Infant and Offenbach
"Everything happens in threes": Everything is three.
In 1967, Colombian writer García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published. In the same year, Cuban writer Cabrera Inventus's novel Three Sorrowful Tigers was published. In the same year, a Siamese cat was born. Infant adopted her (and vice versa). Because she often sang in the middle of the night, her song was so difficult to compliment that it constituted an offense to bach, hence the name: offenbach.
Tiger, tiger, tiger
Invent writes like some sort of feline nomenclature: naming felines and naming others with felines. "Death is the invisible tiger," he says in a novel, and then names the novel "Three Sorrowful Tigers"—in fact, this is the third name of the book, which he previously named "The Hole Without Edges" and "Tropical Dawn Landscape" until the tiger came out of the mountain. Sure enough, everything is three.
The writer admits that the real protagonist of this novel is Havana on the eve of the revolution, and the original title of the book, tres tristes tigres, is the beginning of a famous tongue twister, which literally translates as: "Three sad tigers..." The tiger symbolizes the wild land and exoticism, sadness can be said to be the most literary emotion, and "three" is a mysterious number, representing "terrible asymmetry" in the author's eyes, "a dark flash in the jungle of the mind". There are too many cultural symbols associated with the "three" that can be found in the origins of the two Greek cultures, the most common being the Trinity God in the Jewish Christian tradition. The literal translation of "Three Sorrowful Tigers" is an interesting title, but the loss is inevitable: first of all, the taste of the tongue twister is gone, and the "Three Sorrowful Tigers" in the Chinese does not twist the mouth at all, and the writer's intention in this regard is frustrated. I searched through all kinds of tongue twisters and found no satisfactory results. If, in order to highlight the color of the language game, choose an irrelevant Chinese tongue twister as the title, the reference in semantics and the association axis will be lost. I once came up with a plan that was not satisfactory: "Bitter Tiger Diagram". First of all, the "bitter ku-tiger hu-tutu" rhyme is repeated, highlighting the sense of phonological alienation; semantically "bitter" can barely relate to "triste", and "tiger" has survived. As for "Tu", the novel is indeed a 1958 picture of a night tour of Havana. But where did the "three" go? - Isn't the title three words?
How are translators in other languages handled? The French translation is translated without suspense as trois tristes tigres, effortlessly, and the Romance languages are all the same and envious. The German literal translation is drei traurige tiger. And after a long search (three sad tigers, three tired tigers, three flat tigers, three triped tigers, three-tongued tigers, three triggered triggers), and finally translated as three trapped tigers, you can see that there are sacrifices in the literal sense:" Triste "sad" became "trapped", but by virtue of its western pinyin script, it successfully retained ttt's "head-like rhyme" form. Inventus said that this is already the least bad of the many options, or simply does not translate, directly using the original title in Spanish. The writer added playfully: "In the final analysis, we still have to listen to the opinions of the publishers, who are the best judges." For the same reason, after a long search up and down, the Chinese edition was honestly translated literally and returned to the "name".
There are no tigers in Three Sad Tigers, some in Havana in the late 1950s, nocturnal animals that haunt bars, nightclubs and the Corniche: writers, photographers, actors, singers and drummers, and other urban wanderers. It is said that in the dark language of Havana's nightlife, they can all be called "tigers", which is far more than three. When Infant began writing the book in the early sixties, he realized that these tigers would inevitably go extinct in the new era. As a protector of endangered animals on paper, all he can do is circle a protected area of memory with overloaded words.
Introduction to marking
"Three Sorrowful Tigers" is a colorful tiger in itself. In the book, you have compared the variety of characters who sang me to the stripes of a tiger: "... What is an extra stripe for a tiger? "Zoologists tell us that the markings of each tiger are unique, although at first glance they appear to be a chaotic labyrinth of random lines. Marking is an anti-order order, as Fuentes said in the New American Novel in Spanish: "Our work must be a work of disorder, that is, if there is a possible order in the work, it is the order contrary to the present order." "The study of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is referred to as "Red Studies", and the study of "Wenxin Carved Dragon" is said to be referred to as "Dragon Studies" (after all, it cannot be referred to as "Literature"), and it is not easy to call "Tiger Science" when talking about "Three Sorrowful Tigers", but simply called "Marking Science". There are three convenient methods of marking: symmetry, clutch, and concealment.
