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Literature enthusiasts across China have mauled bookstores in search of novels by author Mo Yan. The Chinese writer won the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 11, but his books were sold out even before Nobel Committee made the announcement.
“About 5,000 copies of one of Mo’s novels have sold out,” said tang Zhengyu, Director of the Marketing Department at the Shanghai Literature and art Publishing Group.
Finding Mo’s books online isn’t easy either; even the largest Chinese shopping sites have run out of Mo’s novels.
When Mo learned he was likely to win the Nobel Prize, he returned to his hometown in Gaomi County in east China’s Shandong Province to stay with his father and maintain a low profile. He learned the news on tV.
“Winning the Nobel Prize means that i will have to meet many journalists in the following days,” Mo said. “undoubtedly, the Nobel Prize in Literature is the world’s highest award for literature. However, in history, many great writers never had the chance to win the prize, such as Leo tolstoy and Franz Kafka, while not all winners of the prize deserve the title.”
Mo’s winning has elicited various responses from writers and literary critics.
“In the past, the Nobel Prize in literature was mostly awarded to european writers. The Chinese have always wished that the judges would pay more attention to Chinese writers,” said Wu Di, Director of the institute of Comparative and World Literature at Zhejiang university.
“It’s surprising that the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded to a Chinese. it indicates that Chinese literature has grabbed worldwide recognition. From now on we don’t need to care much about winning the Nobel Prize but can focus more on our writing,”said Zhang Yiwu, Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking university.
Editor-in-chief of Lifeweek, Zhu Wei said on his microblog that the Swedish academy had recognized Mo’s in-depth analysis of the Chinese way of life.
“Mo’s winning has aroused the Chinese people’s love for reading. People can get immersed in reading books again like they did in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” said Sun Yuemu, Director of China Book Business report.
Reading between the lines
Before winning the Nobel Prize, Mo had already won a number of international awards. in January 2005, he won the 30th international NONINO Prize. His works have been praised for their roots in ancient Chinese civilization, and he has been lauded as a writer with a rich imagination and unique technique.
However, for a long time, Mo and many other Chinese writers did not get the recognition they perhaps deserved because much of the meaning of their works was lost in translation. a review published on the Singapore-based Zaobao on October 9 said that the Chinese don’t need to attach much value to the Nobel Prize for Literature because it only evaluates literary works in alphabetic languages, and alphabetic languages cannot present the depth and richness of Chinese works.
Therefore, Mo’s win could largely be attributed to his translators. anna Gustafsson Chen, the Swedish translator of many modern Chinese literary works, translated three of Mo’s books published in Sweden this year. Howard Goldblatt, a master in translating contemporary Chinese literary works, has also introduced Mo’s works to the english-speaking world by translating a dozen of his works. “i love all of Mo’s novels and enjoy translating them,” Goldblatt said. No l Dutrait won the Laure Bataillin award together with Mo, and the Ordre des arts et des Lettres medal for translating The Republic of Wine into French in 2001.
“Chinese literary works cannot have an impact on the world without being translated into foreign languages by great translators,” said tan Wuchang, Director of the Contemporary Chinese Poem research Center at Beijing Normal university.
The influence of foreign writers is another key to Mo’s success.
After China’s reform and opening up in late 1970s, Western literature was introduced to China, which Mo devoured. Mo is regarded as bearing a strong resemblance to the 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. The Nobel Committee in Sweden praised Mo’s “hallucinatory realism,” which blends aspects of “folk tales, history and the contemporary,” and said that his works reminded people of Márquez’s and William Faulkner’s works.
Mo said that if he had read One Hundred Years of Solitude beforehand, he might have adopted a different writing approach to Red Sorghum.
Achieving Fame
In 1988, Chinese film director Zhang Yimou turned Mo’s 1987 novel Red Sorghum into a movie, which won the top prize at the Berlin international Film Festival and made both of them famous.
Set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the War of resistance against Japanese aggression, Red Sorghum is a tale of love and peasant struggles. The main characters “my grandpa” and “my grandma” organize the villagers to combat the Japanese with the simplest of weapons. The passion and vitality exuded by these characters attracted Zhang, and he decided to turn the novel into a film.
The film turned out to be a success, and sales of the novel shot up. Red Sorghum is praised for its unconstrained imagination and smooth flow of language. it praises the power of life and upholds the nationalistic spirit, and provides a fresh look to contemporary war novels.
