Before brushing the screen of "genius translator" Jin Xiaoyu, perhaps we should first read his translation

Write on the front

In the past few days, an article titled "Hangzhou Man Calls from a Funeral Home: Can You Write About Our Genius Son" quickly spread across the Internet, and even CCTV News specially wrote an article to tell the story of this "genius translator". The books translated by Jin Xiaoyu have been out of stock on some book online shopping platforms and offline libraries, which is really a modern version of "Luoyang Paper Expensive".

There is no doubt that labels such as "manic depression", "self-taught English, Japanese, and German", "twenty-two books translated in ten years", "many translated books with Douban scores of more than 8 points" can immediately grab the public's attention, and can make us be repeatedly ravaged by the current impetuous society, as if plunging into the clear and transparent alpine lake of Lugu Lake, shining with silver waves, and being free and cheerful.

But in addition to the overwhelming praise, exclamation and empathy, we may wish to read more of Jin Xiaoyu's translated books; perhaps, this is the greatest encouragement to him.

If we praise a person's talent and sweat, we must first truly understand his efforts and achievements, rather than sighing "doing really well" instead of saying "It's done awesome."

Before typing on the keyboard these excerpts of these books translated by Jin Xiaoyu, as a "half-peer" who also knows a few foreign languages and occasionally uses book translation as a hobby, I originally wanted to make some superficial personal appreciation of his translated works.

However, as I looked through more and more of Jin Xiaoyu's translations, I finally decided to be a pure reader and sharer in this matter, limited to bringing him and the original author's words to more friends.

Because, to appreciate a translation, you need to appreciate the person himself has a high level, and I think that my level is not enough to judge the translation of others; also because to appreciate a translation, you need to read not only the translated work, but also the original work. And I don't have enough time to do this work for the time being.

A few final points.

First, book translation is a time-consuming, laborious, extremely rigorous and prudent work that requires the ability to withstand loneliness.

Second, the current book translation work in the mainland is completely out of proportion to the income and payment, and many translators are generating electricity for love. So those who say that Jin Xiaoyu's father let his son do the translation to make money from him can shut up.

Third, Jin Xiaoyu's story is inspirational and touching, but it does not prevent us from reading his translated works from an objective and professional perspective, and there is no contradiction between the two. Emotions can help the intellect, but emotions should not mislead the intellect.

Fourth, the following three excerpts from books translated by Jin Xiaoyu, from the content, broken sentences to punctuation, completely follow the original appearance of book publishing. Only a few omissions have been made, which will be highlighted in the section selection.

Finally, let us wish Jin Xiaoyu better and better on the road of book translation, wish him and his father can be with each other for a long time, and wish that every life that strives to improve can bloom.

——Fun Spring and Autumn

Vol

Book: The Silk Road Chronicle

Author: (Sun)Hisao Matsuda

Translator: Jin Xiaoyu

Excerpt:

Therefore, the mountains are all naked. The mountains are like that, exposing the soil of white, black, red, purple, and yellow, and rising from the waves of sand to form a continuous mountain range. Some of the mountains are high, with snow and ice, like white-headed old men. It seems that it is because of a little moisture flowing from the open sea through the sky. When summer comes, the snow and ice begin to melt, and the countless folds carved into the hillside turn into rivers and transport the water down the mountain. As soon as the water reaches the desert, it is immediately sucked dry by the sand. Some of these rivers flow on the surface, but most of them dry up completely in the middle of summer, leaving only traces of flowing water. Looking at the map, this kind of flowing water is also represented by a blue line as a river, but it is only a sign, in fact, there are very few rivers that flow all year round.

Water that is sucked into the ground becomes groundwater. Needless to say, groundwater is covered in hot and vast sand, making it difficult to speculate on its existence. However, the location of groundwater is also high and low. In the high parts, weeds are sparsely grown, which are characterized by the ability of roots to be deeply rooted downwards and to retain moisture in the body, such as clostridium or camel grass. This is called steppe. In Japan, it is very inappropriately translated as "grassland". Of course, its actual state is not like the straw mattress that these two words give people. In general, it can often be called a semi-desert.

...... (Some of this is omitted here)

In such places, human beings also live brilliantly, and not only that, but they sometimes show the power to shake asian history and even set off a storm that has swept the world down. They lived on sparse weeds on the steppe, raising sheep, cattle, and horses, feeding on the meat and milk of these livestock, and using their skins and wool as materials for clothing. Remarkable human ingenuity. However, because the grass grew sparsely, the livestock soon ate the grass. As a result, people had to find another land with good conditions and drive the herds of cattle. Therefore, it is not possible to settle in one place ... People who live in this way are called "nomads"... Of course, they are nomadic, but they are different from the gypsies who wander around without restriction. They demarcated the boundaries between them, living within the agreed range of water and grass, and raising livestock. In any case, however, the need to drive large numbers of domestic animals and to walk in undefended wilds and hillsides makes group action, even on a small scale, an absolutely necessary condition. Therefore, group life formed by blood relations is basic. This is also known as a clan society. It is generally believed that this social stage was also experienced once in ancient times among our agrarian peoples without exception, but the agrarian peoples got rid of this stage very early, built villages and towns, and transitioned to the so-called geo-society centered on arable land. However, among the nomadic peoples, even if the blood relationship becomes thin, the idea of having the same ancestral god will become a belief, supporting the entire group, and the form since ancient times will be maintained for a long time until future generations. Moreover, because they share a common ancestor, or because they have a belief in having a common ancestor, several such clans and even clan groups unite to form tribes. In principle, this tribe is the basis of the nomadic ulus (i.e., the state).

