The People's Literature Publishing House's "Series of Masterpieces of Foreign Literature" began to be published in the late 1950s, and until the beginning of this century, the scale of the entire series of books reached 145, which was the first large-scale series of books in New China to systematically introduce foreign literary works, representing the highest level of Foreign Literature Research, Translation and Publishing in China at that time. It is also known as the "grid book" because of its grid-like cover pattern. In 2000, the publication process of the old grid book came to an end, but the scarce varieties of them were difficult to find and became the darling of the used book market. The People's Literature Publishing House launched the new edition of the grid book publishing project in 2019. By 2022, a total of 5 series and 147 titles of the new grid book will be published, many of which have been reprinted many times.
On the 22nd, the People's Literature Publishing House held a seven-hour live broadcast of "Dialogue: Endless Grid Book". The seven-hour live event "Dialogue: The Endless Grid Book" was hosted by Chen Luyu and Shi Hang.
Famous artists talk about the various forms of expression of literature
February 22 marks the birthday of the philosopher Schopenhauer and the death anniversary of the writer Zweig. At the event site, two videos were also used to pay tribute to these two sages, Zhou Xiaofeng read Zweig's "When the Stars of Mankind Shine", Sutter's "Writing Career" read by Zhi'an, and Zhao Baisheng read Thoreau's "Walden Lake" in English.
Liu Liangcheng, who has worked tirelessly in the field of prose, believes that "prose is the most popular style", "a way of our daily expression, a solemn ritual of our mediocre and scattered life", so it has always been an important part of domestic language education, and this narrative mode of "starting from the hometown of the earth and flying to the sky" is the most widely spread in the era of self-media. The prose proposed by Liu Liangcheng is impressively "desperate for life".
The famous novelist Bi Feiyu likened writing novels to "making clothes for characters" and defined reading novels as "a dialogue between readers and writers constructing a world with imagination". Famous novelists Liu Zhenyun, Li Er and the new generation of novelists Zhang Yueran built a small "novel world" on the spot, sharing their own feelings about writers and books, and recalling several writer-type translators who appeared in the grid book, including Feng Zikai, Ba Jin, Fu Lei, Yang Dai, etc.
In 1958, when the Central Propaganda Department instructed the Editorial Board of the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to compile three sets of books - "Marxist Literary and Art Theory Series", "Foreign Classical Literary and Art Theory Series" and "Foreign Classical Literature and Art Masterpiece Series", among the more than thirty writers and scholars organized at that time, Zhu Guangqian, Feng Zhi, Ge Baoquan, Ye Shuifu and so on were listed.
Film and television is also another expression of literature, and many of Liu Zhenyun's works have also been put on the screen. Liu Zhenyun, Li Er and Zhang Yueran also shared their experiences in film and television adaptations of classic literature and improvised the voice of clips from the 1970 film Jane Eyre.
What do foreign literary classics inspire us?
Professor Liu Wenfei, a scholar of Russian literature, has a special status in the new edition of the Grid Edition, as he is both a member of the new Editorial Board and a translator who has translated all of Pushkin's poems, becoming the preface author and translator of more than a dozen poems in the Grid Edition of Pushkin's Selected Poems, as well as the translator of the Selected Poems of Tsvetaeva. He talked about the problem of classical retranslation according to his personal practice and shared his experience in the translation of poetry.
Dong Qiang, chairman of the Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award, has studied novels under Kundera, and has translated a large number of art history works and many French modern and contemporary poems, and his narration revolves around the relationship between foreign poetry and novels and art, and talks about the significance of the Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award. In the on-site reading session, Liu Wenfei read Tsvetaeva's "I want to recover you", Hongying read Shelley's "Philosophy of Love", Dong Qiang read Baudelaire's "Wine Soul", Zang Di read Wordsworth's "To the Lark", and Xu Jinlong read "Selected Manyo Collections" through video, Xue Qingguo read Gibran's "Earth God", and Zhao Zhenjiang read Garcia Lorca's "Poet Asks Couples to Write to Him".
The famous actor Pu Cunxin is one of the actors who have starred in shakespeare plays in China and the actor who has performed the most Works of Chekhov, so he was invited to the event. He recalls that under the guidance of his father, Chekhov's works began his journey of reading and literature, and his love of books continues to this day. Pu Cunxin came to the event with the 1847 British version of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare", and he introduced that his father, as a professional actor, had starred in the Russian drama master Ya Ostrovsky's "A Thousand Worries of the Wise Man, There Will Be a Mistake". Wen Zheng, an Italian literature translator at The University of Foreign Chinese in Beijing, said that the first grid book he bought was "Persian Letters", and Gu Chunfang, a professor at Peking University's School of Art, read the grid book "Andersen's Fairy Tales" in elementary school, and began to study drama and came into contact with many of the plays in the grid book.
Regarding the famous "to be or not to be" sentence in Hamlet, and about which golden sentence in Hamlet is, different people have different opinions on how to read it and how to translate it, and everyone is hotly debated. Pu Cunxin performed a famous excerpt of "Hamlet" on the spot, introducing the details of the Sino-Tibetan bilingual version of "Hamlet" that he gave to the director of the Sixth Tibetan Acting Class of the Shanghai Theater Academy. The conversation then shifted to women's issues in the play. Professor Wen Zheng and Gu Chunfang interpreted The fate of Nala in Ibsen's classic play "Doll's House" from different perspectives, and explored whether the fate of women can create a "miracle within a miracle". Pu Cunxin summarizes the theme of all cao yu's plays into one word: "exodus", and cao yu expresses his dissatisfaction with reality and his desire to change reality through the inner motivation of all characters who are eager to leave. Whether it is Ibsen, Shakespeare or Chekhov, their plays are the "rich mine" of "problem plays". When talking about the film and television version of "Jane Eyre", Pu Cunxin shared his personal real experience, a very important point in the performance is the beauty of the language, the poetry of the language, and the philosophy of the language, so he himself is actually "creeping in front of the text". Yangzi Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Huang Yanwen