‘Don’t speak’
Mo first captured the attention of the literary world with his novella Transparent Red Radish, published in 1985. The “red radish”is symbolic of both sex and food, and hunger inspired Mo to write. as a kid, he knew he wanted to be a writer because a writer could eat three meals of dumplings a day, he was told. as a child, Mo suffered through the 1960s famine, during which time the village children ate whatever they could get their hands on, including tree leaves, insects, mud and coal.
Red Sorghum expresses his thoughts on history and love, and The Republic of Wine embodies his regret for the degeneration of mankind and his hatred for corrupt officials. although the novels are quite different in content, they both reflect a hungry child’s longing for a good life.
Mo was born in the 1950s in a small village in Gaomi, a county with a history of more than 2,200 years, and well known for its traditional folk arts and its production of many celebrities.Mo often returns home to write and most of his novels are set in his home village.
Mo dropped out of school during the“Cultural revolution” (1966-76) and worked on a farm, where the cows became his friends. “i understood more about cows than about human beings. i knew what they were thinking.”
During that time he developed the habit of talking to himself. His mother thought he was sick when one day she found he was mumbling in front of a tree. His mother begged him to stop talking in public. That is why he gave himself the pseudonym “Mo Yan,” meaning “don’t speak” in Chinese, when he began writing.
Words on paper
“Writing is another way of speaking. i write because i want to share my ideas and thoughts with my friends by telling stories. in the process of writing, i have known more about myself and human nature,” Mo said.
Writing also enables Mo to do what he dares not do in real life. He is brave in revealing and criticizing the dark side of society in his works, which has angered some people.
But in daily life, he is careful and considerate, often fearful of upsetting others. “My daughter lives near the Beijing Capital airport. every time i come to Beijing, i won’t head straight to her home after i get off the plane. instead, i always ask the taxi driver to take me to the city center for fear of annoying him by traveling such a short distance. Maybe the more cowardly a writer is in real life, the more brave he is in his works,” Mo said. “Literature enables us to do what we dare not do and cannot do in reality.”
“In my earlier writings, i wrote about miseries inflicted by the outside world, focusing more on the evils of society. Now i pay more attention to the evils hidden deep in my heart,” he added.
“About 5,000 copies of one of Mo’s novels have sold out,” said tang Zhengyu, Director of the Marketing Department at the Shanghai Literature and art Publishing Group.
Finding Mo’s books online isn’t easy either; even the largest Chinese shopping sites have run out of Mo’s novels.
When Mo learned he was likely to win the Nobel Prize, he returned to his hometown in Gaomi County in east China’s Shandong Province to stay with his father and maintain a low profile. He learned the news on tV.
“Winning the Nobel Prize means that i will have to meet many journalists in the following days,” Mo said. “undoubtedly, the Nobel Prize in Literature is the world’s highest award for literature. However, in history, many great writers never had the chance to win the prize, such as Leo tolstoy and Franz Kafka, while not all winners of the prize deserve the title.”
Mo’s winning has elicited various responses from writers and literary critics.
“In the past, the Nobel Prize in literature was mostly awarded to european writers. The Chinese have always wished that the judges would pay more attention to Chinese writers,” said Wu Di, Director of the institute of Comparative and World Literature at Zhejiang university.
“It’s surprising that the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded to a Chinese. it indicates that Chinese literature has grabbed worldwide recognition. From now on we don’t need to care much about winning the Nobel Prize but can focus more on our writing,”said Zhang Yiwu, Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking university.
Editor-in-chief of Lifeweek, Zhu Wei said on his microblog that the Swedish academy had recognized Mo’s in-depth analysis of the Chinese way of life.
“Mo’s winning has aroused the Chinese people’s love for reading. People can get immersed in reading books again like they did in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” said Sun Yuemu, Director of China Book Business report.
Reading between the lines
Before winning the Nobel Prize, Mo had already won a number of international awards. in January 2005, he won the 30th international NONINO Prize. His works have been praised for their roots in ancient Chinese civilization, and he has been lauded as a writer with a rich imagination and unique technique.
However, for a long time, Mo and many other Chinese writers did not get the recognition they perhaps deserved because much of the meaning of their works was lost in translation. a review published on the Singapore-based Zaobao on October 9 said that the Chinese don’t need to attach much value to the Nobel Prize for Literature because it only evaluates literary works in alphabetic languages, and alphabetic languages cannot present the depth and richness of Chinese works.
