On what there is to love, about READING, the collisions of two GREAT minds here, translated…
As We’d Read the Novels When We Were Younger, We’d Begun on Our Journeys, it’s Just, that It Take Twenty, Thirty Years, We Would Get the Chance, to Use Our Bodies, to, Measure This World We Live in Again………
Dze Yang: When I was younger, I took reading to be something sacred, so, I’d, chosen the late nights to start reading and studying, so I can, make a world of quieted solitude for myself, and, slowly, taking the solitude in. This sort of intentionally doing it, it’d contained a sort of dramatic nature of developments, but in the end, I’d, easily messed up the real purpose of reading late nights, and, made myself neurotic more or less, and, once I’d gotten too into the processes, I’d become, stuck, in this mind of falsified daydreaming state, and, I was, trapped by living like this for a very long time.
a collection of classics of literature…not my photo…
Kundera said, that “Don Quixote” was the very first modern novel, and Mr. Don Quixote was the very FIRST modern man. His story was well-known throughout the world, so, I’ll remind you, of the plot here.
Quixote is a Spanish gentleman from the countryside, because he’d become, too intrigued with reading about chivalry so much so, one day, he’d pulled along Sancho, a farmer from his hometown to go on an adventure with him, one of them was tall, the other short, one on a horse, the other, on a donkey, they’d made up their minds, to head to the big old world outside, to help out the weak, to give to the poor. In the world without knights anymore, he’d made himself into one, and, made troubles all around. He’d treated a farm woman as a maiden, and, proclaimed his love to her; mistook the windmills for giants, and, ran toward it, to fight them in his duel, ended up injuring himself so. and, robbed a barber’s wash basin to be used as a helmet, and, declared war on everybody he’d met across his paths, with that long spear in his hand, waving it toward anybody he sees again, and again.
Quixote was finally, tricked by a scholar and a priest back to his own hometown, and after he’d regained his mind back, he’d fallen ill, shortly thereafter, and before he’d died, he’d blamed how the novels on chivalry had, destroyed him, and wrote out his will, and warned his niece, that she shall NEVER marry someone like him, otherwise, he would, disinherit her.
a collection of prized books, not my photo still…
Toward us, who are older now, and already witnessed the weathering of the world, the story of Quixote was actually, just a fable, and the reasoning was, all too clear. The stories of knights, we can’t get to, but, the sword-fight novels, the historical romances, from Louis Cha, Long Gu, all the novels, from the smaller, to the larger volumes, we’d both, chased after these stories in our younger days. But, I want to confess first: sure, the novels had destroyed me from before, but, they weren’t, the sword-fighting tales, but those earlier versions of translated novels.
I’d once mentioned, that my younger days in Chiayi, not to exaggerate, but, I did, grow up in the bookstores in the areas. As I went strolling in the bookstores, the kinds of books I’d picked up, spent the most time to read, were those, dusty translated novels by the forgotten corners of the stores. And, these books, were translated, over thirty years ago. And, one of which I was so totally into, was by the Russian writer, Turgenev, and later, I’d become, half-crazed, and searched for his books everywhere.
this, would be a great habit to have, not my photo…
Several years back, the Cherry Farms Publishing had published the brand new translated version of Turgenev’s “First Love”, the owner of the publishing company, Chiu knew, that Turgenev was my favorite author, he’d asked me to write the preface for the book. And, I can only, tell the readers my story of my first love of literature. And wrote about how reading can destroy people, at the same time, make people too, the novels are nonfictional, and made up at the same time, but, isn’t life so?
So, this, is the effects that reading fictions have on your life, and, there are a WIDE variety of fictional novels, of different genres you can get into these days, and, although these stories are fictional, but, you can still find truths in those made-up stories you thumbed across, because, they’re, a mirror to real life, reflecting on what the characters were going through in the story lines.
Hong-Chih Jeng: Dze Yang, on the discussion of “Don Quixote”, there’s something interesting I want to tell you about: I’d read Edward Morgan Forster’s “Aspects of the Novels” (the translations were from New Trends Publishing, the founder of the Chih-Wen Publishing Co. Chang recently passed, and, our generation owed the New Trends Publishing Company a debt for leading us into the field), the contents came from Forster’s lecture in the 31 School of Cambridge, he’d mentioned that he’d written a book of his travels called Gazpacho, a cold soup in Spain, and, a bowl of cold soup represented Spain’s culture. That, was confusing to me, I’d quickly found a copy of “Don Quixote”, and, the description of the diets of this gentleman from La Mancha being having more beef than lamb in the daily suppers, and on the weekends, eggs and vegetables were served primarily (until I’d read the translations by Jiang Yang back in the ‘80s, did I learn, that on the weekends, the locals would eat the internal organs of animals), and on Fridays, they would have lentils, Sundays, they’d had an extra pigeon added to the menus, there wasn’t any segment on the gazpachos. Such pity for a high school student who’d never been abroad before, all of his beliefs about foreign world was from the novels he’d read, he thought, that the diets of Don Quixote was representative of the diets of all Spaniards, and, if the two books don’t match in content, then, he wouldn’t know what to do.
My being drawn to foreign world started when I met Sherlock Holmes back in my elementary years, recalling back, the translations were probably from the translator, Xiao-Ching Cheng (with a TON of Shanghai dialect in it), all those names sounded so crisp, and, there was also that fog that came in the nights, with the gas-lit streetlamps too, every part of it, had me intrigued, and, I’d started, becoming, infatuated, with a city called London then.
