The Paper's reporter Gao Dan
Black-footed moon cat: It can only be seen when you are barefoot on the moon.
Transparent Zebra: Many people in Africa believe that the transparent stripes on transparent zebras are a fence to protect the soul.
Ephemeral Whale: Born at sunrise and dies at sunset. When you are born, you have a mountain as big as a mountain, and you are getting smaller and lighter every minute, and when you die, you are like a little ephemera.
Spoon Bear: Spoon bears carry their own spoons with them and never forget them wherever they go. As soon as you find a good book, immediately take out a spoon and dig a spoon to taste.
The Time Bear, the Mirror Tiger and the Invisible Kitten
In the latest book "Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten", Fan Ye conceived more than 40 kinds of strange animals such as transparent zebras, bench tigers, weather bath leopards, time bears, and volcanic rabbits in the "Animal Handbook", wrote a brief introduction to their habits and characteristics, and compiled Latin names for them; In the "Invisible Kittens and Other Stories" section, Fan Ye writes from a kitten who has no tail but has been licking its paws by chance on the platform, telling various bizarre and cute stories about animals, sometimes a casual dialogue, sometimes a completely unbridled rambling conversation.
The purring nightingale is a good friend of all the insomniacs on the planet, the rubber elephant uses his body to help the eraser wipe away the regrets and shame of his life, the stinging rats that think that pain is part of warmth... Fan Ye projects the loneliness, sadness, and tenderness of people's hearts onto strange animals, and also shows what kind of sounds can be released when different emotions encounter different life forms.
Just as Márquez wrote "One Hundred Years of Solitude" because of a picture in his mind— a grandfather leading a small child to see the back of the ice — Fan Ye also wrote these stories about animals because of the pictures he saw by chance many years ago, "Eighteen years ago, I saw the little rabbits by the grass at the Mexican zoo that seemed to stop at a certain distance according to some law, not greeting each other, but there seemed to be a magical tacit understanding. This little picture made a deep impression on me, and I wondered if there would be some story between these rabbits that we didn't know. From this, I wrote the story of The Volcano Rabbit. The story of "photographing the tiger" comes from a zoo that pulled out the tiger's teeth and claws in order to facilitate the tiger and people to take a photo, and this story made Fan Ye feel very sad. Thus, "Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten" is a whimsical imagination, a reconciliation and a psychological compensation for people and animals.
Dong Qizhang believes that each of Fan Ye's small stories is a surprising little journey. It often starts with a connection between an animal and its unusual attributes, such as a "time bear," a "mirror tiger," or a sugar cube whale, and then expands the boundaries of meaning along the seemingly illogical way of association. It seems to be a child's unintentional play, and it seems to be an adult's intentional speculation. At the end of the day, it's all about the tenderness, hurt, loneliness, and recognition of life.
Recently, The Paper interviewed Fan Ye, and we talked about fantasy literature and magical animals.
Fan Ye
"Who hasn't had the slightest impulse to create the world?"
The Paper: In an online sharing between you and Liang Yong'an before, you used the title "The Healing Power of Fantasy Literature", and the introduction to your new book also calls it a "fantasy literature work", for many readers, what is "fantasy literature" may not be very familiar, can you introduce the genre of "fantasy literature"?
Fan Ye: I'm not sure if this book counts as fantasy literature, or whether fantasy literature can be considered a "genre." If you are interested, you can read Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction to Fantasy Literature or Hayato Kawai's Reading Fantasy Literature. I certainly can't say that well. In the 1950s, a North American scholar defined "magic realism" as a "mixture of fantasy and reality", which was later criticized as too big and inappropriate, because after all literature can be said to be a mixture of fantasy and reality. In this sense, then, these words of mine are also fantasy literature.
When I used to do Spanish literature, I read interviews with some writers, and the common answer was: I don't know. As a reader at the time, I felt that this author was a bit arrogant. But now that I have become an author, I have found that I am not necessarily arrogant, but really what I can say and what I can say is already in the work.
The Paper: We will also find that there is also such a trend in the books published in recent years - many books like to be named "encyclopedias" and "illustrated books", but they are not rigorous and discipline-oriented in the traditional sense, such as the "Encyclopedia of Urban Legends", "The Encyclopedia of Monsters", "The Mysterious Animal Atlas of Naturalists", "The Illustrated Catalogue of Supernatural Deformed Animals", which parodies the form of popular science themes characterized by rigor as the main feature, and fills them with whimsical content, how do you think about this trend?
