1、 毕业设计 外文翻译 院系名称 外国语学院 专业班级 学生姓名 指导老师 _ 1 外文文献翻译 Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo My uncles crime was just a misdemeanor, but it really got on peoples nerves, writes Wang Xiaobo in 2015 (part of the long novel The Silver Age), the first of three novellas translated by Hongling
2、Zhang and Jason Sommer in Wang in Love and Bondage . The title 2015 refers to a future when artists cannot paint without a permit and will not get a permit unless their paintings make sense. Wang explains: This was because his paintings, with their riot of color, made no sense to anyone, and no one
3、could tell what his paintings were about. Once, I saw a policeman hold up a painting and bawl at him sternly, Young fellowstand up and tell mewhat is this? If you can tell me what it means, Ill squat there instead of you! My uncle turned and looked at his own work, then squatted down again, saying,
4、I dont know what it is either. Id better do my own squatting. (Zhang Hongling and Jason Sommer, 2007:4-5) Squatting turns out to be an important symbolic act in the fiction of Wang Xiaobo (1952-97), which has become something of a phenomenon in contemporary China, especially among intellectuals. Now
5、 three novellas from Wangs widely debated fictional oeuvre are available in English for the first time. While Wang initially published stories in 1980, he did not become famous until his novella The Golden Age (also called The Golden Years) received a prestigious award in Taiwan in 1995. From 1968 t
6、o 1970, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, Wanglike many of his ubiquitous Wang Er (Wang No. 2) charactersspent two years in the southern province of Yunnan, laboring to learn (or learning to labor) from the masses. After returning to Beijing, he worked in a factory for four years before beco
7、ming a student at Renmin University, where he studied commerce and trade from 1978 to 1982. He taught for two years and then continued his studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received an M.A. degree from the Department of East Asian Studies. Wang was a lecturer in the Beijing Universit
8、y Department of Sociology from 1988 to 1991, after which he became a full-time writer. He had only six years left to devote to writing before he succumbed to a heart attack in 1997. Zhang and Sommer begin with a useful short introduction contextualizing Wangs life and work. Among other things, they
9、mention the Wang Xiaobo exhibition held at the Lu Xun Museum in 2005, evidence that his reputation as a writer continues to improve and that some, such as his wife (Beijing University professor of sociology 2 Li Yinhe), who helped organize the exhibit, seek to help it improve. Zhang and Sommer also
10、bring up several biographical details that are useful to know in reading his fiction: he was a fan of Mark Twain, his brother has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Tulane, and his father was a well-known logician. They also provide some excellent general interpretive comments: that Wang persistently refuse
11、s to portray intellectuals who went through the Cultural Revolution as tragic heroes, that many of Wangs stories have to do with the play of dominance and submission, and that Wangs style is what distinguishes his work. Unfortunately, they indulge in some clichs with comments such as Well, it is lov
12、e that is the true sin, the thing that ultimately makes the authorities aghast, which leads us to conclude, following the trail of the irony, that what the authorities most fear, noted so clearly by the narrator, the author most values. The elevation of love as a supreme value is not, in my opinion,
13、 one of the many subtle and fascinating points that Wang makes through his choice of style, theme, and topic. Nonetheless, Wang Xiaobo does to some extent deploy an against the state approach, although his focus is not truly on resistance. This is apparent in the second of the three novellas, The Go
14、lden Age, which is generally thought to be Wangs masterpiece. This 1994 work has struck many with its unorthodox treatment of sexual desire and relations, and critics gush about the experience of reading it. The Golden Age is about the relationship between Wang Er, here age 21, and Chen Qingyang, a
15、26-year old married female doctor. Since the novella is set during the Cultural Revolution, both are sent-down youth who have taken up Mao Zedongs call for young urbanites to haul themselves down to the countryside and work with the People. Their crime of illicit sexual relations results in the usua
16、l socialist punishments of public denouncement, forced self-criticism, and general social scorn, but these violent strategies of control somehow fail to take center stage in this parodic tale of black humor. Officials more interested in reading Wangs lurid self-confessions than in reforming him urge
17、 the couple to hole up in a hotel and keep working on the narratives so they will have something to read the next day. Despite the constant interest of the characters in sexual intercourse, one thing we do not see in The Golden Age is deep sexual obsession or the debilitating, fanatical emotions of love. Told by a much older narrator who has the benefit that ageing confers, the emphasis is more on a gentle, philosophical, meandering irony than on resistance to the state, even in a very personal form.