There was another special experience in my younger years, in my fourth grade year, I’d thumbed across a novel in my hometown library, and, many years later, I’d learned, that it was the novel called “The Return of the Native” by Hardy, that was, the translated version in the fifties, by Ching-Ji Liang, from the publisher Zheng-Zhong Publishing. The story took place in the countryside of England, but, the countryside in the book was, so different, from the countryside I was living in back then! The protagonist was a red man, because he’d sold red paint to the farmers, and, the farmers used the red paint to mark their livestock, to differentiate them from other people’s livestock; and, the scenes from the novel in the countryside was so totally different from my own experiences, the Egdon Heath was this desolate place, with the bushes grown all over, and, my hometown had the bamboo forests. And, these contrasts had, sparked my interests, in making the different discoveries of the world, I’d hoped, I can, fly away, to enter into those, incredible realms.
And I can say this, as we’d started reading the novels, we were, set out on our journeys then, it’s just, that it took us, twenty, to thirty years, to finally, live it out with our personal experiences………
Dze Yang: You are absolutely right, we were drawn by our desires to know the world when we read these novels as children and teens, to fulfill our insatiable imaginations of those foreign worlds………
Let me say something more about the gazpacho, I’d also heard of it, but never known what it was. Toward the end of 1980s, Almodovar with his “Pepi, Luci, Bom” made it into the American film industry, the film trended throughout New York, I’d gone to see it with the crowds, I saw in the movies, that the girlfriends made that spicy Spanish tomato soup, and finally, I’d, gained a bit of understanding of what gazpacho meant to the Spanish populations. You know, there are, a massive population of Hispanic Americans in New York, they lived in the upper side of the state of New York, in the song by Leonard Cohen, it stated, “I hear the Spanish voices laugh, their loud voices was widely recognized, and, the huge pot of gazpacho that Almodovar cooked up had taught the audience, a numerous of valuable things, all of these people can, finally, carry themselves high, and finally, made it. And, gazpacho originally didn’t have tomatoes, or chili in it, as Columbus discovered the New World, before he’d brought tomatoes and chili to Spain, the gazpachos were made of overnight breads, olive oil, salt, garlic, and vinegar. And, by this way, Almodovar should thank Columbus, that spicy pot of gazpacho was heated on the inside, cold on the out, with the freshened sweet taste of the tomatoes, plus the spiciness of the chili peppers, symbolizing the minds of the characters, so very, persuasive!
Thinking back on it seriously, Hong-Ji, this world, this life, is just, so full of surprises, the two of us, readers, youths from a third-world back then, are we, lucky! Turns out, the eras were, too kind to us, we not only lived in this land of change, we are also, a part of mixing of the cultures from the east AND the west since that latter era of the Qing Dynasty. Although, we may not have known about this before, but, from the start, when we’d, fallen in love with the translated novels, it’d, set us on this path in the future………
The novels are not on a grander scale, it’d made truths out of fictions, and, naturally, it’d contained partial truths in them, and what’s strange was, the novels were, said to be “new” in the late Qing Dynasty, this, is a split, that’s considered, NOT as a blessing to the novels. Based off of what I perceive, there were, two separate paths of novels: the objective and the subjective; one “the world is WAY bigger than you supposed, and more complicated”; the other pushed forth the beliefs of “Living in Faraway Lands”, the view of subjectivity, meaning, “life isn’t what is perceived, there should be other possibilities to life”. Whether it be objective or subjective, matter of form or topic, let me reiterate: the novels were made, from the returns of the adventures of the mind and spirit, the fictions are falsified into truths, making people, and breaking them, that, is the value of the novels………
Hong-Chih Jeng: Very well stated, Dze Yang, the translated novels told us, two third-world country small readers, that the world is, bigger than you’d supposed, that life, is more twisting and winding than we had, supposed, that we should, go experience the world more fearlessly, to seek it out, we thought we were, only reading some intriguing tale of someone else’s life, without realizing, that we’re, actually, making our own separate adventures in life.
As we were reading the novels in the volumes, we owed those translators for leading us in. And, the names of these translators had become, a secret code to a passage that led us into finding the treasures, seeing the proclamations, you gained the perspectives of Herman Hesse from Germany, the French, the Dostoevsky of Russia, the Japanese Samurai too………
Dze Yang, look, from our first passage of describing our pathways, we can already, predict the directions of our lives in the future based off of the encounters that we had with these novels, you are what you read, chasing the reading list, is like following the maps of the DNA, it tells us the histories of an individual.
But, perhaps, I’d, overemphasized the functions of novels as we were growing up, and, ignored the meanings they had to this world. We’re no longer young, and, we’d had a lot of moments past, but not enough yet to come, we are no longer, willing or able, to strike out on the adventures in life anymore, for instance, from before, I’d never dreamed of being an artist, and now, it would be, even HARDER for me to live that dream; from before, I’d not climbed up the Himalayas, and now, it would be, impossible for me to even imagine myself doing so, but if I were only twenty years old, and, I would have wider range of possibilities. But, thinking back, living until now, fixing up my past mistakes, patching up the holes of my pasts, may sometimes be more meaningful than pursuing new things. But, because I kept reading novels, my discoveries in life, never halted.
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So, this, is on how reading affected these two writers, and, the habits of reading for these two men started back when they were younger, and, like ALL the habits that you’d kept to date, they’d started when you were younger, in your childhood years, and, this article showed the importance, to keep on reading books, so you can, widen up your own perspectives to the world, and, reading can reactivate your already dormant sense of imagination, and, imagination can lead you to come up with more creative problem-solving methods when you come across the difficulties in life, and, even IF you’d read the fictional stuff, you can still apply what you’d read, onto your own everyday living, and then, fiction becomes, NONFICTIONAL, because you’d, applied it, to your own real life!
Life, the Obstacle Course 