2020 is coming to an end,
Shelley's verses still seem to echo in your ears———
"Winter is coming, will spring be far away?"
In this unusual year,
Because of the epidemic,
Literature seems more powerful.
Reading at home
People staying at home during the epidemic took advantage of this rare time to travel in the sea of books to gain spiritual comfort and self-improvement from reading, among which the sales of literary works related to the epidemic increased significantly.
On the eve of World Book Day, data released by a number of online bookstores showed that a large number of works related to the epidemic and infectious diseases received widespread attention from readers, such as "Plague", "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Blood Plague: The Story of Ebola", "Corolla Virus", "Snow Crow" and so on. When people encounter a sudden crisis, their hearts are often filled with anxiety, loneliness, panic, and sadness, and literary reading at this time can give the soul a warm comfort. From the reading hotspots, we can also see the profound reflection of human beings on disasters. An epidemic has raised the awareness of human beings from society to individual crisis, and it is also a life education lesson that makes people begin to reflect on the value and meaning of life.
As a way of looking at the world, writers' literary creations naturally involve the real world of the epidemic and the post-epidemic era.
Writer Chi Li published her latest documentary novella "What Flashed in my Mind During the 99 Days of Lockdown and Confinement" in the 7th issue of Beijing Literature in 2020. In the novel, she uses nearly 40,000 words of notes, starting from the perspective of a writer, to record what she thought and felt in the 99 days from the lockdown of Wuhan and the beginning of her own grounding. Because Chi Li is a wuhan writer who was an epidemiologist before entering the literary world, her novella "Cholera Disorder", which she wrote in 1997, was also concerned by netizens in the first half of this year.
Writer Yi Zhou's short story collection "Gengzi Story Collection" was completed in the first half of 2020, and its "chronicle" nature is particularly prominent, equivalent to a book of memory preservation in 2020 Gengzi. The five stories in the book are all about the "plight of man", in Yi Zhou's view, the epidemic is just one of the plight of mankind, "the world has never been too peaceful." In the days when they don't wear masks, everyone is not trapped in their own violent mediocrity. ”
The Nobel Prize effect
Every year, the Nobel Prize for Literature "Draw" always attracts a wave of Nobel Prize winners' works, and this year is no exception. Louis Grecker's poetry collection "The Alloy of Moonlight", which has been imported into China, "Until the World Reflects the Deepest Needs of the Soul", was originally sold dismal, not much readers paid attention, after the Nobel Prize was announced, these two books immediately appeared on the book best-seller list, and the publisher urgently printed 50,000 copies each.
Exactly how many readers will be able to read Glick's work is unknown, but the Nobel Prize gives us a chance to get closer to poetry. By awarding the laurels to poetry, the Nobel Prize tells us that poetry is still important to humanity.
The works of previous Nobel laureates remain a hot topic for publication this year. Two of tokarczuk'Chinese s two collections of novels by 2018 Nobel Laureate Tokarczuk were released on the shelves, including "The Collection of Grotesque Stories" published a year before she won the Nobel Prize, and another "Wardrobe" was directly translated from the original Polish text, arranged according to the original work, visually showing the original appearance of Tokarczuk's work. In 2016, the only experimental text in the life of Nobel Prize author Bob Dylan, Tarantula, was also introduced and published. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Nobel laureate Patrick White in 1973, and the press has introduced two of his masterpieces, "The Explorer Voorth" and "The Man in the Chariot." "Go to Room Nineteen" is included in nineteen famous works by 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing, which tells the passion and confusion in interpersonal relationships.
Meet the documentary
In the eyes of most people, literature is a serious existence, documentary is a form of high cold, when literature and documentary meet, but collide with a surprising spark.
The five-episode documentary "The Daily Life of Literature", which began airing in April this year, through a friend visiting a well-known writer, through the dialogue between the writer and his friends, shared with the audience their cognition and interpretation of hot topics such as the concept of life and death, the people's hearts of the world, the hometown, and youth rebellion, illuminated life with the candle of thought, and led the audience into the world of literature. Mai Jia, Ah Lai, Ma Yuan, Xie Youshun, and Ma Jiahui mass-produced "golden sentences" in the film in the form of mutual dialogue, which is full of highlights.
Mo Yan's Gaomi Northeast Township, Jia Pingwa's Shangzhou Countryside, Alai's Jiarong Tibetan Area, Chi Zijian's Ice and Snow North Country, Liu Zhenyun's Yanjin World, Bi Feiyu's Northern Jiangsu Water Town, these famous landscapes in the map of contemporary Chinese literature, are the true descriptions of the writer's hometown, or the artistic imagination? The filming team of the documentary "The Hometown of Literature" spent two years following Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Liu Zhenyun, A Lai, Chi Zijian and Bi Feiyu back to the village where they were born, returning to the scene of literary creation, and listening to the writers talk about how to transform the hometown of life into the hometown of literature. The hometown in the documentary is the place where writers were born and grew up, the "root" of new literature, and the spiritual home that every audience member finds after watching this documentary.
The documentary "Water Moon in Hand", which shows the portrayal and continuation of Mr. Ye Jiaying's decades-long inheritance of the spirit of Chinese culture, was premiered in Beijing on October 14. In this "poetic documentary" that spans a hundred years of personal memory, the audience feels Mr. Ye's ups and downs but poetic life, as well as the daily nature of culture, poetry and creation.
During the severe outbreak in April, the BBC launched its latest 58-minute documentary, Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet, which attracted worldwide attention. In the documentary, Du Fu is reduced to an ordinary person with moods and sorrows, and traces his life from birth to entry. Du Fu's optimistic attitude towards life in the midst of pain and hunger has brought spiritual strength to those who are fighting the epidemic.
