The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on October 10 at 7 p.m. Beijing time. In the past decade (2014-2023), ten writers from different regions and genres have won this award, and their classic works have all been quickly published or reprinted in Chinese mainland, but the fate of these Chinese translations is different. Before the new Nobel laureate in literature is born, let's take a look back at these works, and maybe you can get some glimpse of this year's clues.
2014 Patrick · Modiano France French "Dark Shop"
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Patrick · Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature for "awakening the most unspeakable human destiny with the brilliant 'art of remembrance'." His masterpiece "Dark Shop" was published in 1978 and won the Prix Goncourt in the same year. The protagonist, Guy · Rolland, suffers from amnesia and forgets the first half of his life, but he is indomitable and persistently searches for the past. Through this bizarre story, the work shows us the problems of Western society after World War II and the sense of inner emptiness and disillusionment that prevailed among people.
In 1984, "Foreign Literature and Art" introduced and translated this work for the first time, and the translator was Xiao He. In 1986, Xue Lihua's translation was published by Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, which was the first single Chinese translation of the work. Xue's translation had a great impact, and the opening chapter "My past is hazy" was planted under the grass of Wang Xiaobo's "Wanshou Temple", and it captured a group of literary and artistic youth. However, this version not only caused an oolong with the name of another translator appearing on the title page, but Xue Lihua's statement many years later led to a copyright case. But no matter what, the Xue translation is a classic in the hearts of many people. After that, in 1992, the Lijiang Publishing House version was translated by Li Yumin as "Looking for Me", because the text was too embellished, and the praise was mixed. After Modiano won the award, 99 Readers republished the 1994 translation by Wang Wenrong of Yilin Publishing House by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, and successively published or reprinted other works of Modiano into the "99 Readers Patrick · Modiano Works Series".
2015 S.A. Alekseevich Belarus (born in the former Soviet Union) Russian "The Sorrow of Chernobyl", "Zinc-skinned Baby Soldiers", "Second Time"
CITIC Press
As it has done many times before and since, the Nobel Prize judges' choice this year was both surprising and reasonable. Prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Alekseevich had already won a series of awards, including the Germany Leipzig Book Prize, the France State Radio "World Witness" Award, the United States National Book Critics Association Award, the Germany Book Industry Peace Prize, the France Medici Literary Prize, and the Poland Kapchinski International Reportage Prize. Critics believe that if it were to be awarded to a writer other than novelist and poet, the Soviet-born Belarus journalist would be the most promising candidate. Sure enough, in 2015, because "her polyphonic writing became a monument to the suffering and courage of our time." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Alekseevich has five major publications (his debut novel "I Left the Countryside" is unpublished). In addition to the two early works of "I Am a Female Soldier, I Am a Woman" and "I Still Miss You, Mother" (also translated as "The Last Witness" and "The Last Witness"), the remaining three works, "The Sorrow of Chernobyl", "Zinc-skinned Baby Soldiers" and "Secondhand Time", it is difficult to say which work is more representative than the others, but each has its own characteristics and is equally valued.
Published in 1997 and gaining international fame for the writer, "The Cry of Chernobyl" is considered a psychological portrait of the person involved, bringing to light the horrific scale of the catastrophe. Prior to his award, there had been a number of Chinese translations, including The Zinc-Skinned Baby Soldiers, which was first translated and published in 1999 by the late translators Gao Mang and Tian Dawei (actually a collection of two books, The Zinc-Skinned Baby Soldiers and The Prayer of Chernobyl), and the translation of Chernobyl's Memories: An Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster (translated by Wang Tiantian) by Motie Books, and I Don't Know What to Say, About Death or Love: Voices from Chernobyl (translated by Fan Zufang, republished as Chernobyl's Sorrow in 2015). In 2018, this book, along with other works by Alekseevich, was acquired by CITIC Publishing House, republished under the title "The Prayer of Chernobyl", and was collected together with four other works as "The Collected Works of S. A. Alekseevich".
"Zinc-Skinned Baby Soldiers" is her most famous work, which records the bloody and tearful memories of Soviet officers and soldiers during the war in Afghanistan, as well as their relatives, friends and children, in the form of oral history. "Second Time" is her most recent and most important work, winning four awards in four countries in one fell swoop.
