Dr. Robin Gilbank is a researcher at Northwestern University for more than four years.

In addition to teaching, he translates Jia Pingwa's novels in his spare time. Because he is more familiar with me, every time we meet, he talks about a few difficult and difficult to understand details, I asked him to summarize these tricky points, about a weekend, with Pingwa's editor-in-chief and translation expert Professor Hu Zongfeng, as well as young scholars Yang Hui and Ma Jiana who study Jia Pingwa, the theme is that spring is coming, eat Chinese dumplings stuffed with shepherd's cabbage.

The editor-in-chief of Pingwa loves vegetarian dumplings, and made a special call the night before to tell him that it is best to put some tofu in the shepherd's cabbage.

I said that you should consider the difficult mouths, and put some meat or eggs. He said that there are two kinds of fillings, and I will eat the one with tofu.

The dumplings are made by Ma Jiana, she has good craftsmanship and is also neat, two kinds of filling, she has been busy all morning.

I stewed the beef, simmered it in a casserole. After eating, the chopsticks of Pingwa editor-in-chief mainly pointed to beef, and I saw that he was busy and reminded him to eat more tofu dumplings, which were specially wrapped for you.

He said to Hu Zongfeng, Mu Tao, the deputy editor-in-chief, for so many years, I didn't know that he could make beef.

Hu Zongfeng said, I have eaten with Robin many times. Robin has a good appetite and is real, and the dumpling beef goes hand in hand.

Dr. Robin and Hu Zongfeng are good friends and work together as translators. The thorny problems of Robin's translation are mainly in traditional culture

"Chinese characteristics", and these are precisely the places where Jia Pingwa's writing shows off his skills, such as the practical application of the Book of Changes, hexagrams, common sense of feng shui, the homophony of Chinese characters, the symbolic metaphors of poems and folk songs, and so on.

The editor-in-chief of Pingwa annotated while eating beef, which is basically correct. Dr. Robin is rigorous, and he has a thick book in his hand, and he has eaten a lot, and it is estimated that he can't taste the good taste of casserole beef.

The core of the topic was later focused on

In terms of "artistic conception and realm of literature", this is where the Chinese separation in the translation process is more prominent. Dr. Robin is a scholar who studies British Chinese literature, and I asked him for advice, and he lectured on traditional Chinese literature

"Writing the environment", also speaking

What is the related term "artistic conception" in traditional English literature? Dr. Robin thought for a while, but still couldn't think of it.

Professor Hu Zongfeng said that American scholar Li You'an translated Wang Guowei's "Words in the World"

"The word takes the realm as the top, and if there is a realm, it becomes a high quality",

"Realm" uses a Wisley phonetic alphabet. Cultural separation is a big thing, but also very specific, different groups of people have different spiritual atmospheres, the mutual replacement of atmospheres, to achieve to the point of expressiveness, is really a difficult thing.