莫言作品英文版推荐(一)

导语:莫言获得诺贝尔文学奖后,世界各地很快都掀起了一阵莫言热。小编也收集了几篇莫言作品的英文介绍,推荐给大家学习一下。

From the preface to Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh (2001)

Every person has his own reasons for becoming a writer, and I am no exception. But why I became the sort of writer I am and not another Hemingway or Faulkner is, I believe, linked to my childhood experiences.

They have been a boon to my writing career and are what will make it possible for me to keep at it down the road.

Looking back some forty years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China's most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism.

On one hand, those years saw the country in the grips of economic stagnation and individual deprivation.

The people struggled to keep death from their door, with little to eat and rags for clothes; on the other hand, it was a time of intense political passions, when starving citizens tightened their belts and followed the Party in its Communist experiment.

We may have been famished at the time, but we considered ourselves to be the luckiest people in the world.

Two-thirds of the world's people, we believed, were living in dire misery, and it was our sacred duty to rescue them from the sea of suffering in which they were drowning.

It wasn't until the 1980s, when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream.

《师傅越来越幽默》(2001)

序言:任何作家从事这一行业都有自己的理由,我也不例外。但我为什么成了这种作家,而没有成为海明威或者福克纳那样的作家,我想是和我的童年经历分不开。我的写作生涯受益于我的童年,它帮助我一直在这条道路上继续走下去。

回顾40多年前,也就是20世纪60年代初期,那是现代中国历史上最奇异的一段时期,人们经历着史无前例的狂热。一方面,整个国家经济停滞,人民贫困,人们缺吃少穿,终日挣扎在生死线上;另一方面,那个时代的人有着强烈的政治热情,挨饿的人民勒紧裤腰带也要追随党的共产主义实践。

那时我们相信,虽然忍饥挨饿,但我们是世界上最幸运的人。我们相信世界上2/3的人民都生活在悲惨之中,我们的神圣使命就是把他们从水深火热中拯救出来。直到80年代中国实行改革开放政策,我们才最终开始面对现实,仿佛大梦初醒。