描述
开 本: 16开纸 张: 纯质纸包 装: 平装-胶订是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9787544775205
《中华人文（2018第2辑）》是一本译介中国当代作家作品兼顾中国当代艺术的全英文图书。本书以兼容并蓄的精神择选稿件，旨在向英语世界译介中华人文，特别是中国当代文学创作的优秀成果，弘扬中华人文精神，促进中华文化交流。
《中华人文（2018第2辑）》的主推作家为贾平凹，这是系列图书首次对江苏省外作家进行重点推介，进一步贯彻“立足江苏、面向全国”的出书宗旨。本辑选译了贾平凹的三篇短篇小说，分别为《秋天》（“天狗”系列中的第二篇）、《土炕》和《制造声音》，并配发了舒晋瑜采访的短文和杨乐生的文学评论。“中国文化遗产”和“经典回声”两个栏目分别介绍了已列入世界文化遗产目录的京杭大运河（李德楠博士撰稿）和孔子的《论语》（Burton Watson的译本与简介）。本期其余章节中，翻译出版了江苏作家姜琍敏的短篇小说《胥阿姨》、河北作家胡学文的短篇小说《在高原》、女作家塞壬的散文《声嚣》、徐泽的九首诗歌以及画家盛梅冰教授的艺术作品。
Editor’s Note by Yang Haocheng （杨昊成）
Featured Author: Jia Pingwa （贾平凹）
Autumn （《秋天》）
The Brick Bed （《土炕》）
Trees Can Talk! （《制造声音》）
Critique
A Fixed Star in the Literary Firmament by
Yang Lesheng （杨乐生）
Interview
An Interview with Jia Pingwa by Shu Jinyu （舒晋瑜）
Culture & Heritage
An Incredible Marvel of the East by Li
Denan （李德楠）
Life along the Grand Canal by Li Denan （李德楠）
Echoes of Classics
An Introduction to Confucius and His
Analects by Burton
Watson
Selections from The Analects (Part Ⅰ)
Short Stories
Auntie Xu (《胥阿姨》) by Jiang Limin (姜琍敏)
On the Plateau (《在高原》) by Hu Xuewen (胡学文)
I See the Light (《我望灯》) by Ge Shuiping (葛水平)
Prose
Clamour (《声嚣》) by Siren (塞壬)
Poems
Nine Poems by Xu Ze (徐泽)
Art
Restriction and Creation — Thoughts upon
Reading Meibing’s Recent Oil Paintings by Cao Yiqiang (曹意强)
Starting this issue, CAL will
branch out to cover our key writers across China
and not just those active in Jiangsu
Province. The first name
that came to my mind was Jia Pingwa （贾平凹）, a writer from Shaanxi Province, north western part of the country.
I began reading Jia about thirty-five years ago when I was a new-baked teacher
of English fresh from college. I was intrigued by the way Jia told his stories,
all based on his intimacy with that land and its people. He seemed most adept
at telling those stories with his distinct native dialect, and to someone like
me from Jiangnan, south of the Yangtse
River, his stories gave
off an exotic flavor I never savored before. He was so fluent a raconteur and
his tales were so full of color that when years later I happened to see him on
TV, I was surprised to find that Jia Pingwa was in effect a very plain person,
“a weak physical specimen of unremarkable physiognomy, a halting speaker,” to
quote one of his many critics, and did not seem to be very comfortable talking
to people or answering questions put to him on the spot. I then realized that
his world belonged at his desk where, shrouded in heavy cigarette smoke, and
with all the window curtains closely drawn, he span one yarn after another
about the land and the people he knew and loved so much. His pen has never
stopped writing ever since he took it up for the first time, and over the
forty-odd years of literary creation, he went through innumerable ups and downs
and finally made a name for himself as an unshakably established writer.
