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Iranian translator describes working on Mo Yan’s two stories
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IBNA- An Iranian French into Persian translator Asghar Nouri elaborated on translating Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s work, ‘Le Veau suivi de Le Coureur de fond’(‘Calf’ and ‘The Distance Runner’) which contains two long stories.
In an interview with IBNA, Nouri said that Mo Yan’s work is indeed a satirical criticism of power and it is a good entry to his world. Mo Yan is a pen name for Guan Moye that means “don’t talk” and is said to have originated in advice his parents gave him as a school-age boy during the Chinese Mao era.
The translator of Joël Egloff’s ‘L'Etourdissement (Dizziness) asserted that the narrative of Mo Yan's two Nobel Prize winner stories occur in a village which is a metaphor for China. “Mo Yan criticizes the Chinese government very indirectly and he has never been imprisoned because of his criticisms nor his books have ever tolerated censorship," Nouri said adding that "Mo Yan wants to remain a writer and he doesn’t intend to become a campaigner".
About how much the Persian translation of Mo Yan's masterpiece has been loyal to the original work as Nouri has translated from the French and not the Chinese version, he said that the French translators insist on retaining the forms of the original literary works and “I am almost sure that in the Persian version, the form and the style of Mo Yan’s stories have also been preserved”.
“Mo Yan is a good storyteller and employs Chinese folklore artistically in his works,” posed Nouri stressing that sometimes Mo Yan incorporates the unreal elements into the real world of his stories and he has borrowed these elements from Gabriel García Márquez and the magic realism of Latin American authors.
In magic realism, time is circular and non-linear, and human-like creatures can play role in the progression of the story. Mo Yan’s story is the story of three beeves and in some points the narrator enters in a dialogue with them, according to the translator of “The Proof” by Ágota Kristóf .
Asghar Nouri believes that Mo Yan has been under Charles Dicken’s influence and he is comparable to the French writer Jean de La Fontaine, one of whose stories is the story of ‘Crow and the Fox.’
“Literature creates a world beside our own world and this is the reason of its eternity. We can create a different world in literature and it is due to this point that in French writer is called “auteur” meaning creator,” Nouri stated.
He said that Mo Yan has mostly been influenced by his own life and his entire works originate from his life. He sets his stories in his own village since he knows there very well and the narrator is similar to Mo Yan himself very much.
Living in village and poverty leads the Chinese laureate from the very beginning of his childhood to take refuge in oral and folklore stories. He joins The Chinese Red Army to evade poverty. Afterwards, Mo Yan sees the Revolution and experiences everything. He witnesses the poverty of Kingdom period and the war against royal regime, which he takes part in himself. He sees that how the Revolutionists who sometime promised ideal life to people, were themselves similar to the previous dictators. What Mo Yan has experienced is so bitter that he uses satire to make it tolerable, according to Nouri.
“Mo Yan sees everything and writes in a way that involves the reader in the story and he incorporates the unreal elements in order to escape censorship. The Chinese genius believes that literature before everything should be literature and its commitments are in the second priority. For him, novel should be first attractive,” the Iranian translator posed.
About the role of criticizing communism in winning the Nobel Prize by Mo Yan’s masterpiece, Nouri said: "If we look at the history of the Nobel Prize, safe for a few writers, we have often had two groups of writers: first, those who explore humane themes human and the second those who have been political and have criticized some power”. He added that the Nobel Prize isn’t usually allocated to someone who criticizes imperialism. Mo Yan gives a detailed report of a dictatorial government which is closed and this was a significant factor in winning the Nobel Prize. However, Mo Yan himself is a great literary writer and deserves gaining this prize.
About his future plans, Nouri said that he is currently translating the entire works of the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf. He has already translated her trilogy, Le grand cahier (The Notebook), ‘La preuve’ (The Proof), 1991: ‘Le troisième mensonge’ (The Third Lie).
Interview by Shataw Naseri
Source: Iran Book News Agency (IBNA)
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