Snow Country Chinese Translation
In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his three masterpieces of "Snow Country", "Ancient Capital" and "Thousand Paper Cranes", becoming the third Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The novella "Snow Country" is considered to be the highest quality, the most beautiful artistic conception and the most extensive influence of Yasunari Kawabata - it has been translated the most overseas, and has been translated to many countries and regions, and China has also published different translations.
So, how can a 119-page novel about a married rich second generation in a midlife crisis and a geisha emotional entanglement be able to present such a beautiful mood?
The protagonist of the novel, Omdomura, is a dance art researcher, and what sounds like such a serious profession is actually just his hobby. His serious job is not to work, to live on the legacy left by his ancestors, and he may not have to work to support his family in this life.
He has a very interesting professional habit, obviously studying Western dance, but he never watches the dances of Westerners, nor does he watch Western dances performed by Japanese people.
Yasunari Kawabata explains this character: "What he admires is not the dance art performed by the dancer's flexible flesh, but the dance that is illusory based on Western words and photographs, like a fascination with a woman he has never met." ”
Perhaps for this reason, he had already married and had children three times to the hot spring inn in Snow Country to meet a local geisha named Komako.
Stills from the 1957 film Snow Country 01
The first time he saw Komako, Shimamura was attracted to her young, simple, beautiful flesh, and the foot fetish immediately came to mind with the image that every bend of her toes was probably clean. As for spiritual attraction, that should be an afterthought.
If Yasunari Kawabata had written the purpose of Shimamura's three meetings with Komako as a Senrijo cannon, it would be meaningless, after all, he was not Junichi Watanabe or Haruki Murakami.
The two often date at the hotel where Shimamura stays, and in ambiguous scenes like the hotel, all they do is chat, take a bath, hug, occasionally drink some wine, and flirt.
Stills from the 1957 film Snow Country 02
As for whether they have slept in the end, if the Chinese translation is not deleted, it is difficult to see directly in the book, which creates an extremely charming temperament for the novel and increases the artistic conception of the novel's beauty.
On Shimamura's second train to Snow Country, he encounters Leaf. Ye Zi is the lover of Komako's son, Yukio, and Komako is the fiancée of Yukio. At this time, Xingo had already suffered from tuberculosis and was dying soon, and the reason why Komako worked as a geisha was to earn money to see him.
It's easy to guess that Shimamura, who is obsessed with new things, is also obsessed with Leaves at first sight, and the two don't see each other much and rarely talk. After Yukio's death, the two had a conversation, and Shimamura almost turned her to Tokyo. Later, because of a fire, the leaves are killed in the fire, and the novel ends in tragedy.
The Shimamura in the novel is a nihilist, the spirit is often in a state of wandering, feel that nothing is important, do everything in vain, all day sad spring and autumn, sentimental, to put it bluntly, people still can not not work.
He felt that the dead moth was a beauty, that the struggle and convulsions of the bees before death were unnecessary, and that the sight he saw, though sometimes full of life, was in fact depressed. For the fickle life, life is not important, death is not important, so everything seems so futile.
When it is known that Komako had to work as a geisha in order to earn money to see a doctor, it is even more futile in Shimamura's eyes, including Komako's hard work to read and take notes, diligent practice, and even falling in love with him, which is meaningless in his eyes.
Maybe the life of a rich person is to avoid understanding life.
Everything Komako did, in her own words, was just to live with dignity and pursuit. She is always fighting against her surroundings, and the difference between her struggles is a real unfortunate life, but the final result is nothing.
In this contradiction between reality and fiction, until she saw Ye Zi die in front of her, her life was completely reduced to a futile sadness, and both life and love seemed to have completely lost its meaning.
For Shimamura, the koma and the leaves, one red rose and one white rose, and the wife who is far away in Tokyo can only be regarded as a thorn in the rose. Even this thorn could no longer prick him, so that he could pursue a lascivious life outside in the cloak of nihilism.
If the colt was a dream he had in the Snow Country, then the leaf was the dream of that dream. Although komako is beautiful, as a geisha, she cannot help but be stained with the traces of worldly life. The beauty of the leaves is the pure, ethereal beauty.
The colts made him feel the nothingness of life, the leaves made him feel the nothingness of life, and only their fate was tragic enough to make him wake up completely from his dreams.
And it is the nothingness of all this that makes the novel full of the temperament of the beauty of "material sorrow".
Material lament is a literary concept put forward by Motoyabu Honju, a major scholar of the Edo period in the commentary book "The Tale of Genji Monogatari", "The Tale of Genji Monogatari", which is simply "true feelings revealed", touching the scenery and feeling things.
Purple Shibu novel "The Tale of Genji"
Don't be intimidated by this concept, to a smaller extent, in fact, it is basically the same as our Tang poetry and Song Ci, such as - "Boundless falling wood Xiao Xiao, do not see the Yangtze River rolling in", "people have sorrows and joys, the moon has yin and sunshine and lack." "To put it more broadly, most literary works have such characteristics.
The mourning in "Snow Country" is the inheritance of the mourning in "The Tale of Genji", and the core idea is that only when "people do their best to mourn" will "all things decline", especially the love between men and women.
Yasunari Kawabata once said that "Izu's Dancing Girl" or "Snow Country" was written with a feeling of gratitude for love. "The Dancing Girl of Izu" focuses on simplicity in its performance technique, while "Snow Country" shows the inner pain of the characters.
The question of whether Shimamura and Komako have slept, which readers have always been concerned about, may be answered from the island in "The Dancing Girl of Izu".
In "The Dancer of Izu", "After the two dancers met the college student 'I' and the dancer, neither of them poured a word of admiration to each other from beginning to end, and their feelings for each other were between perceived and non-aware." Yasunari Kawabata consciously dilutes the emotional tone of love but not love, that is, "material sorrow".
Stills from the movie "The Dancing Girl of Izu"
Therefore, the delicate relationship between Shimamura and Komako in "Snow Country" seems to be self-evident, and it does not matter whether you sleep or not.
In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata gave a keynote speech on "The Beauty and Me of Japan" at the Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he emphasized: "Destroying me is nothingness, and this 'nothingness' is not the nothingness of the West, on the contrary, it is the emptiness of all things, and it is the spiritual universe of boundless and endless hiding." ”
The magic explained by the old man is actually a combination of Buddhist thought and Taoist thought in our understanding. The essence of Buddhism is all in one "emptiness" word, and Taoism is all in a "nothing" word, which is completely in line.
The novel is written in a way that blends Western streams of consciousness, aestheticism, and the Neo-Sensationalism and Nihilism that prevailed in Japan at the time.
So many "factions" and "isms" are not empty shelves, and Kawabata's novels may cause mixed reviews in terms of ideological content, but his superb narrative skills are recognized, and so many "factions" and "isms" are the foundation of the novel's skills.
Statue of Yasunari Kawabata
It is worth mentioning that Yasunari Kawabata's depiction of the Snow Country is a real place, based on Niigata Prefecture in Japan.
Yasunari Kawabata described the snow country this way in "I Am in Beautiful Japan": "Bright light shines deeply, and the pavement is cold and blue. The lights on the train station, because of the cold, flickered non-stop. ”
It can be said that "Snow Country" is a beautiful dream created by Yasushi Kawabata as a man in a midlife crisis, and it is likely to be a nightmare for women.
However, if you are lucky in this life, as a literary and artistic youth, rich and single, you have every reason to visit the snow country.