The essay autobiography "Song of the Sheep", written by Japanese writer Kato in the 1960s on Monday, was praised as "the most beautiful prose written in Japanese" and was reprinted 62 times in half a century, and many Japanese middle schools and universities even listed it as a required reading list. Half a century later, Weng Jiahui translated the book into Chinese published.
Recently, a new book sharing meeting of "Song of the Sheep", curated by movable type culture and published by Beijing Publishing House, was held in Beijing. The event invited Weng Jiahui, the Chinese translator of the book and associate professor of the School of Foreign Chinese of Peking University, the Japanese scholar, former editor-in-chief of Iwanami Bookstore, professor of the School of Foreign Chinese of Peking University, Anderson Ma baba, and the writer Xu Zhiyuan to share their reading experience with readers.
The Song of the Sheep (with sequel) is Kato's autobiographical work, originally serialized in the Asahi Weekly magazine from 1966 to 1967, and published in the Iwanami Bunko library in 1968. The book describes the author's life experiences between childhood and the defeat of Japan in 1945. "The Song of the Sheep" is written from the defeat of Japan in 1945 to the conclusion of the new security treaty between Japan and the United States in the 1960s. On the one hand, the author describes the poverty and chaos of post-war Japanese society, and on the other hand, he describes the characteristics of the exotic cultures of European countries and the tense international atmosphere unique to the Cold War.
The Song of the Sheep is so beautifully written that it is even considered to be a textbook example. In the first volume of the book, the author's childhood memories of the scenery of Shimomachi, the scenery of the four seasons, and the campus life of Ichigoku and UTokyo are extremely vivid, and the suffocating atmosphere of the war is also very well grasped. In the next volume, the description of Japan's devastation after the defeat in the war and the exotic scenery of European countries is contrasting, and the author's psychological changes in love are also portrayed very delicately. The whole book integrates "poetry" and "truth" without a nostalgic sense of nostalgia, but makes people feel rational clarity. On the one hand, this is due to the influence of traditional Japanese culture since childhood, and on the other hand, it comes from the rational thinking cultivated by his profound Western learning foundation.
The scene of the event
Akito Kato: A Maverick "Sheep"
Kato wrote monday in the afterword to "The Song of the Sheep" that he wrote the work not just to reminisce about the past, but to document his experience as an "average Japanese." The name of the work is "Song of the Sheep" because the author was born in the Year of the Goat and believes that he also has a gentle and stable side of his personality like a sheep. The "sheep" written by Japanese writers often has the meaning of meek and honest, likes to live in groups, has no resistance to reality, and lacks personality characteristics, which is very clear when you look at Kenzaburo Oe's work "Human Sheep". But Kato's "I" on Monday is obviously not a "sheep" in this sense, "I" do not want to succumb to the pressure of the group, do not want to go with the flow, has a distinct personality, maverick, is a "sheep" that belongs to the sheep but is independent of the flock.
Yu Rongsheng, a professor in the Department of Japanese at Peking University's School of Foreign Chinese, wrote a preface to the translation of the book, saying that Mr. Kato is a well-known Japanese critic and novelist, but also a medical expert in hematology. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Japan, and studied in France to pursue medical research in Paris. Although his specialty was medicine and hematology, his main achievements were in cultural studies, intellectual criticism, and literary creation.
Kato began writing on Monday in high school, and even when he was admitted to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tokyo, he did not give up his penchant for literature and took courses in the French and liberal arts departments of the University of Tokyo, where he studied under French literary experts Kazuo Watanabe and Kenzo Nakajima. After graduating from university, he worked in the medical department, but continued to maintain a close relationship with literature. In 1951, Kato studied in France on Monday, and while engaging in medical research, he extensively examined the social culture of European countries, deepened his understanding of European cultural thought, and re-examined Japanese culture from the perspective of comparing with European culture.
