The reporter learned from the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that Mr. Luo Xinzhang, a retired cadre of the Institute of Foreign Literature and a famous French translator, died in Beijing at 17:13 on February 22, 2022 due to illness at the age of 85.
Mr. Luo Xinzhang was born in 1936 in Shangyu, Zhejiang. He graduated from the Department of Western Languages and Literatures of Peking University in 1957, majoring in French. Since 1963, he has been engaged in the translation of French literature in the magazine "Chinese Literature" of the Bureau of Foreign Languages, and since 1980, he has worked in the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He joined the Chinese Writers Association in 1986. Mr. Luo Xinzhang is the author of papers such as "The Theory of Self-contained Translation in the Mainland", "The "Likeness" and "Equality" of chinese and Foreign Translation Concepts", "The Translation Art of Qian Zhongshu", "Interpretation of "Translation Works", "The Origin of Translation Art", proofreading the fifteen volumes of Fu Lei's Translation Collection, translating "The Story of Lena Fox", "Trisdown and Iser", "Red and Black", "Dinner Under the Chestnut Tree", etc., and editing "Translation Collection".
In terms of literary translation, Mr. Luo Xinzhang was influenced by Fu Lei, Qian Zhongshu and others, and when he was young, he wrote to Mr. Fu Lei for advice on the issue of translation, and also studied Fu Lei's translation with the original text word by word. Mr. Luo Xinzhang summarized the traditional Chinese translation thinking as "case book - seeking faith - god-like - transformation of the realm", and believes that Chinese translation theory is profound and self-contained, and can occupy a place in the world. His translation practice and research have made important contributions to the translation of Chinese foreign literature and the development of translation theory.
We would like to write this article in memory of Mr. Luo Xinzhang.
Luo Xinzhang, a French literary translator and translation theorist, died in Beijing at 5:00 p.m. on February 22, 2022 at the age of 85 due to illness.
In Memory of Luo Xinzhang: Translating as a Career
In Yu Zhongxian's impression, Luo Xinzhang had always been an old gentleman who did not like to talk very much. In his view, Luo Xinzhang is "serious and decent", often talking about the current situation of translation in China at seminars and criticizing various bad phenomena. He still remembers that at the end of the 1990s, the French Literary Research Society held a seminar in Jinggangshan, and he went with Luo Xinzhang and Shi Kangqiang, lived in the same room, and had close contact with Luo Xinzhang. The picture of the three French translators sitting on a tricycle and swimming together will remain in Yu Zhongxian's mind forever and become a beautiful memory.
"In life, Mr. Luo walks quickly, has a good spirit, and likes to take pictures of friends. Bad health is a matter of the past three or five years, especially after the death of his wife. Yu Zhong said first. Luo Xinzhang's wife, Gao Huiqin, who died in 2008, was also an accomplished translator who translated works by Japanese writers such as Yasunari Kawabata and Ryunosuke Wasagawa, and presided over the compilation of the Ten Volumes of Yasunari Kawabata and the Complete Works of Ryunosuke Wasagawa, making important contributions to the translation of Japanese literature in China. Gao Huiqin graduated from the Department of Oriental Languages at Peking University, majored in Japanese, worked with Luo Xinzhang in an international bookstore, and later went to the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to preside over the Japanese Literature Room. Now, Luo Xinzhang has left his wife first, and we can no longer see mr. Zhang's voice and smile.
After decades of suffering, the achievement of "late ripening" life
Luo Xinzhang was born in Shanghai in 1936 and was admitted to peking university at the age of 17, majoring in French in the Department of Spanish. When he graduated in 1957, he was originally arranged to serve as an editor of the People's Literature Publishing House, but he was assigned to the International Bookstore to be responsible for the import of French books. The good old days of dealing with French literature were replaced by trivial matters such as collecting orders and checking invoices. This boring job lasted five years and three months. Seeing that his classmates either stayed at Peking University or went to other universities to develop, Luo Xinzhang issued an exclamation that "the avenue is like a blue sky, I can't go out alone", which is quite helpless.
At the beginning of 1963, with the help of Zhou Erfu, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs and Cultural Affairs Committee, Luo Xinzhang's life took a turn for the better. He was transferred to the editorial department of Chinese Literature, a foreign language publishing house, and engaged in Chinese translation, and his colleagues included Yang Xianyi, Dai Naidi and other translators. Although the new work allowed Luo Xinzhang to get rid of the days of dealing with invoices all day long, and also had the opportunity to translate famous works such as Tao Yuanming, Liu Zongyuan, Ba Jin, Lao She, etc., Luo Xinzhang finally found that no matter how hard he tried, the translated French was still "Chinese French".
While learning to translate from Fu Lei's translation, Luo Xinzhang began a long wait, waiting for 17 years. In 1980, Luo Xinzhang was transferred to the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to engage in literary translation and theoretical research. Mr. Qian Zhongshu once suggested that Luo Xinzhang could "turn over a few books as he liked", which stimulated Luo Xinzhang's interest, and he began to exert his translation talents and embark on the road of French literary translation.
