01
Questions to keep thinking about
Wang Tianai is the editor of World Literature at the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a translator of Spanish literature.
Wang Tianai: In 2021, I will continue to work on the literary creation and psychological history of the Spanish generation of intellectuals in the mid-20th century (known historically as the "mid-century generation"). This generation of intellectuals experienced the whole process of Spain's transition from civil war to post-war dictatorship to democracy, experienced different mentality changes under common external historical conditions, and made their own choices on the path of literature and life. In the texts they eventually leave behind (not only in their literary creations, but also in diaries and correspondence between them), we can read the perhaps difficult and weak, perhaps personal narrative of history of a generation that was either spared or coerced in the tide of the times.
I want to know how this generation is affected by the external environment in a special historical context, how to make choices that affect their own lives, and what kind of historical outlook is reflected in such a choice. After all, both the text and the writer are historical beings, and the writing of literary history and literary works itself contains the author's understanding of the course of history. The texts of modern and contemporary literature reflect not only history, but also part of history and reality. Especially when a group of people historically becomes a generation and participates in culture, this intergenerational occurrence is not a purely literary or aesthetic problem, but the formation of a group of intellectuals and their social networks. Such an order is not self-evident, but it is worthy of in-depth study with a "double-eye" literary history narrative as Teacher Hong Zicheng said, so that the historical materials and literary texts themselves form a relationship of reference and dialogue. At this point, in 2021, I read Hong Zicheng's "Materials and Notes", "Interviews and Dialogues", Jiang Tao's "Tower in the Apartment" and other modern literary research works, which gave me great inspiration.
Fan Ye is a teacher and translator in the Department of Western Portuguese and Italian at Peking University.
Fan Ye: Maybe it was by chance (Cortázar would say that there is no accident, only the necessity to be discovered), in the past two years I have translated texts with a strong sense of "formality" and "experimentality" (a Cuban novel, a collection of Chilean poems... ）。 One day at the beginning of this year, looking at the queue in the gymnasium opposite the community to get a vaccine, and I was nestled in the house racking my brains to think about how to translate a pun, my heart inevitably felt weak: What is the point of doing this now? But I can only cheer myself up, maybe at some point there will be a meaning that I can't understand for a while? (There should be bGM here: "Maybe I'll have a trickle of thoughts in my life/A fluke into a river...").
02
Books to watch
Wang Tianai: In fact, it is not a book, but a set of books, edited by Zhang Taozhou and Wang Dongdong, the "Hidden Light of Chinese Language: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Poets", the first series has a total of six volumes, namely a collection of research papers on Zhang Zao, Zhong Ming, Duoduo, Zhu Zhu, Xidu and Wang Xiaoni, and the editors of each volume are scholars who have been deeply involved in the research objects for many years (such as Teacher Yan Lianjun, editor of Zhang Zao Scroll, and Teacher Jing Wendong, editor of Zhong Ming Scroll), and the selected articles basically include the most important commentaries on these contemporary poets. The authors of these articles are almost all scholars and poets at the same time, so the articles are very well written, and their writing and vision have benefited me as a poetry research apprentice like me. Although I am engaged in the translation and research of Spanish poetry, reading the criticism of modern and contemporary Chinese new poetry has always been one of the sources of nourishment for my survival. In particular, the rich peruse of individual poems in this set of books has taught me a lot from the methodological level.
"The Hidden Light of Chinese: A Collection of Studies on Contemporary Chinese Poets", "The Xiangdao of the Late Night: A Collection of Many Studies", edited by Zhang Taozhou and Wang Dongdong, Chinese Publishing House, August 2020.
Fan Ye: On Christmas Eve a hundred years ago, a 28-year-old Chilean poet ended his life in Paris. Known as Chile's first anarchist and feminist, she was once imprisoned by her family and husband as mentally ill. Her name was Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921):
"I went to learn how to endure all my own pain in the pain of others. I'm gone, Anuarí, and I swear that until this moment I'm still looking forward to the resurrection. ...... I don't care about the world and the mediocre scales that measure what I do, and there aren't many people like me who have loved and lived and hurt. ”
Recommend her poetry collection Unspoken Words.
03
Looking forward to the original work
Wang Tianai: Reading At the beginning of this year, Yang Xiao's "Re-Walking: Finding the Southwest United University on Highways, Rivers and Postways" and Yi Jianfeng and Yang Ying's "Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang" read at the end of this year are impressive, and I hope to see more such original works published in the future.
"Re-Walking: Finding the Southwest United Congress on Highways, Rivers and Postways", by Yang Xiao, casting and engraving cultural | Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2021.