The Paper's reporter Luo Xin intern Huang Jingjing
On July 18, writer Sun Ganlu and Luo Gang, professor of East China Normal University, writer Mao Jian, and xiang Jing, associate professor of East China Normal University, came to Duoyun Academy drama shop to talk about "the Shanghai time of a suburban poet".
"A few days ago, Teacher Sun Ganlu just celebrated his 'twenty-fifth birthday.'" At the scene of the event, Sun Ganlu's "chaotic" hair tip was "chaotic" again, and she blurted out, "He and Proust are on the same birthday!" ”
Regarding Sun Ganlu and Proust, Mao Jian once switched Proust's famous questionnaire directly to the "Sun Ganlu Questionnaire" - "Favorite Profession?" Go to love. Your favorite flower? all. Your favorite bird? swallow. Who do you most want to be? Myself. She said: "We often put Sun Ganlu and Proust together, we say that Proust is the French Sun Ganlu, that Sun Ganlu is the Proust of China, and that the birthday on the same day is a very obvious metaphor, which is God's handwriting." ”
God's handwriting, this statement is really familiar. Wang Shuo commented on Sun Ganlu in his early years: "His written language is the most refined, he is like God writing according to his hand, so that we have renewed respect and reverence for the written language." ”
In May this year, Sun Gan revealed two new books, one called "I Heard the Voice of the Suburbs Again: Poetry and Thoughts", which is a complete collection of his literary and artistic criticism and poetry creation since the 1980s; the other is "Two Sides of the Coin of Time", which contains his prose works about daily life, literary and artistic memories, and shanghai time. The attentive reader will also find that there is a vague intertextual relationship between the two books.
They are published by East China Normal University Press and Century Wenjing, respectively. In the introduction of the two new books, both publishers invariably used a set of contrasting expressions. Wang Ling, deputy general manager of Century Wenjing, bluntly said that Sun Ganlu is a slow pioneer in this fast era, while Wang Yan, president of East China Normal University Press, said that Sun Ganlu's poetic language has brought elegant calm to this noisy era.
I Heard the Voice of the Suburbs Again: Poetry and Thoughts by East China Normal University Press
The Two Sides of the Coin of Time is published by Century Wenjing
Sun Ganlu smiled and sighed that friends often comforted him, saying that he was "slow" writing, but in fact he was lazy and wrote less. For him, this "slowness" has a reason for life, a reason for personality, and of course, a reason for what he understands as writing itself.
In a sense, we can explore the reasons for this in two new books. As Luo Gang said, the two books return to the essayistic tradition of modern Chinese literature, and are more about Sun Ganlu's "literary history positioning": "Through them, we can see the context and origin of Sun Ganlu's writing. ”
"When we tell students about Sun Ganlu's work, we encounter the question: Why did he write such a language? What is the connection between his poems written in the 1980s and his later written language? His language exploration in novels, we say 'avant-garde' or 'new wave novels', where is the context of his exploration? Luo Gang said that he has always read Sun Ganlu's "Shanghai Flowing Water" as a novel, "His language has always changed." The language of "Shanghai Flowing Water" is no longer the language of "Visiting Dreams", nor is it the language of "Breathing". ”
On July 18, writer Sun Ganlu, professor of East China Normal University Luo Gang, writer Mao Jian, and associate professor Xiang Jing of East China Normal University visited Duoyun Academy Drama Shop to talk about "the Shanghai time of a suburban poet". The full-text site map is provided by the event organizers
A kind of slow writing on the edges
Sun Ganlu likes the word "suburb" very much.
He has a poem called "I Hear the Voice of the Suburbs Again" and a short essay called "In the Suburbs." The theme of the event was named "Shanghai Time of a Suburban Poet".
"Graham has an autobiography, The Road to Escape, which has an interesting sentence that says, 'We live in the suburbs of the universe.'" Why is this quote? Sun Ganlu said that his writing over the years is actually concerned with the center and the edge, deviating from the core theme, or as a writer, his thoughts are a little wandering, a little unable to keep up, can also be said to be a kind of slowness.
