This sentence comes from the mouth of Helia Correa, winner of the Cam?es Literary Award, the highest honor in the Portuguese literary world. This writer, who published poems in literary newspapers at the age of 19, has an almost obsessive love for poetic language.
In 2018, she continued to create with poetic expression, taking the "refugee issue" that has triggered widespread discussion in recent years as the creative theme, and wrote a "long poem" for the refugees who fled to Europe during the war. This year, the Chinese version of this "long poem" "Dancers in Battle" was jointly launched by Southern Publishing Media and Huacheng Publishing House, and was translated by Zhou Ning, a teacher in the Portuguese Department of Beijing Language and Culture University.
The book subverts the traditional novel method of using story language to describe, but combines the author's own background of loving poetry and studying drama, using poetic language to describe, and using dramatic ideas to lay out the plot.
Zhou Ning mentioned a sentence when writing the "Translator's Preface": This novel was allegorical, magical, dramatic and exaggerated from the beginning.
In the past, most of the refugee-related content you read came from the news. In order to convey information faster, the news itself strives to use more refined vocabulary to describe events. But in this book, what you see is a description between objective and subjective.
What is objective is the object being described, a group of refugees walking alone in the vast desert. What is subjective is the language and color of the description, in order to let the pain of one glance stimulate the nerves and stimulate thinking at a slow pace.
Just like this paragraph:
Under the cloak, there was once a living life. Now, the cloak no longer moves, and its "lost legs" are actually the life that once lived under the cloak.
The reason why Correa's description technique is so clever is that there is not a word about "death" in the whole paragraph, but every sentence reveals the message of death.
Let’s take a look at what it looks like under the cloak of “lost content”:
When I read this paragraph, my preconceived idea was that the deceased was a refugee child who starved to death. . This kind of imagination is already tragic, but when I read the beginning of the next paragraph, I realized that the tragedy is far more tragic than imagined:
Reading this sentence, the dull pain will be worse than knowing that this person is hungry. Even more dead. Hunger, death, childbirth...things that would never threaten people in a peaceful environment all happened on the way to escape. However, sympathy will not reduce the pain that needs to be experienced by people. The refugees are walking hard in the endless desert, no matter how hard they imagine, no matter how hard they move forward, they will go to the "promised land" in their hearts.
In reality, Europe is the choice of many refugees when they escape. They try to get out of the desert, drift across the ocean, and rebuild the hope of survival in another land. However, the exaggerated plot stems from the cruelty of reality. As the "blockers" who appear frequently in the book say, Europe does not welcome them.
At the end of the novel, a small group of armed but without firepower meets the refugees on a narrow road. Arguing, negotiating, and integrating, two teams with different original goals reached an agreement in the hinterland of the desert - just to live, to live briefly.
When it comes to the issue of refugees, we always have many questions: Their homes were destroyed by war, and their history was interrupted. Where should they go to continue to survive? How will their history be continued?
All of this is waiting for you who read this book, and every "I" who cares about refugee issues to keep thinking about. And this book "Dancer in Battle" provides us with a good beginning.