"I started translating Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972)'s works into Chinese in the late 1970s. However, I've been inviting trouble by doing this," 76-year-old Ye Weiqu told Beijing News on July 20.
"My wife Tang Yuemei and I co-translated Kawabata's Snow Country (1937) and The Old Capital (1962), and delivered our scripts at the beginning of 1981 to Shandong People's Literature Publishing House," Ye recalled.
"But, the publishing house for some reason thought that Snow Country was about a prostitute! So its final publication had to wait for another half a year until approval was given from the powers-that-be."
"Since its publication, that novel has incited nothing but criticism in this country," Ye added.
"Nevertheless, it stood the test of time, and was put on the list of highly recommended books for university students a couple of years ago," he said.
Ye, now a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was born and educated in Vietnam. At high school, he participated in progressive student movements and acted as chair of the underground student association. He often staged "modern" dramas along with his classmate Tang, then chair of the school's official student association. They were engaged after graduating from high school and promised to return to China together.
On June 10, 1952, Ye and Tang arrived in Beijing and immediately started preparing for the university entrance examinations.
Both of them secured a place at the renowned Peking University that autumn. They majored in Japanese literature at the Department of Eastern Language and Literature chaired at the time by Ji Xianlin, a famous Orientalist.
"As the People's Republic of China had been established not too long before in 1949, we were not allowed to listen to the NHK (a Japanese news station), and the only Japanese newspaper available was the Red Flag published by the Japanese Communist Party," Ye recalled.
In the late 1950s and 60s, Ye started his career as an amateur writer and translator, but that was soon interrupted by the Cultural Revolution that crippled the country in 1966. The ideology during that time was to eradicate everyone and everything that upheld traditional Chinese culture or education. Ye and his family were sent to a reform labor camp in central China's Henan Province. Before being sent away, he was forced to forsake the collection of books he had accumulated over the years. But he managed to keep one hidden from the authorities. It was a Japanese-Chinese dictionary, and he leafed through it in secret after a hard day's work in the fields.
It was only more than a decade later in 1978 that Ye could devote himself heart and soul to his translation work, and Yasunari Kawabata was first on his translation list.
"For Chinese researchers, Kawabata's literature had remained an out-of-bounds area for decades," Ye said. "Kawabata integrates traditional and Western styles of literature so perfectly. Without him, modern Japanese literature would be incomplete. That is why I was determined to translate his works even when conditions in the 1970s were still not very favorable."
Nevertheless, Ye admitted that at that time he was not completely immune to the influence of the rampant ultra-leftist currents of thought. For instance, when compiling Selected Works of Yasunari Kawabata in the early 1980s, he didn't anthologize the writer's well-known One Arm (1964), Thousand Cranes (1949) and House of Sleeping Beauties (1960), because he felt they were a little too decadent.
"It took me some 20 years to fully and truly understand their aesthetic value," Ye said with a hint of regret.
More recently, another Japanese author burst onto the scene. He was Kenzaburo Oe, who's familiar neither to Chinese nor to Japanese readers. But this seemingly unknown writer "suddenly" won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In fact, both Ye and Tang knew him as early as in 1960 when the then 25-year-old Oe was a member of a Japanese writers delegation that visited China.
When news of Oe's Nobel Prize achievement was received in Japan, Tang who was there on a visit jumped on the buying bandwagon. Everyone wanted an Oe book.
Oe is an existentialist writer who explores deeply the humanity issue, a topic Chinese researchers had been forbidden to touch for years.
In 2000, Oe visited China a second time and met with Ye and Tang. The three had an in-depth discussion about literature.
It was after that meeting that Ye concluded: "I'm now more keenly aware of the great responsibility I have to take of introducing Japanese literature to Chinese readers comprehensively and objectively."
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, July 25, 2005)