Luo Xinzhang worked for a total of 16 years in the Institute of Foreign Languages until his retirement, bearing fruitful results. Literary translations such as "The Red and the Black", "The Story of the Lena Fox", "Terisdang and Ethan", and "Dinner Under the Chestnut Tree" have also been published; at the same time, many papers such as "The Theory of Translation in the Mainland", "The "Similarity" and "Equality" of the Chinese and Foreign Translation Concepts", "The Translation Art of Qian Zhongshu", and "Interpretation of "Translation"" have also been published, which has had a certain impact on the French literary translation circle.
Luo Xinzhang's translation of "Trisdown and Iser"
Luo Xinzhang's translation of "The Story of Lena Fox"
"Copy" Fu Lei's translation, become "Fu Translation".
As early as during his studies at Peking University, Luo Xinzhang had become interested in translation, which made him and Fu Lei have an indissoluble relationship. The origin was when he read a passage from Roman Roland's John Christophe in a French literature class, Mère et fils (Mother and Son), and luo Xinzhang was impressed by comparing Fu Lei's translation. During the winter vacation of this year, Luo Xinzhang returned to his hometown of Shanghai on vacation, and specially found the first volume of "John Christophe" L'Aube ("Early Morning"). While reading Fu Lei's translation, he lamented that "the translation pen is clever and admirable", and since then he has developed a strong interest in translation.
In 1960, Luo Xinzhang also worked in the International Bookstore. He found a complete collection of john Christophe in French at the Dongdan Market in Beijing, asking for 35 yuan. At that time, Luo Xinzhang's salary was only 56 yuan, and he had to subsidize the family's use. In order to buy this set of rare old books, Luo Xinzhang had to save money for two months. In addition to his boring work, Luo Xinzhang spent all his time transcribing and studying Fu Lei's translation. He had a "stupid way" to copy Fu Lei's translation word for word between the lines of the original French work. According to Luo Xinzhang's own statistics, from 1949 to 1960, Fu Lei published a total of 2.75 million words of translations, and he copied 2.55 million words (the book "John Christophe" alone copied 1.2 million words). The remaining 200,000 words were not copied simply because the lines of the french documents he bought were too narrow to be written, but he also took notes. Through this "stupid method", Luo Xinzhang had a new understanding of translation.
Luo Xinzhang copied Fu Lei's translation by hand
Fu Lei's letter to Luo Xinzhang
In early 1963, Luo Xinzhang summoned up the courage to write to Fu Lei for the first time, asking for advice on translation. To his surprise, Fu Lei quickly wrote back to the juniors. In his letter, Fu Lei seriously pointed out the problems in Luo Xinzhang's translation: Looking at each sentence alone, the translation is correct, but throughout the text, each sentence is independent and not coherent; Fu Lei also put forward the proposition that "the heavy god seems not to be heavy", and said that "the first requirement of translation is to translate the original work into me, so that I can talk about the translation." Luo Xinzhang took this to heart and tried it repeatedly. After four years of study and exploration, he was familiar with Fu Lei's translation techniques.
Li Wenjun, a translator and faulkner research expert, once said with emotion, "He (Luo Xinzhang) is really one of the most willing people in the translation industry I know to work hard." In this regard, Luo Xinzhang was very modest, saying that he "stood on Fu Lei's shoulders and took advantage of it a little." But who knows, just standing on the shoulders of giants, it takes so much effort to exchange for those accurate and elegant translations.
Count the manuscripts and hand over the best translation of The Red and the Black
The Red and the Black is a classic of the French literary hero Stendhal, and before the 1990s, several translations were published. In 1991, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House invited Luo Xinzhang to translate a new version, and Luo Xinzhang, who was more than half a hundred years old at the time, resisted the pressure and resolutely took over the task. He once again showed the hard-working spirit when he was learning to translate: he got up at 4 a.m. every day, translated for three hours, and then went to work at work. At night, before going to bed, I re-examined the translation of the day. In this process, Luo Xinzhang summed up a translation experience: "understanding and then translating", which means "reading the original text, having an understanding of myself, and then translating it out, rather than translating it mechanically according to the dictionary".
The translation of "The Red and the Black" took Luo Xinzhang two years, during which he changed his manuscript several times, and then changed it twice after delivery, both in order to improve the translation. For example, he translates the beginning of "The Mayor Stares at His Wife" at the beginning of "The Red and the Black" and translates it in Fu Lei's penmanship as "Mr. Rena has a calculating look and glances at his wife" (en regardant sa femme d'un air diplomatique), which, if translated literally, becomes "see his wife through the eyes of a diplomat", with no charm at all. Luo Xinzhang jokingly claimed that this translation was "copied" from Fu Lei's translation of Eugenie Grande, and after those years of "copying" Fu Lei's translation, the technique had become familiar.
In an interview with reporters, Yu Zhongxian said that he particularly appreciated Luo Xinzhang's translation in "The Red and the Black", believing that Luo Xinzhang paid attention to the elegance of the words and was a unique candidate for translating 19th-century French literature. He was also impressed by Luo Xinzhang's translation of The Story of the Lena Fox, a collection of French medieval folktales. This is also Luo Xinzhang's own favorite personal translation, because he can "let go and translate" and play some word games.