Let's start with symmetry. The "prologue" of the book begins with a monologue by a man (the nightclub host) and ends with the monologue of a woman (a mad woman in the park). The opening ceremony was filled with guests and ignored when they left. There are more than one set of such symmetrical markings, followed by the first "debut" of the "prologue", which is the little girl telling childhood anecdotes in the first person, and the "eleventh time" before the "epilogue", the woman who asked for a doctor also told a sad story of a little girl, the protagonist of the story is her childhood child, but at the end she suddenly said: "Sometimes I think my little friend is me." ”
Look at the clutch again. For example, the story of "Star Liya" is divided into eight parts, all titled "She Sings Polly Dew", which together become a biography of the legendary black female singer. The monologue of another female character is named numerically: "First time", "Second time"... Tells the story of eleven visits to a psychiatrist by Laura Díaz. "Star Leah" and Laura (someone pronounced "dawn" in her name laura), black and white, night and day, their stories are staggered throughout the book, and the divine light is like a series of echoing stripes.
Three looks at the hidden. Find looming lines in the patched bushes. For example, the story of the "tourist" is told four times, about the Weekend Trip to Havana by the American tourist Campbell and his wife, Mr. Campbell tells it in the front, and Mrs. Campbell's errata is in the back, which counts twice; immediately after the same narrator, the same story the couple tells again, which is four times. It was not explained until later that it turned out that the short story of an American writer Campbell was translated into Spanish and prepared to be published in the magazine, but because the translator René Leal (the surname "leal" in Spanish means "faithful", a wonderful irony) was too literal and lame, the editor-in-chief had no choice but to find someone to retranslate: "Sylvesterre, René's translation is terrible - so to avoid using other adjectives, it would be a dirty word." I implore you to write another manuscript on top of the one in which you have written it. I'll also send you the original English manuscript to show you how Rine did it..." The editor-in-chief here has only three letters of gci, which is the initials of the author of the book, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who in reality was indeed the editor-in-chief of the magazine. The two editions are very different in style, the René version should have been in the chronological order, but the book appeared after Sylvesterre's version, which is the worst translation style - as a Chinese translator, I have encountered new challenges in my translation career, I always had to try to translate well, but here I have to try to translate badly, and it has to be bad at a glance - blindly literal translation Hard translation, there are also many errors in the meaning of the text, such as "the first finger" is obviously a mistranslation of the English "first finger". But in both the René version and the more fluid and easy-to-read version of Sylvesterre, Mr. Campbell's narration is imbued with a strong macho spirit, Mrs. Campbell is dedicated to exposing her husband's hypocrisy and conceit, and what the couple has in common is the condescending arrogance and prejudice of the citizens of the new empire visiting the old colony: what I can't understand is meaningless, and the one who is different from me is flawed—ah, this charming and dangerous other! In addition, we must not forget that Mr. Campbell is a single novelist in the reality of the novel, and Mrs. Campbell is actually his fiction. We can't see the "English manuscript" mentioned in the book, because the original does not exist, it is the fiction of the novelist Infant. The virtual and the real, is Yefiyah, the two versions of the translation without the original text intertwined with the reality inside and outside the text, like the antithesis of each other and the contrast between each other, let people at first sight is incomprehensible, dizzy when they look at it again, sad and inexplicable when they look at it three times. Translation and original, self and other, fiction and reality, all kinds of tangible stripes mixed with layers of hidden lines.