Therefore, Mo’s win could largely be attributed to his translators. anna Gustafsson Chen, the Swedish translator of many modern Chinese literary works, translated three of Mo’s books published in Sweden this year. Howard Goldblatt, a master in translating contemporary Chinese literary works, has also introduced Mo’s works to the english-speaking world by translating a dozen of his works. “i love all of Mo’s novels and enjoy translating them,” Goldblatt said. No l Dutrait won the Laure Bataillin award together with Mo, and the Ordre des arts et des Lettres medal for translating The Republic of Wine into French in 2001.
“Chinese literary works cannot have an impact on the world without being translated into foreign languages by great translators,” said tan Wuchang, Director of the Contemporary Chinese Poem research Center at Beijing Normal university.
The influence of foreign writers is another key to Mo’s success.
After China’s reform and opening up in late 1970s, Western literature was introduced to China, which Mo devoured. Mo is regarded as bearing a strong resemblance to the 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. The Nobel Committee in Sweden praised Mo’s “hallucinatory realism,” which blends aspects of “folk tales, history and the contemporary,” and said that his works reminded people of Márquez’s and William Faulkner’s works.
Mo said that if he had read One Hundred Years of Solitude beforehand, he might have adopted a different writing approach to Red Sorghum.
Achieving Fame
In 1988, Chinese film director Zhang Yimou turned Mo’s 1987 novel Red Sorghum into a movie, which won the top prize at the Berlin international Film Festival and made both of them famous.
Set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the War of resistance against Japanese aggression, Red Sorghum is a tale of love and peasant struggles. The main characters “my grandpa” and “my grandma” organize the villagers to combat the Japanese with the simplest of weapons. The passion and vitality exuded by these characters attracted Zhang, and he decided to turn the novel into a film.
The film turned out to be a success, and sales of the novel shot up. Red Sorghum is praised for its unconstrained imagination and smooth flow of language. it praises the power of life and upholds the nationalistic spirit, and provides a fresh look to contemporary war novels.
‘Don’t speak’
Mo first captured the attention of the literary world with his novella Transparent Red Radish, published in 1985. The “red radish”is symbolic of both sex and food, and hunger inspired Mo to write. as a kid, he knew he wanted to be a writer because a writer could eat three meals of dumplings a day, he was told. as a child, Mo suffered through the 1960s famine, during which time the village children ate whatever they could get their hands on, including tree leaves, insects, mud and coal.
Red Sorghum expresses his thoughts on history and love, and The Republic of Wine embodies his regret for the degeneration of mankind and his hatred for corrupt officials. although the novels are quite different in content, they both reflect a hungry child’s longing for a good life.
Mo was born in the 1950s in a small village in Gaomi, a county with a history of more than 2,200 years, and well known for its traditional folk arts and its production of many celebrities.Mo often returns home to write and most of his novels are set in his home village.
Mo dropped out of school during the“Cultural revolution” (1966-76) and worked on a farm, where the cows became his friends. “i understood more about cows than about human beings. i knew what they were thinking.”
During that time he developed the habit of talking to himself. His mother thought he was sick when one day she found he was mumbling in front of a tree. His mother begged him to stop talking in public. That is why he gave himself the pseudonym “Mo Yan,” meaning “don’t speak” in Chinese, when he began writing.
Words on paper
“Writing is another way of speaking. i write because i want to share my ideas and thoughts with my friends by telling stories. in the process of writing, i have known more about myself and human nature,” Mo said.
Writing also enables Mo to do what he dares not do in real life. He is brave in revealing and criticizing the dark side of society in his works, which has angered some people.
But in daily life, he is careful and considerate, often fearful of upsetting others. “My daughter lives near the Beijing Capital airport. every time i come to Beijing, i won’t head straight to her home after i get off the plane. instead, i always ask the taxi driver to take me to the city center for fear of annoying him by traveling such a short distance. Maybe the more cowardly a writer is in real life, the more brave he is in his works,” Mo said. “Literature enables us to do what we dare not do and cannot do in reality.”
“In my earlier writings, i wrote about miseries inflicted by the outside world, focusing more on the evils of society. Now i pay more attention to the evils hidden deep in my heart,” he added.