Lake Terrace Night Talk | Also talk about Naipaul

It's safe to say that Naipaul is a racist. But he was sharp and insightful, and a great writer. (Visual China/Photo)

"Miguel Street" is Naipaul's first Chinese translation, translated by Zhang Qi, published in China in 1992, but there is little repercussion from the book world there. It wasn't until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 that the book became popular, and other translations have since appeared, equally critically acclaimed. In 2007, Taiwan's Far Stream published Zhang Qi's translation of Miguel Avenue, but the response was mediocre and far less popular with readers than Naipaul's masterpieces, "The House for Mr. Walles" and "RiverBend.".

Critics in Taiwan have reservations about Naipaul's social attitudes in Miguel Street, in line with the Anglo-American literary community, where some of the views and observations in the book are considered racist. It's safe to say that Naipaul is a racist. But he was sharp and insightful, and a great writer. I've admired Naipaul since the early 1990s, and Riverbend remains one of my favorite contemporary novels.

In the autumn of 1996 I participated in a major international literary prize, I nominated Naipaul, and a Jamaican writer also nominated Naipaul; he thought that with a double nomination, he should be able to win this award, but none of the female judges and The African judges voted for him, and he was left behind. In the eyes of everyone, he was too reactionary. Although he was my favorite master, I have always had reservations about his "Rue Miguel" and do not consider it a great work, unlike the writers and critics who Chinese mainland admired it.

First of all, it is a transitional work from Naipaul's writing career. He once said that most of his time in his writing is spent searching for subject matter, because he comes from the small country of Trinidad and has no stories to tell. This is the same as Coucher's comment about him: Naipaul eventually became a writer entirely by a strong will, constantly searching for subject matter in the process of writing, and finally discovering that his most important theme was how a "man without a state" (Naipaul) like himself survived and developed. When Naipaul told his early friend Paul Theroux about The Rue Miguel, he said, "The good hanging exhausted me." It's a thin little book, and the characters and plot are not rich and complex, but what makes the author write so laboriously?

The biggest thing about this book is the language, and the characteristics of this language cannot be translated. Naipaul sought to create an English language that reflected the trinidad people of the lower classes, which was full of slang and vernacular, grammatically confused, but very expressive and lifelike. However, this Kind of English is marginal or border area, and the rhyme can only be felt in the original text.

The first "Bogart" begins with Hart asking, "What happening there?" Zhang Qi's translation is: "Is there anything wrong?" "Half of the verb is missing from the original sentence, but Chinese is not a Pinyin script, and it can only be translated so standardly." Another example: "Hart said, 'You think he went Venezuela?'" The original sentence lost its auxiliary verbs and prepositions, and was completely grammatically unintelligible, but the Chinese translation was very smooth: "Do you think he will go to Venezuela?" The non-standard dialogue in the original text is the essence of the book, and most of the dialogue in the book is conducted in similar non-standard English. For example, there are no binge pronouns at all in the dialogue, and himself is said to be hisself; to her is said to be to she; and each character has his own accent, which makes the dialogue more vivid. Bogart shouted, "Shadddup, Hat! (Shut up, Hat), this incorrect pronunciation can not be reproduced in the translation, can only be translated as "shut up". That is to say, Chinese readers read works that are far from the original works, and the entire translation is very elegant, but it loses one of the most important factors: the slang and diversity of language. Therefore, when Chinese readers praise the language of this book, it will give people the feeling of looking at the mountains through the fog. It should also be noted that for Naipaul, this language is just an experiment, a transition. Like the narrator of the novel who eventually left Trinidad, Naipaul stopped writing in this language after Miguel Street, and his scenes and characters moved to other parts of the world. He also had to write in a richer, more universal English.

Chinese readers usually read "Miguel Avenue" as a collection of short stories, and critics Chinese mainland have even compared it to Joyce's "Dubliners" and Anderson's "The Strange Man in the Small Town", which is actually a misreading and lacks textual common sense. As short stories, these stories are almost not "one", unfinished, the characters are not fully developed, and the plot is too simple. Naipaul was not a good short story writer, and his short stories were rarely selected in short story anthologies in Anglo-American literature. Some short anthologies of the 1980s and 1990s included selects his works, but often excerpts from his long or novellas. This can also be seen in Naipaul's arrangement of the story of "Rue Miguel": he uses numbers to arrange the chapters in the book from 1 to 17, to emphasize the coherence of the book, and to ask the reader to read the book as a whole, like a long piece. No collection of short stories is so laid out. In 1982 he published a book called Three Novels, the last of which was Rue Miguel, suggesting that he preferred to treat it as a novel.

Most Taiwanese readers grew up reading Western literature and are familiar with the form of short stories, which can explain why Taiwanese readers do not react enthusiastically to "Miguel Avenue" as a collection of short stories. But Chinese mainland readers are different, very enthusiastic about this "short story" collection, and even regarded it as a classic, which may be related to their familiarity with Chinese notebook novels. The traditional note-taking novel is very similar to the literary style of Naipaul's "Miguel Street", drawing vivid characters in just a few strokes, illustrating events, but not seeking to develop characters and drama, nor to pursue structural integrity.

Another explanation I have is that readers of Chinese mainland tend to focus on the whole over the part, like the social consciousness and cultural trends there. My American friend Bill Holm (1943-2009) was a great musician who taught in Wuhan and wrote a book called Coming Home Crazy. He has a great love for Chinese culture, and in the book he made this observation of Chinese and Western music: Western music starts with every tone, every short sentence, and every tune; every part must be perfectly done before it can be integrated and expanded into a complete work; Chinese mainland music does not pay attention to these partial things, but focuses on the overall effect of the work; but the final effect of the two methods is actually almost the same (131-132 pages). I think Holm's words also indirectly explain the fascination of Chinese mainland readers for Miguel Street: they don't pay attention to the completeness of each article, they only look at the effect of the whole book.

In fact, there is another level that everyone has overlooked, that is, Naipaul wants to write a unique genre bender: it is like notes, some like short stories, and some like long stories. He later played a similar approach in The Mystery of Arrival.

Hakin