Vol.2

Books: Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema

Author: (U.S.) Robert Bird

Poet Boris Pasternak, in his memoir Safe Conduct, describes how he gave up his musical career because, unlike his mentor Alexander Scriabin, he lacked perfect pitch discernment. About fifty years later, the young Andrei Tarkovsky, himself an avid lover of Pasternak's poetry, similarly gave up music and eventually chose film as his profession. He could never explain what had drawn him to film. It was here, however, that Tarkovsky discovered his own form of perfect pitch discernment, manifested in unmistakable aesthetic sensitivity and a keen response to cultural impulses, which made each of his seven feature films resonate in the Soviet Union and around the world as major cultural events.

Tarkovsky's fame began with Ivan's Childhood (1962), a project that was like an orphan who had lost his parents and was entrusted to the novice director as a last resort. Tarkovsky's film, shot in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev in the Thaw period after his critique of Joseph Stalin, was particularly typical of the Soviet New Wave movement of that period. In the West, Tarkovsky's debuts, along with other films, such as Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and Grigorii Chukhrai's The Ballad of a Soldier (1959), It gives an unexpected glimpse into the suffering of the Soviet people during World War II and their potential revival, which manifests itself in the young protagonists of these films as well as in the bold, confident aesthetic attitudes of the films. At home and abroad, Ivan's Childhood captured the spirit of the moment, and at the age of thirty, Tarkovsky found himself praised at major European film festivals, discussed by important European intellectuals, and pushed to the forefront of Soviet culture.

The arrangement of this book also reflects my basic thesis that Tarkovsky's films can only be understood directly as works of art to gain meaning and importance. I take four traditional material elements as my guide, each of which is explored through different elements of cinema that are decisive for Tarkovsky's work, from "system" and "imagination" to "screen", "image", "story" and "lens". Along the way, I will think and clarify Tarkovsky's ideas in the broader context of film theory, especially in the final chapter on "atmosphere," an extremely uncertain concept that is an almost unavoidable reference in the discussion of poetic films.

I start with the first fundamental element, earth. In the final part of Andrei Rublev, when Boriska slid down a muddy slope in a torrential downpour, he found suitable clay. This clay forms the mold of casting the big clock, which serves as a clarion call for beauty and hope. By analogy, earth seems to be the easiest element of Tarkovsky's films to become a symbolic vessel. After all, the earth surrounds and sustains the homeland, and one leaves the home only for shameful reasons (Stalker, Nostalgia, Sacrifice), and one returns to the home barefoot to feel every step closer (The Mirror). The earth is the nation, Russia, and— at least in Solaris— the planet. Maybe these are regressive concepts, but not just in the sense that they appeal to earlier time. They also begin to mask what they represent, which must be renewed in a fresh experience of the soil itself.

Soil is much more than a container of nostalgia. The land dominates Tarkovsky's film There Will Be No Leave Today (1958), in which a large number of unexploded bombs were found beneath a small town that had just been rebuilt after World War II. Hosting and protecting the land of the scarred town has become its secret enemy. Realizing that the explosion might level the town, which would effectively amount to a repeat of the effects of the war, a group of young soldiers carefully dug out the bombs, gently carried them out of the pit like newborns, and transported them by truck to the desolate ditch. Tarkovsky himself played the soldier who lit the fuse, leaving the land full of craters and the air filled with smoke. The land is a fragile place, constantly being covered, beaten and burned by other elements. As the real substance in Tarkovsky's films, soil is the necessary contrast between catastrophic events—floods, storms, fires—something he's really interested in. Soil, for me, represents Tarkovsky's depiction of the spatial conditions of human immanence. Soil is the system in which Tarkovsky works, the place where his films unfold, and the screens on which films project.

Vol

Books: A Diary of a Walk with Language

Author: (Japanese) Tawada Leaf

January 3

Yesterday' drive through the romansh-speaking regions of Switzerland since ancient times. On the way, we passed a small town called "Uors", which is derived from the Romansh word for "bear". There are many examples of village names associated with "bears" like "Kumano". As soon as I saw the word "Uors," I immediately remembered a woman's name that was common in Germany, "Ursula." The name comes from the Latin word "Ursus" (bear). Romansh, like Romanian, Italian, French, etc., has a common ancestor, Latin. That is, Uors, Ursus, and Ursula are interrelated in etymological listings.

The Trainee of Snow tells the story of a beast trainer named Ursula who trains his skills with a polar bear in a circus. That's a novel I wrote in Japanese, and my target city this year made it into German itself. For this reason, whatever I see, I first pull up to this novel and think about it. Until my mother's time, I wrote novels with different contents in Japanese and German in parallel, and sometimes I made works written in German into Japanese, but I never translated" works written in Japanese into about once. Whether that is a "translation" or not, I don't even know.

Girls with "bears" in their names are less common in Japan. In Japan, the names are becoming more and more diverse, and if I can meet a girl named Kumako one day, I think I can't help but smile.

After the confrontation was desperate, he stood up

Walk through the dark alley and then get the light

After being seriously injured, he welcomed a new life

It is our indomitable appearance of life

——CCTV News