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1、Han ShaogongA Dictionary of MaqiaoTranslated by Julia LovellTranslators Preface In 1968 the Chinese Communist regime under Mao Zedong instigated one of the twentieth centurys most sweeping movements of human upheaval. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) resulted in a cataclysmic disr
2、uption of Chinese society and the relocation of millions of intellectuals, predominantly high-school and university students (zhiqing, Educated Youth), from the cities and towns to the countryside, where they were expected to settle for the rest of their lives, laboring alongside the peasants. Often
3、 dispatched thousands of miles to remote, impoverished areas on the borders or in the rural hinterland of China, they were confronted with languages and ways of life that were entirely alien. Han Shaogong, age sixteen in 1970, was sent to villages in northern Hunan (south China), to spend his life p
4、lanting rice and tea. That life plan came to an end in 1976, along with the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong himself. Han returned to the Hunan provincial capital Changsha, where he attended college and began a career as a writer in the post-Mao political and cultural thaw. By the mid-1980s, he wa
5、s at the forefront of one of the key liberating developments in post-Mao literature: the Root-Searching Movement (xungen pai). The Root-Searchers set about reopening fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture, aesthetics, and language, rebelling against decades of stifling Communist cont
6、rols. From Maos proscriptive 1942 Talks at Yanan on Art and Literature up until his death, the Chinese Communist Party had defined the function of literature as serving Chinas hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, and soldiers (whose own thoughts and desires were also defined by the Party). In
7、the interest of increasing its control over literary production, the Maoist regime made ever more strenuous efforts to regulate language through manuals dictating correct forms of grammar, rhetoric, and characterization. After Maos death, Han and his peers emerged, blinking, from a world in which th
8、e limits of literary expression had been so closely prescribed that fictional output had dwindled alarmingly: an average of eight novels had been published every year between 1949 and 1966; this figure fell even lower during the Cultural Revolution. 1 Not surprisingly, the question of how to break o
9、ut of the strangulating Mao Style in language and form dominated literary discussion of the 1980s and beyond. A Dictionary of Maqiao (completed in 1995) is, among many other things, Han Shaogongs answer to this question. It is a rebuttal both to the insanity of Maoist thought control and to the ling
10、uistic dogmatism that persists within contemporary Communist China in the form of continuing censorship of public expression. As its title suggests, the novel is structured as a dictionary. Its headings are words from the dialect of Maqiao, a tiny village in southern China, noted down by Han during
11、his time in the countryside and confined for years in exercise books, until they became hisfocus for this philosophical meditation on the impossibilities of creating a universal, normalized language, and on the absurdities and tragedies that ensue when such an attempt is made. The book is also a fic
12、tional account narrated by Han Shaogong as an Educated Youth, recording the history, language, and customs of the area to which he was sent down-from before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. A Contents page appears at the start of the novel, in theory permitting the reader to treat it as a
13、 reference book or lexicon, to dip into entries at will. As the novel progresses, however, entries start to assume knowledge of dialect words and of characters already introduced-the Party Branch Secretary Benyi, the old village leader Uncle Luo, the local opera aficionado Wanyu, the special Maqiao
14、understanding of words such as awakened and precious-thus requiring a linear reading. Han Shaogongs compilation of dictionary entries, it soon becomes apparent, is neither alphabetical nor random, and the book is very far from a dry catalog of anthropological and linguistic detail. A Dictionary is t
15、he biography of a community, told through its history, people, plants, and animals. Through entry headings that range from people and places to dogs and mosquitoes, from brief vignettes to lengthy sequences, Han combines the variety of a short-story collection with the satisfactions of a sustained n
16、arrative. (By breaking up the narrative into shorter episodes and observations, he is also harking back to well-established genres in the Chinese literary heritage, in particular the jottings (biji) essay form much beloved of premodern literati.) Chinese history, in particular the traumatic recent p
17、ast, has a large part to play, as Han presents his and the villages own unique interpretation and experience of events: the pre-1949 struggles between the Communist and Nationalist parties, Land Reform and the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao economic reforms
18、. But Hans story telling always has a larger, philosophical point to make. Even against the Orwellian backdrop of Maoist China, Han shows us, language and history do not become fixed, controllable entities; words and meanings are mutated, misrepresented, and invented by everyone, including Benyi, th
19、e local Party mouthpiece. One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is Hans own position as an Educated Youth-as an educated outsider living within the village. Many of the Educated Youth enthusiastically embraced the idea of banishment to the countryside as a way of assuaging the long-standin
20、g Chinese intellectual guilt complex toward the People. The legitimacy of the Chinese literary elite is traditionally rooted in the Mencian theory of government namely, that the mandate to rule was deserved only if the Peoples welfare were properly attended to-and modern literati have continually ag
21、onized over how to portray the lives of the Masses, rather than the preoccupations of the group they belonged to and most understood, the urban bourgeoisie. This sense of guilt opened the way to intellectual support for Communism and, later, for the radical plan of sending millions of students to th
22、e countryside to reform their filthy intellectual thoughts by practicing the clean laboring habits of peasants. Many of the episodes Han relates, however, testify to the difficulties these sent-down kids had in adjusting to the local dialect and customs, and to the tragicomic clashes between peasant
23、s and students that resulted. Han Shaogongs Maqiao is very far from being a rural paradise: life is often violent, arbitrary, and oppressive (especially for women); food is in short supply, privacy nonexistent, the work backbreaking, and the cultural and recreational possibilities limited and genera
24、lly monotonous. But Han achieves a balanced portrayal of the country-dwellers he worked alongside, one that neither romanticizes nor betrays contempt for its subjects. Throughout the book, Han never behaves like a moralizing spectator, but as a guilty participant, even leader, in some of the more ri
25、diculous and insensitive episodes. As an earnest youth with a Maoist schooling, Han is at one point instructed to write a revolutionary opera glorifying the lives of the laboring peasants. Wanyu, one of the stars of the show, reacts badly to Hans script: Sing this? Hoes and rakes and carrying poles
26、filling manure pits watering rice seedlings? Comrade, I have to put up with all this stuff every day in the fields, and now you want me to get on stage and sing about it? Han and the local cultural officials arrogantly tell him to get on with it-this is art. Hans musings on the impossibility of univ
27、ersalizing or normalizing language and truth reveal a deeply Chinese, unmistakably Daoist strain of thought. The Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way, pronounced Laozi, the great Daoist philosopher, and Han constantly draws attention to the confusion, comedy, and calamity that result from
28、the uses and abuses of language, from the failure to accept the insufficiency of language. Yet neither, as A.C. Graham tells us, do Daoists reject language as useless. Taoists are trying to communicate a knack, an aptitude, a way of living They do not think in terms of discovering Truth or Reality.