"He likes some words with a sense of edge, his vocabulary has a lot of 'like', a lot of 'seems', a lot of uncertain things, these words look ambiguous and more sweeping, but in fact express Sun Ganlu's extremely sharp feelings about time and space." He rarely allowed himself to be in the safe zone or comfort zone of time and space, he wandered on the edge, he tested himself in the abyss. When Mao Jian described her observations in this way, Sun Ganlu looked into the distance and nodded her head gently.
In a short essay called "Slow", Sun Ganlu described writing this way: "Personally, writing is introverted, sensitive, lazy, sharp, contradictory, and eager. I pin my hopes on the readers, but I don't know where they are. All this does not depend on the quality of the writing, but it determines the quality of the work. Finally, writing is simple and clear. But not justified. Writing is in place, polyphonic. But not abstract. Both its simplicity and complexity carry the characteristics of the senses, and it exists for nerve endings. ”
Emotionally, he also tended to be more marginal, writers with desert-like experiences, such as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and the Czech writer Milan Kundera. "Both writers are relatively free, like in mainstream writing, the focus is not aligned, or like the previous radio FM is not accurate, the feeling of being accompanied by the sound of current."
Coincidentally, Xiang Jing, who was sitting next to him, had just finished writing "On Han Shaogong", and it was Han Shaogong who translated Pessoa's "Records of Panic" and Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Life" into China and caused a sensation. "Teacher Sun especially likes to translate literature, and Teacher Han also attaches great importance to translation. Mr. Han is not a professional translator, and translating foreign works as a writer is actually choosing and introducing a literary tradition. There are many literary traditions around the world, as well as our own literary traditions, and translation is to create a filling literary tradition for the literature of the time. Xiang Jing said.
Writer Sun Ganlu
Be a stranger to your own national language
In a conversation, Sun Ganlu and Luo Gang talked about one of Christia's points of view: "A writer, who means a foreigner, his job is to translate his inner voice, a process that is more heterogeneous than a foreign language, which contains a life." ”
Under the influence of such a concept, Sun Ganlu regarded "being a stranger to his own national language" as an ideal state.
Luo Gang called Sun Ganlu's language exploration an important part of the "second language breakthrough" of Chinese literature in the 20th century, "The May Fourth New Literature is very important, it gave birth to modern vernacular literature, and it is the foundation of Chinese literature in the 20th century or modern and contemporary Chinese literature." But the problem is that except for a very few writers such as Lu Xun, most writers have a big problem with their writing, which was later called 'Europeanized Eight Shares' or 'Student Cavity'. ”
Luo Gang said that at that time, there were two ways to correct the "Eight Strands of Europeanization", one was to return to the traditional Chinese language, that is, "how to purify the vernacular into the text" proposed by Lin Yutang and others; the other was to return to the vivid and lively "vocal narrative" that the Chinese people liked to hear. "Vocal narratives" did produce masterpieces in the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, but this narrative gradually combined with the official mainstream language will also become rigid. "The most representative is a detail in Wang Anyi's "Xiao Baozhuang", in which the novel describes that 'fishing for slag' to save people is an act of 'benevolence and righteousness', which has a strong folk color, but there is a literary madman in the novel, who submits articles to the county all day, and the story he wrote about 'fishing for slag' is completely out of shape compared with the story told by the common people."
If the "vocal narrative" is the "first language breakthrough", Luo Gang believes that the second language breakthrough is the "return to a written language" represented by Sun Ganlu.
"This regression is to get nutrients from exotic regions. Sun Ganlu is particularly fond of translating literature, which actually involves a problem, which has become a very important part of modern Chinese, and the stereotyped language that has gradually become official has been broken through. Gan Yang has edited a book "Cultural Consciousness in the 1980s" (formerly known as "Contemporary Chinese Cultural Consciousness"), which has some articles that are all about Western studies, so the question is, why can Western studies become the cultural consciousness of contemporary China? In other words, why did Kundera and Pessoa influence contemporary Chinese literature and even become a part of it? I don't think contemporary literary studies today have turned something from a foreign land into an integral part of contemporary Chinese cultural consciousness. ”
Professor Luo Gang of East China Normal University
He "invented" strangeness, love, time and space, and the city
In Mao Jian's view, Sun Ganlu had "four major inventions": he "invented" strangeness, "invented" love, "invented" time and space, and "invented" the city of Shanghai.