2016 Bob · Dylan United States English "Bob · Dylan Poetry Collection"
Guangxi Normal University Press
The "old pedants" of the Sweden Academy surprised the world by awarding the Nobel Prize to a "musician" for the first time. But in reality, Bob ·'s award is not untraceable. First of all, he is not only a musician, but also a poet, writer, painter, actor, and has published the surrealist novel Tarantula and the poetry and painting anthology Write and Paint. As early as 1990, the French Academy of Letters awarded him the "Outstanding Achievement Award in Literature and Art", and in 2004, his memoir "Like a Rolling Stone: The Memoirs of Bob · Dylan" was published for 19 weeks, and was later awarded a special honor by the 92nd Pulitzer Prize for Literature for "profound influence on popular music and United States culture, as well as extraordinary poetic power in lyric writing." Secondly, since 1996, some institutions have begun to plan to nominate him for the Nobel Prize, and Allen ·Ginsburg, United States representative of Beat poetry, has also written a letter of recommendation for him. It can be seen that Bob · Dylan was able to win the Nobel Prize, but it was an "accident" that had been brewing for a long time.
After winning the award, Chinese the world reacted quickly: Guangxi Normal University Publishing House's · Xinmin Shuo brought together Xichuan, Xi Mi, Chen Li, Li Wan, Ma Shifang, Hu Xudong, and then a group of outstanding translators in the Chinese poetry and music criticism circles, such as Leng Shuang, Bao Huiyi, Chen Zhen, Luo Chi, Etu, Cao Shuying, Hu Sang, Zhou Gongdu, etc., for the first time, introduced a lyric collection covering 31 albums and 369 lyrics of Bob · Dylan, and in 2017, 8 volumes of "Bob · Dylan Poetry Collection" were released in one go, each of which was packaged in a "potato chip bag" type packaging +Pocket book poetry collection. The "Potato Chip Bag", a creative packaging with a strong American style, attracted a lot of attention at the time and became a cultural event at that time.
2017 Kazuo Ishiguro, United Kingdom (born in Japan), English "The Long Day Will End"
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Kazuo Ishiguro is a famous Japanese-American United Kingdom novelist. His style is known for its delicate and beautiful style, and almost every novel has been nominated or award-winning, and his works have been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1989, he won the Booker Prize, an important literary award for English literature, for "The Long Day is Near". In 2017, the Sweden Academy of Letters awarded the Nobel Prize to Kazuo Ishiguro for "finding the connection between the real world and the illusory abyss in the world of great emotional fiction".
"The End of the Long Day" begins with the memories of steward Stevens, telling the story of his more than 30 years of service to Lord Darlington; Although at the peak of his career, Stevens was too ruthless in suppressing his ego emotions and striving for perfection in his duties, missing the last time before his father died, and then brushing shoulders with love. Through the memories of the protagonist, the novel peels off the cocoons of a person's life journey in front of the reader's eyes, and at the same time reflects the international political pattern of the extraordinary period between World War I and World War II. The 1993 remake of the film of the same name based on the novel (also known as "Farewell to Love"), starring famous United Kingdom actors Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, won eight Academy Award nominations and six United Kingdom Academy Award nominations, becoming a classic in film history.
Yilin Publishing House was the first publisher in Chinese mainland to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro's works, and since then, Shanghai Translation Publishing House has obtained the Chinese Simplified Chinese version of all Kazuo Ishiguro's works, which has now been published. It is worth mentioning that the latest work "Klara and the Sun" in 2021 was reprinted twice within three months of its release under the excellent marketing of the translation, and it was one of the best-selling literary works of the year.
2018 Olga · Tokarczuk Poland Poland "The Ancient and Other Times"
Sichuan People's Publishing House
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was delayed due to a sex scandal crisis, and Poland writer Olga · Tokarczuk only received the award in 2019. Before winning the Nobel Prize, the Chinese world was quite unfamiliar to Tokarczuk, with only two simplified Chinese translations of "House by Day, House at Night" and "Swire and Other Times" published by Houlang Publishing Company by Sichuan People's Publishing House in 2017, both translated by Yi Lijun and Yuan Hanrong. After the announcement of the Nobel Prize, the Chinese version of the works of Poland female writer Olga · Tokarczuk accelerated the landing, and after the release of "Cloud Travel", KEY· can be culture· Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House has successively launched 9 works such as "Collection of Grotesque Stories", "Wardrobe", "Soil of Bones" and "The Book of Jacob", of which "The Book of Jacob" was just published in October this year.
"The Ancient and Other Times" is Tokarczuk's famous work. The novel has a total of 84 chapters, each named after "xxx time", and tells the stories of various characters, even animals, plants and things in the primeval world from different perspectives: the girl who touches the boundary of the world, the landlord who indulges in puzzle games, the lonely housewife, the old woman who curses the moon, and even angels, water ghosts, pugs, mycelium, and a little coffee mill...... With the life stories of three generations, it reflects the turbulent historical destiny of Poland in the twentieth century. The book interweaves folklore, epic, mythology and Poland to form a world full of symbols and metaphors, inviting reflections on life, love and meaning. It can be said that this work is the epitome of the Nobel Prize citation, which is full of encyclopedic enthusiasm in narrative imagination and represents a way of life that transcends borders.