Fan Ye: I didn't think about it so much when I wrote it. I'm not sure if this is a trend. I think it's a good thing. After all, who hasn't had the slightest impulse to create the world?
The Paper: Together with the previous question, in the first part of "Animal Handbook" in "Time Bear, Mirror Tiger and Invisible Kitten", you also fictionalized more than 40 kinds of animals such as bench tigers, weather bath leopards, and time bears according to the classification method of "order, family, genus, and species" of modern zoology, and designed Latin names for them. Can you talk about why you use such a form in conjunction with your own specific writing (specific to the naming of a certain class, a certain animal) and what kind of experience you want it to bring to the reader?
Fan Ye: I just think it's funny. I like to read some books about animals, and later I like to collect a little animal manual book, such as "Chinese Bird Observation Manual", "Chilean Bird Encyclopedia", "The World's Wild Cats", and recently placed an order for a crowdfunded "Chinese Big Cat". Because of the need to translate literary works, I also prepared several reference books such as "World Beast Names (Lahan-English Comparison)". Naming is a very special, fascinating kind of writing.
The Naturalist's Illustrated Catalogue of Mysterious Animals
"That's what it means, and that's a lot of other meanings."
The Paper: Entering into the specific writing, you mentioned that many animals may have a realistic archetype, such as the volcanic rabbit, eighteen years ago, you saw the rabbits by the grass in the Mexican zoo as if according to some law at a certain distance to stop at their positions, do not say hello to each other, but there seems to be a magical tacit understanding, which produces a very strange feeling. Is there a similar story to share? For example, in what context to see the state of an animal or to inspire an experience and write about an animal.
Fan Ye: The last one in the animal manual is naturally called the tail. The reason why I became a cloud tail may be because in the years of living in granada, the ancient city of southern Spain, for a while I lived on the second floor of the street, and there was a small bar not far downstairs, called Cloud Tail, which should be the title of a song.
And the Stun Dream Fox. We have two cats in the family, and they will faint and vomit when they sit in the car, which is very pitiful. I myself don't often dream of falling in a dizziness, and I'm scared enough each time. So in addition to motion sickness, you may also be dizzy because of dreams. Of course, this feature can also be installed on the bear, but I chose the fox. Because there is harmonic sound will be more fun, when I was in middle school, I read a novel written by a German writer, the plot is not remembered, but the name is remembered very clearly, it is called "Dream Lake", so here I chose the fox, a fox that will faint because of dreams, just like others motion sickness, it will dream of fainting: halo dream fox.
Surging News: There is an animal comic book that is very famous, called "You Are So Good Today", the author will extend the story according to the habits of animals, such as crocodiles because of their long mouths, short hands and unable to embrace, a small bird fell on the breathing holes on the top of the whale's head, and the whale shouted "breathless", which are extended based on the characteristics of the animal itself, readers will find it interesting and "very reasonable", but I noticed that your story is actually detached from the specificity of the animal itself, such as "cage horse" and "magnet rhinoceros" "Amber Elephant" and "Silent Bear" can make the imagination untethered and free from the inertia of thinking and the experience that already exists, can you talk about how you get rid of this habitual experience of animals?
Another point, especially in Chinese stories, always emphasizes a kind of allegory, a story always seems to symbolize what is reasonable, such as the earliest animal fables - qian donkey skills poor, fox fake tiger wei, etc., when reading the story, I always have a psychological presupposition of wanting to find something, such as the "tower bear" and "utopian rabbit" who live on the tower and build ships, and "photographic tiger", but sometimes I feel that I have completely thought too much or bored a psychological experience that should have been very simple and pleasant. As in the previous question, it seems that the more one learns and understands, the more difficult it is to maintain a pure, innocent state in reading and writing, and it is difficult not to write a story for the sake of metaphor, and I wonder if you are also anxious about it and want to overcome it.
