly Garden of Eden from the chaos of the times. Who is the master of God, time, man and angels is probably the only way to find the answer in the labyrinth of the game that knows the entire past and future history of the world.
As a novel, "Taikoo and Other Time" is not large, but it has the characteristics that any good novel must have, such as vivid characters, fluent and personalized language, and rapidly developing plots. The works are concise and precise, but there is often no lack of poetic descriptions that bring the reader into a wonderful world, and the playfulness and wit, ridicule and humor, simplicity and spirituality that can be seen everywhere between the lines often amaze the reader.
Many myths, legends and even biblical allusions seem to be the author's hand, but they are used just right, which not only enriches the character image, but also renders the environmental atmosphere, so that the whole work has a strong mythological color, shrouded in an intriguing mysterious atmosphere of both virtual and real, true and illusory.
Those metaphors, which are both solemn and harmonious, contain the writer's concern and anxiety about the state of human existence today, and contain a certain uneasiness that can be called both metaphysics and existentialism. For all kinds of ups and downs of life, the characters in the article do not have the emotional outbreak of great joy and great sorrow, some are just a kind of affectionate warmth and lingering faint sorrow, and some are a kind of homesickness that is constantly cut.
The strong impression left by the whole work is its unity, the high unity of content and form, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and culture, philosophy and daily life, change and repetition, macroscopic thinking and microscopic thinking, individual subconscious and collective subconscious.
There is no world that exists independently of man's consciousness, nor is there consciousness divorced from nature and the eternal rhythm of existence. Therefore, it can be said that although this work is a small production, it shows great wisdom and great skill. Lightness contains thickness, simplicity contains complexity, tranquility pulsates with power, and ordinary is full of poetry. After reading it carefully, it is evocative.