□ Peninsula All-Media Reporter Meng Xiuli Correspondent Wang Ximing
Recently, Hermann Bloch, Kundera’s literary idol and one of the “Four Central European Masters” as famous as Kafka, became famous for his novel “The Sleepwalker” Launched by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House·key-can culture. This book is a direct translation of the original German text. It is the first direct translation of German in the Chinese-speaking world. It also contains many rare and precious manuscripts and old photos of Bloch.
"The Sleepwalker" is Bloch's first novel and is known as "the immortal masterpiece after "Ulysses"." The novel focuses on the turbulent thirty years in Europe from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, and shapes three generations of "sleepwalkers" in the form of a trilogy. The sleepwalker walks between wakefulness and deep sleep, reality and dreams, which is a condensation of people's mental state in an era when social values continue to collapse.
"The greatest novelist in Europe after Joyce"
George Steiner once said: "Bloch is the greatest novelist in Europe after Joyce." The Austrian writer Hermann Bloch is indeed the greatest novelist in Europe after Joyce. A well-deserved master of modern literature. Milan Kundera regarded him as a literary idol who paid tribute to his life. He once said: "Bloch, his photo is placed on the table where I work. He smiled at me with a pipe in his mouth." Hannah Arendt even wrote countless articles, recommending this "great novelist of the 20th century" to the entire English-speaking world. In addition, he was a close friend who shared the same destiny with Zweig, and was one of the few literary friends who maintained correspondence with Thomas Mann.
Bloch was born in Vienna into a Jewish textile merchant family in 1886. As he grew up, Bloch showed a fascinating and comprehensive intelligence: he took over the family textile business, studied the improvement of textile machines, and obtained a patent; at the same time, he was also highly passionate about philosophy and literature, and he kept writing and was active in Vienna Intellectual Circle. In 1927, when he was nearly forty, Bloch resolutely chose to give up the factory and enter the University of Vienna to study mathematics and philosophy. During the same period, he turned to literary creation. At the age of forty-five, he presented his first novel "Sleepwalker" to the world and became famous in one fell swoop.
In "The Sleepwalker", Bloch showed his anxious concern for the times, and since then he began the literary path of describing European society in the 20th century, successively writing "The Possession", "The Innocence" and "Virgil". Death" and other works. Due to the disclosure of reality, his works were once banned in Germany. In 1938, Bloch was persecuted by the Nazis and imprisoned. Later, he went into exile with the full rescue of international literary colleagues. In his later years, Bloch once again crossed boundaries and turned to philosophy, social politics and even psychology, hoping to give an answer to the chaotic world. In 1950, Bloch was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but died of a heart attack a year later.
Talking about Bloch's creation, Arendt once accurately commented: "His writing is between the irretrievable past and the future that has not yet come." Behind Bloch's words, there is a world that he tried his best to fill. The times are empty.
A great example of modernist literature in the 20th century
"The Sleepwalker" consists of the trilogy "1888: Passeño or Romanticism", "1903: Ash or Anarchism" and "1918: Hu Guinao or Realism". They respectively created three generations of typical "sleepwalker" images of the aristocratic officer Passeno, the accountant Ash, and the deserter Hu Guinao. In the novel, the officer Passeno wanders at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, trapped in the fear of uncertainty and not knowing which way to go; the accountant Ash vainly desires to save a world with inverted values, but ultimately discovers that he is part of the collapse of values; The deserter Hu Guinao cheated and cheated all the way, collaborating with the chaotic and disorderly era. Bloch uses such three representative characters to show the three possibilities of people facing the era of devaluation - confusion and helplessness, futile struggle, and complicity, presenting the three stages of European ideological change at the turn of the century.
Kundera commented that this is a work that describes the gradual collapse of European civilization values; Thomas Mann also said that "Sleepwalker" is an admirable work. "Sleepwalker" is indeed such a masterpiece deeply rooted in the times.The year 1931 when the novel was published coincided with the Great Depression in Europe and the changing political situation in Germany and Austria. Bloch used a magnificent page to magnificently describe the impact of industrial civilization on European feudal society, the impact of the financial crisis and the First World War on the European people. Industrial civilization, economic crisis, World War I, and great social changes have impacted every "sleepwalker" in the era of change.
In terms of novel techniques, "Sleepwalker" is recognized as a representative work of modernist literature comparable to "Ulysses". Bloch combined multiple genres in his novels to form a unique polyphonic feature, which changed the traditional narrative mode of European novels. He completed a profound change in the traditional novel form with "The Sleepwalker". Especially in the third part of the novel, Bloch incorporated poetry, philosophical discussions, business letters, newspaper articles and other literary styles, forming a polyphony with extremely difficult artistic techniques, which had a profound influence on later literary creation. As Kundera said: ""The Sleepwalker" foreshadows the possibility of the future of novels."
The "Sleepwalker" published this time is the first German literal translation in China. The original text of the translation comes from the old German publishing house Suerkamp and was first published in The 1994 classic version was lovingly translated by senior German translator Huang Yong, paying tribute to and restoring Bloch's writing style to the greatest extent possible. Huang Yong once used the pen name "Mingcheng Zhiqu". He was invited to join the International Hermann Bloch Society in July 2020. He is strictly the translator of the first full Chinese translation of "Sleepwalker" released on the Internet in China. He devoted himself to the Chinese translation of Bloch. Starting from "The Sleepwalker", he worked tirelessly to complete the translation of "The Possessed", "The Innocence", "The Death of Virgil" and other works. These works will also be published by Zhejiang Literature and Art in the future. Publishers are launching them one after another.
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