"Fourteen years ago, when I was in my 40s as chairman of the Fu Lei Prize jury, someone questioned me that I was too young. In the past 14 years, the Fu Lei Prize has changed the image of translators and even translators. Dong Qiang, chairman of the organizing committee of the Fu Lei Translation and Publishing Award, said that translators and translators are not highly admired authorities, but can also be young people. He said that among the ten shortlisted translators for the Fu Lei Prize, eight were post-80s and 90s, and the winners "will increase the trend of youthfulness." Yesterday, the 14th Fu Lei Translation and Publishing Award held a preliminary evaluation conference, and Dong Qiang announced ten shortlisted works, divided into two major fields: literature and social sciences.
Social science categories include: Eric Hou Mai's "Beautiful Taste: Essays on Houmai's Films", a collection of important critical essays written by Houmai between 1948 and 1979; Pierre Creste's Chronicle of the Guayaqui Indians, a group of nomadic Indians in the dense forests of Paraguay, translated in English by American writer Paul Oster; Sabina Melchior-Bonet's The Brokenness of Love: A History of a Part of the Hand, in which historians turn their attention to the theme of the brokenness of love; George Dolby's The Age of Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, Dolby's important work on the history of the medieval mentality; Jacques Le Gauve's The Intellectuals of the Middle Ages, which constructs "an anthropology of medieval intellectuals."
Literature includes: Edmund Jabez's The Book of Boundaries, a cross-stylistic experiment between poetry, prose, aphorisms, and philosophical essays; The Returned Library is a best-selling novel by contemporary French writer David von Kinos in 2016; "Deep in the courtyard, which little bicycle with chrome handles?" is an early masterpiece by the pioneering French writer Georges Perec; "Burlesque Novel" is the masterpiece of the French 17th century poet, novelist and playwright Paul Scaron, and is also a model of French burlesque and satire.
"There are many young translators and many female translators in the shortlisted works, and the translations include both classic works and the latest works." Yu Zhongxian, chairman of the jury of the 2022 Fu Lei Prize, said that of course, there are also "middle-aged and elderly male translators" among the shortlisted works. He introduced that Liu Nanqi, the translator of "The Book of Boundaries", is a "post-50s" who has been translating French poetry and translated seven volumes of Edmund Jabez's works after retirement, which is "very valuable" and is not the first time he has been shortlisted for the Fu Lei Prize. Another familiar face this year is a translation by French historian Georges Dolby. This year's finalist is Gu Xiaoyan's translation of The Age of the Cathedral: Art and Society, 980-1420, after George Dolby's Sunday in Buwen, co-translated by Liang Shuang and Tian Meng, won the Fu Lei Prize in 2018.
This year's Fu Lei Prize invited Chinese writer Chen Guanzhong and writer Miao Wei as special guest judges. At the event, Chen Guanzhong said that he himself started his "lifelong literary and youth career" from French New Wave films in the sixties and seventies of the last century, but the problem is that French theorists of that era opposed clear and easy-to-read works, and even he often had the feeling of "unclear" when reading. "Some books are important, others are difficult to translate", and according to theorists in the sixties and seventies, "good-looking" is not the standard, so how is it possible to evaluate translations? In response, Dong Qiang responded that works or theories of a certain era may pose difficulties for translators, but "99% of a book cannot be read because the translator has not translated it well." Dong Qiang believes that even if a book is difficult to read, it has its own logic, that is, a set of rules of the game. If the translator can understand the rules of the game, the translation can be clarified. He took literature as an example, the life of a writer lies in his style, if the taste is not right, it is not the writing style that the writer will have, then it is not well translated; Taking social science as an example, a historical period will have its specific institutions, titles, etc., and if the translation is not correct, there is a problem. In short, "books are organisms and have vitality", and if the translator does not grasp them well, its vitality will decline.
This year's Fu Lei Prize ceremony will be held on November 19. On November 20, several literary lectures will be held at the Beijing Foreign Language Bookstore, which is expected to be closed for renovation for two years and is expected to reopen to readers in 2024.
Attached: 10 finalist works and reasons for shortlisting
Social sciences
This book is a collection of important critical articles written by Hou Mai between 1948 and 1979, which appeared in Modern Magazine, Art, Battle Newspaper, and the Handbook of Cinema, where Hou Mai was editor-in-chief from 1957 to 1963. Hou Mai believes that the essence of film lies in the ontology of art, not the uniqueness of its language, and this view runs through all articles. This anthology shows Hou Mai's portrayal, interpretation or criticism of literary adaptations, authors' films and other film trends and new concepts at that time, as well as comments on the works of famous directors such as Maunau, Hitchcock, and Delier, which is a supplement to the study of modern film aesthetics.
