Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Song Hao Zhang Jinhua Intern Reporter Yan Kexing
Every year around April 23 (World Book Day), on the day of spring breeze and warmer, a grand event about reading, the Spring Wind Reading Festival, is held in Hangzhou.
Writers, translators and critics from all over the country gathered in Hangzhou to take stock of the high-quality books of the past year and work with readers to unveil a comprehensive and high-quality "Spring Breeze Delight Reading List".
Since 2012, the Spring Breeze Reading List has been awarded for nine sessions. It achieved its original goal and became a unique reading event in the Yangtze River Delta.
Past judges, award-winning writers, and award guests have formed friendships with Chunfeng Yue Reading List and left a story in Hangzhou. The Spring Breeze Reading List connects them with readers and records milestones for the course of literature.
It's spring again, and on the occasion of the 10th Spring Wind Yue Reading List, we visited these old friends and listened to their stories with the Spring Wind Yue Reading List. What expectations do they have for the upcoming 10th Spring Breeze Yue Reading List?
Professor Yuan Xiaoyi
【Character Business Card】
Yuan Xiaoyi: Winner of the 6th Spring Wind Yue Reading "Golden Translator Award" / Professor of East China Normal University
Award-winning work: "Song of Tenderness"
Song of Tenderness [French] by Layla Slimani, translated by Yuan Xiaoyi, Can Culture/Zhejiang People's Publishing House, 2017
Meeting with the translator Yuan Xiaoyi was at the Daxia Bookstore.
After yuan Xiaoyi's translation of "Song of Tenderness" (by Layla Slimani) was published, the "Golden Translator Award" was awarded to her in April 2018. Six months later, she won the Fu Lei Translation and Publication Award for this book.
Daxia Bookstore is located in front of the Campus of North Zhongshan Road of East China Normal University, which is the old campus of Hua normal University, with many old buildings, such as the Qunxian Hall of the former Daxia University. When the bookstore opened, some media said that the bookstore was full of the humanistic spirit of the Centennial Chinese Normal University.
Yuan Xiaoyi, a leading French translator in China, is also a professor at China Normal University and a former dean of the School of Foreign Languages, and she asked us to meet at the bookstore.
Do young people still read French literature?
We talked about the changes in reading for young people today. Do today's young people still read large tomes? Still reading French literature? As a frontline educator, Professor Yuan has her observations.
She recalls being a college student at that time, "reading novels likes to read big", like Goethe's Faust, Stendhal's "The Red and the Black", or Fu Lei's translation of Balzac – this is the most traditional classic. If you like Balzac, read all the books balzac you can find in the library.
British drama "Les Misérables", 2018
But today's young people don't like to read heavy. Even Hugo may not read it, with adapted movies and musicals, young people will contact Hugo in this way, but there may be very few people who read the original book from beginning to end.
There are some changes in the way people accept large works of literature.
At the same time, French literature gradually began to marginalize from its central position. At the level of popular acceptance, It is still British and American literature that is more extensive. Statistics point out that in the Nobel Prize in Literature, in recent decades, English writers accounted for one-third of the writers.
In 2011, the writer Le Clézio at the Shanghai Book Fair.
At the Shanghai Book Fair a few years ago, Nobel laureate Le Clézio came to the scene, but this old friend is still a minority among Chinese readers.
【Spring Breeze Q&A】
Hourly News: Can you tell the story of your encounter with the Spring Breeze Reading Festival?
Yuan Xiaoyi: The award process is quite natural, and most of the judges and the people who won the award are friends, and there is no particularly strong feeling of winning. But what is more interesting is that that year, "Song of Gentleness" was on the Spring Breeze Yue Reading List, and it was also that year that the Fu Lei Translation Award was also awarded to this book.
Plague [French] by Albert Camus, translated by Liu Fang, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2013
At the time, I met the editors of Houlang, who may also have been blown by the spring breeze and had a hot brain, and I promised them to retranslate Camus's Sisyphus Myth, but it dragged on until the new crown epidemic. Camus's Plague became a hit during the pandemic.
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, translated by Yuan Xiaoyi, Pu Rui Culture/Hunan People's Publishing House, 2021
Many of Camus's words can be used as golden sentences, and after I translated the Myth of Sisyphus, I also found that there were many golden sentences.
He once said: "When life is dull, it is time that sustains us." But there are also special moments that we need to sustain time. ”
I send this sentence to Chunfeng Yue to read for the tenth anniversary. Because I think that Chunfeng Yue reads the grand ceremony, she can support time.
Hourly News: Camus's Chinese translation has many golden sentences, what work did the translator do in it?
Translators rarely transgress. Why does Camus have more golden sentences? He often writes philosophical essays, he is not a philosopher in the true sense of the word, but his novels have a certain philosophical meaning in their thinking about life and existence. Therefore, the way he speaks is quite "golden sentence", not the golden sentence I made up.
Hourly News: Can you tell us about the creative process after winning the award?
Yuan Xiaoyi: Recently, there have been few translations, because some other reasons occupy time, and most of the tomes may not be available.
After Song of Tenderness, I translated Slimani's Virgo Ogre Garden.
The Garden of the Ogres, by Layla Slimani, translated by Yuan Xiaoyi, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 2018
More important is Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. After last year, I have relatively more time, so starting this year, some of the things I promised before will be pushed forward.
During the Chinese New Year, I completed a work about Hugo, French Romantic Genius: Hugo (one of a series of Western literature books published by Central China Normal University Press).
At the same time, I am translating a new work by Slimani, "Someone Else's Home Country." Because she is a mixed-race, she traces her own family history, the first of a trilogy of family history, based on her grandmother's experience during the decolonization period in Morocco. It is precisely because I have a major national social science project "Translation and Study of French Literature in Africa", and Slimani happens to be within the scope of this research.
English translation of Someone Else's Home Country, translated by Sam Talor, Faber & Faber Press, 2021.
There is also a long-overdue one: there is a book about French 20th-century literature, "Legends of Words: Eleven Lessons in Modern French Classic Literature" (published in 2019). I also consulted with the publishers for a long time, and they always wanted me to write a second, although it was called two, but it was actually a retrospective, ready to write about the 19th century French classics. If you have time this year, you may also start to do this.
Hourly News: Can you talk about an interested newcomer or a new book?
Yuan Xiaoyi: Because of my work, I don't read many novels and theoretical books.
Last year, I was more impressed by the "Indoctrination: The Ideal of Ancient Greek Culture" published by the East China Normal University Press, which talked about Greek classical mythology, and I read a lot of things.
Another work, which is also related to my research project, Li Anshan's "Modern History of Africa", I think is also a pretty good theoretical work.
Chinese works, there are many rankings every year, and sometimes they are listed in them. In the novel, I think the better is Lin Zhao's "Tidal Chart", I feel that she is quite talented, the narrative is very special, but it is not particularly deliberate.
Sometimes friends will send their own creations, Silent Yin's "Sixty Spring in One Word", writing about the life of Shanghai Lane, I have loved her writing since very early on, and today as always. I personally like her words, more thorough but not particularly desperate.
This article is the original work of Qianjiang Evening News, without permission, it is forbidden to reprint, copy, excerpt, rewrite and carry out network dissemination of all works of copyright use, otherwise this newspaper will follow judicial channels to pursue the legal responsibility of the infringer.