Reporter | Yin Qinglu
Edit | Yellow Moon
"Confessions of a Citizen"
The Hungarian writer Malloy Shandor was born at the turn of the century, the last glorious moment of the European civic class. The cultivation of aristocratic culture led Malloy to embrace an ethic of diligence, patriotism, and social responsibility, but as Hungary became mired in the political situation in Europe, these ideas also disappeared. Malloy examined the fate of his homeland and insisted on writing in "lonely Hungarian", and it was not until the twenty-first century that this national master writer was rediscovered by the literary world. Yu Zemin, the translator of this series, sees that it turns out that every contemporary Hungarian writer grew up under the wing of Malloy's spirit.
The "Confessions of a Citizen" series is based on Malloy's hometown of Kausau, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the day of the German-Austrian unification and the establishment and subversion of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. During this period, Malloy changed from a romantic youth to a wandering exile, but never forgot the social mission undertaken by intellectuals, leaving this book as a witness to history. "I wanted to be silent. But then, I couldn't resist the call of time, and I knew I couldn't be silent. I also realized later that silence—at least as much as speaking and writing—is also an answer. Sometimes, even time, silence is not the most undangerous answer. Nothing inspires violence more than rejective silence. In Confessions of a Citizen: I Wanted to Be Silent, Malloy writes.
In 2015, an abridged version of the series was introduced into China, and this year is the first time that the entire original book has been published, complementing a large number of chapters that Malloy personally deleted, presenting the complete appearance of the original work.
"Let's go pick the roses"
Moon Jung-hee is a leading figure in modern Korean women's poetry, and she has been at the forefront of modern poetry since she entered the poetry scene in 1969 with her poems "Insomnia" and "Sky", and the prolific poet of her seventies has published fifteen books of poetry and translated into many languages. The book includes 179 poems written by the poet in the 41-year period from 1973 to 2014, and it is the first time that Wen Zhenji has brought such a rich poem to a Chinese reader.
Moon Jung-hee's poems start from her own experience, expressing thoughts about love, personality and life, and there is no lack of ironic reflections on the status of women. As written in the preface, Moon Jung-hee gets married shortly after graduating from university, but finds herself having to face Korean male-centric habits and prejudices, her body belongs to her lover and child, and only when she "takes off her blouse/naked holding the cold machine" does she "thoroughly feel that these two breasts belong to me". In the view of fellow poet translator Xue Zhou, Wen Zhenji's poems are neither hypocritical nor forceful of recognition, but a certain firm and powerful consciousness is quietly germinating and generating, which eventually resonates with readers.
"Old School Girl Shopping Route"
"Old School Girls' Shopping Route" is the first book by Taiwanese writer Hong Aizhu, who hopes to reconstruct the memory of his mother and grandmother through daily sumptuous food and old street life. In Hong Aizhu's view, the two women are extremely demanding of themselves, maintaining a "slow-down" upbringing and human affection in a generation where everyone is eager for the trendy, but they also need to take on heavy household work, and can only become as light as a girl when doing leisure shopping, from which the title of this book is derived.
Hong Aizhu wrote this book when her mother was seriously ill, and there are many warm and sentimental fragments in the book, such as in order to restore the taste of fried spring rolls that her mother cherished, she came to Dihua Street and Yongle Market to buy pie crusts, the scenery suddenly changed, full of cooked food vendors and green herbs, she also recalled that when her grandmother came to Dihua Street, she would buy crispy and sweet gana beans, and her mother would buy salty snacks. Food is Hong Aizhu's way of connecting with her family, and it also constitutes a warm and unique family history.
Park Beijing: Cultural Production and Literary Imagination (1860-1937)
In the eyes of most modern people, the park may be an ordinary urban space, but for Lin Zheng, associate professor of the Department of Chinese at Sun Yat-sen University, the park is an indispensable part of China's modernization process. The book "Park Beijing" examines how parks, as an emerging installation of Western civilization, entered Beijing in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and how they realized the transformation of local and foreign, traditional and modern. Lin Zheng took Wanji Garden, Central Park, Beihai Park, Seongnam Amusement Park and Taoran Pavilion as case studies, and corresponded to the lives of five groups of people: traditional gentry, new cultural people, new youth, ordinary citizens, and political groups, and wrote about the park's cultural, entertainment, political and other enlightenment functions in the context of Chinese and Chinese.