His trip to Europe led him to consciously focus on re-examining the character of Japanese culture and giving new meaning to the old Japanese culture. Since then, he has been hired as a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo, where he teaches modern European thought, and was invited by the University of British Columbia in Canada to continue to give lectures on Japanese classics for nearly a decade. In 1970 he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin. In 1971, he participated in the visit of the Japan-Chinese Exchange Association to Visit China. "Kato Monday is one of the rare Japanese who can teach at different universities around the world, so he is really discovering something cosmopolitan, and he looks at Japanese society with a broader perspective." Xu Zhiyuan said.
When it comes to "abandoning medicine and following the text", readers will naturally think of Lu Xun's experience. Weng Jiahui analyzed: "Mr. Kato's motivation is to make a career choice under the premise of a very specific discipline subdivision specialization. He did not, like Mr. Lu Xun, who was worried about the country and the people, and first went to the spirit to heal his own people. Mr. Kato is more like our young people today: do you want to sacrifice your life for the sake of the profession, or give up the profession for your hobbies, then in the process of choosing one of the two, he chose to abandon the medical profession. ”
Shuichi Kato
An examination of Japanese culture
In the book on Monday, Kato portrays characters from three different eras (grandfather, father, "me") and the stories that revolve around them. Whether it is grandfather or father, they are all people who are wrapped up by the outside world, people who are swept by the trend of the times, and "I", the person who has survived and grown up in its background, is not like this. "I" have been insisting on myself from beginning to end, unwilling to be held hostage by external forces.
For Japanese culture, Kato did not blindly praise Japanese culture on Monday, but objectively and calmly re-examined it in comparison with Western culture. Kohiko Baba said he was impressed by the description of the day the Pacific War broke out. On December 8, 1941, the Attack of Pearl Harbor broke out. The streets of Tokyo are jubilant, and the author seems out of place with this atmosphere, and he buys tickets alone to see a puppet show. Escape the comical neighborhoods and be alone in the dark to remember The Traditions of Japan.
"(At the time) Kato was just a middle school student, and he foresaw the negativity of militarism so calmly and objectively and sadly. He said in a later interview that I had died twice, the first time on this day, because I saw naïve Japanese militarists who actually challenged the United States. He said that on this day I felt that our whole nation was going to perish. Weng Jiahui sighed.
For Japanese culture, Kato Monday has always believed that Japanese culture must recognize the hybridity of its own culture in order to maintain its characteristics and be passed down from generation to generation. Weng Jiahui explains: "Unlike the Chinese cultural model, Japan is too obsessed with pursuing its own pure-blood nature, that is, the unity of blood, the unity of language, and the unity of the nation, often using dualistic ways to recognize the world and surrounding cultures. This may also be the next dilemma they need to break through. Because in the current era, if a culture cannot be inclusive and allows itself to produce more reproducibility, the content it wants to be learned and passed on will become more and more empty, and then lose the continuation of the culture itself. ”
Song of the Sheep
Trade-offs in translation
When talking about the mental journey of translating "Song of the Sheep", Weng Jiahui frankly said that "how to make the Chinese translation also impress Chinese readers" is a problem she has been thinking about. "Mr. Kato himself learned a lot of Chinese and was very knowledgeable, but he always wrote for the public. When I was translating, I realized that in addition to those professional terms, personal names, and place names, his narrative language basic vocabulary did not exceed 6,000, which I particularly admired. Weng Jiahui said.
In translating the dialogue, Weng Jiahui chose to abandon the honorific part that must be used in Japanese and added a satirical, mocking choice of tone words. Considering the tit-for-tat debate between the young intellectuals represented by Kato Monday and the poets and writers who cheered for the war, there was no way to cover the confrontation in the debate.
"All words, words and phrases, are grammatical, and only when the reader's mind constructs in their minds what they consider to be beautiful, thoughtful, profound or superficial, dirty, bad, rogue, is constructed into the original system, it really exists; otherwise, it is the same as it has not been written, translated, disseminated, and printed." Weng Jiahui said.