How do you tell about Ziorang? Or rather, Xiao Xun? Born from romanian, Ciolan became famous in French and wandered for most of his life. At the height of his fame, controversy and criticism continued, and even his writing and publication itself were seen as a shocking scandal. Even now, evaluations of him are polarized. Readers who like him feel that Zioran's writings, such as explosives and spikes, are extremely high in heat, and intense pleasure coexists with deep vertigo. Readers who don't like it feel that Zioran's writing is neither original nor systematic, that it is an old antique, that it is constantly repeated, and that his "nihilism" of extreme, arrogant and rudeness is also disgusting. But in the eyes of more people, he seems to have become the most common kind of "golden sentence philosopher" and "golden sentence writer", but this is the result of abuse.
The most famous discussion about Ciolan came first from Sontag. After reading his first book, Outline of Disintegration, written in French, Sontag praised Ciolan as one of the most thoughtful and powerful writers today. She saw at a glance the philosophical tradition behind Ziorang: a new, personal, aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic philosophy represented by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Ziorang is the best spokesperson for this tradition at the moment. But Sontag also believes that what is missing in Ciolang's work is Nietzsche's heroic effort to overcome nihilism.
Tears and Saints, by E.M. Ziorang, translated by Sha Mei, January 2014 edition of the Commercial Press
But this may be more or less misunderstood by Zioran. Nihilism, which is the most common label people attach to him. In response, Ciolan said: "I am not a nihilist. One can say I am, but it doesn't make sense. "We can say that he is entangled in nothingness, but it cannot be said that he fell into nothingness. In fact, when we enter his writings, we feel a strange, moving comfort when we feel a primordial dark force that destroys the ancient laurels. It does not carry any real hatred, on the contrary, it brings a kind of vitality.
For example, Ciolan is obsessed with death and suicide, but he believes that suicidal thoughts are natural and healthy, and that people's strong desire to exist is a serious defect. Suicide keeps people alive because suicide teaches us that we can leave the world when we want to, which makes life bearable rather than destroying it.
"The Guide to Enchantment", by e.m. Ziorang, translated by Lu Xianggan, Flower City Publishing House, May 2019 edition
Perhaps, in the words of the poet Zagaevsky, it would be closer to the truth of Ziorang's writing. He once compared the works published by Ziorang and Milosz in the same year—like two still life paintings. In Milosz's work, you see an intact apple, in front of which is a glittering oyster, and only when you gaze backwards with all your attention do you catch a glimpse of the vague outline of a guillotine. In Ziorang's work, on the contrary, the first part is a bare skull, followed by quicksand that seeps down from the delicate hourglass, followed by a bunch of grapes that flicker on and off.
What influenced Ciolan's style? This is probably a difficult question to explain. When he was a seventeen-year-old Romanian teenager, he suffered from an inextricable neurosis and was plagued by insomnia all night for six or seven years. It was during that time that his view of the world changed. Ciolan realized that sleep was an extraordinary thing. For those who have sleep, every morning is the beginning of a new life, while for those who have insomnia, the new life is not established, and it forces you to experience the long consciousness clearly and without interruption. When this experience extends to months and years, people's feelings about things and their perceptions of life are forcibly changed.
Ciolan began to feel the burden of Romanian history, began to want to be someone else, began to write. During his time writing in Romanian, he wrote almost simultaneously the radical political pamphlet The Romanian Metamorphosis and the blasphemous and decadent Tears and Saints. In 1937, at a time when Rebecca West, the author of Black Sheep and Grey Eagle, was returning to the Balkans in search of the source of Europe's problems, Ciolan left Romania and came to Paris.
He continued to write in Romanian for a decade, when Twilight of Thought and his unpublished manuscript, The Enchanted Guide. Then, something else happened. In 1947, When Ziorang was translating Malami's poems into Romanian in a village in Normandy, France, he had lost interest in philosophy. One day, he was suddenly struck by a feeling: "I'm in France, I'm not a poet, I'm translating very poorly, why am I still doing this?" ”
Twilight of Thought, by E.M. Ziorang, translated by Lu Xianggan, May 2019 edition of Huacheng Publishing House
Ziorang began to decide to write in French. It was much harder than he had imagined. By temperament, French did not suit him, and Ciolan needed a savage language, a drunkard's language, and French was like a tights for a prisoner. But he immersed himself in French like a madman, rewrote the Summary of Disintegration four times with a dictionary. This is reminiscent of Yageta Christopher, author of The Diary of a Bad Boy, who began learning French at the age of 21 and developed her own unique writing style. So did Ciolan, who became the French spelling of Xiao Xun.
However, the more He aged, the closer he felt to his source. He had seen many countries and read many books, but finally came to the conclusion that it was still the Romanian peasant who was the original one. As he grew older, he felt that things were no longer so intense, and that the good and bad of everything were in the depths, not on the surface. But whether writing in French or Romanian, his goal has always been that a book must be a wound, and that every time a book is written, someone is awakened and whipped with a whip. He would still carry the recklessness and naivety of writing the Romanian Metamorphosis as a young man, hoping to "conquer the light in a blind country."
Written by | Yang Siqi
Editors| Zhang Jin and Li Yongbo
Proofreading | Fu Chunyi