Writing/唐山 (Book Review) Editor/徐秋颖 何睿 校对/杨许丽
"A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is getting used to it, but I can't," said Krasnohorkaj Laszlo, a Hungarian who took the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature. Previously, he had won the 2014 American International Writing Lifetime Contribution Award, the 2015 International Booker Prize, and the 2019 American National Book Translation Literature Award...
Laszlo is not a stranger. Many people know the movies "Satan's Tango" and "The Horse of Turin" (both originally written by Laszlo), but they don't understand much. They are gray, dark, crazy, desperate, obscure... Laszlo's original works are like this. Sometimes more than 400 pages of books are a sentence from beginning to end, separated only by commas, and cannot be translated. There is noconfirmed。People are curious: Does it have to be so weird to win the Nobel Prize?
This involves the difference between serious literature and popular literature. Popular literature attempts to tell a good story, but the fact is that the vast majority of life is not a story."occur-development-climax-ending" is just a routine and a scam. The price of "good looking" is a distortion of the sense of reality. There are always people who, after going through vicissitudes, will stammer, hesitate, and hesitate when others ask what life is, because he knows that everything he has experienced refuses to be summarized, cannot be compressed, is difficult to tailor, and cannot be repeated...
Serious literature pursues reality, and it transcends the limits of human senses.
In Satan Tango, a simple trick holds the world: Little Ashti believes his brother's words, sows "money seeds", water every day, waiting for the harvest; the owner of the small bar is neglected, taking over a small bar in a spider flood; the hopeless wife once cheats her husband and meets his lover; two scammers create utopies, inducing the villagers to flee; villagers cheat each other, wanting to profit from it, resulting together ... there is no matching wisdom of life, not understanding what Russell is writing.
From the translator Zemin's "Krasno Holkai and I", we know that Russell's life consists of a series of absurdities.
For example, the strange surname of Krasnohorskay, was the name of the family castle, "First War" after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the castle became exotic, grandfather sadly sang "very bad tune, every time I heard, in the body will be chicken skins", once "in the small pub sang a whole day"。In March 2013, the castle was ruined by “a fire caused by two boys smoking cigarettes.”
After graduating from college, laszlo became a librarian in a small town. He was very involved, but he only worked for one year. The cultural center was destroyed by another fire, and the books were gone, so the administrator was laid off.
Laszlo threw it into the stove 1/3 of Satanic Tango and burned his hand.
Once defeated by the absurd, is the fate of modern man, can be born to be human, you always have a choice, and always can fight against "a dirty rotting war."
In 1991, he came to China as a journalist and became fascinated by Chinese culture. After returning to Hungary, he ate Chinese food, listened to Peking Opera, read Tao Te Ching and worshipped Li Bai. In August, 1998, he traveled in China for a month, followed Li Bai's footsteps, traveled to nearly ten cities, and asked every passing Chinese: Do you know Li Bai? Can you recite Li Bai's poems? Why do you like Li Bai...
However, Laszlo can only write helplessly in "The Destruction and Sorrow of the World": "It is blinded by the future and has no time to take care of the present." Laszlo found that he could never get out of the strange circle of Krasnohorkai, which swallowed up everything, and all life was wrapped in it, and there was nowhere to escape.
If Lee White really travelled to this day, suddenly discovered that Tang dialect became a dialect; everything he had dreamed of was ignored by the people who rushed to work; in the wave of consumption, his poetry was also far from catching up with the hot posts of the Internet ... What would Lee White do?
When some writers have turned away from Li Bai, Laszlo told us that you can be as pure as Li Bai. Literature has no past and present, but only dances for eternity. Li Bai has never gone far. As long as he yearn for it, he is always there. All people in the world will eventually be moved by him.