Controversy over public editions
In 2020, a number of authors and scholars who died in 1969 entered the public press. Domestic scholars include Chen Yinke, Zhang Junjie, Wu Han, Fan Wenlan, Liu Shousong, Tong Dide and so on. Abroad includes the American "Beat Generation" writer Jack Kerouac, the American novelist John Kennedy Tours, the British science fiction writer John Wyndham, the Polish novelist Vitord Gombrowicz, the German philosophers Theodore Adorno and Carl Jaspers. Because there is no need to pay copyright fees and do not need to obtain the authorization of the original copyright holder, the public edition of the book has always been the "fragrant food" in the publishing industry.
Chen Yinke, the most famous historian of the 20th century in China, demanded that his works "must be published in a straight line in traditional chinese characters, otherwise they would rather be buried in the ground", and since then the publishing industry has been following this meaning not to produce simplified characters. In 2020, the 50th anniversary of Chen Yinke's death has passed, and his works have entered the public edition. The news of the publication of the simplified Chinese version of the "Chen Yinke Collection" of Yilin Publishing House has attracted the attention of the academic and publishing circles. Some scholars believe that even if it enters the public edition period, it should follow Mr. Chen Yinke's last will and will, and express concern about the possible omissions and misreadings of the simplified version in the process of conversion from traditional to simplified; Some people also believe that the publication of simplified chinese versions will help promote academic popularization and the dissemination of Mr. Chen Yinke's ideas, which is actually a good thing.
This year, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" became a public edition book, and in January and February, some publishing houses have launched new translations, in addition to using binding and famous translations to attract readers, some publishing houses have attached shredders to the book to "burn after reading". Jiang Hanzhong, a translator at the China Foreign Language Bureau, said, "The average reader can neither distinguish the ins and outs of the original version, nor can he be sure of the quality of the translation." Nowadays, many novels are difficult to understand the tone of foreigners speaking Chinese, which lacks the unique charm and advantages of Chinese itself. If the publisher lacks a sense of responsibility, he can only rush to the edge. ”
Old writers produce new works
The 106-year-old famous writer Ma Zhitu's "Continuation of Ye Tan", published by the People's Literature Publishing House in June, is a sequel to the "Ten Records of Ye Tan" published in 1983. Ma Zhitu had the dual identity of a revolutionary and a literary scholar, risking his life to engage in underground work in the "National Unification Zone". Because he often changed occupations, he often dealt with the three religions and nine streams. In 1982, Wei Junyi, then editor-in-chief of the People's Literature Publishing House, invited Ma Zhitu to create a creation, recording in writing that he had "personally experienced or seen and heard many strange people and strange things", and finally contributed to the publication of "Ten Records of Night Tan" in 1983. In 2010, the chapter "The Tale of the Thief" in "Ten Tales of night tan" was adapted into the movie "Let the Bullets Fly" and was widely known.
Writer Mo Yan launched his first collection of short stories after winning the Nobel Prize this year, "Late Ripening People". Regarding "late ripening", Mo Yan said: From the perspective of literature and art, a writer or an artist matures prematurely, is stereotyped, and does not change, and his road of artistic creation will come to an end. In this sense, writers do not want to stereotype themselves prematurely, that is, they hope that they can mature late, so that their artistic life and artistic creativity can be maintained for a longer time. ”
In addition to "Waste Capital", almost all of Jia Pingwa's works are written about the countryside in the Qinling Mountains, and this year's new work "Temporary Sitting" focuses on young urban women for the first time. This novel "'urbanization' is more thorough, from the story scene to the character image, wrote a group of young women living in Xi'an, economic independence, spiritual freedom, and fashion, writing about their gorgeous and colorful lives, but also writing about their melancholy confusion." ”
Literature "shakes" up
"Hello everyone, I am Mo Yan. Since today I have settled in Douyin, please pay more attention to it. On September 3, writer Mo Yan, as the creator of a short video, released a video to share with readers the new work "Late Ripening People" published by the People's Literature Publishing House. By the afternoon, 122,000 followers had followed Mo Yan, and the video had garnered 129,000 likes.
In the first half of this year, affected by the epidemic, the rise of live broadcasting, many writers, publishing houses, bookstores, periodicals have also launched official Douyin numbers, personal Douyin numbers, live introduction books, live book sales, live broadcast new book launches, WeChat circle of friends are full of writers and critics live broadcast, with a variety of information with goods. For a time, literature "trembled".
Does literature need to "shake"? Critics He Ping and He Tongbin began a dialogue on this topic.
He Ping believes that the current people are "trembling" Although there are different efforts, the general direction is still the pursuit of profits for the king of traffic, and it is difficult to obtain large traffic support for simple information transmission and aesthetic expression, so literature, especially literature in the narrow sense, how much traffic or fans can be bo is doubtful, and it is not so easy to "go out of the circle".
He Tongbin pointed out that whether literature needs to be "shaken" is actually a pseudo-problem", literature "has long been a single category of concepts, many literary genres have been "shaken" in different ways, and douyin is only the latest stage. From the previous hundred pulpits, to various audio and video literary online classes, and then to the current vibrato, Kuaishou, literature fanatically and follow the trend in the new media forms, perhaps related to an "ancient" and "often new" complex: the popularization of literature and art, or let literature enter the general public, truly become their favorite "program", become a literary "square dance", its essence continues or after the marketization and commercialization of literature since the 1990s, the essence of literature, literary nature, literature, Literary definitions need to face blurred boundaries.