Taking Central Park as an example, Lin Zheng traveled from literary historical sources to the vast urban history, architectural history and other fields, not only pointing out that the geographical concept of "central" represented the political meaning of the imperial period, but also tracing the cultural activities of literati such as Shen Congwen and Yang Zhensheng and how the modern intellectual community gradually took shape by analyzing the prestigious tea house "Laijin Yuxuan". The author believes that it is in the salvage of everyday debris that history becomes full, which is also the meaning of writing parks.
Power and Man: Mourning the Death of Seko and the Joseon Royal Family
In 1762, the Joseon Dynasty's Emperor Yi Yong deposed his son Yi Shu and put him in a wooden cabinet to death, which became the greatest tragedy in the history of the Joseon Dynasty. Mourning the death of the son of the world has not only been valued by the academic community, but also often appears in novels and film and television works. However, in the view of the author of this book, Jung Byung-shuo, a scholar of Korean classical literature, out of sympathy for the son of the world, the various hypotheses put forward by the academic circles do not hesitate to distort historical facts and are not objective and correct. Starting from the long-neglected book "Hate in Hate" by the concubine of Seko Hyeonggyung, which has long been ignored by Korean academia, Jung Byung-say tries to shed light on the truth of Seko's death, while delving into the political struggles of the royal family, portraying the turbulence of the palace struggle for a century.
It is worth mentioning that Zheng Bing said that from the clues of the literature, he read the human distress of Yingzu, Si Mourning Shizi, Zhengzu and others, and excavated a certain modernity in history. Shizi was born in attention and anticipation, but suffered from madness at the age of ten, and his personality was like an artist, unable to meet his father's expectations of himself, avoiding his father's strict and critical gaze everywhere, and once tried to enter the palace with a knife to kill his father... This tragedy was finally brought about by the complex interweaving of various powers and people.
"The Man by the Sea"
The Wizo are fishermen from western Madagascar, they are soft-tempered, do not like to get involved, and live only in the present, with no concern for the past and no plans for the future. In her research, anthropologist Rita Astuti found that the identity of the Vizo is not born into a state that is constantly constructed. Astuti learned to fish, paddle and swim in the ocean with the locals, and she was praised by the locals: "You're getting more and more like a Vizo!" ”
This ethnographic book The Man by the Sea discusses various cognitive concepts of the Vizo in a light-hearted manner, and the author and psychologists undertake collaborative research to examine the theoretical assumption of Western anthropology and psychology that "man is determined by blood and origin." However, there are still unexplainable and opaque areas in the heart of the Vizo, which is also reflected in the local view of life and death - the deceased is not completely dead, but can return to the world of the living, and the villagers need to try to establish a separation from death in order to become "carefree" Vizo again.
"Painting Against Image"
Painting Against Image, a recent collection of art criticism by Wang Min'an, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Humanities, is regarded by the author as a writing experiment and a personal essay in addition to theoretical writing, usually written in coffee shops on weekends or holidays. Wang Min'an's 2022 book "Emotions, Matter and Contemporaneity" provides a clear explanation of "what is contemporaneity" in the context of the emotional turn and material turn of the academic circle, while this "Painting Against Image" takes contemporary artists such as Shang Yang, Chen Danqing, Liu Xiaodong, and Ding Yi as research objects, trying to find contemporaneity in their works.
For example, when commenting on the works of the painter Wang Yin, Wang Minan found that the artist did not use popular techniques and discourses, but cleared all historical traces in his works, and the painting style also retained the shadow of former Soviet painting, which appeared "old and old". Through theoretical dialogues with scholars such as Deleuze and Agamben, he believes that it is this state of "screwing" and keeping distance from the times that makes the works present contemporaneity and allows artists to gaze deeply at this era.
"Braiding the Fragrance"
How to reflect on modern science in the "old" past is one of the themes that researchers in various fields continue to explore. As a forest ecologist and member of the Potawatomi tribe in North America, Robin Wall Kimmer is skilled in using scientific methods to explore questions about nature while identifying with indigenous ideas at the bottom of his heart. She believes that plants and animals are the oldest teachers, and that the earth is the most generous mother.
In the creation story of the North American Native people, villagers braided the plant into three braids, symbolizing the unity of mind, body and spirit. In the book "Weaving the Grass Incense", Kimmel also tries to think about the unity of human beings and the living beings of the world, as well as the increasingly urgent ecological and environmental problems from the process of planting, caring for and collecting thatch, as well as the contact with nature. Since its first edition in 2013, the book has appeared on the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists, and has become the sales champion in three categories: nature writing, botany, and environmental biology on Amazon.