In recent years, when Mr. Lu Xun is mentioned, there is always such a question: "Is Lu Xun overrated?" "There have been more than 30 articles included in primary and secondary textbooks, and lu xun's famous sayings of all kinds of true and false are all over the Internet, and no literati has ever been as beautiful as him, even Li Bai and Du Fu, who have long been deified.
To answer this question, we ordinary people do not count, his peers say it. Guo Moruo, an old rival, spoke highly of Lu Xun after his death; Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan all said that Lu Xun's works had the greatest influence on him. In particular, Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize, said such a sentence meaningfully: "If I can write a novella that has a status in the history of Chinese literature like "The True Biography of Ah Q", then I will be willing to eliminate all my novels." ”
This was said by Mo Yan in an interview, and I think it was Mo Yan's inner words, but when the author heard him pronounce "A Q", he was still shocked, because this "Q" word even Mo Yan would mispronounce it. In this novel, Lu Xun clearly explained how to read it, but even the Chinese teacher mispronounced it when he was in school. Let's look at this passage from "The True Biography of Ah Q":
I don't know how Ah Q's name was written. When he was alive, people called him A Quei, and when he died, no one was called A Quei anymore, and there would be a "bamboo veil" wherever there was. If you talk about "writing bamboo", this article is considered to be the first time, so I chose to encounter this first difficulty. I thought about it: Ah Quei, Ah Gui or Ah Gui?
This passage is taken from the first chapter of the "A Q Zheng Biography", which is the preface. Speaking of which, Lu Xun is also quite interesting, and he devoted a large chapter to explaining why he gave this novel the name "A Q Zheng biography". In the preface, Lu Xun lists 4 reasons for such a name, each of which is irrefutable.
Through this passage in the preface, we can understand that Lu Xun believes that the protagonist A Q's real name should be called A Gui or A Gui, according to normal logic to take the initials of "Gui" or "Gui" Pinyin, it should be called "A G Zheng biography", why there is a "Q" word, many people do not understand. In fact, the article also makes it clear that in Lu Xun's era, "Gui" is to pronounce "Quei".
There was a period in the folk, and there was a latinization stage in Chinese, which was the roman character Chinese. The standard was promulgated in 1928 and was initiated by Lin Yutang, with linguist Zhao Yuanren as the main researcher. At that time, this matter caused a lot of controversy, some people thought that the Latinization of Chinese characters was a number of classics and forget the ancestors, but some people thought that this was the best way to carry forward the Han culture. Lu Xun supported this from the beginning, so before this standard was promulgated, he had already used this set of standards in the novel, so Ah Gui became Ah "Quei". In fact, even if Lu Xun did not use "Quei", there was no "Gui" pinyin at that time, because the simple pinyin we use now began to be used around 1955, and Lu Xun wrote this novel in 1921.
After this exploration, everyone should understand. "A Q" has nothing to do with English, Lu Xun did not write this to catch up with the trend of English, strictly speaking, these two words should be pronounced "A Gui" or "A Gui" pronunciation. If most people read it wrong, why hasn't anyone corrected it? Because with the popularity of the novel, the image of Ah Q has long been no longer a person, he is a symbol of a group of people, and the optimism of Ah Q has long become a very specific literary image, and after the convention is established, everyone will no longer delve into who the prototype of Ah Q is. What do you think about this? Discussion is welcome.