Luo Xinzhang's translation of The Red and the Black
Luo Xinzhang's translation of The Red and the Black received a lot of praise and was recognized as the best of more than a dozen translations. His classmate and translator Liu Mingjiu said: "I have a vision in my life, I only want to translate "Red and Black", but after learning that he (Luo Xinzhang) translated "Red and Black", I was convinced and broke this idea from then on. Translator Luo Guolin also said that some publishing houses had asked him to retranslate "Red and Black", but he did not accept it, on the grounds that "Luo Xinzhang's translation was first."
Luo Xinzhang used the French Sobre (meaning "simple and unpretentious") to describe the refinement of his translation in his mind, and believed that if there was any success in his translation of The Red and the Black, it was at this point. "After the delivery of the manuscript in February 1993, I spent nearly three months to read the whole text from beginning to end, deleting all the dispensable words in the original translation, and the quality of the translation can be said to rely on this time, of course, from the cost of the manuscript, there is a loss, but the original bloated, cumbersome, clumsy places are gone."
Compilation of "Collection of Translation Theories" to expound "The Translation Theory of the Mainland's Self-Contained System"
Immersed in translation practice for many years, Luo Xinzhang gradually gained a unique understanding of translation theory. Especially in the study of Fu Lei's translations, I am afraid that few people are more professional than him. He first wrote the earliest mainland commentary on Fu Lei's translation, "Reading Fu Lei's Translation with Feelings", which was published in the "Literature and Art Daily" no. 5, 1979. Subsequently, he took the lead in compiling and selecting the collection "Translation Theory Collection", which collected the mainland translation theories. The book collects more than 180 essays on translation from the end of the Han Dynasty to the date of compilation, combs through the history of translation from the Zhou Li and the Book of Rites, to the Han, Wei, Tang, and Song Dynasties, to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, until modern times and after liberation, and includes the translation practices and expositions of important translators such as Zhi Qian, Dao'an, Kumarosh, Yan Fu, Zhu Shenghao, Fu Lei, and Qian Zhongshu. With its rich scale, rich content, and meticulous system, the Collected Works of Translation has become an important selection of contemporary Chinese translation historiography.
The Book of Translation Treatises
Luo Xinzhang's preface to the anthology, "The Mainland's Self-Contained Translation Theory", also became an important translation theory article, and together with a series of papers he subsequently published to study translation, it formed Luo Xinzhang's unique translation theory. The Mainland's Self-Contained Theory of Translation divides Chinese translation theory into three major periods: the translation of Buddhist scriptures since the Han and Tang dynasties, the central theory marked by Yanfu's "faith, da, and ya" in modern times and the May Fourth period, and the argument for "god-likeness" and "transformation" after liberation. Luo Xinzhang believes that China's translation theory system can be boiled down to eight words: case book, seeking faith, god-likeness, and transformation.
Luo Xinzhang once said in an interview that it is best to introduce foreign translation theories in combination with Chinese translation practices and translation traditions. "Translation must first be rigorous, and the writing may as well be relaxed; that is, the words are exhausted and wonderful. Bound and unbound, the original object and the translator's subject are both capitalized and inclusive, and the other and the self have the best of both worlds. He believes that the study of foreign translation theory is not to turn oneself into a Chinese foreign translation theorist, but to promote the modern interpretation of mainland traditional translation theory and develop contemporary translation theory on the mainland.
The book shadow of "The Outline of ancient texts"
In Luo Xinzhang's view, it is naturally crucial to do a good job in foreign translation, but on this basis, the Chinese should also be good enough. To this end, during his lecture in Taiwan after his retirement, Luo Xinzhang wrote a "Outline of Ancient Texts" with interest, which contained 180 ancient texts. In addition to the classic famous texts that must not be selected, some articles with profound ideas and can enhance the personality of translators are also deliberately added. In order to facilitate young readers to understand the ancient Chinese translation ideas, translation papers such as Zhi Qian's "Fa Sentence Sutra Sequence" and Yan Fu's "Heavenly Speech and Translation Examples" were also specially included in it.
Luo Xinzhang once said: "I have neither ambition nor strength, I am a very stupid person." When I was studying, I found that there was a translation of Fu Lei's in the text, and when I saw that it was really clever, I began to be interested in translation. This is naturally a self-effacing word, but it also invisibly warns the younger generations in the translation industry: we must be willing to work stupidly, do not be hasty, and be interest-oriented, step by step, in order to achieve a "late ripening" life.
Resources:
1. "Interview with Mr. Luo Xinzhang", Jin Shenghua, Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao, June 1999
2. "Luo Xinzhang: Enjoying Loneliness and Going to a Place where Life Is Very Deep", Jiang Nan, Beijing News, July 2013
3. "Interview with Translator Luo Xinzhang: Fu Translators and Interpreters, Interpretation and Later Translations", Du Yu, Guangming Daily, December 2016
4. "Literary Translation is the Literary Work of Begs Dexterity and Careful Rhetoric: Remembering literary translator Luo Xinzhang", Wen Yu, Literature and Art Daily, December 2019
(Image from the Internet)