Literary Master 1983

Chapter 12 A Letter to Columbia
The editor-in-chief from Beijing is Liu Xinwu, a native of Chengdu. He won the first Mao Dun Literature Prize in 79. His work "Class Teacher" is considered to be the pioneering work of scar literature.

Liu Xinwu is currently obsessed with Marquez's novels. He believes that this is one of the future directions of Chinese literature. Therefore, he wants to vigorously advocate and introduce it.

"I know you, Yu Qie. Why do you want to pour cold water on us?" he said.

"Because Marquez only recorded what he saw and heard truthfully, and did not add any imagination to his own works," said Yu Qie.

"What evidence do you have?"

"In his own interviews, Marquez talked about how Latin America and Europe are very different. There, there are storms that last for months and the Amazon River, while Europe only has continuous rain and the Danube River, no big rivers, no strong winds or heavy rains... So when Europeans see his books, they think they are 'magical realism', but his is 'realism', without the word magic."

Yu Qie also added, "This 'magical' realism is based on the 'reality' in the Western cognitive system. It is the material used by Western-centrism to construct its own 'other'. It has a postcard-like exotic imagination and is the West's projection of the 'irrational' and 'abnormal' ignorance and backwardness of the non-Western world. This is a discriminatory usage by others, but we just follow suit..."

Liu Xinwu started sweating when he heard half of it:

Damn, why is it discrimination at the beginning?
What era is this style of play from?

"We don't have anyone here who speaks Spanish, so we can't verify the truth of what you said. Do you have any other evidence?"

"The evidence is in Márquez's speech at the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. He never talked about his literature, let alone magical realism. He talked about the historical, social and political status quo of Latin America. He asked everyone to truly care about and understand the realities of Latin America. These realities are different from what Westerners see. They are not magical, but they are real."

"Do you speak Spanish?" Liu Xinwu asked.

"I taught myself a little." Yu Qie replied.

He actually knew a little bit. In his previous life, undergraduates had already started to learn a second foreign language, and Yu Qie learned it sporadically. Not only Spanish, Yu Qie also learned Japanese.

There was indeed no one at the scene who could speak Spanish, but it was easy to translate a speech, and we just had to find a translator to verify it later.

In fact, Yu Qi just wanted to curse - this matter can be regarded as the biggest blunder in the country regarding "One Hundred Years of Solitude". A concept that even the author himself does not agree with has been followed for decades. These people understand "One Hundred Years of Solitude" better than Marquez.

A few years later, Liu Xinwu was kicked out of People's Literature for publishing some overly hurtful articles. Then he wrote a letter of apology and ran back to be the editor-in-chief again. Since then, he seemed to have lost his creative comfort zone and devoted all his energy to the study of Dream of Red Mansions.

Now, the situation is a bit deadlocked. A young man who knows a little Spanish points out that everyone is talking nonsense, but no one can refute him.

Huang Xingbang came out to smooth things over. He asked Yu Qie, "Do you really still know Spanish?"

"Know a little."

Liu Xinwu interrupted, "I don't believe it! Besides, where did he get the information? Maybe he made it up."

Huang Xingbang then smiled and said, "Yu Qie was the top scholar in the local area and was admitted to Yan University. You may not know... his family is a scholarly family. I read a report before that Yu Qie's home was filled with books on an entire wall, many of which were foreign books. Because of his uncle's special identity as a translator, they were carefully preserved in those days."

Liu Xinwu certainly wouldn't be fooled, he questioned from another angle:

"Yu Qie, you may be gifted at writing novels, but when we do literary research, we need to be bold and careful, and most importantly, careful. We need to verify things carefully... Magic realism is popular in foreign countries now, and I was just about to introduce it, but you insist that there is no such thing. How can we be convinced if you don't come up with something?"

"If you are really capable, write a well-reasoned study and I will send it to a journal for criticism... If you are not capable, please don't bother us."

Got it!
Here comes the work.