"Every time I read Sun Ganlu's article, even if I have read it two or three times before, I still have a new feeling. His words stand up to reading and reading, and his sentences are particularly suitable for memorization. They inform you when you fall in love, and they soothe you when you fall out of love. I know there are a few songs that can be sung again and again / There are a few autumn woods that can't be passed by over and over again. Sun Ganlu named some of the most important moments in our lives, including love. Through his writing, we suddenly realize, ah, it turns out that this is love. So, I call him the inventor of love, more powerful than the compass. ”
Mao Jian believes that the future of world literature will compete in urban literature, and Sun Ganlu has written a particularly stunning sense of Shanghai's city. Luo Gang doesn't see 'Shanghai Flowing Water' as a flowing water body or a prose body, he sees it as a novel, which I think is particularly important. Through these two new books, we can see that Sun Ganlu invented a new style and recreated the city of Shanghai in a sociological sense, and he is the inventor of our city. ”
"The number of Novels by Sun Ganlu has declined a bit in recent years, but he has thrown his own flesh into the city, and he is a true performance artist. Wasn't that what the people who invented gunpowder were like that? Detonate yourself and constantly blast out new worlds. So I sometimes think it doesn't matter if he writes one less book or one more book, because every corner of Shanghai has the space he writes. Mao Jian said that readers from all over the world gathered at the Duoyun Academy Theater Shop on a particularly hot Sunday like this, which is the meaning of Sun Ganlu.
Luo Gang also agreed that Sun Ganlu was not only a city wanderer, he also inscribed himself into the city. Since the 21st century, Shanghai has given birth to many landmark cultural occasions, such as sinan reading clubs and Duoyun Academy... "Many urban wanderers can only be passive, but Sun Ganlu has transformed the city." ”
Mao Jian, professor and writer of East China Normal University
Different literary aspects are fused together in him
Xiang Jing also believes that Sun Ganlu "invented" the 1970s, and that several articles in the two books are written in the 1970s, while previous literary history rarely used the 1970s as a spiritual origin. In "I Love Things I Don't Know," Sun Ganlu writes: "The dance drama 'Red Detachment of Women' shaped my passion for ballet, 'Gao Yubao' shaped my sympathy for poor children, 'Harbor' shaped my identification with Shanghai and the workers, and 'Chaoxia' shaped my lifelong love for novels. ”
"Sun Ganlu is a complex contemporary writer, and what we often see and recognize is that he likes the first-person narrative of Duras, the jungle and personal experience of Proust's heart." Xiang Jing sighed, "How these different literary aspects fit together in a person may be a problem that the novel will solve." ”
Mao Jian believes that the 1970s constituted the starting point of Sun Ganlu's writing, and it can also be said that the 1970s had a special significance in literary history through Sun Ganlu. "His 1970s included the Red Detachment of Women, Russian literature, workers, peasants, and soldiers, as well as various translations."
"Mao Jian spoke particularly importantly. In cinematic terms, the 1970s were a defining moment in my films. It has shaped me, even if I go farther, no matter how old I am, I will always look back at that place. Sun Ganlu said that when he was a child, he bought a one-dollar decal at the bank, when the bank was just a place to save, and for a teenager, the one-dollar decal was not so much a savings as a game. Later, on an afternoon in July 1994, he witnessed an old woman in her sixties saving a dollar in a current passbook at a savings house on Huashan Road.
"What role could a dollar play in life at that time?" Someone with life experience will know that this is something that makes you shudder, and she does it every month. In the article titled "Chinese People Are Very Good," Sun Ganlu finally wrote: "At this moment, depositing and withdrawing seems to be more important than the number of deposits and withdrawals." I know that this kind of thing is too numerous to mention, as is its opposite. However, when it happens in the bank scene, its meaning is most appropriately revealed by Yang Wei's work. ”
He says the article may be bland to read, but he's afraid to use the word "shudder" directly in his writing. "In fact, when we come back to life, you see nothing, and I think that's probably what life looks like, even though it's been a thousand sails below."
Xiang Jing, Associate Professor of East China Normal University
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Luan Meng