No.10
A History of the Children of the West: From Antiquity to the 17th Century
(Italian) Aigle Becky / (French) Dominique Giulia / Editor Shen Huaming / Translation
The Commercial Press January 2016
No serious historical record focuses on children, which is the challenge and fun of studying children's history today: researchers must pay attention to things that are quite popular, such as educational institutions, children's literature, nursery rhymes, and so on. The changing times are, of course, the key clues to this thick work: after 1900, it was a "century of children", and children were no longer seen as adult laborers to grow up, but as a human group that needed to be cared for and protected in the name of a golden childhood.
No.9
Solaris Star
(Wave) Stanisław Lem / Jing Zhenzhong / Translation
Yilin Press, August 2021
When the Cold War was on the verge of giving rise to World War III, Solaris Star came out. Three scientists, and three typical "Cold War men," seek dialogue with the ocean on the distant planet Solaris. The cold, huge ocean is the only thing that has life on that planet, and the efforts of the Earthlings will of course fail, and in the end, they decide to bombard the sea with X-rays...
This terrible and sad story proves the stupidity of mankind, as Kafka coldly observed, that man is always arrogant out of fear, and the more he feels offended, the more he treats others in a rough way, without feeling that he is wrong. Lem's depiction of the Sea of Wisdom is so mysterious that it is breathless, and the idea of talking to the ocean is too magical, and the metaphor of this setting is too thought-provoking: he at least satirizes the ambition of human beings, like the Spring and Autumn Period by calling a meeting of the princes of the world to dominate, but closing the door to the same kind of people who are close by. When the ocean sends them the memories and dream characters of scientists, they dare not talk to these simulated characters. They are all prisoners of fear.
The second half of the novel is rather dull, and it never seems to end. But that's not Lyme's failure. He was too faithful to his realistic feelings.
No.8
Muhammad and Charlemagne
(B) Henry Piran / by Wang Jinxin / Translation
The Commercial Press March 2021
"In a country like Belgium, it is incredible to be able to produce such a great scholar as Professor Piran." British medieval historian F.M. Bowik said. Piran's painstakingly written History of Belgium, published at the turn of the century and not yet published until 1932, was hailed by the Belgians as the greatest citizen in the last fifteen years of his life (his death in 1935), an honor that was not worth mentioning in comparison with the pain of his personal life: all three of his sons had died before, and perhaps his continued work was to forget his sorrows.
The main argument of the book is that "the empire created by Charlemagne was a key point in the breakdown of the European equilibrium caused by the Muslims." The reason is that the rise of the Muslims limited the power of the Holy See to the western region, and at the same time, the Muslim conquest of Spain and Africa objectively created the conditions for the rise of Charlemagne and the hegemony of the Frankish kingdom. Piran's assertion contributed to the formation of a historical vision of global considerations, and the seemingly different historical paths between the East and the West were identified and established.
No.7
Karma: A Brief Discussion of Actions, Faults, and Postures
(Italian) Giocho Agamben / by Pan Zhen / Translated by Wang Zhaoyu, Ye Renjie / School
Bai Deya Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, November 2021
"How can a man be guilty?" Kafka's questions have always hit the nail on the head. He was a man deeply immersed in the culture of Judaism, in which the question of sin has been discussed many times in the rabbinic story. Satan once accused God that you, the Lord of the World, can show all your power to condemn me, but the power you accuse me of does not belong to you after all—Forrest Gumpen quoted this story into his Karma, thus beginning a fruitful study.
Forrest Gumpen wrote a lot of small works, but the resources of thought used were exceptionally rich. This book is yet another proof that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Benjamin, Arendt, etc., appear on their own; in Socrates' view, the cause of man's mistake is simply ignorance, while Aristotle sets off the train of sin to hell, and St. Augustine and Kant leave their theoretical imprints along the way. Agamben also criticized areent's confusion in the realm of action and politics in Arendt's The Human Condition. You need to keep reading intently to feel the impact of the ideas in the book.
No.6
The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991
Robert Servais / by Zhou Fangru / Translation
April 2021, Publisher | Social Science Literature
Now that we have finally had the opportunity to read a detailed account of the history of the end of the Cold War and the upheavals in Eastern Europe, it is especially important that we do not need to stand on a particular position, that we do not see regrettable lessons everywhere, and that we do not need to admire or curse people over and over again. Presumably, people at that time must have had the feeling of "having the privilege (or misfortune) to witness" a major historical turning point. Servis's writing conveys an atmosphere of the times that has now lost all its charm: decisions at the top are crucial, and popular choices are unpredictable.
No.5
How to Think Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke / by Tao Anli / Translation
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, August 2021
One of the most prominent features of anthropologist writing is the penchant for listing: anthropologists seem to have a penchant for listed writing, talking about a problem, talking about a phenomenon, and a long list of words or concepts juxtaposed with each other appears as they speak. Of course, it is not so much that they are wordy, but that their pursuit of detail and rigor has reached a high degree of self-discipline.
Engelke explains this roughly in the book. One of the most significant sensitivities of anthropologists, he said, is to clear up preconceived notions about people around the world. They let go of all stereotypes to see people, and they want to forget the university they came from, the country they came from, and melt into the people they observe. To this end, they will also try to avoid one-sidedness in their writing, especially those that are general, and to resort to specificity and detail.