The Guayaquis, a group of nomadic Indians in the dense forests of Paraguay, have their own language, customs, beliefs and social institutions. From the 16th century onwards, Western colonists and local residents continued to occupy and devour their territories, evading, fighting, exiling, and eventually being cornered. In 1963, the author of this book, the French anthropologist Pierre Crest, entered the tribe, and in eight months, Claes witnessed the birth, adulthood, marriage, revenge, death, festivals and rituals of the tribesmen... And their biggest secret: cannibalism. Crest uses an unbiased mind to probe the subtle and unconscious logic behind their actions, recording "the weight of their existence".
Perhaps everything about love has been said for a long time. However, this is not the case: no historian, for example, has yet set his sights on the subject of broken love. This work by historian Sabina Melchiol-Bonay fills precisely this gap. From the perspective of "sensual history", the author explores the roots of love germination and disillusionment; Through the interpretation of individual love tragedies, the impact of society, legal system, culture and customs on marriage and love in specific historical periods is analyzed.
Georges Dolby was the first contemporary French historian to enter the "Seven Star Library". He studies the relationship between matter and spirituality. This book is Dolby's work on the history of the medieval mentality, and he tells the reader how the management of art creation was transferred from feudal princes to monasteries in the 11th century; A hundred years later, how the revived city gave the cathedral the power of artistic innovation; And in the 14th century, why did large-scale art return to the hands of princes, and become a tool to show secular values?
Intellectuals is a modern word with rich and complex connotations. The "intellectuals" mentioned in this book refer to the people who appeared in the Middle Ages as cities developed as a profession to think and teach their ideas. This class emerged in the early Middle Ages, developed in urban schools in the 12th century, and flourished in universities from the 13th century. Le Gauve examines these "word sellers" in terms of society, politics, religion, economics, and intellectual culture, and to some extent constructs "an anthropology of medieval intellectuals," an "introduction to the historical sociology of Western intellectuals."
Literature
The Book of Boundaries is the third book in Edmund Jabez's "Book of Problems series" and is divided into four volumes: The Little Book of Undoubted Subversion, The Book of Dialogue, The Journey, and The Book of Sharing. As a cross-stylistic experiment between poetry, prose, aphorisms, and philosophical essays, this book is Jabez's musings and can also be seen as his self-talk. The book documents Jabez's quest for the ineffable and shows his struggles with self-subjectivity, identity, and the act of writing in the process.
There is a "rejects library" in the Brittany region of France, which for more than a decade has dedicated to unpublished manuscripts delivered by the author himself. Delphie, a young female editor, and her fiancé, also frustrated novelist Frederick, visit the library when they discover a masterpiece: The Last Hours of a Love Story, written by Henry Pick. In the process of investigating the authorship, Delphie and Frederick discover that this is a deceased pizza chef, and in the eyes of his widow and daughter, Henry Picker has nothing to do with writing. Through the origin of this mysterious manuscript, the manuscript was published under Delphie's operation and was a huge success, and the rarely received library became famous. A mysterious manuscript is like a butterfly flapping its wings, revealing many hidden pasts, changing the lives of the characters in the book, and providing the author with opportunities to explore many topics.
A young sergeant named Henri Pollack rode the little bicycle with chrome handles every day between his hometown of Montparnasse and the barracks in Vincenneeuf. In order to stay with his girlfriend and avoid being sent to Algeria to fight, he and his buddy Kara XX and other friends tried to find various ways to exempt them from military service. Perec experimented with experimental narratives, intertextual techniques, and a lot of wordplay in his novels, such as the seventy-two variations of the protagonist's name Kara XX alone. The index attached by the author at the end of the article provides some clues for interpreting the work.
The book depicts a series of funny events that an orchestra encounters while touring Le Mans. At the same time, the author intersperses short stories with different styles through flashbacks, memories, inlays and other means. In general, it is a kind of relocation of real life. Scaron takes a small town in another province as the stage, with real life as the background, and the characters around him as the material, parodifying the heroes and writing the truth. There is no fascinating plot common in linear narratives, nor is there a heroic protagonist deliberately portrayed, the lines are chaotic but contain order, except for the inserted story, it is full of irony and mockery.
The uniqueness of Henri Michaud's work lies in the fact that he makes words fade into pretense and return to authenticity; Take the world away from the usual appearances and dive into hidden realities. "Far Inside" throws the reader to the subconscious boundaries: dreams and frightened places, led by despair. Here the violence and heaviness weigh down on him, just like Michaud's man named "Feather", who has gone through ups and downs, is mistreated for not being in time, and is guilty of refusing to cater to life.