29、They merely have the good sense to remind us of the limitations of the language which they use to guide us towards that altered perspective on the world and that knack of living. To point the direction they use stories, verses, aphorisms, any verbal means which come to hand. Far from having no need
30、for words, they require all available resources of literary art. Equally, how could Han, in undertaking the daunting task of compiling a dictionary, deny his esteem for language? Instead, his range of writing styles, subjects, and discussion reveal a truly Daoist openness to using all linguistic mea
31、ns available. Any component of Maqiao-its purple-teeth soil, its demonic maple trees, its stubborn oxen-has a story to tell and a part to play of no less importance than the characters that people his pages. Several of Maqiaos inhabitants are also strongly Daoist in outlook-for example, the dropout
32、Ma Ming, whose withdrawal from the corruption and hypocrisy of Communist/Confucian life encapsulates the archetypal life choice of the Daoist hermit through Chinese history. In tune with this Daoist receptiveness to ideas and influences, the book is as international and universal as it is local and
33、particular. Han places himself within a broad channel of influences, from Confucius to Freud, and he is not afraid to leap between different countries and periods in his exploration of language. His frame of reference contains both Chinese and Western history and culture-the Crusades, American anti-
34、Communism, modernist art and literature-resulting in a novel that is both fascinatingly Chinese and accessibly Western in approach. He is equally comfortable with conventional and magical realism, with philological musings and story telling. And although his characters live in Maqiao, a little villa
35、ge, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, we would do well to remember the conviction of the modern Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh that Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. The inhabitants of Han Shaogongs Maqiao are as universal and three-dimensional as a reader could h
36、ope for: Benyi, the loud-mouthed local Mr. Big; Tiexiang, his femme fatale wife; Zhihuang, the brutish idiot savant; Zhaoqing, the eccentric miser; Zhongqi, the village busybody; Yanwu, the strange talent whos just a bit too clever for his own good. As explored in Han Shaogongs Dictionary, the diale
37、ct, life, and inhabitants of Maqiao are fully deserving of their place in world literature.A note about the translation When I first wrote to Han Shaogong asking for his permission to translate A Dictionary ofMaqiao, I received a friendly but slightly bemused response. I am very happy that you wish
38、to translate the book, but Im afraid it will be terribly difficult. He probably thought I was mad even to have suggested translating a book written in Chinese, about the language of one tiny corner of southern China, into English. I plunged on regardless and, for the most part, I have translated the
39、 novel in its entirety, from the 1997 Shanghai wenyi chubanshe edition. There are, however, five entries from the novel that I deemed to be so heavily dependent in the Chinese original on puns between dialect and Mandarin Chinese as to make extensive and distracting linguistic explanations necessary
40、 in English. I therefore decided, with the authors permission, to omit from my translation the following entries: Bayuan; Lian xiang; Liu shi; Po nao; Xian; and the final paragraph of the entry Reincarnation. On the theme of dictionaries, the reader will find an alphabetically arranged glossary at t
41、he end of the book to explain any possibly unfamiliar terms that occur in the text. I have included also a list of principal characters and a guide to pronunciation of Chinese words. Julia LovellGuide to Pronunciation of Transliterated Chinese According to the pinyin system, transliterated Chinese i
42、s pronounced as in English, except for the following:vowels: a (as the only letter following a consonant): a as in after ai: I (or eye) ao: ow as in how e: uh ei: ay as in say en: on as in lemon eng: ung as in sung i (as the only letter following most consonants): e as in me i (when following c, ch,
43、 s, sh, zh, z): er as in driver ia: yah ian: yen ie: yeah iu: yo as in yo-yo o: o as in fork ong: oong ou: o as in no u (when following most consonants): oo as in food u (when following j, q, x, y): u as the German (i ua: wah uai: why uan: wu-an uang: wu-ang ui: way uo: u-who yan: yen yi: ee as in f
44、eedconsonants: c: ts as in its g: g as in good q: ch as in chat x: sh as in she z: ds as in folds zh: j as in jobEditorial Note 2 Producing the dictionary of a village has been a somewhat experimental undertaking for us. We received this offering from the dictionarys compiler, Han Shaogong, a renowned gentleman of letters whose