At the heart of the book, Trotsky's assassination in Mexico is told seven times, entitled: "The Death of Trotsky by Different Cuban Writers, After or Before the Incident." From José Martí, the pioneer of the Cuban Revolution, to the eminent femininist Cabrera Lydia (one of Lorca's famous Gypsy Ballads is dedicated to her), from the American Baroque aggregator Lesama Lima, the "magical reality" Baptist Capentier to the poet Nicolas Gilian, who was deeply influenced by African culture, the style and brushwork of seven classic writers, or gorgeous, or mysterious, or elaborate, or elaborate, in a playful way condensed a twentieth-century Cuban literary history, in different styles , rejuvenated. Behind the seemingly showy "style exercise" is the dissolution of personal style: when a person has seven tones and seven sets of pen and ink, then which is his voice? When a fact can be told in seven ways, which is the true version of history? Or is there no such thing as a single truth, and history and memory are destined to be betrayed in the narrative?
Book of Betrayal and Nomenclature
There are no villains in the conventional sense in Three Sad Tigers. If you have to find a villain, Invent says, it's betrayal. Some have betrayed their families, some have betrayed love, some have betrayed friendship, some have betrayed their teachers, some have betrayed the revolution (or vice versa), some have betrayed themselves, "Anyone can betray their ideals..." When the exciting great cause deviates from the original intention, the utopia becomes an enemy totopia. "Three Sorrowful Tigers" is a pre-publicized betrayal: "Any similarity between literature and history is a coincidence," the book begins. It's like the Sea Oath Mountain League in Polly's Dance, who believes who is a fool. It was later called "this book is written in Cuban." That is, to write in the various dialects of Spanish in Cuba, and writing is nothing more than an attempt to capture the flying voices of people. "It's a doomed attempt, and writing or writing is ultimately going to betray the vocals." More than once in the book, "That scene was worth hearing," "You really should have listened," "But you have to listen to himself to be more interesting," and similar explanations, and we, as readers in other space-time, certainly can't hear it. The author is hinting at the limitations of his own writing and the fate of betrayal. Think of lewis Carroll quoted at the beginning of the book: "She tried to imagine what kind of light will come out when the candle is extinguished", the brilliance of the candle after the candle is extinguished can only shine in the memory, and the remembrance of the lost water years is equivalent to betraying the lost time, just like in the book, Couet suddenly asks "I" if she can recall a woman she loved, and after "I" give a positive answer and describe it in detail, Couet brazenly asserts that "I" did not love at all, "That woman does not exist, you just made it up... Because if you really love, if you really love you won't remember anything, you can't remember whether the lips are thin or thick. Or you can remember the mouth but you won't remember the eyes if you remember the colors you can't remember the shape, you never, ever, never can do to remember the hair forehead eyes lips chin and legs and shoes feet there is a park. Never. ...... You'll only see the pupils that look at you, and as for the rest, believe me, it's all literary creation. "It's all literary creation, it's all about "translating" the lost years: the past is to memory, just as the original text is to the translation, and "translation is betrayal."
The author's other self, the spiritual teacher of the "tigers", Strofidon, said that true literature should be written in the air, and so did his own practice: the seven interpretations of Trotsky's assassination mentioned above were all his oral creations, which were recorded by his disciples and transcribed against the teacher's wishes, resulting in a double betrayal: "betrayed will" and betrayed empty Chinese. The irony is that those who strongly oppose writing have left a nickname in the world: bustrófedon (boustrophedon) is the original meaning of the method of writing, "cattle ploughing conversion writing (an ancient way of writing, from right to left, and then from left to right, which was used in ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, etc.)". Prefix bous-(βο??? -) is the ancient Greek "cow", so I deliberately chose the "牾" next to the word ox on the premise of similar pronunciation, taking the meaning of "back and reverse" ("牾, reverse also"), because he always moves against the tide, contrary to the conventional. Even Strofidon had "betrayed" himself: as an avid dictionary reader, a heavy addict to language games, a lover of harmonics, a hunter of palindrome, he would not be unaware that a game like palindrome could only exist in words, because as the name suggests, palindromics read both positively and negatively, "a deception of hearing", so it must be written. The palindromic written is a betrayal of last resort (words betraying the voice), and the translated palindromic is an unavoidable betrayal (the translation betrays the original text). For example, in the book, "dábale arroz a la zorra el abad" quoted by Strofidong, which literally means "the abbot gives the female fox rice to eat", I racked my brains and reluctantly translated it as: "Rice cooked rice paste, Hu Temple monk feeding fox", although it is said that the sentence reduces the difficulty by itself, but the good villain translates the palindromic into a palindromic, which can be called the betrayal of betrayal...
