In 1971, Yu Guangzhong, who had not been to the mainland for more than 20 years, felt homesick and wrote "Nostalgia" in his old residence on Xiamen Street in Taipei.
"A small stamp",
"A narrow ship ticket",
"A short grave",
p>
And "A Shallow Strait"
Carrying this nostalgia, it was included in the middle school textbooks in mainland China, influencing generations of people and being passed down to this day.
In our memory, there has always been such a delicate and sad poet. On December 14, 2017, the poet Yu Guangzhong was confirmed to have died at the age of 89. When a text message pops up from the phone, no one can help but feel a little sad.
Yu Guangzhong has been engaged in poetry, prose, commentary, and translation all his life, and calls himself the "fourth-dimensional space" of his writing. Because of his brilliance in the artistic attainments of poetry and prose, the titles often given to him are always "poet" and "literary man."
This polytheist in art is also an excellent translator who is often overlooked.
1
Yu Guangzhong was born in Nanjing in 1928. When he was a child, he followed his parents to and from Nanjing, Quanzhou, Hangzhou and other places before entering school.
Like most parents, my father Yu Chaoying started teaching "Moonlight before the Bed", which exposed Yu Guangzhong to many poems in his childhood. Later, Yu Guangzhong took the initiative to read many poems according to his own interests when he was young. Ancient literature, including classical literature and prose, etc.
When he was 12 years old, Yu's father began to teach him classical Chinese, most of which were of the "text to convey the Tao" type, such as "Ten Thoughts on Remonstrance to Taizong". And his uncle taught many aesthetic articles such as "Autumn Wind Ode" and "Afang Palace Ode".
In Yu Guangzhong’s life, the status of classical Chinese was “very important” and “very important”.
The influence of classical Chinese from an early age also influenced Yu Guangzhong’s later views on translation.
2
In 1950, the Yu family moved to Taiwan, and Yu Guangzhong also transferred from the Foreign Languages ??Department of Jinling University (now Nanjing University) to the third year of the Foreign Languages ??Department of National Taiwan University.
- After graduation, Yu Guangzhong taught English at Soochow University, National Taiwan Normal University, National Taiwan University, and National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
- In 1959, he obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa and returned to China as a lecturer in the English Department of the Teachers College.
- In 1972, he served as professor and director of the Department of Spanish at National Chengchi University. From 1974 to 1985, he served as professor of the Chinese Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- In 1985, he served as professor and chair professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, including concurrently serving as dean of the Faculty of Arts and director of the Institute of Foreign Languages ??for six years.
While studying abroad, Yu Guangzhong also came into contact with rock music and fell in love with listening to the songs of music poet Bob Dylan.
From Chinese to foreign languages, from foreign languages ??to Chinese.
From an undergraduate student to a professor, his experience has never left language and literature, and he has been going around in the worlds of English and Chinese.
During this period, he translated and compiled many foreign novels and poems.
When he just graduated, Yu Guangzhong, who was only 24 years old, translated Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (Yu Guangzhong's Chinese version), which was serialized in Taipei City's "Dahua Evening News". When it was published as a book in 1957, Yu Guangzhong, who was about to turn 30, proudly stated in the preface that this could be said to be the earliest Chinese translation of The Old Man and the Sea.
In the same year, "The Biography of Van Gogh" was published, and later several of his British and American poetry anthologies and translations of dramatic novels were published one after another.
3
The book "Yu Guangzhong Talks about Translation" published in 2002 contains more than 20 essays on translation by him, covering both translation and modern Chinese.
Yu Guangzhong hates the translators’ “non-stop”, “non-stop”, “passive abuse”, “rigid syntax” and other problems.
In this book, he mentioned that pure Chinese must be used for translation.
When "Van Gogh's Life", which he translated when he was young, was republished twenty years later, Mr. Yu Guangzhong took a look at it and felt that the translation at that time was "too Westernized" and made more than 10,000 changes in one breath. He said that he It is necessary to "change back" the characteristics of Chinese.
He gave an example: Change "in fact" back to "actually". He said that "in fact" is Chinese for "eating foreign things but not adapting them, neither Chinese nor Western". The Chinese text should be "in fact".
Another example is the Chinese saying "It's hard to explain in one sentence. Many people will write: 'I'm afraid it's difficult to explain clearly in one sentence'" etc. This is naturally "eating foreign things without adapting to them".
4
In 2010, after 53 years, Mr. Yu Guangzhong handed over the translation of his earlier (1957) "The Old Man and the Sea" to Yilin Publishing House for publication again.
The title of the book was changed to the familiar "The Old Man and the Sea", and the author was also renamed Hemingway. The original translation was "Han" Mingway, but Mr. Yu still felt that "Han" was closer to the original pronunciation.
In the preface, he frankly admitted that he had just graduated from National Taiwan University and had little experience in translating this masterpiece, which was quite overestimating his abilities. Judging from today's standards, this translation level can only be rated at 70 points.
Hemingway was a masculine writer, and the old fisherman he wrote was also an aggressive and rough character. Yu Guang, a young man more than fifty years ago, was so good at Chinese translation that, in the words of his friends, his Chinese translation was like a white glove on the hand of an old fisherman.
So before reprinting, the 82-year-old man revised it intermittently for two months, making more than a thousand changes, striving to stay close to the original style.
At the end of the preface to "The Old Man and the Sea", he wrote:
At the end of the story, the old man was unwilling to give up and was still preparing to cross the sea with the boy.
The old Mr. Yu Guangzhong who wrote this sentence also spent his life wandering in the ocean of Chinese and English words, but his story finally ended.
Fortunately, before going to heaven. He left us an eternal sea with his pen and ink.