2019 Peter · Handke Austria German "Scolding the Audience", "Casper"
Shanghai People's Publishing House
Peter · Handke was both a poet and a novelist, a screenwriter and a film director. As one of the most important writers in the German-speaking world, Hank is an unskippable chapter in all the history of theatre. Like many other masters, his famous works, written in the 1960s, are still ahead of our time. His representative works include the screenplay "Scolding the Spectator", the novel "The Goalkeeper's Anxiety About the Penalty Kick", and the films "Divergent Path" and "Under the Berlin Sky" co-written with Wim · Wenders. Hank was awarded the Hoptmann Prize in 1968, the Birchner Prize and the Obi Prize in 1973, the Kafka Prize in 2009, and the International Ibsen Prize in 2014. In 2019, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "works with linguistic talents that explore the peripherals and particularities of the human experience".
The Chinese translations of Scolding the Audience and Casper were published by Century Wenjing · Shanghai People's Publishing House in 2013 and included in the "Peter · Handke Series". Published in 1966, "Scolding the Audience" was an instant hit and is regarded as a classic that defies the audience and the theater. There is no storyline and sequence of traditional drama, no dramatic characters, events and dialogues, only four nameless speakers almost hysterically "abuse" the audience on a stage without sets and curtains, demonstrating the negation of traditional drama from beginning to end.
Caspar is considered to be a subversive of traditional theatre on par with Waiting for Godot, and it shows how a man named Casper learns to speak. Handke expresses how man is tormented by language, how he becomes a slave to language, how he is controlled by language, and this "language" often expresses only the consciousness of tradition or the consciousness of the rulers, and it is this language that has now domesticated man himself. Because of this work, Handke is also known as a master of creating "drama-telling" and anti-linguistic discipline.
2020 Louise · Glick United States English "Until the World Reflects the Deepest Needs of the Soul" "The Alloy of Moonshine"
Shanghai People's Publishing House
Bob · Dylan aside, Louise · Glick are the only pure poets to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in the past decade. Born into a Jewish family of Hungary descent , the United States poet laureate published his debut poetry collection The Firstborn in 1968 and is the author of 14 poetry collections and a collection of poetry essays that have won numerous poetry awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Award, the Wallace · Stevens Award of the Academy of United States Poets, and the Bollingen Prize.
Glick's poems are good at grasping the subtleties of the psyche, and his early works are very autobiographical, while his later works lead to the fundamental problems of human existence, love, death, life, and destruction, through the confrontation between man and god and the psychological analysis of mythological characters. Beginning with Mount Aare, each of her poems has been a delicate weave that can be used as a long poem or as a group of poems. Beginning with "Mount Aare" and "Wild Iris", Glick became a "must-read poet".
In 2016, translated by Liu Xiangyang and published by Century Wenjing · Shanghai People's Publishing House, the translation of the poetry collection Until the World Reflects the Deepest Needs of the Soul is a complete collection of two poetry collections, "Averno" (New England PEN Award) and "Village Life" (Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist); There are also selections of five early poetry collections, including "The Firstborn" (United States Poetry Society Poet Award), "House on the Swamp," "The Descending Image," "Achilles' Triumph" (National Book Critics Award), "Mount Allere" (Rebecca Bobbitt National Poetry Award, Library of Congress), and "The Alloy of Moonlight," which includes four of Glick's poetry collections: Wild Irises (Pulitzer Prize), "Meadow," "New Life" (New Yorker Poetry Book Award), and "Seven Periods" (Pulitzer Prize Poetry Short List), all of which are important works in the mature period.
2021 Abdul-Razak · Gurna United Kingdom (born in Tanzania) English "Paradise"
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
After the award was announced, the Chinese world was in an uproar: Who is he? At the time, the Tanzanian-born, English-speaking writer was a stranger in China, and his Chinese translation was only published in the Anthology of African Short Stories, published by Yilin Publishing House in December 2013. In this book, the "father of modern African literature", the famous Nigerian writer Chinua · Achebe, and the professor of the University of Kent in United Kingdom C. The Anthology of African Short Stories, edited by L. Innes and translated by Zha Mingjian and others, contains two novels, "The Imprisoned Dragon" and "Bosi".
Gurnah is the 8th writer in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature to have an African element (born or raised in Africa). Born in Zanzibar on the East African coast in 1948, he moved to United Kingdom in the 1960s and was a jury member of the Kane Prize for African Literature and the Booker Prize before being elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. Gurnah's works focus on the theme of refugees, mainly describing the living conditions of colonial people, focusing on identity, ethnic conflict, and historical writing, and showing the current situation of survival in the post-colonial era is considered to have important social practical significance. Representative works include "Paradise", "Afterlife", "Seaside" and so on.
