Today is World Book Day, in this fast-paced fragmented reading flood of mobile Internet era, I don't know how many people like me, have not opened the dusty bookcase for a long time, picked up a paper book and immersed themselves in reading?
Even if I haven't read for a long time, when I see the news that "1984" and related film and television works were closed in the rating and comment area of Douban on this special day, I am still very sad.
Today, the dystopian novel, published in 1949, rushed to the top of the Douban real-time video list, and also appeared on the popular search of WeChat reading.
One netizen wrote, "'1984' was finally banned, and this day happened to be World Book Day." I didn't expect this day to come so quickly, I didn't expect that this day would really come. ”
British writer George Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World" and Russian writer Zamyatin's "We" are regarded as three dystopian masterpieces, translated into 62 languages worldwide, and sold more than 30 million copies, making it one of the most influential English novels of the 20th century.
However, when I talked to my friends about 1984, I was surprised to find that many people, even those who had gone to college or even graduate school, let alone read it, had not even heard of the title of "1984" and the name of George Orwell's other famous allegory novel, Animal Farm.
In zhihu, a post from the previous two years has mentioned that on Douban, "1984" has a total of 10 versions, assuming that the mark scoring users do not repeat in each version, then, the Douban users who have read the book have a total of 171454 people, according to his verification, the Registered Users of Douban in early 2018 were 160 million, he made a hypothesis, if the number of Douban users in 2020 reaches 200 million, and it is assumed that these users are real people, then, in the Douban user group, I have seen "1984" The proportion of people is only 0.0857%, which means that of the 100,000 people, only 85 people have read it. Based on the mainland's 1.4 billion people, only 1.2 million people have seen "1984".
Of course, the author's estimates are not necessarily accurate, but they can be corroborated to a certain extent, even if "1984" has been popular in the world for more than 70 years, has been publicly distributed in the mainland for more than 30 years, and has long entered the field of public copyright, there are still too few people who have read the book.
After the publication of "1984" in 1949, it was rare to have the privilege of getting to know George Orwell and the Chinese who had read the book, and Wu Ningkun, who returned from studying abroad in July 1951, once brought back a copy in his suitcase and discussed "1984" to the students in class, but most of the more than 20 male and female students in the class were absent-minded, preferring to be busy with love and progressive activities.
The first person to translate "1984" into Chinese was Dong Leshan, who came into contact with the name Orwell as early as the 1950s when he translated international telegrams at Xinhua News Agency, and it was not until the late 1970s that he read this famous book "1984" by chance. ”
From April to July 1979, Dong Leshan's translation of "1984" was published in three issues of "Selected Translations of Foreign Works" hosted by the then vice president of Xinhua News Agency, and the first time I met with Chinese readers, with a print run of 5,000 copies, and internal distribution, Dong Leshan received a fee of 4 yuan per thousand words. In the editor's note for the second issue, it is also particularly emphasized that Orwell "is a writer who has moved from the 'left' to the far right" and that "in order to know oneself and know the other, this journal has been published in its entirety from the previous issue".
In 1988, as one of the "Negative Utopia Trilogy", Guangzhou Huacheng Publishing House publicly published Dong Leshan's translation of "1984", and since then, the book has been published in Nearly 10 Chinese editions by different publishers in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Liaoning and other places.
Here, I do not want to deal too much with the specific content of "1984", but I hope that everyone will seize the time to read it when they can still buy it, as the famous saying that likes to be printed on the waist seal of the publishing house is interpreted, "Every time one more person reads Orwell, freedom is more guaranteed." ”
In Animal Farm, George Orwell profoundly wrote: "All animals are created equal, and some animals are more equal than others." In 1984, Orwell described it more profoundly: "Whoever controls the past controls the future; whoever controls the present controls the past." War is peace, ignorance is enslavement, ignorance is strength. ”
As George Orwell himself put it, "I don't believe that the society I describe in the book is bound to come, but I believe that something similar to it might happen." ”
While you can still read it, friends who have not read it should hurry up and read it. Just like netizens sighed, "I didn't expect this day to come so quickly, I didn't expect this day to really come", in the future, many things may be beyond your imagination.