The People's Literature Publishing House recently planned and held a seven-hour live broadcast of "Dialogue: An Inexhaustible Grid Book" to dialogue with oneself, the world, the distant world, and life in the reading of foreign literary classics. The event was broadcast live on nearly 20 mainstream platforms across the network, with Zhang Yueran, Huang Lei, Hongying, Zhi'an, Shi Hang, Dong Qiang, Chen Luyu and other cultural giants helping to expose strongly, and the total number of online views exceeded 5.33 million.
At this event, readers left messages one after another, saying that they had "benefited a lot" from this "literary feast" and from these "literature lessons". Weibo topics such as "The Grid Book in My Memory", "The People's Literature Publishing House Launched the Grid Book", and "The Endless Grid Book" were discussed more than 15 million times, setting off a climax of discussion on the whole network.
The new edition of the Grid Edition publishes 5 series and 147 species
The People's Literature Publishing House's "Series of Masterpieces of Foreign Literature" began in the 1950s, and under the strict requirements of "first-class original works, first-class translators, and first-class translators", it has dedicated valuable spiritual food to generations of readers.
As the first large-scale series of foreign literary classics in New China, the "Foreign Literature Masterpieces Series" embodies the wisdom and painstaking efforts of generations of writers, translators, researchers and editors who have studied in China and the West, and its quality has withstood the test of time, becoming a model for foreign literary masterpieces in the minds of readers, and is nicknamed "grid book" because of its grid-like cover pattern. The old 2000 grid edition came to an end, but it became the darling of the used book market for more than two decades, and many readers struggled to find a book. To this end, the People's Literature Publishing House launched the new edition of the grid book publishing project in 2019.
By 2022, the new edition of grid books has published a total of 5 series and 147 titles, which has caused great repercussions among readers, and many books have been reprinted many times. With the advent of the new version of the grid book series after series, Cao Wenxuan opened a grid book area in his bookcase, so that the grid book occupies the "core position of the bookshelf". On the occasion of the warm spring, the People's Literature Publishing House specially invited heavyweight guests to read novels, read poems, appreciate Beautiful Texts and recite dramas online with the majority of readers, taking genre as the starting point.
Big names gather to talk about novels, poetry, prose dramas
The large-scale live broadcast "Dialogue: The Endless Grid Book" was hosted by Chen Luyu and Shi Hang. Chen Luyu admits that she belongs to the "generation nourished by the grid book". Shi Hang hopes to use this activity to help the whole people read and lead the majority of readers to get close to the famous translations of famous artists.
The seven-hour event is divided into four main sessions. The famous essayist Liu Liangcheng's literature class opened the "Prose: Dialogue with Self" session. Liu Liangcheng believes that "prose is the most popular style" and "a way for us to express our daily life", so it has always been an important part of domestic language education, and this narrative method of "starting from the hometown of the earth and flying to the sky" is the most widely spread in the era of self-media. Zhao Baisheng, a professor at Peking University, Zhou Xiaofeng, a writer and vice chairman of the Beijing Writers Association, shared their favorite prose writers and prose classics, quoting the golden sentences of Montaigne, Bacon, Thoreau, Zweig and other prose masters. Zhou Xiaofeng's Reading of Zweig's "When the Stars of Mankind Shine", Sutter's "Literary Career" read by Zhi'an, and Zhao Baisheng's Thoreau's "Walden Lake" read aloud in English should be in line with Liu Liangcheng's conclusion with beautiful and wise sentences: "Prose is a solemn ritual for our mediocre and scattered lives."
The "Literature Lesson" in the "Novel: Dialogue with the World" session came from the famous novelist Bi Feiyu. He likens writing novels to "making clothes for characters" and defines reading novels as "a dialogue between the reader and the writer of the world constructed by imagination." Famous novelists Liu Zhenyun and Li Er and the new generation of novelists Zhang Yueran built a small "novel world" on the spot, talked about their feelings about writers and books, and recalled several writer-type translators who appeared in the grid book, including Feng Zikai, Ba Jin, Fu Lei, Yang Dai, etc. The three guests also shared their experiences with film and television adaptations of classic literature and improvised footage from the 1970 film Jane Eyre.
Recording the "Literature Lesson" for the "Poetry: Dialogue with distant places" was the famous singer Hu Haiquan. Famous translators Liu Wenfei and Dong Qiang, as well as famous poets Hongying and Zang Di, "poetically inhabited" the scene. Liu Wenfei talked about the problem of classic retranslation according to his personal practice and shared a little 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. The poetry session ended with the much-anticipated Russian, English, French, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese multilingual reading, and liu Wenfei read Tsvetaeva's "I want to recover you", Hongying read Shelley's "Philosophy of Love", Dong Qiang read Baudelaire's "Wine Soul", and Zang Di read Wordsworth's "To the Skylark".
The last link is "Drama: Dialogue with Life". Director and actor Huang Lei brings his experience and love for theater performance to all aspects of drama and theater appreciation in the "Literature Lessons" video. The famous actor Pu Cunxin recalled that under the guidance of his father, chekhov's works in the old grid book began his reading journey and literary journey, and his love for books continues to this day. Pu Cunxin even brought the 1847 British version of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" to the event site to share his experience with everyone. Wen Zheng, a translator of Italian literature, had long longed for the old grid, but was shy in his pocket, and the first book he bought was the Persian Letters. His definition of wealth freedom at the time was that you could buy grid books as you like. Gu Chunfang, a professor at Peking University's School of Arts, read the grid book "Andersen's Fairy Tales" in elementary school, and after starting to study drama, she came into contact with many of the plays in the grid book, and she felt that the grid book "is a classic symbol, it feeds generation after generation, it can be said that it is the breast milk of the literature of generation after generation."
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 the debate is fierce on stage. In a fit of excitement, Pu Cunxin performed a famous excerpt of "Hamlet" on the spot, and also introduced the details of the Sino-Tibetan bilingual version of "Hamlet" that he gave to the director of the Sixth Tibetan Performance Class of the Shanghai Theater Academy.