Fan Ye: Fables are not unique to China, and at this point they are also "the East China Sea and the West Sea, and the psychology is the same." When we talk about the history of Spanish literature in class, we also mention the allegorical literature of the Middle Ages, or allegorical literature. The fables here can be all the way to Aesop's Fables, such as the fable/fábula of the Count of Lucanor, or the allegory/alegoría of the Miracle of the Virgin Mary. The former tends to add a sentence at the end: This story tells us... How and how; The latter will clearly decrypt and tell you A=B.
Of course, my words are not allegories, and there is no predetermined, unique standard answer: A is not necessarily equal to B, A may be equal to B, equal to C, equal to N, or A is A. It is said that when the poet Lorca was asked what a certain poem of Lorca was trying to illustrate and what it meant, he replied: That is what it means. And many other meanings. If someone reads a lot of meaning from this little book, I will find it interesting too.
"You're So Good Looking Today"
Someone is injured by a word, and someone is healed by a word
The Paper: In the afterword, you also have too high an emotional concentration in the story, and a lot of inner things are exposed, and indeed what you read in more animal stories is a state of mind and emotion - sad, happy, lonely, and quiet, so can it be understood that you first have an emotion, and then find an animal counterpart? And, your state of "fear of revealing a lot of emotions" seems to be a very common emotional state now, such as changes in language: more and more acronyms, pinyin pronouns, phrases extracted from a popular passage to express an emotion, a popular phrase that is popular immediately, but more likely to be quickly abandoned, when used in more contexts, is actually a "safe word" that forcibly incorporates emotions and attitudes, and the position of the user conveyed in it seems to be somewhat unique. It's not safe and accurate, but it's safe because it's universal, how do you feel about it?
Fan Ye: This "safety word" sounds very interesting, and I really haven't thought about it. Reminds me of the "safe house" in spy movies. I'll see if I can write a "safety word" story in the future, and call it "Safety Bear" for the time being.
The Paper: It can also be extended that when mentioning this book, the most commented by readers is "healing", how do you understand the word "healing"? And why do we keep stressing the need to heal this emotion?
Fan Ye: The premise of healing is injury, right? This may be able to do some sociological anthropological investigations, but of course it will not be my turn.
I am reminded of a Spanish word letraherido, which literally means "wounded by words", and by extension a person with an extraordinary passion for literature. Since someone is injured by a word, someone should be healed by a word? You may wish to treat this small book as a cylinder ice cream, whether there is a "curative effect" dare not say, but if you catch up with the depressed hot day, there may be a trace of coolness and sweetness.
The Paper: What's more interesting is that we don't seem to need words to easily deliver our feelings to a cute image now, such as the fictional idol Lingna Bell who can't speak, the mascot Ice Pier, such as a duck sent by the KFC package that suddenly bursts into flames, as if the more silent and stable the image, the more able to carry our fragile, easy to collapse emotions, will you think that when creating something called cute and healing, the figurative image will be more effective than words?
Fan Ye: It's an interesting point, but I don't know. My tools and toys are just words at the moment.
The Paper: This can also be combined with Gu Xiang's illustrations, can you talk about how she presents the image of the animal in your description with a specific example? Or is her presentation appropriate?
Fan Ye: Presentation may not be the most appropriate statement, the ideal text-graph relationship should be mutual generation and mutual achievement. I think Gu Xiang's paintings sometimes create scenes that I don't expect and details that are difficult to visualize (such as rabbit-like asteroids, small orange cats on bench tigers, blue bears and blue-and-white maidens, Morandi-style immovable bears...). And of course there's the baby hippopotamus, and we struggled for half a day about whether to use this one as a cover.) On behalf of all the time bears and other bears, I thank her.
Bench Tiger
The Paper: Or do you have to ask whether the translation work you have been doing and the study of Latin American literature have helped you write these fantasy stories? For example, in the introduction of transparent zebra, you also talked about the many people in Africa who believe that these stories were not written in a short period of time, and you may also experience the experience of "an old man holding a child to see the back of the ice" because of the extension of time to modify the impression and make the specific deformation.
Fan Ye: There should be an impact... Right? However, this kind of influence is difficult for me to dissect (do not exclude the factor of laziness, self-analysis is sometimes boring... Also often not credible). As for Macondo, some people do think that Macondo in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" may have originated from the Maconites in Africa, of course, others may also have (such as the name of a tree, the name of a manor near the author's hometown), and "transparent zebra" is a slightly self-deprecating bad taste here, right?
Transparent Zebra
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Liu Wei