The last and longest part of the book, bachata, which means "hilarious, prom, party", so I chose chacha dance when I transliterated it as "Bachata", and considering that the bachata contains Bach's name bach, I resolutely decided to replace the "Bach" that appears in the whole book with another common translation name "Baha", with Chinese glyphs similar (Cha-Ha) corresponding to the letters in the original text, also in order to deal with the following language game:" I now listen to Baha in between the comments of Koué imagining what kind of language games he would have made up if HentaRofi were alive: Baha, Baha, Basla, Bastille Pit (distributed on the cement floor, interrupting the spatial continuity of the Corniche), Baha dolls, Bahavana, Bacciata, Bachachacha — listen to him make up a dictionary in one word. "Here are two protagonists, two tigers running fast, Cue carrying Sylvesterre on havana's Corniche, classical music on the radio," Couet hummed music as he drove, shaking his head, sometimes shaking his fist forward to indicate forte (strongly), sometimes opening his hand downward to indicate pianossimo (extremely weak), walking down a level of invisible, imaginary musical ladder, as if sign language experts were translating speeches. ......
Can't you hear how old Baha fiddled with the d key, how to set up his imitation, how to make the change appear unexpectedly, but always in the case of the main melody and hints, never ahead, never lagging behind, but still amazing? Don't you think he's a completely free slave? Ha, old man, he's better than Offenbach, I swear, because he's here, hier, ici, here, in this sorrow of Havana, not in the joy of what Paris. ”
Just as he was about to put out his lyrics, the radio host said, "Ladies and gentlemen, what you have just heard is concerto major in D major, no. 11, no. 3, composed by Antonio Vivaldi. It is said that this is the famous choteo in Cuban culture, which the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Language Institute succinctly interprets as "teasing, joking", while Cuban scholars such as Jorge Ma? Ach extracted from it a national trait, that is, mocking self-appointed authority, not accepting the reality of the order, and laughing and laughing in return. According to the people in the book, "This is very Cuban. Here the truth must be accepted as a joke. This may be why the whole book is full of all kinds of witty words, harmonic melodies, and hidden music, film, and literary allusions "shows"... All the rap and digression, the side knock, because it is impossible to easily say the most important name.
In 1972, Infant was diagnosed with "bipolar disorder" and received 22 electric shock treatments at a hospital in London. He also asked the doctor to increase the amount of medicine he took, because he felt that the roar of the tiger always echoed in his ears. The doctor replied with a wry smile: Mr. Infant, next to our hospital is Hyde Park.
The London physician failed to truly understand his Cuban counterpart (Infant studied medicine in his early years, and later abandoned the light and the dark), just like the doctor who opened the skull of Psitrofidon in the book, only knew how to attribute the patient's "speech vomiting" to brain damage. The invisible tiger that roars in his ears is death, a betrayed ideal, a past and homeland that cannot be returned, and at the same time a whispering and aphasia in exile. Science fiction movie lover Invent often said that the only time machine is a typewriter. His writing is Feline Nomenclature & Exorcism, because the best way to subdue the Tiger of the Heart is to give it a name.
Photographer Néstor Almendros was staying at the home of his old friend Infant, dreaming in the middle of the night that he was devoured by a tiger, and woke up to find a twelve-pound Siamese cat lying on his chest and staring silently. Its name is Offenbach.
Author: Fan Ye
Editor: Qian Yutong