The years I spent in Fudan were really mixed, and my fascination with chemistry in high school mysteriously dissipated, much like the carriage that carried Cinderella to the prom, and just after midnight, it restored the original shape of the pumpkin. The teachers in the chemistry department who taught me organic, inorganic, analytical, and quantum, I don't remember them, and they won't remember me. In order to fill the credits of those elective courses, I studied more seriously than the major. In my junior year, I took public French for two semesters, took all A exams, and the teacher who gave us classes was surnamed Yuan, who had just transferred from the French Department of Nanjing University to Fudan. When I graduated and went to Work in France, Teacher Yuan was also studying in France, and we talked on the phone around Christmas, but we never had the opportunity to meet. It wasn't until last autumn, when Teacher Yuan came to the gallery on Wukang Road to see the exhibition "Memory of Literature", that we were reunited, and in the past twenty years, Teacher Yuan has been the head of the French Department in Fudan.
That day in the pine shade, Teacher Yuan said that she was very happy to see me, and she was really happy to see Mr. Zhou Kexi, who was her idol, and she said that when she first came to Shanghai, she wrote a letter to Mr. Zhou to ask for help, and Mr. Zhou's reply was very thorough, which solved many problems in French translation for her. I am not at all surprised that Teacher Yuan has such admiration and respect for Mr. Zhou, after all, he is a translator who has translated so many French literary masterpieces: "The Little Prince", "Madame Bovary", "The Count of Monte Cristo", "The Three Musketeers", and those volumes of "Tracing the Lost Time". At the end of last year, Mr. Zhou sorted out different versions of all his translations, asked me to retake the book shadows, and I asked my colleagues to go to Mr. Zhou's house to get books, three boxes, stacked together to reach the Two-meter-tall Christmas tree in the gallery.
Mr. Zhou Kexi", poster for the exhibition "After Eighty"
Colleagues in the gallery all said that they couldn't see that Mr. Zhou was almost eighty years old, and I couldn't see it, except for a silver hair, slightly farther away from Shaohua, but not losing fenghua. The smile is indifferent, the temperament is elegant, the eyes are calm, that is a kind of calm after getting used to the cold eyes and hot eyes of others, and understand that there is no need to use cold eyes or hot eyes to see others. The years have left Mr. Zhou with vicissitudes, and even more for Mr. Zhou's wisdom. As a translator, Mr. Zhou's pen is also very "light", not bland, not dull, not in the translation of the main indifference, read profound literary literacy, can not read the deliberate text management, Mr. Zhou said that "literary translation is the process of feeling and expressing feelings", perhaps only translators who have translated those stream-of-consciousness novels will have such a feeling.
Translation is not actually Mr. Zhou's profession, at least not until he is fifty years old. In terms of generations, Mr. Zhou is my "old senior", undergraduate is the Department of Mathematics of Fudan University, took the class of Mr. Su Buqing, a great mathematician, and transferred to the Department of Mathematics of East China Normal University to teach. Mr. Zhou said that when he was young, he loved to read novels, first liked Russian literature, and then became fascinated by French literature, and since then he has buried the desire to read French novels in the original text. In the 1970s, he studied French with a Mr. Lan from shanghai's Chinese College, once a week, for two years. In the early 1980s, the École Normale Supérieure de Paris gave the University a place to study in France, and Mr. Zhou volunteered to do so. In the two years in France, Mr. Zhou studied Riemannian geometry while indulging in the romance, elegance and subtlety of French literature, and I believe that the experience must be very wonderful and pleasant, otherwise Mr. Zhou would not have chosen to share this experience with everyone in the way of translation, and would not have decided to put down mathematics after ten years and began to translate. It's really good that the carriage that carried Mr. Zhou to the prom did not turn back into a pumpkin.
The line changes so thoroughly, it must not be easy to put thirty years ago, and it may seem strange to others, but I believe that these seemingly uncaused things on the surface are somewhat related: mathematics and translation are pursuing precision, pursuing simplicity, pursuing logic, especially French translation, my understanding of this language can only be regarded as crude, but I can appreciate its beauty in addition to its pronunciation (of course, this always varies from place to place and from person to person), but also from the precision and logic of the language itself.
Mr. Zhou may have been the first professor of mathematics to become a professional translator in history, and I know one of the amateur professors of mathematics who translated foreign literary works, Mr. Zhao Yuanren, who was born fifty years before Mr. Zhou, translated Alice in Wonderland, and in the 1920s he taught mathematics, physics, language and music at Tsinghua University. Mr. Zhou also knows music and has translated the "Journey of Discovery" series of books introducing musician Beethoven and opera singer Wagner for the Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House. That set of pocket books has produced a total of more than ninety volumes, hardcover color printing, I began to buy in my twenties, until I was in my early thirties, the book introduced Western history, literature, music, art, it is really eye-opening, remember the introduction of the sculptor Rodin The book is also translated by Mr. Zhou, multi-talented people are often versatile.
A photocopy of the lecture notes used by Mr. Zhou Kexi when teaching mathematics at East China Normal University
After teaching mathematics for nearly thirty years and doing translation for thirty years, Mr. Zhou said that he would want to be a little more leisurely in the future, and it would be good to write and write at home. In the translators who were a few generations earlier than Mr. Zhou, the brush characters were written a lot better, Lin Yutang, Liang Shiqiu, and Shi Jingcun; I only remember Su Buqing, who could write brush characters in mathematics, and the name of the middle school I read in Hangzhou was written by Mr. Su, and Mr. Zhou inherited the mantle of the old school scholars, which was the afterglow of Wuyi Alley. At last year's exhibition, I asked Lu Gongzi to accompany Mr. Zhou's excerpts of "The Little Prince", Mr. Zhou saw Lu Gongzi's illustrations and praised them, and said that he also wanted to try, and a few days later, Mr. Zhou's drawings came on his mobile phone, also in The West, the pen is expressive, that is the new moon in the French Concession. Mr. Zhou often told me that he did not smoke or drink, afraid that I thought he was boring, I really did not think, every time I thought of Mr. Zhou in the Dragon Gate Array to persuade Lu Gongzi to try the half of the fat on the garlic white meat, I think he is very interesting. In fact, people as well-versed as Mr. Zhou will certainly not be bored, but the afterglow or the new moon, when you see it, it is inevitable to look back, the place of sight has always been illuminated, to be able to have Mr. Zhou's skills, to be able to "change careers" like him so freely, I would rather smoke a few less cigarettes, drink a few glasses of wine, too worth it!
Excerpt from Zhou Kexi's "In Search of Lost Time", Volume II (Under the Shadow of a Girl's Flower), 65x25cm, Sprinkled with Gold Wax Notes, 2021
Zhou Kexilu Yang Dai's translation of Lander's poem "Life and Death", 34x69cm, Sprinkled Gold Wax Notes, 2021
Zhou Kexi recorded Verlaine's "Song of Autumn", 30x16cmx2, hard pen on paper, 2021