The research on "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is similar to the research on "Dream of the Red Chamber", in that a bunch of Redologists studied the book thoroughly and had to study the author himself and the society at that time, but they ended up finding far more substantial information.

Yu Qi happened to know the explosive information in Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude".

The book describes many seemingly incredible plots, so it is called magical realism.

The most famous of these is the description of a multinational rubber company (the prototype is the United Fruit Company of the United States) shooting at workers who demanded a wage increase. According to the protagonist José Arcadio, when he woke up, he found himself on a train rumbling towards the sea at night, surrounded by rows of dead workers.

They were all placed on shelves loaded with bananas, and the train had two hundred carriages.

The train was carrying more than 3,000 bodies of workers, heading for the sea, just like dumping overripe and spoiled bananas. However, after the protagonist escaped death, he suddenly found that no matter where he went, others had no impression of this incident, as if the army had never fired a gun and the workers had never taken a walk.

When Westerners read it, they thought what Marquez wrote was too far-fetched. He wrote many plots like this and called it "magical" realism.

This is a true story written by Márquez himself, but in the end even he was confused. When he was a teenager, he asked everyone he met in his hometown about this incident. The union leader at the time told him that thousands of people really died, and foreign reporters reported that at least hundreds of people died. Later, Márquez became famous and was able to check local historical files. According to the official Colombian data, only 7 people died.

As a result, a few years later, some information was unsealed, and it was discovered that in 1928, the United Fruit Company and local warlords carried out arrests and shootings in various places for a full three months. In the end, the number of workers killed was far more than , and far more than carriages.

Can this be called magical realism?
This is conservatism.

Others write about the true blood and tears of class brothers, but you are here to use the Western publisher's foreign style to say that he is engaging in magical realism.

Marquez himself must not be very happy.

If Marquez had been told about this in advance and allowed to collect evidence, then with his current reputation as a great writer, the truth might have come to light.

What procedures were required to send a letter to Colombia in China in the 1980s?
Yu Qie tried to write in Spanish while asking questions.

When the people at the seminar learned that Yu Che was going to start writing letters, they all ran to see what he wrote. However, they couldn't understand it after all, so they just praised Yu Che's bravery.

He is an internationally renowned writer who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. There are countless writers from all over the world who are eager to establish a relationship with him. You are just an unknown guy, yet you dare to send him a letter to disturb him.

If they think we Chinese are impolite, that would be bad. Diplomacy is no small matter, and we must be very careful and polite in our words.

Perhaps this was the first informal contact established between ancient China and the great Colombian writer.

This letter even alarmed Ma Shi Tu.

One day he brought a Spanish professor from Sichuan University, a middle-aged man named Chen, to see Yu Qie.

"Yu Qie?" They both shouted while leaning outside the window.

"Hey! What's wrong?" Yu Qi stood up.

"What else?" Ma Shi Tu led the people in and took off his hat. A Lai bent over to serve tea to the two guests and stood aside to listen.

Alai first boiled water in the enamel bowl, then made tea and served it to Ma Shi Tu and Professor Chen.

Ma Shi Tu glanced and said: "Alai, why only two cups of tea?"

He meant that there was not enough tea.

"We were only given two enamel bowls when we came to study this time." Alai answered honestly.

This enamel bowl with a mandarin duck pattern was very popular and a must-have in every household. It once became a wedding dowry and was used by many rural families until the next century.

"And a bowl of tea, hot. I have an enamel bowl left that I haven't used. You can use it quickly."

After Alai found out the place, he thought as he walked, four people, three cups of tea, I'm making tea, but I don't have any to drink yet?

Wait, why did I assume it was for the cotangent?

However, good-tempered Alai didn't care and finally served them all.

At this time, Ma Shi Tu grabbed his hat and kept fanning himself, urging Professor Chen, "Take a look at Professor Yu's Spanish letter. How is it? Come and give him some guidance."

(End of this chapter)