Strangely enough, unlike the sad trajectory of many writers’ career that went
from slogging uphill to reach the apex of fame to falling quickly downhill into
the pit of oblivion, Jia Pingwa’s career was more or less plain sailing. As he
matured, he became more and more eloquent in his story-telling, and his
literary and artistic interests even expanded to cover such genres and fields
as essays, literary criticisms, calligraphy, and paintings, each harvesting for
him unusual gains and fruits. One cannot but acknowledge that Jia is a born
genius and he came to this world mandated by Heaven to present spiritual
miracles to the people.
“Autumn” （秋天） is the
third chapter of Jia Pingwa’s fiction Tiangou （天狗）, or the Heavenly Dog, a good-hearted, artless, diligent orphan. He
was an apprentice to a master well-
digger and was in secret love with his
master’s wife. Well past the age of marriage （he was thirty-six）, Tiangou would
brush off any match-making proposal by anyone, even by his eldest aunt, who
swore that she would not die with her eyes closed if Tiangou did not get his
better half. His heart was with his master’s wife, an able, warm-hearted, and
equally hard-working woman, the “Bodhisattva” in his eyes. One day, as fate
would have it, the expert well-digger, an iron-willed craftsman and the
backbone of the household, got trapped in a well-digging operation when a huge
rock fell off and half-buried him. When Tiangou was sent for, he managed to
negotiate the passage downward, and frantically pawing at the soil under the
unconscious man, he finally pulled him out. Although his master was dragged
back to life from the verge of death, the nerves below his waist were beyond
repair and he became a useless lump. To help support the family, Tiangou
consciously and constantly lent a helping hand, so much so that he gradually
replaced his master to become the pillar of
the family. The wasted man then had an idea; he wanted his wife to “marry anew
to support the old,” and the man he had in mind was none other than Tiangou,
his son-like apprentice. Tiangou was in two minds about this; on the one hand,
he felt his long-cherished dream would finally come true; on the other, he felt
somewhat guilty if he should have his master’s wife as his own woman. The trio,
plus Wuxing, the couple’s primary school kid, formed a new family in the end
and began to live under the same roof albeit in an embarrassing way. It would
take some time before they hit it off. The story is masterfully translated by Jun
Liu （刘浚）, one-time editor and
journalist with China Daily and now a professional C-E translator residing in
New Zealand.
“The Brick Bed” （土炕） tells of a barren woman who adopted a pregnant Eighth Route Army
soldier who had strayed from her squad. The country woman waited on her like
mother and sister until she gave birth to a baby girl Kitty. Then the female
soldier left for the army, leaving her baby to the care of the country woman
who took the girl as if she were her own flesh and blood. Kitty grew into adulthood,
finally becoming a bureau chief in a big city. But when the Cultural Revolution
came, she was sent to a reform school and, refusing to see her children suffer
because of her, she decided to send her oldest daughter Xiuxiu to where she
herself was raised by her foster mother. Two generations of mother and daughter
were fed, nurtured, and raised up on the same large brick bed of the country
woman, but both left for the city in the end, leaving the old woman all by
herself to wither, shrivel, and die without making a stir in the world.
“Trees Can Talk!” is a simple enough story about an old stubborn man
who, for fifteen years and three months, went petitioning to officials higher
up that he owned a tree planted in 1948. All thought the man was insane, but he
would not give up, claiming that “the tree can talk.” His repeated failure to
convince people of his “weird” idea led to the reinvestigation of his case by
“I,” a cadre in the local government, who was accidentally drawn into the
picture. At long last, the wrong was righted, and he breathed his last, a good
case in point of Confucius’s maxim “In the morning, hear the Way; in the
evening, die content.”
