On June 21st, the "MaiTiange Famous Artists Lecture Hall" welcomed two heavyweight lecture guests, the famous writer Yan Lianke and the writer and critic Wang Yao, who were well-known at home and abroad, and together brought a wonderful lecture entitled "Facing The Chinese Language Forever Humble". This lecture was presided over by the famous writer Walk Away Teacher. All members of Mai Tiange and some writers and friends in Hunan Province attended the lecture.
Mr. Li Zhuo, founder of MaiTiange, delivered a short welcome speech. The two-hour lecture has been conducted in a warm and cheerful atmosphere.
The scene of the event
Walk around: (ask Teacher Wang Yao) Today's theme, first of all, the object is "Chinese", and secondly, the attitude towards Chinese is "humility". So, is this "Chinese" all Chinese? Does it make a distinction? Even if it is dirty language, even if it has an era background, all Chinese, do you have a humble attitude?
Yao Wang: Enter the wheat field and feel excited! Because I have also worked as a Chinese teacher in elementary, middle, and university. Take Mai "I like Mai Tian Ge" as an example, language can actually be distinguished into the language of daily life and the language of literary writing. The existence of two "divisive" languages is a cultural problem facing us today. It has a lot to do with physique, with ideology, and with the whole "fake" of our personality today. All face a life of language division.
So what kind of language should we enter the reading and writing environment? The Chinese tradition is very long, but the language change is very slow. The change of language is not entirely a cultural issue, but there are many dimensions of language that are actually examined. Linguist Zhao Yuanren summed up the Chinese language as a bit of elegance and simplicity. He once reflected on the need for Chinese to get rid of the influence of Western language structures and return to the environment in which we grew up as Chinese.
The language of division is actually connected with divided thoughts and split personalities. Writing is actually engraving words on oneself, it has its own blood, its own breath. We have to know that we are in a divided language, and you have to find your own language, find your own way of writing. Teachers, if you let students find their own language, find their own way of writing, and let children have their own inner breath in writing, then you are all great teachers. This is one reason why "I just like the wheat field".
Walk around: (ask Teacher Yan Lianke) We ordinary people writing will unconsciously be disciplined by those grammars, bound by it, and our language will become regular. In Teacher Yan's works, taking "Years, Months and Days" as an example, the unfamiliar language such as "falling lonely" has an unusual use of such a vivid vitality. How did Teacher Yan's creative use of language come about?
Yan Lianke: My respect for middle school teachers is beyond imagination, because I did not enter the university door in my twenties. At that time, I wrote a post-reading feeling, others wrote two pages, I wrote nine pages, but the Language teacher commented: "The idea is open!" But that doesn't mean the essay is just fine. "I was inspired by this.
Speaking of "son of Chinese", I am actually the same, but I am a "contrarian". However, even the "contrarian son" is also a Chinese child. (Based on the stories of korean, Vietnamese and other translators, the contrast shows) Chinese is remarkable, it can reflect the characteristics of the world's excellent works. Being a "son of Chinese" is a fortunate thing. Teacher Wang Yao's new work "Folk Songs" is worthy of the title of "Son of Chinese".
Shouldn't language be fluid? Without development, there would be no language today. It is both entrenched and fluid. For example, in Japan, you see signs, shop signs, you see those familiar square characters, you know every word, but it is no longer the meaning we understand, such as the word "go". From this, you can see the richness of the language, and you may want to "bring it back".
Another example is the Bible, which does not have a single sentence that is particularly in line with the logic of our Chinese language, but everyone understands and accepts it. This translation of the Bible will show you that language flows. Some people want to hold on, some people want to run away. Someone is the son of language, and there should also be someone as the "contrarian son" of language. This will make our language richer.
Walk around: (ask Teacher Wang Yao) Teacher Yan's inner self, in the flow, openness, and rich development, he does not stick to the self, each of his works is "changing", it is from the change of content, leading to the change of style, and then lead to the change of language, so he can not apply "always humble", he said that he is a "contrarian", he is rebellious to language. Rebellion is not courage, but is associated with talent. So how is Teacher Yan's talent related to language?
Wang Yao: Teacher Yan Lianke has a great influence in Japan. An ordinary old lady began to learn Chinese because she had read Teacher Yan's book. Your influence on others is to influence their harvest and influence their writing. In Vietnam, there are writers who imitate yan Lianke's writing methods and structures. This is called influence. Chinese has become a very big influence in the world. Teacher Yan is a very important link.
Where is Teacher Yan's contribution? I thought that his language had been able to bring together his imagery, details, opinions, language, and personality. And most people are divided. For example, Teacher Yan's "Rebel" adds a new content form to Chinese grammar in another form. Others, such as "Year, Month and Day", "Explosive Chronicle", "Four Books", etc., are very special images. Here reflects the special place of "rhetoric" in the traditional Chinese language, the so-called "rhetoric" is how you turn words into words, how words become long and short phrases, and how phrases are combined into sentences, which is very remarkable.