After winning the award, Shanghai Translation Publishing House has published 10 works, including "Paradise" and "Afterlife". The story of "Paradise" takes place in Zanzibar, East Africa, under the shadow of Germany's colonization a hundred years ago, an ancient land where many civilizations and religions coexist. The boy Yusuf was mortgaged by his father to the merchant Aziz to pay off his debts, and since then he has traveled with the caravan in a foreign land and experienced the hardships of survival. Published in 1994, this work is one of Gurnah's masterpieces. From the perspective of a teenager who has not been exposed to the world and does not apply filters, the author embeds the story of a boy's growth in the background of social turmoil and historical changes, and writes the past lives of a generation of immigrants to "try to preserve that memory, find the moments and stories that people live on, and use this to understand themselves".
2022 Anne · Ernaux France French "Long Years"
People's Literature Publishing House
Ernaux has been working since 1974 and has published about fifteen works to date. Works such as "Position" and "A Woman" vividly depict how parents from poor backgrounds struggle full of loss, despair, hope and dreams to free themselves and their next generation from the lowly status at the bottom of society with delicate and sad brushstrokes, accurately and objectively reproduce the huge differences in psychology, living habits, interests and other values of people from different social classes in France today, and at the same time, they also truly express their love and hate for their parents and hometown with extremely painful and contradictory feelings. And "Long Years", a masterpiece that has been thought about and scrutinized for more than 20 years, makes her deservedly one of the first-rate contemporary writers in France.
As early as 2003, Guo Yumei of Tianjin University of Foreign Chinese had translated three of Ernaux's representative works, namely "Position", "A Woman" and "Shame", and published them in Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House under the general title of "A Woman". In 2008, the publication of "Long Years" in France received great response, and the People's Literature Publishing House invited Mr. Wu Yuetian to translate this work the following year, and won one of the "Best Foreign Novels of the Year in the 21st Century" selected by the publishing house that year.
Upon its publication, "The Long Years" won the "Duras Literary Prize" in France that year. The use of "no one to call autobiography" is actually to encourage others to recall while recalling oneself, reflecting the evolution of the times with the experiences shared by people, thus arousing strong resonance in people's hearts. Guided by 14 photographs, the work presents Ernaux's personal autobiographical memories and France's historical memories between 1941 and 2006. By describing the scenes, people and the specific time when they were taken, the author recreates the history of France for more than 60 years at the intersection of history and reality by describing the scenes, people and the specific time when they were taken, and linking these photos to the context of the era in which they live.
Almost at the same time as the award, at the end of October 2022, Shanghai People's Publishing House launched three books by Anne · Ernaux, namely "A Man's Position", "A Woman's Story" and "A Girl's Memory". Among them, "A Man's Position" and "A Woman's Story" are revised reprints of "Position" and "A Woman", and "A Girl's Memory" is the first translation. Since then, many Chinese translations such as "Simple Passion", "Young Man" and "Occupation" have come out one after another.
2023 Jon· Fosse Norway Ninosk (New Norway) "Someone is Coming" "Trilogy"
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
The second playwright of the decade, Fosse, of course, also wandered through poetry, fiction, prose, translation, and other genres. He has been publishing since 1983 and has translated into more than 40 languages and won the Nordic Theatre Guild Award for Best Play, the Scandinavian National Theatre Award, the Sweden Academy Nordic Prize, the International Ibsen Prize, and the International Booker Prize Shortlist. Fauser is one of the most staged playwrights in the world, with about 1,000 plays based on his work performed around the world. His works are all written in New Norway.
In 2014, Shanghai Translation Publishing House published his play "Someone is Coming: Selected Plays of Jon · Fosse", which selects five of Fosse's most representative plays, "Someone is Coming": a man and a woman buy an old house on a steep cliff, far from the city, ready to leave everything past behind and start a new life here without disturbance. "Variations of Death": The sea swallows him and her daughter, forcing them to face each other again, their memories and pasts, confused by this sudden tragedy, but unable to find answers. "Names" tells the story of an estranged family under the same roof. A pregnant girl and the father of this child have nowhere to go. It's a functionally absent family, and conversations are almost impossible; Everything necessary becomes a habitual gesture, and everyone feels lonely. "One Summer Day": The husband chooses to die one day without warning. He left his home and walked to the sea and never returned. And the wife has been standing in front of the window day after day, facing the sea, unable to get rid of the entanglement of memory. "Guitar Man" is the only one-man show in Fausser's work, and it is also the most performed by students in the world.
The novel "Trilogy" was published by Century Wenjing · Shanghai People's Publishing House this year. In this work, Fosse not only constructs an allegory about love, rebellion, and redemption, but also makes a highly symbolic depiction and a very deep reflection on the condition of modern human existence.
(Source: The Paper, Author: Xu Xiao)