Echoes of Classics of this issue does indeed feature Confucius and
his Analects, perhaps the most iconic cultural embodiment of Chinese
civilization. As a great educator, thinker, and founder of Confucianism,
Confucius’s stature and influence even surpass those of his mentor Laozi, and
he has been ranked Number One of the “Top Ten World Cultural Celebrities.” His
dream, however, had been in the political arena, and that’s why he and a few of
his disciples spent fifteen years wandering from state to state as an
“itinerant preacher,” to quote Christoph Harbsmeier, trying to have his voice
heard by the rulers and princes. Only when he met with repeated cold shoulders
and even hostility did Confucius settle down in his homeland and devote the
remaining years of his life to “teaching students regardless of their class
distinctions.” His talks mainly centered on politics, education, and human
relations, and the key concepts of his preaching were loyalty, righteousness,
ritual, wisdom, truthfulness, benevolence, the Way, Goodness, gentlemanship,
and filial piety. Confucius is, however, a most humane, good-humored and
humorous conversationalist, even a plaisanteur, quite different from the
grim-faced moralist and ritualist later Confucianists helped to shape and
uphold ever since Dong Zhongshu （董仲舒） of the Han
and Zhu Xi （朱熹） of the Song
dynasties. In other words, Confucius is much less Confucian for his
multifarious characteristics, and above all, his humanistic sensibilities, as
the text of the Analects well testifies.
……
Autumn (an excerpt
from Tiangou)
Jia Pingwa / 贾平凹
Translated by Jun
Liu / 刘 浚
When a man hasn’t proven himself capable, does his
seniority by birth somehow drop a notch? He knelt at his uncle’s tomb and cried
his heart out.
Ever since then, he has been emotionally close only to
his eldest aunt, the last living sister of Tiangou’s mother. Her time is
overdue, but she’s still hanging in there. “I’m just too worried for Tiangou’s
sake,” as she puts it, and topping her worry list is her nephew’s marriage.
Seeing no hint of marital prospects while Tiangou was thirty-five, she’s been
panicking about his Threshold Year. “Be careful about each and every thing you
do,” she admonishes him at every chance, “don’t let your guard down for one
second.” And she insisted that Tiangou celebrate the critical thirty-sixth
birthday with fanfare, so the happy event would overpower the bad luck, and
vanquish potential disasters.
In the end, the one who hosted the
celebrations was none other than Tiangou’s Shi’niang, his Master’s wife. Three
days ahead of the big day, she forbade her husband and his apprentice to do any
well-digging. Come the third day of the ninth lunar month, she cooked up a
lavish banquet, seven platters and eight bowls in all.
During the feast, his eldest aunt came from the other
side of the river. She had been to Tiangou’s place and found no one. Taken
aback at the table laden with dishes, she was quick to pronounce a string of
blessings, place her handmade noodles and fish-shaped dough on the cabinet, and
present Tiangou with a loose-fitting blouse, a red belt and a crimson silk
dudou belly-wrap. Being pampered like a baby upon its first birthday, the
thirty-six-year-old cackled until he was breathless. As soon as his aunt left,
Tiangou tried to regift these lucky charms to Wuxing, his Shifu’s son. But
Shi’niang pulled a long face and demanded that he don them then and there. She
was dead serious, so Tiangou obeyed.
As Tiangou’s year of peril draws to a close now, the
old lady arrives again from across the river. Finding her nephew with four
limbs intact, strong and sturdy, rosy and ruddy, she’s as content as a devotee
reciting the Buddhist sutras.
“Seems your destiny is a robust one.
When nothing disastrous happens during your Threshold Year, the future is even
brighter.”
On that cheerful note, her prattle turns to the family
lineage: Perhaps the Wang’s won’t come to an end after all. But then thoughts
of her sisters, all of whom died ahead of their time, redden the rim of her
eyes.
“Once your birthday is over, Tiangou,
it’ll be time to get things rolling with your marriage. The King of Hell has
kept your auntie in this world, but unless she sees you tying the knot, she
can’t make her exit. Confide in your old auntie: Didn’t you spot even one promising
girl all last year?”
“Nope,” admits Tiangou.
“Your auntie has got her eyes on one for
you. She’s a divorcée, but a very decent one. She has a three-year-old child,
and she divorced just this spring. Might she please you?”
“Auntie, you must be going senile! I
haven’t even laid eyes on her. How do I know if I’d be willing?”
“Go on, spill the beans then. What sort
of woman do you fancy?”
Tiangou hems and haws, but can’t find the right words.
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