Anthropologists often give the impression of humility, openness, and natural humor, because they have made it their duty to expand the category of "human beings" and to affirm differences, and they have been telling those in the more "civilized" regions not to be arrogant, not to easily regard peoples and regions that are still limited by religion and still subject to low levels of production as "backward", but to understand that their way of existence is not the only one in the world, let alone a natural way of existence. In Engelke's view, good anthropologists can do it without "alienating" others, but also without reducing cultural differences to the point of insignificance. Humor is also occasionally seen in his books, when he recounts his own experiences working in the field in Zimbabwe.
No.4
Poetry from the Tang Dynasty: Tang Dynasty Poetry and Its Tangible World
(Beauty) Ni Jian / by Feng Naixi / Translation
Century Wenjing, Shanghai People's Publishing House, September 2021
When praising the Tang Dynasty poems that are well known to women and children, has anyone ever thought that this text came out more than a thousand years ago, why can it be transmitted to this day? In the process of dissemination, how can every communicator, reader, and commentator achieve a unified version without bias? Did the original author expect the work to survive for a long time, and to anticipate that it would be difficult to keep it as it was?
Poetry has a material carrier. In Ni Jian's work, the literal translation of the original English name is "expressed in words, written on paper", emphasizing that this is a study of carrier and transmission. Like his mentor Yuwen Soan, he opened windows that would be unfamiliar to readers who only had common opinions about "Tang and Song poems." His archaeological perspective is particularly lacking in us, and we rarely investigate how those famous works and authors are recognized, let alone think that a poem we are familiar with may be one of hundreds of versions that are different from it, and that the distance between it and its author is farther and more complex than we think.
Many of the scholarly ideas presented in the book are both rigorous and insightful: he says, for example, it is customary practice in the study of ancient Chinese poetry to measure the achievement of works based on the use of individual words. He has no critical meaning, but it is enough for us to find that more than 90% of the ancient poetry "appreciation" discourse on the market is so old and boring.
No.3
Asymmetry: Zagaevsky's Collected Poems
(Poland) Adam Zagajewski / by Li Yiliang / Translation
CITIC Publishing Group October 2021
For the recognition of a first-class writer, "free to retract" can be described as the most basic comment. Zagaevsky's 2014 collection of poems, which can be read at random, is a testament to the extent to which he has retracted. Some poems, such as "Summer 1995", read like prose at first glance, and there are doubts about "tapping the enter key a few more times", but after reading it, I feel that the timely line break is an excellent part of this work; some poems, such as "Childhood", have a large title and a small length, and the imagery ingested in the sixteen lines of text is irregular, but it is also a beautiful work.
The "skilled workers" who write poems are those who have mastered some tried-and-true routines. But for Zagaevsky, I can only use very cheesy words to say that his proficiency, his sense of ease, is a great breakthrough in the dependence of routine. In Kingfisher, he writes that the swift kingfisher "This colorful bullet hit safely / The rocky shore, where its nest hides", and then, with a transformation, the nest becomes "a refuge, a shelter, where / thoughts are lit and not destroyed, / a prison, which frees us from indifference", and he goes on to think that this is "a powerful rhetoric of contradictions", and then thinks that "sometimes it is also a poem, / almost a sonnet." ”
The changes here will not be repeated in other poems. The limited subjects that can be conceived are presented in this book in an infinite way, so that you don't think about the existence of the subject. The collection itself is small, it can be read in an hour, and it is only natural to prefer any one of them.
No.2
The Legend of Celan
(de) Wolfgang Emmerich / by Liang Jingjing / Translation
Yazhong Cultural | Nanjing University Press, January 2022
We come to know the wonderful exiles because they left behind; and as we read their works, we will understand that creation is a rigid demand in their exile, even that they are exiled for the sake of creation, and that they use this purpose to alleviate the compulsion of exile and the pain of loss. However, the creative language they use often constitutes further torture for them.
It seems that translating Celan means to be inferior to his peers; Celan's poems have always been difficult to understand, so translators are particularly concerned about who is right and who is wrong, who is "correct" and who is misreading. From this biography, it can be seen that when Celan first embarked on the road of writing poetry, he was also subject to the obscurity of the imagery of the text, and for a long time he either did not receive the necessary attention or was treated in a way that Celan hated.
This biography is of great help in understanding Celan's poems and why he wrote them; and it is particularly valuable that Emmerich criticized the critics of that year, pointing out that Celan's hard work was due to the paradox that he had to write in the language of his enemies, and that he had to wrestle with the irreparable wounds in his heart in search of his own voice. When Death Fugue was praised as the poet's "overcoming" and "cleansing" of Auschwitz's horrors, Celan was filled with a sense of failure and world-weariness.
The book is not very large, but it gives the impression of being unspoken at every turn—in line with Celan's poetic style.
No.1
Kafka's Talk
(O) Kafka / Dictation (Czech) Gustav Janosh / Account of Zhao Dengrong / Translation
Lijiang Publishing House April 2021
This small talk book borrows more or less from the way Goethe Talks is written, not just dialogue, but scenes, narratives, actions, expressions, details of speech, and unexpected events, from which we can also see all kinds of new things and new phenomena in the newly established Czechoslovak Republic after the collapse of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, such as the media industry, the development of the film industry, and Zionism, which is already quite obvious to Kafka and Janosch. Kafka often corrected Janosch's impression streams and deepened their conversations with a deeper and more thorough point of view, and when Janosch spoke in 1919 of social disorder, the bankruptcy of many people, and the destruction of trade, industry, and food supplies, Kafka solemnly stated that poverty was only a symptom, but in essence, in a society dominated by factory production and profit-seeking, man was merely an "old-fashioned tool" used to increase capital, a "remnant of history."
Such observations are, of course, direct interpretations of the famous passages of his novels such as "In exile". But it also pierces our present experience more appropriately.