Teacher Yan's cultural language intuition is not something that everyone can have. We usually say that language can reach the place of meaning, but Teacher Yan can find language backwards from the meaning itself. His language is very strong. A good novelist is a linguist, and Teacher Yan enriches Chinese writing, which makes us respect Chinese more.
Walk around: (Ask Mr. Yan Lianke) I remember watching an interview with Mr. Yan Lianke, and you said that you can only find that language if you are in a state of "chaos". It's not the same as how we feel when we write. That's what you're talking about, that language has to do with its state, with its thinking. Teacher Yan has a saying called "language is me", a writer's literary view, world view, is to distinguish language into "you", "we" and "them", when you separate this group, language then distinguishes the "I" from "we". It is the language to clarify its own style state. What I want to ask is, is your writing state touched in "chaos"? Teacher Wang Yao pointed out a very important situation that your language is to open up imagery and synaesthesia, is this related to your "chaotic" state?
Yan Lianke: I think so: A writer has to write a lot of novels in his life, and the stories of good novels are different, and the emotions in each story are different. The reason why Camus's The Outsider feels good is that its emotions are different from those of our good novels. Why we think Tolstoy's novels are good is that the "love" embodied in his novels is not the same as the "love" embodied in Lu Xun's novels. This is a fundamental issue. You can't express it in one language. When you express it in a language, its linguistic differences become smaller. What matches an emotion must be a special language. Language, in fact, is an emotion. It's not just words, not just words, that language must be emotion itself. Without this emotion, you write this language as "doing." And to have that emotion, to bring that language out, is nature. We see that a language is good, but there is no emotion, what we see is "doing", language and emotion are split, they are stripped.
The Tang poems and Song poems handed down today are particularly good and classic sentences, which must be consistent with words and emotions and inseparable from each other. The word itself is emotion, and emotion is the word. So the novel, if your story and emotion are consistent, it is a language that erupts from emotion, and you can't express your inner emotions without this word, this word, then even if this grammar is wrong, I can only use this wrong to express this emotion, then the reader can forgive. If a good writer, your language is not an emotion, it is just a language, it seems "craftsmanship". The language master must be embodied in emotions, such as Lu Xun's "Wild Grass", its language must be integrated with its story and thought, it is consistent, and we put it together to tell it. Lu Xun contributed to language. Wang Zengqi and Shen Congwen also contributed to language.
We used to say how great a certain writer in Beijing was, but today we all forget him. But one thing, his language, contributes to our literature. Others have not contributed this way. Not all writers have this ability. Teacher Wang Yao's "Folk Song" begins with a sentence: "I sit on the dock, and the sun is like a thin paper pad under my ass." This sentence is grammatically wrong and problematic. But the "magic" of literary language is reflected here. The poetry of this sentence, the richness of this sentence, is precisely reflected in the place that goes against the common sense of language and the inertia of language. You will find that sometimes good language is often in the "wrong" place. Sometimes the progress of society is often brought forward by a "misunderstanding" and a "mistake". And sometimes, it is pulled back by a "mistake". But there is a point that society, in its dynamics, must be brought by something "wrong". Either it was correct, and we didn't realize it at the time, or how many years it took us to realize it. I would like to say, whether literature or language, can we make some "mistakes" to some extent. When we make a "mistake", it may improve a little bit.
At the end of the lecture, the two heavyweight keynote speakers had a wonderful interaction with the on-site teacher Mai Tiange and the signatures of the on-site works. The lecture ended successfully in a warm group photo atmosphere!
Teacher Yan Lianke
Yan Lianke
He is currently a professor at Chinese Min University and a chair professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The main works are "Daylight Flow Year", "Living", "Ding Zhuang Dream", "Four Books", "Burst Zhi", "Sunrise", "Heart Sutra", "I and my fathers", "They", "Zhongyuan", etc., and have been nominated for the Booker International Literature Award three times, and won the Lu Xun Literature Award, Kafka Award, the Newman Literature Award, the Japanese Twitter Literature Award, the "Dream of the Red Chamber" Award and many other awards, and is currently one of the most internationally influential contemporary writers.
Teacher Wang Yao
Wang Yao
Writer, critic. Professor of the School of Letters of Soochow University, Jiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, Chief Expert of the National Social Science Foundation of China. He has won the 7th Lu Xun Literature Award for Theoretical Criticism and the Chinese Literature and Media Award. He is mainly engaged in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, editing the "Department of Contemporary Chinese Literary Criticism", "The Literature Department of the Cultural Revolution", etc., and has authored "History of Contemporary Chinese Prose", "The Eighties as a Problem", "Dialogues of Mo Yan Wang Yao", "The History of Each Other", "One's Eighties", "Intellectuals on Paper", etc., and has successively opened columns in many newspapers and periodicals such as "Southern Weekend" and "Reading". In 2021, he published his first novel, Ballads.
Walk away the teacher
Go for a walk
He is the author of the short story collection "Brand New", "Shantytown: Like Childhood, Like Love", "Underwater", etc., the novel "Want to Jump into the Fire", "I'm About to Break" and many others.