The surging news reporter Fan Jialai intern Gu Ran
In Ulysses, June 16 is the day when the protagonist Leopold Bloom wanders the streets of the Irish city of Dublin. On that day, Bloom chose to run away from home, and the following eighteen hours of stories, author James Joyce used stream-of-consciousness brushstrokes to weave into an intricate and mysterious story of Ulysses, making eternity in literary history.
To many readers, Ulysses is like a "book of heaven"—symbols, nests, foreign languages, solitary words, Old English, Latin, harmonic stems... These sophisticated word games abound in Ulysses. The study of Joyce's work has become a specialized discipline — "Qiao Xue".
How would the average reader read Joyce? Recently, the new translation of "Ulysses" by Mr. Liu Xiangyu, a "Qiao scholar" who has spent more than 20 years and exhausted his life, was published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. On July 31, Shanghai Translation Publishing House invited Dai Congrong, professor and translator of Fudan University, and Feng Tao, chief planner of the "Joyce Anthology" and director of the Literature Office of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, to share Joyce, a great writer, and his unfinished book "Ulysses".
Sharing session on the new translation of "Ulysses" (Dai Congrong on the left, Feng Tao on the right)
The translation is "get out of the way with your body."
In Dai Rongrong's view, a writer's achievement depends on the quality of the work, not the quantity. Joyce's life's work is not much, but it can become the second largest in the history of English literature after Shakespeare, and this is why. Each of his works is not a repetition of the self, but an unusual step forward on the basis of the previous one.
Before Joyce created Dubliners, realism had matured under the pens of Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoevsky and others, but the young and bold Joyce not only integrated elements of realism into Dubliners, but also made a pioneering attempt at modernism. Later, he wrote an even greater work, "Ulysses", and in Dai Rongrong's view, the "stream of consciousness novel" often referred to by the world could not hold this work at all. "Perhaps Joyce did explore the stream of consciousness in the first six chapters, but since the seventh chapter, he has completely freed his hands and feet, and has arbitrarily expounded his views on history, modernity, and human nature."
However, like many classic fates, Ulysses is famous but rarely seen. How do I get started with Ulysses from scratch? Dai Calmly said that although readers in the digital age hope to achieve more with less, only down-to-earth reading is the respect for the classics. "Easy pleasure is not fun. I didn't read the notes much the first time I read it, and the second time I read it with the notes, and although it was difficult, I did feel it more deeply after reading it. This is also the reason why Mr. Liu Xiangyu's notes and his translation notes are very necessary. ”
In Feng Tao's view, reduction is the first pursuit of translation. Joyce used to write novels in a poetic way, and every word was carefully crafted, but poetry is precisely what is easiest to translate and filter. Translation is "to roll out a path with the body", and every serious translator is a path for the reader to approach the author, but no path is perfect. What matters is not which version is better, but the perspective provided by the translator. The more perspectives, the closer it is to the true face of the original. Liu Xiangyu lists two translations of Xiao Qian, Wen Jieruo and His wife, and Jin Di in the translation notes, providing readers with different choices for understanding the original work.
As a translator, Dai Rongrong can deeply appreciate the hardships of translation. The translator must at least reach the height of dialogue with the original author in order to ensure that the translation is not distorted to the greatest extent. Ulysses is an encyclopedic masterpiece, which means that translators have to work in the direction of the encyclopedia. In Ulysses, the fourteenth chapter like the "Book of Heaven" has always been a headache for translators, and in Liu Xiangyu's translation, in order to correspond to Joyce's syntax, stylistic, linguistic changes, and multiple parodies and metaphors, he ingeniously uses the small seal, Lishu, Weibei font and the entire text without sentence reading distinction to restore, just like the flow of ancient Chinese style, to maximize the preservation of Joyce's true charm.
It is worth mentioning that this is also the third translation of "Ulysses" in Chinese history: as early as the 1920s, "Ulysses" received the attention of Xu Zhimo and Mao Dun at the beginning of its birth, and in 1994, China successively launched the translation of Xiao Qian and his wife and the translation of Jin Sui, which caused widespread repercussions. In Liu Xiangyu's new translation, he has compiled his translations that have lasted more than 20 years into more than 500 pages of translation notes and a total of 4471 notes, helping readers to swim in the "maze of words" of Ulysses.
Cover of the new Chinese translation of Ulysses
"Ulysses" became ireland's city card
Despite Joyce's creativity and becoming the "first man" in a variety of literary languages and styles, Ulysses is a classic that can stand in a lofty position for a long time, in addition to being groundbreaking, its charm lies in its eternal value.
In Dai Rongrong's view, the eternity of "Ulysses" lies in the tolerance of all truths as equals. Prior to this, literary scholars have made the ultimate exploration of human nature in many aspects, and readers have long been accustomed to male and female infidelity. But no writer would describe the scene of the character going to the toilet in detail, and Joyce not only wrote it, but also wrote it brilliantly. He dared to push the truth of human nature, language, and culture to the extreme at the same time, and "truth" became the basic criterion of his writing.
The true riches are exhausted, and Joyce, with great tolerance, includes them all under his command. In Ulysses, Bloom still loves his wife despite cheating, and he accepts everything about her, whether it's a more successful career than his or the green hat he wears. "In those days, even with dark, distorted physical representations, Joyce was able to see it as an equal, which was remarkable." Feng Tao sighed.
Dai mentioned that during his travels in Ireland, he found Joyce to be a well-known national writer in Ireland. The locals are no less familiar with Joyce than Chinese Li Bai and Du Fu. Joyce wrote a history of Dublin with Ulysses, and Ireland set up a festival second only to National Day, "Bloomges", in the name of the protagonist of "Ulysses". On this day, people hold a grand gathering to discuss books and eat the "Joyce Happy Package", which has become an important way to promote Irish culture.
Joyce left Ireland after graduating from university, and the world trend led by Paris was opening its arms to him. But unlike other young people who follow the trend, Joyce understands that only Dublin is his roots. Since Dubliner, Joyce has been taking pictures of his beloved city. At the same time, he upholds the position of cosmopolitanism and knows that the nation is the world. His Ireland is not only Ireland, but also a microcosm of world culture, which makes the thickness of his work extraordinary. "There are so few universe-creating brains in the world, and Joyce happens to be one of them," Dai said with a smile, "after studying Joyce for many years, he is still mysterious to me." ”
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang