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632 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
33 people are currently reading
1741 people want to read
About the author
Han Shaogong
29?books16?followersHan Shaogong (Traditional:韓少功; Simplified: 韩少功; Pinyin: Hán Shàogōng; born January 1, 1953) is a Chinese novelist and fictionist.
Han was born in Hunan, China. While relying on traditional Chinese culture, in particular Chinese mythology, folklore, Taoism and Buddhism as source of inspiration, he also borrows freely from Western literary techniques. As a teenager during the Cultural revolution he was labeled an ‘educated youth’ and sent to the countryside for re-education through labour. Employed at a local cultural center after 1977, he soon won recognition as an outspoken new literary talent. His early stories attacked the ultra-leftist degradation of China during the Mao era; they tended toward a slightly modernist style. However, he reemerged in the mid-1980s as the leader of an avant-garde school, the "Search for Roots" or the Xungen Movement.
Han's major work to date is A Dictionary of Maqiao, a novel published in 1996 and translated into English in 2003. His writing is influenced by Kafka and by the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. In 1987, he published a Chinese translation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and edited Hainan Jishi Wenxue ("Hainan Documentary Literature"), a successful literary magazine. He has been given the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and with other Chinese writers visited France in 1988 at the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture. Han was invited back in 1989 but was denied permission to leave China until 1991.
Han's other works include Moon Orchid (1985), Bababa (1985), Womanwomanwoman (1985), Deserted City (1989), and Intimations (2002).
(from Wikipedia)
Han was born in Hunan, China. While relying on traditional Chinese culture, in particular Chinese mythology, folklore, Taoism and Buddhism as source of inspiration, he also borrows freely from Western literary techniques. As a teenager during the Cultural revolution he was labeled an ‘educated youth’ and sent to the countryside for re-education through labour. Employed at a local cultural center after 1977, he soon won recognition as an outspoken new literary talent. His early stories attacked the ultra-leftist degradation of China during the Mao era; they tended toward a slightly modernist style. However, he reemerged in the mid-1980s as the leader of an avant-garde school, the "Search for Roots" or the Xungen Movement.
Han's major work to date is A Dictionary of Maqiao, a novel published in 1996 and translated into English in 2003. His writing is influenced by Kafka and by the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. In 1987, he published a Chinese translation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and edited Hainan Jishi Wenxue ("Hainan Documentary Literature"), a successful literary magazine. He has been given the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and with other Chinese writers visited France in 1988 at the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture. Han was invited back in 1989 but was denied permission to leave China until 1991.
Han's other works include Moon Orchid (1985), Bababa (1985), Womanwomanwoman (1985), Deserted City (1989), and Intimations (2002).
(from Wikipedia)
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February 28, 2017Where to even start with this? Who knew books like this even existed? First, how many Chinese novels have you read (and I ain't talking about those overseas-Chinese novels about how they can't truly connect with their grandparents) for starters... despite the fact that nearly 20 percent of humanity identifies as Chinese in some meaningful way. Now, let's look at how fucking insane the structure of this book is, a dizzying collage of stories all of which are this sort of folk sociolinguistics of the people of one remote area of China during and after the Cultural Revolution. Shit on me, I was consistently disappointed I couldn't read Chinese, seeing as how this was like one gigantic, brilliant linguistic pinball game, even in translation, and given the richness of how Chinese characters are structured, I'm guessing this is better than Joyce in the original.
April 24, 2013
Having a sense of humour doesn't mean being able to tell jokes. Humour is the ability to play with the expected. Which is never more apparent than when authority tries to tell people what to think.
In 1970, the young intellectual student Han Shaogong was sent to the tiny village of Maqiao, where not much has changed since the emperor's days. But this was the cultural revolution and everything was to be made new: city-dwelling weaklings would become good workers, and in the process help turn the farmers into good socialists. So when he's not working the fields or the mountains, Han gets to teach the farmers to recite Mao quotes in proper, modern Chinese. But of course, to do that he first needs to understand their dialect, which isn't easy - you'd think the whole village was speaking backwards! "Awake" means "stupid", "expensive" means "young", "respect" means "punish", "hick" means "city boy", "democracy" means "chaos"... woops, sorry, some of those are modern Chinese. But anyway.
25 years later Han has grown to an accomplished novelist and puts together this fiction about life in Maqiao (any similarity between that name and Macondo is surely a coincidence) before, during and after his visit, in a form he's borrowed from Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A dictionary of the Maqiao dialect, where every chapter heading is a different word he needs to explain, at once making up a part of the ongoing story and an explanation for why that particular word has that particular meaning in this particular place. And of course, he doesn't present it all in alphabetical order like a proper dictionary; alphabets - especially the Chinese one, where words can be spelled several different ways, each of which gives them a different meaning - are arbitrary, after all. So instead he arranges them in a different order, to tell a very entertaining story of the people who make up the village, full of serious gallows humour and with an amazing cast of characters - none of which seem to fit neatly into the categories his standardised Maoist vocabulary tells him they belong to. And 25 years later, as a Chinese intellectual with his head full of Western books, he can't help but draw parallels between his outsider status then, and the different but similar one he faces today.
In 1986 I visited an "artists' colony" in Virginia, USA; that is, a center for artistic creation. The word "colony" kept making me uncomfortable. Only later did I realize that many Westerners in countries that used to have a large number of colonies don't associate the word with murder, fires, rape, plunder, opium smuggling and other things that the people in former colonies think about when they hear it. [To them] the colony is an outpost for the noble, a field camp for heroes.
...says the man who was sent to the countryside to teach them how to think in a new age. All words, all concepts, mean different things depending on by whom, when, where and how they're spoken. What starts in a small village in inner China becomes a cross-section of the world where battles are increasingly fought with words and ideologies rather than brute force - defeating someone is one thing, changing their minds is another, even Mao knew that. And as burlesque, angry, sentimental or hilarious the stories of the hicks... sorry, that word doesn't work here... in Maqiao get, the subtext of how we control and are controlled by language runs through everything in a way that's both very similar to and completely different from what a writer like Herta Müller does. Orwell was wrong; Big Brother's doublethink will always, through usage, be knowingly or accidentally subverted into triplethink.
A Dictionary of Maqiao, as a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside, knows better than to offer simple problems or solutions. Instead Han creates a very entertaining chronicle where both the characters and the underlying themes float like a river of rice gruel, blood, sweat and shit, always leaving new layers of sediment and breaking through every attempt to dam it, yet always clear enough to see the bottom and calm enough to reflect the person reading it.
In 1970, the young intellectual student Han Shaogong was sent to the tiny village of Maqiao, where not much has changed since the emperor's days. But this was the cultural revolution and everything was to be made new: city-dwelling weaklings would become good workers, and in the process help turn the farmers into good socialists. So when he's not working the fields or the mountains, Han gets to teach the farmers to recite Mao quotes in proper, modern Chinese. But of course, to do that he first needs to understand their dialect, which isn't easy - you'd think the whole village was speaking backwards! "Awake" means "stupid", "expensive" means "young", "respect" means "punish", "hick" means "city boy", "democracy" means "chaos"... woops, sorry, some of those are modern Chinese. But anyway.
25 years later Han has grown to an accomplished novelist and puts together this fiction about life in Maqiao (any similarity between that name and Macondo is surely a coincidence) before, during and after his visit, in a form he's borrowed from Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A dictionary of the Maqiao dialect, where every chapter heading is a different word he needs to explain, at once making up a part of the ongoing story and an explanation for why that particular word has that particular meaning in this particular place. And of course, he doesn't present it all in alphabetical order like a proper dictionary; alphabets - especially the Chinese one, where words can be spelled several different ways, each of which gives them a different meaning - are arbitrary, after all. So instead he arranges them in a different order, to tell a very entertaining story of the people who make up the village, full of serious gallows humour and with an amazing cast of characters - none of which seem to fit neatly into the categories his standardised Maoist vocabulary tells him they belong to. And 25 years later, as a Chinese intellectual with his head full of Western books, he can't help but draw parallels between his outsider status then, and the different but similar one he faces today.
In 1986 I visited an "artists' colony" in Virginia, USA; that is, a center for artistic creation. The word "colony" kept making me uncomfortable. Only later did I realize that many Westerners in countries that used to have a large number of colonies don't associate the word with murder, fires, rape, plunder, opium smuggling and other things that the people in former colonies think about when they hear it. [To them] the colony is an outpost for the noble, a field camp for heroes.
...says the man who was sent to the countryside to teach them how to think in a new age. All words, all concepts, mean different things depending on by whom, when, where and how they're spoken. What starts in a small village in inner China becomes a cross-section of the world where battles are increasingly fought with words and ideologies rather than brute force - defeating someone is one thing, changing their minds is another, even Mao knew that. And as burlesque, angry, sentimental or hilarious the stories of the hicks... sorry, that word doesn't work here... in Maqiao get, the subtext of how we control and are controlled by language runs through everything in a way that's both very similar to and completely different from what a writer like Herta Müller does. Orwell was wrong; Big Brother's doublethink will always, through usage, be knowingly or accidentally subverted into triplethink.
A Dictionary of Maqiao, as a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside, knows better than to offer simple problems or solutions. Instead Han creates a very entertaining chronicle where both the characters and the underlying themes float like a river of rice gruel, blood, sweat and shit, always leaving new layers of sediment and breaking through every attempt to dam it, yet always clear enough to see the bottom and calm enough to reflect the person reading it.
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July 31, 2019Traditional storytelling overwhelming experimental fiction
"A Dictionary of Maqiao" is a 1996 Chinese novel about a fictional village in the south of China. It takes the form of a dictionary, which is an unusual gambit for a novel. A principal precedent is Milorad Pavi?'s "Dictionary of the Khazars" (1984). (See the note at the end of this review.) Are there others? There are shorter pieces by Borges, Perec, and Lem, but I am not aware of other book-length dictionaries that ask to be read as novels. The model for the organization of Han's novel was possibly Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being," a novel Han translated (生命中不能承受之轻; from the English translation, I assume), where each chapter is about a word.
1. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as experimental fiction
A case could be made that this is one of the world's untranslatable novels, because it depends so much on local vocabulary, dialect, and phonetics. The narrator is continuously exploring differences between the Maqiao "dialect"--its pronunciation, and especially its idioms--and Mandarin from "the city." The translator, Julia Lovell, strikes a compromise by giving Chinese characters for each dictionary entry and finding English for everything else. Katherine Wolff's brief "New York Times" review (August 31, 2003) sees the book as "a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words." Many of the stories are explicitly about language, and not character development. The entries are not in the usual Chinese "alphabetical" order, because--as a prefatory note explains--it is easier to follow the book's stories if they are disarranged. Almost all the entries are discontinuous and independent, and the majority are self-contained stories.
For all these reasons--independent pieces of fiction, arbitrarily arranged, the dictionary format, the experiment in language--the book could be read as part of postwar French-influenced European and North American fiction in the general tradition of Oulipo. But I don't think that is an adequate description, because it is overtaken by two other readings.
2. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as political text
A look at the online reviews in English seems to indicate the book has been mainly received as a political essay. The narrator went to Maqiao as part of the Cultural Revolution, and there are many references to the futility and comedy of attempting to standardize Chinese life.
As "Kirkus Reviews" put it: "The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought." Or as Danny Yee puts it, the book is "a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be—or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China." A reader with the screen name Bjorn, on 欧宝娱乐, says the novel is "a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside."
In these readings, Han is primarily sending a message to anyone in China who feels minorities can be safely classified and contained by a central administration. I don't think the online reviewers are wrong, and the book can be read as a critique of ideology, with the Maqiao dialect as its principal example.
3. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as traditional Chinese narration
For me even the political reading is less central than a third reading, which would connect the book to Ming "novels" and earlier texts. Han's dictionary entries are often stories that draw morals, and in that respect they present themselves as variants on traditional sorts of Chinese fables and stories. The "Publisher's Weekly" review does a good job at conjuring this:
"A sharp, sophisticated observer, [Han] narrates... folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male 'dragon'; of 'poisonous' Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits."
For a while I experimented in adding titles to the dictionary entries, so that instead of single words they had brief discursive titles in the manner of older Chinese narratives. (I was thinking mainly of Cao Xueqin, and also the "Journey to the West.") Here are some examples, Han's dictionary entry first, and then my invented title:
"Tincture of iodine [碘酊]"
On the unexpected accuracy of some rural expressions.
"Sweet [甜]"
In which the narrator draws a simple moral from the observation that impoverished language leads to misunderstandings.
"Same pot [同锅]"
In which a lucky marriage helps fills the stomachs of a young couple from the city.
"Placing the pot"
On a colorful and slightly violent old custom and what it once led to.
"Qingming rain" [清明雨]"
In which the author muses on how rain stirs political memories, lost on the young.
"Rough"
In which a man appears to be a sage in disguise, but the author won't tell us for sure.
This traditionalism is most prominent source of meaning for me, and it reduces both the political messaging and the linguistic experimentation to vehicles. As Jenny Lee pointed out, reading a draft of this review, it is likely Han's interest in Ming and older texts was partly filtered through Lu Xun, who had done work on vernacular Chinese, folklore, translation issues, and rural/urban divides back in the 1920s and 1930s. So it's likely that Han might have experienced his echoes of Ming and earlier texts in a more modernist way--but for me, it's the broad reference that counts, and from a European or North American point of view, the references to folktales, moral narratives, and similar forms seems an imposition in the experimental regime. I'm tempted to see it as the Darmstadt composers saw what Richard Taruskin calls "bad Bartok"--the Bartok who was more interested in eastern European folksong than in his modernist experiments. This creates a conundrum in reading: either the book is richer because of its mixture of traditional and experimental, or its author has been distracted from his experimental interests by the pull of traditional forms. Although I can appreciate the book's historical position in 1980s-1990s Chinese eclectic experimental writing, as a novel it seems overwhelmed by immiscible traditional forms.
4. A note on the Afterword
The book ends with a three-page Afterword, which proposes two morals. Han begins by regretting that his Mandarin has "standardized" him. "Even the 40,000-odd characters in the Kangxi Dictionary," he writes, "have banished this enormous amount of feeling... beyond the controlling imperial brush and inkstone of scholars." However he hopes that new forms of difference (that's my 21st century term) will emerge:
"Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language.. that new dimensions in sound, form, meaning, and regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simulatneously in progress?"
It's a lovely and unexpected moral. The second moral is only a single sentence, and it isn't supported by the novel itself: "Providing we don't intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization," he writes, "then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange... this implies, then, that when people speak, everyone needs their own, unique dictionary."
That is fairly astonishing, and if Han had developed it as he wrote, the novel would have been very different.
How, then, to locate this book? According to Wikipedia, Han is influenced by Kafka and Marquez. (It's not clear if that's the encyclopedist's notion, or Han's.) Traces of Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being" are visible throughout. But Han also translated Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" (惶然录), and I can't begin to guess what he got from that experience: I don't see anything of Pessoa's endless introspection, and only a few traces of his interest in the writing itself. It would be good to know more about what Han read, and whether he imagined this book as a response to postwar experimental writing, from Pavi? to Oulipo.
*
Thanks to Jenny Lee for the Chinese titles of Han's translations. Regarding Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars": a Chinese art historian, Li Yiqing, sent me this:
"I googled The Dictionary of Maoqiao, and found a piece of sensational news about the 'Maqiao Event' (1996-1999). This can explain who influenced Han Shaogong and the controversies of this influence. The story goes like this: in 1996, some writers and scholars claimed that Han Shaogong’s ''Dictionary of Maqiao plagiarized Pavic's 'Dictionary of the Khazars.' Zhou Yiwu from Beijing University said that the book is a complete copy of 'Dictionary of the Khazars.' In 1997 Han sued Zhou and six other writers, arguing that his novel is not a copy of any other writer’s work. Han won the suit. Yet the argument did not end with the court judgement. Some influential writers urged the China Writers Association to investigate the plagiarism issue, and hundreds of articles were published about the event... Later, some scholars found that Pavic's 'Dictionary of the Khazars' is similar to Jorge Luis Borges’s?'Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.' At the end of the last century, the 'Maoqiao Event' aroused a nationwide discussion about originality and innovation of literature.?Some scholars have said that the 'Maoqiao Event' is more interesting and more significant than the 'Dictionary of Maoqiao.'" That's from Li Yiqing. I don't know anything more about the 'Event'; but I have read 'Dictionary of the Khazars,' and in my memory it is very distant from Han's novel.
"A Dictionary of Maqiao" is a 1996 Chinese novel about a fictional village in the south of China. It takes the form of a dictionary, which is an unusual gambit for a novel. A principal precedent is Milorad Pavi?'s "Dictionary of the Khazars" (1984). (See the note at the end of this review.) Are there others? There are shorter pieces by Borges, Perec, and Lem, but I am not aware of other book-length dictionaries that ask to be read as novels. The model for the organization of Han's novel was possibly Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being," a novel Han translated (生命中不能承受之轻; from the English translation, I assume), where each chapter is about a word.
1. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as experimental fiction
A case could be made that this is one of the world's untranslatable novels, because it depends so much on local vocabulary, dialect, and phonetics. The narrator is continuously exploring differences between the Maqiao "dialect"--its pronunciation, and especially its idioms--and Mandarin from "the city." The translator, Julia Lovell, strikes a compromise by giving Chinese characters for each dictionary entry and finding English for everything else. Katherine Wolff's brief "New York Times" review (August 31, 2003) sees the book as "a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words." Many of the stories are explicitly about language, and not character development. The entries are not in the usual Chinese "alphabetical" order, because--as a prefatory note explains--it is easier to follow the book's stories if they are disarranged. Almost all the entries are discontinuous and independent, and the majority are self-contained stories.
For all these reasons--independent pieces of fiction, arbitrarily arranged, the dictionary format, the experiment in language--the book could be read as part of postwar French-influenced European and North American fiction in the general tradition of Oulipo. But I don't think that is an adequate description, because it is overtaken by two other readings.
2. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as political text
A look at the online reviews in English seems to indicate the book has been mainly received as a political essay. The narrator went to Maqiao as part of the Cultural Revolution, and there are many references to the futility and comedy of attempting to standardize Chinese life.
As "Kirkus Reviews" put it: "The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought." Or as Danny Yee puts it, the book is "a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be—or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China." A reader with the screen name Bjorn, on 欧宝娱乐, says the novel is "a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside."
In these readings, Han is primarily sending a message to anyone in China who feels minorities can be safely classified and contained by a central administration. I don't think the online reviewers are wrong, and the book can be read as a critique of ideology, with the Maqiao dialect as its principal example.
3. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as traditional Chinese narration
For me even the political reading is less central than a third reading, which would connect the book to Ming "novels" and earlier texts. Han's dictionary entries are often stories that draw morals, and in that respect they present themselves as variants on traditional sorts of Chinese fables and stories. The "Publisher's Weekly" review does a good job at conjuring this:
"A sharp, sophisticated observer, [Han] narrates... folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male 'dragon'; of 'poisonous' Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits."
For a while I experimented in adding titles to the dictionary entries, so that instead of single words they had brief discursive titles in the manner of older Chinese narratives. (I was thinking mainly of Cao Xueqin, and also the "Journey to the West.") Here are some examples, Han's dictionary entry first, and then my invented title:
"Tincture of iodine [碘酊]"
On the unexpected accuracy of some rural expressions.
"Sweet [甜]"
In which the narrator draws a simple moral from the observation that impoverished language leads to misunderstandings.
"Same pot [同锅]"
In which a lucky marriage helps fills the stomachs of a young couple from the city.
"Placing the pot"
On a colorful and slightly violent old custom and what it once led to.
"Qingming rain" [清明雨]"
In which the author muses on how rain stirs political memories, lost on the young.
"Rough"
In which a man appears to be a sage in disguise, but the author won't tell us for sure.
This traditionalism is most prominent source of meaning for me, and it reduces both the political messaging and the linguistic experimentation to vehicles. As Jenny Lee pointed out, reading a draft of this review, it is likely Han's interest in Ming and older texts was partly filtered through Lu Xun, who had done work on vernacular Chinese, folklore, translation issues, and rural/urban divides back in the 1920s and 1930s. So it's likely that Han might have experienced his echoes of Ming and earlier texts in a more modernist way--but for me, it's the broad reference that counts, and from a European or North American point of view, the references to folktales, moral narratives, and similar forms seems an imposition in the experimental regime. I'm tempted to see it as the Darmstadt composers saw what Richard Taruskin calls "bad Bartok"--the Bartok who was more interested in eastern European folksong than in his modernist experiments. This creates a conundrum in reading: either the book is richer because of its mixture of traditional and experimental, or its author has been distracted from his experimental interests by the pull of traditional forms. Although I can appreciate the book's historical position in 1980s-1990s Chinese eclectic experimental writing, as a novel it seems overwhelmed by immiscible traditional forms.
4. A note on the Afterword
The book ends with a three-page Afterword, which proposes two morals. Han begins by regretting that his Mandarin has "standardized" him. "Even the 40,000-odd characters in the Kangxi Dictionary," he writes, "have banished this enormous amount of feeling... beyond the controlling imperial brush and inkstone of scholars." However he hopes that new forms of difference (that's my 21st century term) will emerge:
"Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language.. that new dimensions in sound, form, meaning, and regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simulatneously in progress?"
It's a lovely and unexpected moral. The second moral is only a single sentence, and it isn't supported by the novel itself: "Providing we don't intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization," he writes, "then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange... this implies, then, that when people speak, everyone needs their own, unique dictionary."
That is fairly astonishing, and if Han had developed it as he wrote, the novel would have been very different.
How, then, to locate this book? According to Wikipedia, Han is influenced by Kafka and Marquez. (It's not clear if that's the encyclopedist's notion, or Han's.) Traces of Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being" are visible throughout. But Han also translated Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" (惶然录), and I can't begin to guess what he got from that experience: I don't see anything of Pessoa's endless introspection, and only a few traces of his interest in the writing itself. It would be good to know more about what Han read, and whether he imagined this book as a response to postwar experimental writing, from Pavi? to Oulipo.
*
Thanks to Jenny Lee for the Chinese titles of Han's translations. Regarding Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars": a Chinese art historian, Li Yiqing, sent me this:
"I googled The Dictionary of Maoqiao, and found a piece of sensational news about the 'Maqiao Event' (1996-1999). This can explain who influenced Han Shaogong and the controversies of this influence. The story goes like this: in 1996, some writers and scholars claimed that Han Shaogong’s ''Dictionary of Maqiao plagiarized Pavic's 'Dictionary of the Khazars.' Zhou Yiwu from Beijing University said that the book is a complete copy of 'Dictionary of the Khazars.' In 1997 Han sued Zhou and six other writers, arguing that his novel is not a copy of any other writer’s work. Han won the suit. Yet the argument did not end with the court judgement. Some influential writers urged the China Writers Association to investigate the plagiarism issue, and hundreds of articles were published about the event... Later, some scholars found that Pavic's 'Dictionary of the Khazars' is similar to Jorge Luis Borges’s?'Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.' At the end of the last century, the 'Maoqiao Event' aroused a nationwide discussion about originality and innovation of literature.?Some scholars have said that the 'Maoqiao Event' is more interesting and more significant than the 'Dictionary of Maoqiao.'" That's from Li Yiqing. I don't know anything more about the 'Event'; but I have read 'Dictionary of the Khazars,' and in my memory it is very distant from Han's novel.
September 15, 2024
??? ???? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ?????.
March 21, 2016
Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao, originally published in Chinese in 1996 and translated into English by Julia Lovell in 2006, is not only the best novel I’ve read in the last few years but also an absolute miracle of translation. The translator had great admiration for the book and approached the author for permission to translate it into English. She relates his response as, “I am very happy that you wish to translate the book, but I’m afraid it will be terribly difficult.”
She was not sure exactly why he thought it would be “terribly difficult”, but an obvious reason is that it is a book about language, and not simply language but non-standard-language. Specifically it’s about the language of Maqiao, a village in northern Hunan, that differs from standard Chinese (Putonghua, Mandarin) not only in vocabulary and pronunciation but also in worldview.
The book takes the form of a journal written by an “educated youth” sent to the country to work with peasants in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution (something that Han experienced directly), but it’s organized into a dictionary of dialect words used in the area he moved to, that is, Maqiao. The author explains the origin of the words as best he can and gives examples of situations where they are actually used, which are effectively vignettes of Maqiao life. But he doesn’t stop there. Rather he goes on to use the words he’s introduced in accounts of other words – that is, in other vignettes – similarly to the way a language textbook will introduce some new vocabulary items in some chapter and then use them periodically in later chapters.
You might imagine that the author is simply peppering the speech of his characters with dialog words to add “local color”, but this is not the case. The journalist/narrator uses the words himself, sparingly but pointedly, as if it is only by using Maqiao words that he can properly describe what he sees and feels in Maqiao. And the words aren’t just any words, dialect or not, they’re words that one way or add to or go beyond normal language, like “streetsickness” which refers to the visceral disorientation that country people feel when they visit large cities or “scattered” which means dead but not necessarily totally gone.
Dictionary of Maqiao is definitely about language, but it’s also about culture and human nature. It reminded me, apart from its special interest on language, of another one of my favorite books, Yang Kwi-ja’s A Distant and Beautiful Place (original title The People of Wonmi-dong). Both share episodic structure, focus on a single place remote from the outside world but impacted by it, distinctive characters who are observed over time, and finally, a warm appreciation of ordinary people, complete with their faults and foibles. But where Yang’s books stays anchored in the world it describes, Han’s rises above its world and explores, modestly but incisively, deep philosophical questions as to the nature of language, culture and the human condition. I give Dictionary of Maqiao two sets of five stars, one going to the author for a great book and the other to the translator for a great translation.
She was not sure exactly why he thought it would be “terribly difficult”, but an obvious reason is that it is a book about language, and not simply language but non-standard-language. Specifically it’s about the language of Maqiao, a village in northern Hunan, that differs from standard Chinese (Putonghua, Mandarin) not only in vocabulary and pronunciation but also in worldview.
The book takes the form of a journal written by an “educated youth” sent to the country to work with peasants in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution (something that Han experienced directly), but it’s organized into a dictionary of dialect words used in the area he moved to, that is, Maqiao. The author explains the origin of the words as best he can and gives examples of situations where they are actually used, which are effectively vignettes of Maqiao life. But he doesn’t stop there. Rather he goes on to use the words he’s introduced in accounts of other words – that is, in other vignettes – similarly to the way a language textbook will introduce some new vocabulary items in some chapter and then use them periodically in later chapters.
You might imagine that the author is simply peppering the speech of his characters with dialog words to add “local color”, but this is not the case. The journalist/narrator uses the words himself, sparingly but pointedly, as if it is only by using Maqiao words that he can properly describe what he sees and feels in Maqiao. And the words aren’t just any words, dialect or not, they’re words that one way or add to or go beyond normal language, like “streetsickness” which refers to the visceral disorientation that country people feel when they visit large cities or “scattered” which means dead but not necessarily totally gone.
Dictionary of Maqiao is definitely about language, but it’s also about culture and human nature. It reminded me, apart from its special interest on language, of another one of my favorite books, Yang Kwi-ja’s A Distant and Beautiful Place (original title The People of Wonmi-dong). Both share episodic structure, focus on a single place remote from the outside world but impacted by it, distinctive characters who are observed over time, and finally, a warm appreciation of ordinary people, complete with their faults and foibles. But where Yang’s books stays anchored in the world it describes, Han’s rises above its world and explores, modestly but incisively, deep philosophical questions as to the nature of language, culture and the human condition. I give Dictionary of Maqiao two sets of five stars, one going to the author for a great book and the other to the translator for a great translation.
December 22, 2023
Zamislite jedno zaba?eno mesta?ce, ta?nije kinesko selo Ma?ao koje je podeljeno na Gornje i Donje selo, rasuto u dolini izme?u planina koje se povremeno obru?avaju, stvaraju?i ?estice beskona?nosti.
U njihovom govornom jeziku ne postoji jasno odre?ena granica izme?u re?i ,,kraja’’ i ,,po?etka’’, one su fonetski objedinjenje i sve ?to ima po?etak ima i zavr?etak, a iza svakog kraja je po?etak. Izjave Ma?aovaca su dvosmislene, nejasne, dvodimenzionalne, otvorene za bilo kakvo uplitanje iskustava sagovornika u datoj re?i, te je s toga podlo?na promenama i uobli?avanju. Za njih porodica nije ona koja ?ivi na okupu, u istoj ku?i, nju ne sa?injavaju roditelji i deca, ve? onaj lonac iz kog jedu isti ljudi. Najbitnije im je da budu obi?ni i da to stave do znanja drugima, a ako vas etiketiraju da ste ,,sablasni’’, to nije dobro po vas, jer iska?ete iz normalnosti. Siroma?ni su, rade po ceo dan, prenose kamenje, ,,hrane se ka?om’’, ali svet iza tog mesta je opasnost, jer se ne mo?e opisati, a ako se ne mo?e opisati ne mo?e se ni kontrolisati, ?to je vrlo problemti?no za njih, jer imaju svoj ure?eni sistem vrednosti koliko god haoti?no na prvi pogled izgledao.
Poseduju svoje pri?e, likove, legende, bi?a i mitove koji se vra?aju iz pro?losti u sada?njost da bi se osvetlili ili okajali svoje grehe. Zanimljivo je da Kinezi ne poseduju svest o vremenu i prostoru, ne zna se ta?no ?ta je sada?njost, a ?ta pro?lost, ali su im zapisi izuzetno precizni, do tan?ina.
Seljani ne ?ire vidike, ne edukuju se, ne gledaju televizor, jer se pla?e da ?e od silnih informacija i znanja po?eleti da se otisnu u svet, u nepoznato, a to mo?e ih mo?e odvesti u smrt, ali se naro?ito ponose pismenom Ma?aovcu i sve ostale kvalitete koji drugi narodi poseduju porede i nipodi?tavaju u odnosu na pismenog Ma?aovca. Za nauku tvrde da je ?avolja rabota, jer taj koji se bavi njom je sigurno neka len?tina, koja nema pametnija posla nego da se bavi nau?nim ?injenicama koje se stalno menjaju i dokazuju.
Polo?aj ?ena je nepovoljan, njihov zadatak jeste da ra?aju decu, tako da iako do?e trudna snaha do zuba, to za njih i nije toliko bitno, jer postoje ta?no utvr?ena pravila po kojima se gleda da li je dete njihovo ili nije.
Da, takvo selo zaista postoji i ovo su zapisi profesora kineskog i engleskog jezika, Han ?aogunga, koji je proveo nekoliko godina u Ma?auu, objediniv?i svoje iskustvo u ovu eksperimentalnu fikciju koju dr?im u rukama zahvaljuju?i poduhvatu prevodioca Zorana Skrobanovi?a (prevod je zaista maestralan i pri?a za sebe).
,,Re?nik’’ je od velikog zna?aja za azijsku kulturu, svrstan je me?u 200 najzna?ajnijih romana, a pro?ao je i kroz dugogodi?nju kritiku javnosti zbog pore?enja sa ,,Hazarskim re?nikom’’ Milorada Pavi?a.
Retke su prilike u ?ivotu da se nai?e i pro?ita jedno ovakvo delo.
U njihovom govornom jeziku ne postoji jasno odre?ena granica izme?u re?i ,,kraja’’ i ,,po?etka’’, one su fonetski objedinjenje i sve ?to ima po?etak ima i zavr?etak, a iza svakog kraja je po?etak. Izjave Ma?aovaca su dvosmislene, nejasne, dvodimenzionalne, otvorene za bilo kakvo uplitanje iskustava sagovornika u datoj re?i, te je s toga podlo?na promenama i uobli?avanju. Za njih porodica nije ona koja ?ivi na okupu, u istoj ku?i, nju ne sa?injavaju roditelji i deca, ve? onaj lonac iz kog jedu isti ljudi. Najbitnije im je da budu obi?ni i da to stave do znanja drugima, a ako vas etiketiraju da ste ,,sablasni’’, to nije dobro po vas, jer iska?ete iz normalnosti. Siroma?ni su, rade po ceo dan, prenose kamenje, ,,hrane se ka?om’’, ali svet iza tog mesta je opasnost, jer se ne mo?e opisati, a ako se ne mo?e opisati ne mo?e se ni kontrolisati, ?to je vrlo problemti?no za njih, jer imaju svoj ure?eni sistem vrednosti koliko god haoti?no na prvi pogled izgledao.
Poseduju svoje pri?e, likove, legende, bi?a i mitove koji se vra?aju iz pro?losti u sada?njost da bi se osvetlili ili okajali svoje grehe. Zanimljivo je da Kinezi ne poseduju svest o vremenu i prostoru, ne zna se ta?no ?ta je sada?njost, a ?ta pro?lost, ali su im zapisi izuzetno precizni, do tan?ina.
Seljani ne ?ire vidike, ne edukuju se, ne gledaju televizor, jer se pla?e da ?e od silnih informacija i znanja po?eleti da se otisnu u svet, u nepoznato, a to mo?e ih mo?e odvesti u smrt, ali se naro?ito ponose pismenom Ma?aovcu i sve ostale kvalitete koji drugi narodi poseduju porede i nipodi?tavaju u odnosu na pismenog Ma?aovca. Za nauku tvrde da je ?avolja rabota, jer taj koji se bavi njom je sigurno neka len?tina, koja nema pametnija posla nego da se bavi nau?nim ?injenicama koje se stalno menjaju i dokazuju.
Polo?aj ?ena je nepovoljan, njihov zadatak jeste da ra?aju decu, tako da iako do?e trudna snaha do zuba, to za njih i nije toliko bitno, jer postoje ta?no utvr?ena pravila po kojima se gleda da li je dete njihovo ili nije.
Da, takvo selo zaista postoji i ovo su zapisi profesora kineskog i engleskog jezika, Han ?aogunga, koji je proveo nekoliko godina u Ma?auu, objediniv?i svoje iskustvo u ovu eksperimentalnu fikciju koju dr?im u rukama zahvaljuju?i poduhvatu prevodioca Zorana Skrobanovi?a (prevod je zaista maestralan i pri?a za sebe).
,,Re?nik’’ je od velikog zna?aja za azijsku kulturu, svrstan je me?u 200 najzna?ajnijih romana, a pro?ao je i kroz dugogodi?nju kritiku javnosti zbog pore?enja sa ,,Hazarskim re?nikom’’ Milorada Pavi?a.
Retke su prilike u ?ivotu da se nai?e i pro?ita jedno ovakvo delo.
July 11, 2023
It's almost 1AM (12:56 to be precise) July 12th, year 2023. On this very fine night, I have finally done something I should've done months before, finally finished this book. During the last 100 pages I was really thinking about giving it 4 stars for all these months I've been dragging this book but in the end I just couldn't do it. It's a phenomenal book, a fantastic Serbian translation (bravo Zoki), and I just couldn't bring myself to lower the rating.
This book is something I would have never picked up on my own, solely because the title has word "dictionary" in it and idk about you but that does not sound like a fun time to me. Turns out, after getting through the first few boring words (geography related) I started to get really invested. The writing of this book is actually insane, I can't believe someone is able not only to write a novel in which the language itself is a main character, but also freaking translate it into another language?? I'm very pleased I decided to start reading this book right before I've heard the author himself talk about it (back in October), but I'm also extremely happy that I was familiar enough with Chinese history to understand where these characters were coming from and what was happening around them at the time. That way you can fully get inside Han Shaogong's brain and understand his thoughts and feelings about the stories he's trying to tell to the readers. Also one of the things that I absolutely loved was the fact that a couple of the words Maqiao people used can also be found in my native language too! My mother read around 50 pages and we had a very nice talk about it, she was really surprised and pleased to see some language similarities.
Overall, I really really enjoyed this book, I wish I hadn't read it for almost a year but better late than never. I also think that it's a very important novel about language, generation gaps, culture, and just simply about life and how a certain time can shape people (and how quickly almost all of it could go away).
This book is something I would have never picked up on my own, solely because the title has word "dictionary" in it and idk about you but that does not sound like a fun time to me. Turns out, after getting through the first few boring words (geography related) I started to get really invested. The writing of this book is actually insane, I can't believe someone is able not only to write a novel in which the language itself is a main character, but also freaking translate it into another language?? I'm very pleased I decided to start reading this book right before I've heard the author himself talk about it (back in October), but I'm also extremely happy that I was familiar enough with Chinese history to understand where these characters were coming from and what was happening around them at the time. That way you can fully get inside Han Shaogong's brain and understand his thoughts and feelings about the stories he's trying to tell to the readers. Also one of the things that I absolutely loved was the fact that a couple of the words Maqiao people used can also be found in my native language too! My mother read around 50 pages and we had a very nice talk about it, she was really surprised and pleased to see some language similarities.
Overall, I really really enjoyed this book, I wish I hadn't read it for almost a year but better late than never. I also think that it's a very important novel about language, generation gaps, culture, and just simply about life and how a certain time can shape people (and how quickly almost all of it could go away).
January 22, 2015
This was such a unique book; part novel, part short story collection, part memoir, part treatise on language and culture. The author was one of the "Educated Youth" relocated to the countryside, specifically the village of Maqiao, in the 1950's as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The author presents his somewhat fictionalized experiences in Maqiao as vignettes, each revolving around a particular word, name, or phrase from the Maqiao dialect. Through these we are introduced to a cast of eccentric and entertaining characters and grow to appreciate the unique culture of the village. There is a rough chronology to the entries, so that by the end we are able to feel some degree of resolution. This is just such a smart book; by turns humorous and heartbreaking and through it all informative and enlightening. My favorite entry was "This Him", which explains the two different words for "him" in the Maqiao dialect: "qu" or "this him" and "ta" or "that him". It is unexpectedly touching and poignant, as was this book as a whole.
June 10, 2025
"???? ???? ???????? ??????? ????????? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ??? ???????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ??????. ??? ???? ??????? ????? ????? ????? ?????? ???????? ????????? ????? ?????? ??????? ???? ?????? ?? ?????? ????. ?????? ?? ???????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ????? ??? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ???? ?????? ????? ??????? ???????? ?? ??????? ????? ?? ??????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???????? ??????".
??? ???? ??? ???? ? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ?? ???????? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ?????? ????? ??????? ???????? ???????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????????. ??? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ??????? ??? ??? ?? ??????? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ????? ???? ??? ???????. ???? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ????? ???? ???? ?? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ?????? "???: ???? ????. ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ????????? ??: ????? ??????. ????? ??????: ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ??????? ???? - ???? - ?? - ????? - ????? - ??? ????? ??????? ????? ??????? ???? ????? ?????: ?????? ?????!?. ????? ??? ?? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? ????? ?? ?????? ??? ?? ???? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ???? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ??? ???????? ?????? ????? ????? ??????? ?? ???????. ???? ??? ??????? ???? ?? ???? ???? ??????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ????? ??????????(????? ???????)? ???????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ??????? ??? ??????? ????? ??????? ????. ??? ????? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ?????????.
"???????? ??????? ????? ??????? ??????? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ?????? ???????? ?????????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????????? ????? ????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ?????? ????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ???? ?????? ??????? ?????. ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ??? ???? ?? ??? ???????? ???????? ?? ????? ????????. ??????? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ????? ????????? ???????? ??????? ?????????? ???? ??? ???????? ????? ?????? ??? ??????".
????? ???????? ????? ??? ??? ??????? ????? -???????- ??? ??? ??? ??????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???? ????????? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ??????? ?????? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ???????? ??????? ????????? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????. ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ??????? ???? ???? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????. ?????? ???? ??????? ?? ???? ???????? ???????? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ?? ???? ???????? ???? ??? ??? ??????? ?????? ?????? ?? ??????? ????????? ???????? ????????? ????????? ???? ?? ??? ??????? ?????? ???????? ??? ???????? ??? ????? ??????? ????????? ??????? ????????. ?????? ??? ???? ???? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??????? ???????? ???????? ??????? ?? ???? ?????????? ???????? ?? ???? ???? ??? ???? ??? ???????. ???? ?? ?????? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ??????!
??? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ????????. ???? ??? ????? ????? ?????????? ??????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????? ???????: ??? ??? ??????? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????! ???? ??? ??????? ???? ?????? ????????? ???? ???? ??? ????? "????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ????????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ?? ????? ??? ??? ?????? ???????? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ???????? ???????????". ?????? ???? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????. ????? ???? ????? ??????? ?????. ??? ??? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? ?? ???????: ???? ??????? ??????? ??? ??? ?????? ????!?. ????? ?? ??? ???? ??? "???????? ???????: ???????? ??? ???????? ?????????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ???????? ????????? ??? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ?????????? ???? ??????? ????? ?? ??????? ??? ???????? ????? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ????? ????? ???????? ??????????? ???????? ??????? ??????. ?? ???? ??? ????????? ???? ???????? ????????? ????? ?????? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ?? ??? ??????? ?? ????? ?? ?????????? ????? ????????".
???? ??????? ????? ???????? ????? ??????? ??? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?? ??? ???? ???????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ????????. ??? ?????? ??? ????? ??????? ??????? ????? ?????? ???????! ??? ???? ???????? ???????? ??? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ????????? ????????? ?????????. ????? ??? ?? ???? "????? ??? ?????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ????? ????? ??????? ???????. ???? ??????? ???????? ??????? ??? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? ???????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ?? ??????? ?? ???????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ????? ???????".
?? ???? ?????? ???? ???????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ?????? ??????. ???? ????? ??????? ????????? ?????????? ????????? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????. "???? ???????? ????? ???? ??? ???????? ?? ????????? ????? ???????? ???????? ?? ??????? ????? ????????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????? ????? ?????? ????????? ?? ?? ????? ???????? ?? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ??????? ????????? ?? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ????????? ??? ??????? ????????? ?? ?????? ???????. ??????? ?? ?????? ???? ??? ????? ??? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ?????? ???? ???????? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ??? ??? ????? ????????? ????????? ?????? ??????? ????? ?????????? ??? ?? ????? ???????? ??? ???????? ?????????? ????????? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ??????".
??? ??????? ???????? ????????: ???? ?????? ?? ??? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ????????? ??? ?????? ??????. "?? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???????? ?????? ????????? ????????? ???????? ????????? ????? ????? ????? ??????? ???????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ?????? ??? ????????? ??? ???? ???? ???". ??? ?????? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???????? ????? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ?? ?????? ??????? ???? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?? ???????? ??? ???????? ????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ????? ?? ???? ???? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????. ???? ??"???? ???? ?? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ???????? ??? ????????? ???? ???? ??????? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ?????? ?????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ????? ??? ????? ?? ????? ??? ???? ???????? ???????? ?????????? ?????. ????? ????? ???? ???????? ??? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ???????? ??????? ???. ?????? ???? ???????????? ???????? ?? ?????? ???????? ????? ?????? ????????? ???????".
??? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??????! ?????? ??????? -??? ???? ?????- ?? ???? ??????? ???????? ???????? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ???????? ????????. ????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ???????? ??????? ???? ??? ???? ?? ???? ??? ???????. ??? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ?? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ?? ?????? ???????. ??? ???? ???? ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????? ????? ???? ????? ????? ??????? ??????? ????????? ??? ?????. ???? ????? ??????? ???????? ?????? ??? ???? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ??? ???? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ???????? ???? ??? ???? ???????? ??????.
?????? ???? ??????? ??? ???? ??????? ???? ??????: "???? ???? ???? ???????? ????? ?????? ????? ??????? ????? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????. ????? ??????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ???????? ??????? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ??? ???????? ???????? ???? ????? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????????. ???? ???? ???? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ????????? ???????? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ????? ??????? ?? ????? ???????? ??? ?????? ?????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ????? ???? ??????? ??? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ??????? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??????. ?? ?????? ????? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ????? ???? ??????? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ????????? ???? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ????? ????? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? ????? ???? ???? ???????? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????. ???? ??? ??????? ????? ????? ???????? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ????? ???? ?? ??????? ?? ????? ???? ??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ??? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ??????? - ??????? ??????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????? ??????".
??? ???? ??? ???? ? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ?? ???????? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ?????? ????? ??????? ???????? ???????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????????. ??? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ??????? ??? ??? ?? ??????? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ????? ???? ??? ???????. ???? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ????? ???? ???? ?? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ?????? "???: ???? ????. ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ????????? ??: ????? ??????. ????? ??????: ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ??????? ???? - ???? - ?? - ????? - ????? - ??? ????? ??????? ????? ??????? ???? ????? ?????: ?????? ?????!?. ????? ??? ?? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? ????? ?? ?????? ??? ?? ???? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ???? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ??? ???????? ?????? ????? ????? ??????? ?? ???????. ???? ??? ??????? ???? ?? ???? ???? ??????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ????? ??????????(????? ???????)? ???????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ??????? ??? ??????? ????? ??????? ????. ??? ????? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ?????????.
"???????? ??????? ????? ??????? ??????? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ?????? ???????? ?????????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????????? ????? ????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ?????? ????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ???? ?????? ??????? ?????. ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ??? ???? ?? ??? ???????? ???????? ?? ????? ????????. ??????? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ????? ????????? ???????? ??????? ?????????? ???? ??? ???????? ????? ?????? ??? ??????".
????? ???????? ????? ??? ??? ??????? ????? -???????- ??? ??? ??? ??????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???? ????????? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ??????? ?????? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ???????? ??????? ????????? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????. ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ??????? ???? ???? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????. ?????? ???? ??????? ?? ???? ???????? ???????? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ?? ???? ???????? ???? ??? ??? ??????? ?????? ?????? ?? ??????? ????????? ???????? ????????? ????????? ???? ?? ??? ??????? ?????? ???????? ??? ???????? ??? ????? ??????? ????????? ??????? ????????. ?????? ??? ???? ???? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??????? ???????? ???????? ??????? ?? ???? ?????????? ???????? ?? ???? ???? ??? ???? ??? ???????. ???? ?? ?????? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ??????!
??? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ????????. ???? ??? ????? ????? ?????????? ??????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????? ???????: ??? ??? ??????? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????! ???? ??? ??????? ???? ?????? ????????? ???? ???? ??? ????? "????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ????????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ?? ????? ??? ??? ?????? ???????? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ???????? ???????????". ?????? ???? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????. ????? ???? ????? ??????? ?????. ??? ??? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? ?? ???????: ???? ??????? ??????? ??? ??? ?????? ????!?. ????? ?? ??? ???? ??? "???????? ???????: ???????? ??? ???????? ?????????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ???????? ????????? ??? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ?????????? ???? ??????? ????? ?? ??????? ??? ???????? ????? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ????? ????? ???????? ??????????? ???????? ??????? ??????. ?? ???? ??? ????????? ???? ???????? ????????? ????? ?????? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ?? ??? ??????? ?? ????? ?? ?????????? ????? ????????".
???? ??????? ????? ???????? ????? ??????? ??? ???? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?? ??? ???? ???????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ????????. ??? ?????? ??? ????? ??????? ??????? ????? ?????? ???????! ??? ???? ???????? ???????? ??? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ????????? ????????? ?????????. ????? ??? ?? ???? "????? ??? ?????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ????? ????? ??????? ???????. ???? ??????? ???????? ??????? ??? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? ???????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ?? ??????? ?? ???????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ????? ???????".
?? ???? ?????? ???? ???????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ???????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ?????? ??????. ???? ????? ??????? ????????? ?????????? ????????? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????. "???? ???????? ????? ???? ??? ???????? ?? ????????? ????? ???????? ???????? ?? ??????? ????? ????????? ?? ?????? ?? ??????? ????? ?????? ????????? ?? ?? ????? ???????? ?? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ??????? ????????? ?? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?????? ?????? ???????? ??????? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ????????? ??? ??????? ????????? ?? ?????? ???????. ??????? ?? ?????? ???? ??? ????? ??? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ?????? ???? ???????? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ??? ??? ????? ????????? ????????? ?????? ??????? ????? ?????????? ??? ?? ????? ???????? ??? ???????? ?????????? ????????? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ??????".
??? ??????? ???????? ????????: ???? ?????? ?? ??? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ????????? ??? ?????? ??????. "?? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???????? ?????? ????????? ????????? ???????? ????????? ????? ????? ????? ??????? ???????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???? ?????? ??? ????????? ??? ???? ???? ???". ??? ?????? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???????? ????? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ?? ?????? ??????? ???? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?? ???????? ??? ???????? ????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ????? ?? ???? ???? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????. ???? ??"???? ???? ?? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ???????? ??? ????????? ???? ???? ??????? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ?????? ?????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ????? ??? ????? ?? ????? ??? ???? ???????? ???????? ?????????? ?????. ????? ????? ???? ???????? ??? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ???????? ??????? ???. ?????? ???? ???????????? ???????? ?? ?????? ???????? ????? ?????? ????????? ???????".
??? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??????! ?????? ??????? -??? ???? ?????- ?? ???? ??????? ???????? ???????? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ???????? ????????. ????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ???????? ??????? ???? ??? ???? ?? ???? ??? ???????. ??? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ?? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ?? ?????? ???????. ??? ???? ???? ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????? ????? ???? ????? ????? ??????? ??????? ????????? ??? ?????. ???? ????? ??????? ???????? ?????? ??? ???? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ????? ??? ???? ??????? ???????? ???? ????? ???????? ???? ??? ???? ???????? ??????.
?????? ???? ??????? ??? ???? ??????? ???? ??????: "???? ???? ???? ???????? ????? ?????? ????? ??????? ????? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????. ????? ??????? ??? ???? ????? ?? ???????? ??????? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ??? ???????? ???????? ???? ????? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????????. ???? ???? ???? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????? ????????? ???????? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ??? ????? ??????? ?? ????? ???????? ??? ?????? ?????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ??? ????? ?????? ????? ???? ??????? ??? ?????? ?? ??????? ???? ??????? ????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??????. ?? ?????? ????? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ??????? ??? ????? ???? ??????? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ????????? ???? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ????? ????? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? ????? ???? ???? ???????? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????. ???? ??? ??????? ????? ????? ???????? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ????? ???? ?? ??????? ?? ????? ???? ??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ??? ?? ?????? ?? ????? ??????? - ??????? ??????? ??? ??????? ?? ?????? ??????".
July 9, 2021
This is a book first and foremost about language. The author uses the story of a "sent down" educated young man during the Cultural Revolution in China as the canvas upon which he paints his philosophical disquisition upon the mysterious power of language. What is it about a breath of air passing through our vocal chords that can cause someone to kill? This bizarre menagerie of poor villagers steeped in superstition has it's own language that uses common words to mean new things, things utterly alien to this educated youth suddenly thrust into their lives. This dictionary, inspects the meaning of the villager's words one by one with elaborate stories of the mayhem misunderstanding can create. Broad general philosophical truths about language across all human cultures are posited by the author. I found this heavy lifting with a cast of generally unlikable characters. However the philosophy of language was very thought provoking making it all well worth the effort.
April 28, 2024
(????? ???????) ????? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ?????? ???????? ??? ??????? ?????? ??????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ???? ???????? ??? ???? ?????? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ????? ???????.
?????? (????? ???????) ????? ??? ?? ???????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ???????. ?? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????? ????????? ???????? ?????? ?? ??? ??????.
??????? ?? "??? ????"? ??? ??????? ???? ??? ????? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ??? ??????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????. ????? ???? ??????? ???????? ?????????? ?????????? ??? ????? ??? ?? ??????? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??? ???? ???????.
?????? ????? ??????? ???? ?? ??????? ?????!
?????? (????? ???????) ????? ??? ?? ???????? ??????? ??????? ??????? ???????. ?? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ??????? ???????? ???????? ????????? ???????? ?????? ?? ??? ??????.
??????? ?? "??? ????"? ??? ??????? ???? ??? ????? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ??? ??????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????. ????? ???? ??????? ???????? ?????????? ?????????? ??? ????? ??? ?? ??????? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??? ???? ???????.
?????? ????? ??????? ???? ?? ??????? ?????!
March 25, 2022
虽然马桥是个捏造出来的地方，不过透过对许多当地特有或共有词汇的解析，刻划出了一段段小人物的喜怒哀乐。在歷史文本与捏造情节的交织中，描绘了小语言微弱但执拗的力量。当一个人在一个地方待久了，学习了当地人的语言，某种程度上来说，也就像个人类学者，做的是一个文化的翻译者。翻译不仅仅是语言的，更是文化的。至於这本书有没有抄袭《哈扎尔词典》一书，只好等之后我有机会读过后者再来评论吧。
摘录几句：
「世故就是运用废话的能力，或者说，是世界上大量道德废话和政治废话培育出来的一种人体机能。」辫.296
「一人吃饱，全家不饿。一人做事，全家出汗。」辫.289
「与文言文不同的是，白话从来不被视為高贵的语言，从来没有引导激情和指示精神终极的能力。」辫.435-436
「所有的语言也不过是语言，不过是一些描述事实的符号，就像鐘錶只是描述时间的符号。......所有的语言也是严格意义下的『白话』，作用也不应该被过於夸大。」辫.437
「从严格的意义上来说，所谓『共同的语言』永远是人类一个遥远的目标。如果我们不希望交流成為一种互相抵消和互相磨灭，我们就必须对交流保持警觉和抗拒，在妥协中守护自己某种顽强的表达──这正是一种良性交流的前提。这就意味着，人们在说话的时候，如果可能的话，每个人都需要一本自己特有的词典。」〈后记〉，辫.445-446
「红花」意指童身。
「梔子花，茉莉花」意指含糊不清、模稜两可。
摘录几句：
「世故就是运用废话的能力，或者说，是世界上大量道德废话和政治废话培育出来的一种人体机能。」辫.296
「一人吃饱，全家不饿。一人做事，全家出汗。」辫.289
「与文言文不同的是，白话从来不被视為高贵的语言，从来没有引导激情和指示精神终极的能力。」辫.435-436
「所有的语言也不过是语言，不过是一些描述事实的符号，就像鐘錶只是描述时间的符号。......所有的语言也是严格意义下的『白话』，作用也不应该被过於夸大。」辫.437
「从严格的意义上来说，所谓『共同的语言』永远是人类一个遥远的目标。如果我们不希望交流成為一种互相抵消和互相磨灭，我们就必须对交流保持警觉和抗拒，在妥协中守护自己某种顽强的表达──这正是一种良性交流的前提。这就意味着，人们在说话的时候，如果可能的话，每个人都需要一本自己特有的词典。」〈后记〉，辫.445-446
「红花」意指童身。
「梔子花，茉莉花」意指含糊不清、模稜两可。
October 2, 2017
This book is an involving, vivid, occasionally funny portrait of a rural village told in the form of a dictionary. Each entry has the definition of a word from the local Maqiao dialect, and with it a new chapter of the story is told.
Aside from an entertaining story, the book is two things; an example of how Chinese village life is timeless no matter what political maelstrom is raging outside, and secondly a lamentation for the rich, earthy local languages lost to the bland functionalism of standard modern Chinese.
‘Maqiao: A little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, with a few dozen households in the upper and lower village combined, a strip of land, set against a stretch of mountain. Maqiao has a great many stones and a great deal of soil, stones and earth which have endured through thousands of years. However hard you look, you won’t see it changing. Every particle is a testament to eternity…’
The story is the fictional account of an educated youth sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Local figures include the Communist party secretary, and there are occasional direct references to the Cultural Revolution (the narrator goes to paint Maoist slogans), however despite being the most intense political period of Communist China, this all feels like a thin veneer. Local life carries on as it has a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Though there are variations on the tune, different families and different faces, and the titles of the leaders might change (Ming military governor, warlord, Communist branch secretary), for the local people life goes on. The personal, physical and spiritual struggles are the same as they ever were: People argue, go to work, get married, have affairs, have children, die. Superstitions thrive.
On language, the book in embodying a rich local dialect is itself a rallying cry for local culture. That is that the ties Maqiao people have with their land, their ghosts, and each other is uniquely manifest in their language. The book is a passionate denunciation of the linguistic standardisation through imposing a bland lingua franca: ‘Strictly speaking, what we might term a “common language” will forever remain a distant human objective. Providing we don’t intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression.’
For historical reasons, up until a couple decades ago people did not move about much in China. Most people would be born, live and die in the same village, and this stability means that the country had a rich stew of dialects. So many and so rich that middle aged people where I live now can tell you where someone is from to within a few streets just by hearing them speak.
Mandarin Chinese, in the sense of a national, official lingua franca, has been around since at least the Ming dynasty (700 + years). But the intention of making it everyone’s first language has only come into effect in the last 70 odd years since the end of the civil war. In the 1950s it was made the language of instruction in all schools in both mainland China and Taiwan. In my experience, anyone who is middle-aged today has dialect as their first language. But the under-twenties, exposed to so much online media and the much more intense rigours of the modern education system, are at best bilingual.
There is another reason for the loss of local languages: Migration. Nowadays China is a much more mobile country, intense redevelopment of towns and cities and urban migration means that families will grow up in a foreign language environment, so that Mandarin is the language they use with everyone – classmates, workmates, neighbours. So modern capitalism is just compounding the original plan of creating a true standard national language.
I love Han Shaogong’s passion about local dialects, which is a cold way to label organic language that grows with living, human communities. It is a rallying cry for all that makes us human, and I love that he portrays Maqiao people in all their spite, pettiness and ridiculousness, all that make us human as much as our virtues. Unfortunately, I think he’s wrong, our language is not ‘indomitable’ I think it’s already part of the walking dead.
But why care? Mandarin is part and parcel of everyone getting a decent place to live and enough to eat, it seems like a small price to pay. But now that people are comfortably well off, they do start to talk about what’s been lost. Dialect is inseparable from local culture, when he talks about language he’s talking about both, that dialect words are often the only terms available for certain foods or customs or descriptions. And the loss of these dialects is much like seeing multinational shopping malls stamping local business into the dust. I recently travelled through four different cities in four provinces, all not only had the same shopping malls with the same shops (Starbucks and McDonalds of course, but also Clarkes Shoes and Debenhams), they even had multiple identical shopping malls right next to each other. And after a week of feeling the elation of seeing shiny things I ended up drained, like a human Matrix battery, spitting out my pathetic little pay check to feed the corporate machine. And so even though Han Shaogong wrote this in the 1990s, before the rise of the shopping mall, he is writing about the symptom of the same disease.
From the Afterword: ‘In 1988, I moved to the south of South China, to Hainan Island on China’s southernmost tip. I couldn’t speak Hainan dialect and, furthermore, I found their dialect very hard to learn. One day, going to the market with a friend to buy food, I spotted a fish I didn’t know the name of, and so asked the salesman, a local. He said it was fish. I said I know it’s fish, could you please tell me what fish? “Sea fish” he said, staring at me. I smiled and I said I know it’s sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: “Big fish!”…
‘Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later I discovered they have the largest fishing-related vocabulary of just about any people anywhere. Real fishing people have set vocabulary, have detailed, precise expressions and descriptions for all the several hundred types of fish, for every fishy part, every fishy condition, enough to compile a big, thick dictionary. But most of these cannot be incorporated into standard Mandarin… When I speak standard Mandarin with the local people, when I force them to make use of a language they’re not very familiar with, they can only fudge their way through with “sea fish” or “big fish”.
‘I almost laughed at them. I almost thought they were pitifully linguistically impoverished. I was wrong, of course… [Their] babbling, gabbling gibbering crying jabbering was concealed behind a linguistic screen that I couldn’t penetrate, was hidden deep in a dark night that standard Mandarin had no hope of illuminating. They had embraced this dark night.
‘This made me think of my hometown. For many years I’ve studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it’s necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbours, colleagues, shop assistants, policeman, and officials, to communicate through television and newspapers, to enter into modernity. It’s just that my experience in the market buying fish gave me a sudden jolt: I’d been standardized. This implied that the hometown of my memories had also been standardized, that every day it was being filtered through an alien form of language – through this filtering it was being simplified into the crude sketchiness of “big fish” and “sea fish,” withering away bit by bit in the desert of translation.’
There are many accounts and stories of the Cultural Revolution that describe the bleak horror and endless catalogue of atrocities, this is not one of those. In fact, I have read enough of that now that I tend to avoid those books. The point in setting it during this time is to say that even in the most extreme circumstances, people’s ties to place, to each other, and the crystallisation of this in language cannot be erased. It is somewhat depressing that rampant capitalism is destroying what communism could not, but at least the comforts capitalism brings are making people reflect on the loss.
On the translation: Lovell does a lovely job, and it can’t have been easy. She walks the line of making the village feel familiar and real, without losing the ‘Chineseness’ of it all. A pleasure to read.
Aside from an entertaining story, the book is two things; an example of how Chinese village life is timeless no matter what political maelstrom is raging outside, and secondly a lamentation for the rich, earthy local languages lost to the bland functionalism of standard modern Chinese.
‘Maqiao: A little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, with a few dozen households in the upper and lower village combined, a strip of land, set against a stretch of mountain. Maqiao has a great many stones and a great deal of soil, stones and earth which have endured through thousands of years. However hard you look, you won’t see it changing. Every particle is a testament to eternity…’
The story is the fictional account of an educated youth sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Local figures include the Communist party secretary, and there are occasional direct references to the Cultural Revolution (the narrator goes to paint Maoist slogans), however despite being the most intense political period of Communist China, this all feels like a thin veneer. Local life carries on as it has a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Though there are variations on the tune, different families and different faces, and the titles of the leaders might change (Ming military governor, warlord, Communist branch secretary), for the local people life goes on. The personal, physical and spiritual struggles are the same as they ever were: People argue, go to work, get married, have affairs, have children, die. Superstitions thrive.
On language, the book in embodying a rich local dialect is itself a rallying cry for local culture. That is that the ties Maqiao people have with their land, their ghosts, and each other is uniquely manifest in their language. The book is a passionate denunciation of the linguistic standardisation through imposing a bland lingua franca: ‘Strictly speaking, what we might term a “common language” will forever remain a distant human objective. Providing we don’t intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression.’
For historical reasons, up until a couple decades ago people did not move about much in China. Most people would be born, live and die in the same village, and this stability means that the country had a rich stew of dialects. So many and so rich that middle aged people where I live now can tell you where someone is from to within a few streets just by hearing them speak.
Mandarin Chinese, in the sense of a national, official lingua franca, has been around since at least the Ming dynasty (700 + years). But the intention of making it everyone’s first language has only come into effect in the last 70 odd years since the end of the civil war. In the 1950s it was made the language of instruction in all schools in both mainland China and Taiwan. In my experience, anyone who is middle-aged today has dialect as their first language. But the under-twenties, exposed to so much online media and the much more intense rigours of the modern education system, are at best bilingual.
There is another reason for the loss of local languages: Migration. Nowadays China is a much more mobile country, intense redevelopment of towns and cities and urban migration means that families will grow up in a foreign language environment, so that Mandarin is the language they use with everyone – classmates, workmates, neighbours. So modern capitalism is just compounding the original plan of creating a true standard national language.
I love Han Shaogong’s passion about local dialects, which is a cold way to label organic language that grows with living, human communities. It is a rallying cry for all that makes us human, and I love that he portrays Maqiao people in all their spite, pettiness and ridiculousness, all that make us human as much as our virtues. Unfortunately, I think he’s wrong, our language is not ‘indomitable’ I think it’s already part of the walking dead.
But why care? Mandarin is part and parcel of everyone getting a decent place to live and enough to eat, it seems like a small price to pay. But now that people are comfortably well off, they do start to talk about what’s been lost. Dialect is inseparable from local culture, when he talks about language he’s talking about both, that dialect words are often the only terms available for certain foods or customs or descriptions. And the loss of these dialects is much like seeing multinational shopping malls stamping local business into the dust. I recently travelled through four different cities in four provinces, all not only had the same shopping malls with the same shops (Starbucks and McDonalds of course, but also Clarkes Shoes and Debenhams), they even had multiple identical shopping malls right next to each other. And after a week of feeling the elation of seeing shiny things I ended up drained, like a human Matrix battery, spitting out my pathetic little pay check to feed the corporate machine. And so even though Han Shaogong wrote this in the 1990s, before the rise of the shopping mall, he is writing about the symptom of the same disease.
From the Afterword: ‘In 1988, I moved to the south of South China, to Hainan Island on China’s southernmost tip. I couldn’t speak Hainan dialect and, furthermore, I found their dialect very hard to learn. One day, going to the market with a friend to buy food, I spotted a fish I didn’t know the name of, and so asked the salesman, a local. He said it was fish. I said I know it’s fish, could you please tell me what fish? “Sea fish” he said, staring at me. I smiled and I said I know it’s sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: “Big fish!”…
‘Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later I discovered they have the largest fishing-related vocabulary of just about any people anywhere. Real fishing people have set vocabulary, have detailed, precise expressions and descriptions for all the several hundred types of fish, for every fishy part, every fishy condition, enough to compile a big, thick dictionary. But most of these cannot be incorporated into standard Mandarin… When I speak standard Mandarin with the local people, when I force them to make use of a language they’re not very familiar with, they can only fudge their way through with “sea fish” or “big fish”.
‘I almost laughed at them. I almost thought they were pitifully linguistically impoverished. I was wrong, of course… [Their] babbling, gabbling gibbering crying jabbering was concealed behind a linguistic screen that I couldn’t penetrate, was hidden deep in a dark night that standard Mandarin had no hope of illuminating. They had embraced this dark night.
‘This made me think of my hometown. For many years I’ve studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it’s necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbours, colleagues, shop assistants, policeman, and officials, to communicate through television and newspapers, to enter into modernity. It’s just that my experience in the market buying fish gave me a sudden jolt: I’d been standardized. This implied that the hometown of my memories had also been standardized, that every day it was being filtered through an alien form of language – through this filtering it was being simplified into the crude sketchiness of “big fish” and “sea fish,” withering away bit by bit in the desert of translation.’
There are many accounts and stories of the Cultural Revolution that describe the bleak horror and endless catalogue of atrocities, this is not one of those. In fact, I have read enough of that now that I tend to avoid those books. The point in setting it during this time is to say that even in the most extreme circumstances, people’s ties to place, to each other, and the crystallisation of this in language cannot be erased. It is somewhat depressing that rampant capitalism is destroying what communism could not, but at least the comforts capitalism brings are making people reflect on the loss.
On the translation: Lovell does a lovely job, and it can’t have been easy. She walks the line of making the village feel familiar and real, without losing the ‘Chineseness’ of it all. A pleasure to read.
August 18, 2010
During the Cultural Revolution, Han Shaogong was one of seven Educated Youth sent to the hamlet of Maqiao in northern Hunan, which consisted of "forty-odd households, about ten head of cattle, and pigs, dogs, chickens, and ducks, with two long, narrow paddy fields hugging its perimeters". His observations of people and customs and language during the six years he spent there form the basis for his novel A Dictionary of Maqiao.
This takes the ostensible form of a dictionary or encyclopedia, with over a hundred "entries" named after Maqiao terms or idioms; the prologue claims these were originally in alphabetical order, but in fact they follow each other in a logical sequence and are much closer to short stories than reference material.
The vignettes and stories in A Dictionary of Maqiao jump around chronologically: most are set during the narrator's time in Maqiao, but there are also episodes from a return visit many years later and from meetings with Maqiao residents elsewhere, as well as the explorations of earlier history. The narratorial perspective also changes: there are pieces in the third person, but in others the narrator intrudes, through first-person presence or commentary, and in some he plays a central role.
Despite its pointillist rendering and lack of a central plot, The Dictionary of Maqiao is an effective novel. It is centred by the community of Maqiao, following key individuals within it, the relationships between them, and the working out of their stories, over a span of decades. Twenty or more figures feature prominently: Party Branch secretary Benyi; his wife Tiexiang, daughter of beggar king "Nine Pockets"; the stonemason Zhihuang and his ox "Three-Hairs"; landlord's son and "traitor to the Chinese" Yanzao, and his "poison woman" grandmother and younger brother Yanwu; the ascetic dropout "Daoist Immortals"; and many more.
Shaogong devotes several entries to Maqiao's place in the historical record, going back into deep history and myth. More recent times are remembered by the villagers — the warlord period, the bandit leader Ma Wenjie, and the events in 1948 when the communists took control — but these are subject to different and changing interpretations. A Dictionary of Maqiao doesn't focus on politics, however. The effects of the Cultural Revolution and the sending of urban elites into the countryside are depicted rather than described, and comments on bureaucracy, Western stereotypes of Chinese politics, and so forth are mostly incidental.
Sociolinguistics provides the strongest recurrent theme. Shaogong explores the way language, and in particular lexical choice, marks social status, moulds the way people think, and reflects the forms of social control. (He never succumbs, however, to the lure of a naive linguistic determinism.) And he highlights the ways in which Maqiao dialect diverges from standard Mandarin — a translator's note mentions that five entries were omitted because they were dependent on untranslatable puns. A Dictionary of Maqiao is not an ethnography, with stories that have been selected and quite likely exaggerated for effect. But it is a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be — or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China.
A Dictionary of Maqiao is skillfully arranged to provide motive force, with far more momentum than a collection of short stories. And despite the sometimes dark subject material, its overall tone is light, with some detachment provided by the framing. The result is a gripping read.
This takes the ostensible form of a dictionary or encyclopedia, with over a hundred "entries" named after Maqiao terms or idioms; the prologue claims these were originally in alphabetical order, but in fact they follow each other in a logical sequence and are much closer to short stories than reference material.
The vignettes and stories in A Dictionary of Maqiao jump around chronologically: most are set during the narrator's time in Maqiao, but there are also episodes from a return visit many years later and from meetings with Maqiao residents elsewhere, as well as the explorations of earlier history. The narratorial perspective also changes: there are pieces in the third person, but in others the narrator intrudes, through first-person presence or commentary, and in some he plays a central role.
Despite its pointillist rendering and lack of a central plot, The Dictionary of Maqiao is an effective novel. It is centred by the community of Maqiao, following key individuals within it, the relationships between them, and the working out of their stories, over a span of decades. Twenty or more figures feature prominently: Party Branch secretary Benyi; his wife Tiexiang, daughter of beggar king "Nine Pockets"; the stonemason Zhihuang and his ox "Three-Hairs"; landlord's son and "traitor to the Chinese" Yanzao, and his "poison woman" grandmother and younger brother Yanwu; the ascetic dropout "Daoist Immortals"; and many more.
Shaogong devotes several entries to Maqiao's place in the historical record, going back into deep history and myth. More recent times are remembered by the villagers — the warlord period, the bandit leader Ma Wenjie, and the events in 1948 when the communists took control — but these are subject to different and changing interpretations. A Dictionary of Maqiao doesn't focus on politics, however. The effects of the Cultural Revolution and the sending of urban elites into the countryside are depicted rather than described, and comments on bureaucracy, Western stereotypes of Chinese politics, and so forth are mostly incidental.
Sociolinguistics provides the strongest recurrent theme. Shaogong explores the way language, and in particular lexical choice, marks social status, moulds the way people think, and reflects the forms of social control. (He never succumbs, however, to the lure of a naive linguistic determinism.) And he highlights the ways in which Maqiao dialect diverges from standard Mandarin — a translator's note mentions that five entries were omitted because they were dependent on untranslatable puns. A Dictionary of Maqiao is not an ethnography, with stories that have been selected and quite likely exaggerated for effect. But it is a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be — or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China.
A Dictionary of Maqiao is skillfully arranged to provide motive force, with far more momentum than a collection of short stories. And despite the sometimes dark subject material, its overall tone is light, with some detachment provided by the framing. The result is a gripping read.
April 18, 2010
An interesting book, this. When I discovered it, the immediate comparison that came to mind was with the by Milorad Pavi?. Ultimately, though, outside of the main structural conceit (eschewing a conventional linear plot in favor of short, interconnecting "dictionary" entries), the connections are limited. In Han's fictionalized dictionary (it's unclear to me where the line is between the fiction and the reality, to be honest...not that I think it's important to know) of the Maqiao dialect (one of hundreds of dialects in China, many of which are incomprensible to one another), he cheerfully employs vignettes, anecdotes, personal musings, and essays to describe both a particular moment in Chinese history (30 years is basically a moment in a culture with a 5000 year history) and the nature of language. Unlike Pavi?'s book, the dictionary structure is just a framework. It would behoove a reader to read this straight through as if it were a linear novel, as later entries rely on the reader having read the earlier ones (as opposed to the Pavi? book, which actively encourages the reader to flip through and read at random).
As historical fiction, the book does a fine job of sweeping the reader headlong into a tiny farming village in China. The small details about the culture and the landscape, along with the political climate at the time, allow readers to peek through a porthole into what is likely an unfamiliar setting. The (mostly) well outlined (and deeply Chinese) characters add a lot of heart to the narrative.
Equally important, though, are Han's musings on the nature of language. He spends a lot of time reflecting on the way language is a tool for power (for example, certain villagers have "speech rights" that automatically grant their words more importance than others'), but that power is limited. Those in control can't really control language, particularly when you include time as a factor. The moment words become static in people's minds, the moment they try to pin them down in time, is the moment that they lose their power. In the end, they are just words--you can't assume that the signifier is the signified. You can't turn words into sacred, untouchable relics or they die.
Beyond these thoughts on language and power, Han takes some time to explore the close connections between apparent opposites. As he demonstrates, opposite ideas often share more connections that one suspects at first glance (see, for example, his entries on "awakened" and "dream woman").
Overall, an interesting book. I suspect it was even better in Chinese (and presumably in the cultural context of China), but Julia Lovell does a terrific job of translating what the author himself considered to be nearly untranslatable. I certainly recommend it for people interested in language or in China (or, as in my case, in both).
As historical fiction, the book does a fine job of sweeping the reader headlong into a tiny farming village in China. The small details about the culture and the landscape, along with the political climate at the time, allow readers to peek through a porthole into what is likely an unfamiliar setting. The (mostly) well outlined (and deeply Chinese) characters add a lot of heart to the narrative.
Equally important, though, are Han's musings on the nature of language. He spends a lot of time reflecting on the way language is a tool for power (for example, certain villagers have "speech rights" that automatically grant their words more importance than others'), but that power is limited. Those in control can't really control language, particularly when you include time as a factor. The moment words become static in people's minds, the moment they try to pin them down in time, is the moment that they lose their power. In the end, they are just words--you can't assume that the signifier is the signified. You can't turn words into sacred, untouchable relics or they die.
Beyond these thoughts on language and power, Han takes some time to explore the close connections between apparent opposites. As he demonstrates, opposite ideas often share more connections that one suspects at first glance (see, for example, his entries on "awakened" and "dream woman").
Overall, an interesting book. I suspect it was even better in Chinese (and presumably in the cultural context of China), but Julia Lovell does a terrific job of translating what the author himself considered to be nearly untranslatable. I certainly recommend it for people interested in language or in China (or, as in my case, in both).
April 28, 2014
This is one of the many books I chose based on the title; I was not disapponted. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" is a novel about a fictional village in rural China and the ways in which the people used language to resist, transgress, and mock the current political climate. The backdrop is the Down to the Countryside Movement, which was a component of the Cultural Revolution in China. Young, urban, college-educated people were sent en masse to rural villages to learn the real and valuable work of the peasant class. The narrator of the book is one of those urban youth sent to Maqiao. What he has produced is a glimpse of rural China, the outrageous characters there, and their clever use of language. I really enjoyed this book.
February 13, 2016
Ik dacht tijdens het lezen af en toe dat ik deze toch wat hoger zou gaan raten, maar uiteindelijk toch niet. Het idee is leuk, een roman over het leven in een Chinees dorpje in de vorm van een woordenboek. Maar de uitwerking kan me niet echt bekoren. Het verzandt te vaak in encyclopedie-achtige beschrijvingen die niet boeien, waarmee het geheel erg vermoeiend wordt om te lezen. er blijft een enorme afstand tussen de personen die in het boek voorkomen, waardoor je ook nooit echt de interesse voelt om verder te gaan. En eerlijk gezegd heb ik ook gewoon heel wat sterkere en mooiere romans gelezen over deze (al enigszins uitgemolken) periode uit de Chinese geschiedenis, waarbij de meerwaarde van dit boek voor mij nul was.
March 22, 2016
Mua quy?n này t? h?i 2014 mà ?? m?i m?i ??c, hình nh? do h?ng thú nh?t th?i v?i b? c?c. B?o là ti?u thuy?t mà chia ?? m?c nh? t? ?i?n th?t l?i còn có c? ch? Hán ngay bên c?nh (?áng ti?c là ch? ph?n th? xem ch?ng hi?u gì l?i còn kh?ng có phiên ?m, kh?ng bi?t b?n g?c có phiên ?m kh?ng nh?? ). Sách ??c ?? v? gi?c ng? cu?i cùng l?i hay quá kh?ng d?t ???c. Ban ??u mình ??c m?t lèo nh?ng th?y h?i ép bèn chuy?n qua ??c m?t ngày m?t m?c, bò bò bò t?i gi? :)). Thích nh?n v?t Diêm T?o, c?ng thích Thi?t H??ng. Lúc ??c ?o?n Thi?t H??ng c? ngh? t?i Mai Di?m Ph??ng dù ch? có nét quái nào gi?ng =)).
April 12, 2017
It was very beautifully written and the story got richer and better the more I read. It has deepened my understanding of chinese society and even though the stories are fictional I think they can represent lives that have and are lived. Having that said, the plot didn't really pull me in and even though it was beautiful I felt my mind wander after reading for a while so it took long to finish.
January 23, 2018
What an intriguing and unusual book! I recommend this to anyone interested in language and/or Chinese history.
July 17, 2022
recommended by, and borrowed from Claris. Mostly read on commute, finished over a rainy dinner
November 12, 2019
Anyone with a scientific bent will appreciate a well designed or clever experiment, a methodology that gets to the roots of something new and groundbreaking. For this reason I have a great admiration for A Dictionary of Maqiao, a work of Chinese experimental fiction, that is exactly the sort of shrewd exploration of society that yields piercing insight into something we all take for granted: language.
First, our framework is Chinese, the world's longest continually used language, with the additional twist that in the (fictional) town of Maqiao, a dialect of Mandarin heavy in local slang is used, giving a lot of flexibility to the author, and he cleverly organizes his dictionary in a way that outlines the spatial and temporal evolution of this ancient tongue.
The time period is the Cultural Revolution, which the author Han Shaogong lived through as an intellectual exiled to the rural areas, and is exemplary for how language can be detached from its roots and twisted around for sinister if well meaning purposes. Doublethink, propaganda, censorship, indoctrination, and public denunciations are among the ways that language is exploited to control the people, "controlling the narrative" so to speak.
By choosing the setting to be a small village in the Chinese countryside, teeming with local traditions and folklore, superstitions and curses, we have the perspective of the people who the revolution was supposed to help the most and for whom the abstract language of propaganda and societal reform becomes something farcical, revolutionary vocabulary in the hands of peasants who understand the world through ghosts and legends and have a dialect which reflects that.
The book itself is an exploration of all the themes listed above, structured as a dictionary where each word or slang term helps us understand the deep interplay between society and language, how we only understand things when we have words to describe them, how the identity of a town or village is intertwined with the vocabulary it develops, and so on. The dictionary itself is in an order that relies on previous entries to understand, with the book itself becoming, in Joycian fashion, an exercise in the dialect itself.
Ultimately, this book is best appreciated by those with some understanding of Chinese modern history and culture, but the lessons it provides are universal and precious and well worth a read.
First, our framework is Chinese, the world's longest continually used language, with the additional twist that in the (fictional) town of Maqiao, a dialect of Mandarin heavy in local slang is used, giving a lot of flexibility to the author, and he cleverly organizes his dictionary in a way that outlines the spatial and temporal evolution of this ancient tongue.
The time period is the Cultural Revolution, which the author Han Shaogong lived through as an intellectual exiled to the rural areas, and is exemplary for how language can be detached from its roots and twisted around for sinister if well meaning purposes. Doublethink, propaganda, censorship, indoctrination, and public denunciations are among the ways that language is exploited to control the people, "controlling the narrative" so to speak.
By choosing the setting to be a small village in the Chinese countryside, teeming with local traditions and folklore, superstitions and curses, we have the perspective of the people who the revolution was supposed to help the most and for whom the abstract language of propaganda and societal reform becomes something farcical, revolutionary vocabulary in the hands of peasants who understand the world through ghosts and legends and have a dialect which reflects that.
The book itself is an exploration of all the themes listed above, structured as a dictionary where each word or slang term helps us understand the deep interplay between society and language, how we only understand things when we have words to describe them, how the identity of a town or village is intertwined with the vocabulary it develops, and so on. The dictionary itself is in an order that relies on previous entries to understand, with the book itself becoming, in Joycian fashion, an exercise in the dialect itself.
Ultimately, this book is best appreciated by those with some understanding of Chinese modern history and culture, but the lessons it provides are universal and precious and well worth a read.
January 7, 2025
It’s always exciting to start a new year with a novel which is not only originally written and has a unique style, but is also full of fun ideas and observations. A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong is exactly that kind of book. It chronicles six years the protagonist spent in a village as a part of his reeducation program after the Cultural Revolution in China. Instead of writing a traditional novel Shaogong decided to focus on words, local dialect and nuanced variance of meanings, so his work takes the form of a dictionary. Only through such a prism different characters, their interactions and lives truly come alive and together form an impressive ornament of daily life, lore and change in a vast and poor countryside. It would be very easy to start idealizing this kind of life as happened with the descriptions of village’s life in literature before, but the author’s connection with Maqiao is far deeper and is devoid of any one-sided sentimentality. Viewing words as a power which can create and bring down civilizations, connect and kill people, force villagers to act bravely or foolishly Shaogong makes readers to experience both the present, past and the future of the village in the same time with words gaining, losing and regaining their definitions and serving as a metaphorical base for human life events and tragedies. The tone of the book simulates the linguistic research with occasional references and quotes yet it only highlights the intensity of human drama. It’s never just an illustration of a certain word author tries to explain, but the example of the power of language which takes us deep almost at mythological level of core human existence where a mix of old and new traditions dictate the rules of human interactions. A worthy and inspiring read.
March 16, 2025
「為一个村庄编写词典，是一个尝试。...使我们明白了，特定的人生总会有特定的语言表现。」
韩少功於1996年出版了长篇小说《马桥词典》，记录他在1969年下乡湖南省马桥村当知青的生活。期间，他透过田野调查，将当地的日常用语、习俗及传说整理成一本特殊的词典。词汇是一种语言共识，描绘出特定地域文化与生活经验累积的集体记忆，也呈现因社会认知差异而产生的多重詮释。
这种写作方式十分有趣，我猜测韩少功或许受到他1986年翻译米兰·昆德拉《生命中不可承受之轻》的啟发。昆德拉在书中描写厂补产颈苍补与贵谤补苍锄之间「误解的词」，揭示了相同词语因文化差异，而形成截然不同的生命意义。而《马桥词典》进一步解释语言背后的脉络，呈现词汇在生活中的具体意义，也藉此勾勒词语背后真实的人生故事，并且刻划出那个社会主义政治运动下的时代轮廓与歷史伤痕。
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Han Shaogong published the novel "A Dictionary of Maqiao" in 1996, recounting his experiences as a sent-down youth in Maqiao Village, Hunan Province,China starting in 1969. During this time, he documented local language, customs, and legends, compiling them into a dictionary.
Words serve as a common understanding shaped by specific regional cultures, with multiple interpretations arising from diverse life experiences.?This writing style is fascinating, and I suspect Han might have been inspired by his 1986 translation of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." In Kundera's novel, the section about "words misunderstood" between Sabina and Franz reveals how cultural differences can lead to completely different interpretations of the same word. While "A Dictionary of Maqiao" further explores this idea through detailed explanations of the language's background, illustrating the real-life stories behind each word. This approach vividly portrays the social and historical context, reflecting the era and its scars under the socialist political movements.
韩少功於1996年出版了长篇小说《马桥词典》，记录他在1969年下乡湖南省马桥村当知青的生活。期间，他透过田野调查，将当地的日常用语、习俗及传说整理成一本特殊的词典。词汇是一种语言共识，描绘出特定地域文化与生活经验累积的集体记忆，也呈现因社会认知差异而产生的多重詮释。
这种写作方式十分有趣，我猜测韩少功或许受到他1986年翻译米兰·昆德拉《生命中不可承受之轻》的啟发。昆德拉在书中描写厂补产颈苍补与贵谤补苍锄之间「误解的词」，揭示了相同词语因文化差异，而形成截然不同的生命意义。而《马桥词典》进一步解释语言背后的脉络，呈现词汇在生活中的具体意义，也藉此勾勒词语背后真实的人生故事，并且刻划出那个社会主义政治运动下的时代轮廓与歷史伤痕。
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Han Shaogong published the novel "A Dictionary of Maqiao" in 1996, recounting his experiences as a sent-down youth in Maqiao Village, Hunan Province,China starting in 1969. During this time, he documented local language, customs, and legends, compiling them into a dictionary.
Words serve as a common understanding shaped by specific regional cultures, with multiple interpretations arising from diverse life experiences.?This writing style is fascinating, and I suspect Han might have been inspired by his 1986 translation of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." In Kundera's novel, the section about "words misunderstood" between Sabina and Franz reveals how cultural differences can lead to completely different interpretations of the same word. While "A Dictionary of Maqiao" further explores this idea through detailed explanations of the language's background, illustrating the real-life stories behind each word. This approach vividly portrays the social and historical context, reflecting the era and its scars under the socialist political movements.
June 1, 2017
I have read and enjoyed several traditional Chinese novels -- The Water Margin, The Scholars and The Dream of the Red Chamber, all of which are written in episodic fashion -- loosely connected stories with some commonality of plot, character and theme, but without a coherent story arc in the sense that is typical of Western novels. A Dictionary of Maqiao uses the form of a dictionary as a way to organize a novel with a traditional Chinese structure around very modern themes of language, culture and discourse that are hard to imagine existing outside of a universe that includes Wittgenstein, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and the rest of the Post-Structuralist gang. The people of Maqiao create unique meanings for their words that are simultaneously informed by traditional Chinese rural society, Chinese communistic rhetoric, the universe of post-colonial modernity, and the unique personalities of specific interesting and eccentric characters who populate the town. It is both specific and general and provides the foundation for a mythology that defines the town as modern, backward, boring and fascinating all at once. Sometimes it bogged down a bit, and I didn't absolutely fall in love with any of the characters, but overall it is a stunning and unique piece of writing that deserves high praise.
April 10, 2025
「妇人们对铁香一直有些不以為然，只是碍着本义当书记的面子，不好怎麼发作。其中也有些人不大甘休，看见铁香来了，有心没心找一些话头来刺她。她们大谈自己来马桥夫家拜堂放锅时的排场和讲究，歷歷如数家珍。无非是大舅子抬嫁妆，二舅子吹喇叭，叁舅子放手銃，四舅子举红伞，诸如此类的夸张。杭州的丝绣有好多，东洋的褂子有好多，手腕上的鐲子如何大，耳朵上的环子又如何亮，她们说得不厌其烦。」
我的爱书就是会在一开始看的时候就成為我的爱书。
「在这裡，人们最要紧的是确认人的庸常性质，确认人只能在成规中度日。任何违犯成规的行為，从本质上说都不是人的行為，只可能来自冥冥中的莫测之物，来自人力之外的天机和天命。不是神经质（神的第一义），就是神明（神的第二义）。马桥人用一个「神」字统括这两种意义，大概认為两者的差别并不重要。一切神话都是从神经质式的想入非非开始。一切神坛前都有神经质式的胡言乱语手舞足蹈。也许，神经质就是神的世俗形态和低级品种。」
「他知道，再不把她背走，她就可能要宣布自己来了月经，可能还要控诉本义晚上在床上的邪恶，使自己的身体被所有的男人了解和关心，成為所有男人们共有的话题，共有的精神财产。她的例假简直是马桥集体性的隆重节日和伟大事业。她当然不会说得很直露。但她一会儿说自己腰痛，一会儿强调自己近日下不得冷水，一会儿拜託哪个男人去為她买当归，甚至在田间吆吆喝喝地喊本义回家去给她煮当归加鸡蛋。这一切当然足够强调她的性别，让人们重视她身体正在出现的事态，也足够引导男人们的想像和对她的笑嘻嘻的讨好。」
不可能一直一直遇到最爱吧？幸运的四月。
「他一生没有什麼所求，只有一条，就是要揭开自己的出生之谜，要孝敬他真正的父亲，哪怕只孝敬一天，孝敬一刻，他也心满意足。
他到县裡去过两次，没有找到希大桿子。他不灰心。他知道这不是一件容易的事情，可能是他毕其一生的使命，他对此有充分的準备。他不像神仙府其他的金刚，成天躺着睡觉，或者游山玩水。他一天到晚忙得很，忙着寻找和调查，也顺便忙一忙世界上的很多忙不完的事。他内懒外不懒，供销社、卫生院、粮库、林业站、学校一类，都是他常去的地方，好像天天在那裡上班。他幫郎中碾藥，幫屠夫吹豬尿泡，幫老師挑水，幫輝庫裡的伙房打豆腐。 只要???朋友的急難之事，他都願意兩肋插刀。」
「口口声声饶不了强姦犯，口口声声她的大腿和腰都被抓破了，非得把那小流氓剐皮抽筋不可—一个个身体部位都说得很具体。男人们在地坪裡交头接耳。再一次投入了对她身体的关心。如果说她很长一段时间没有引导过这种关心了，那麼叁耳朵是不是荣任了她又一次引导的工具？她是不是担心人们已经淡忘了她的大腿和腰身？」
我的爱书就是会在一开始看的时候就成為我的爱书。
「在这裡，人们最要紧的是确认人的庸常性质，确认人只能在成规中度日。任何违犯成规的行為，从本质上说都不是人的行為，只可能来自冥冥中的莫测之物，来自人力之外的天机和天命。不是神经质（神的第一义），就是神明（神的第二义）。马桥人用一个「神」字统括这两种意义，大概认為两者的差别并不重要。一切神话都是从神经质式的想入非非开始。一切神坛前都有神经质式的胡言乱语手舞足蹈。也许，神经质就是神的世俗形态和低级品种。」
「他知道，再不把她背走，她就可能要宣布自己来了月经，可能还要控诉本义晚上在床上的邪恶，使自己的身体被所有的男人了解和关心，成為所有男人们共有的话题，共有的精神财产。她的例假简直是马桥集体性的隆重节日和伟大事业。她当然不会说得很直露。但她一会儿说自己腰痛，一会儿强调自己近日下不得冷水，一会儿拜託哪个男人去為她买当归，甚至在田间吆吆喝喝地喊本义回家去给她煮当归加鸡蛋。这一切当然足够强调她的性别，让人们重视她身体正在出现的事态，也足够引导男人们的想像和对她的笑嘻嘻的讨好。」
不可能一直一直遇到最爱吧？幸运的四月。
「他一生没有什麼所求，只有一条，就是要揭开自己的出生之谜，要孝敬他真正的父亲，哪怕只孝敬一天，孝敬一刻，他也心满意足。
他到县裡去过两次，没有找到希大桿子。他不灰心。他知道这不是一件容易的事情，可能是他毕其一生的使命，他对此有充分的準备。他不像神仙府其他的金刚，成天躺着睡觉，或者游山玩水。他一天到晚忙得很，忙着寻找和调查，也顺便忙一忙世界上的很多忙不完的事。他内懒外不懒，供销社、卫生院、粮库、林业站、学校一类，都是他常去的地方，好像天天在那裡上班。他幫郎中碾藥，幫屠夫吹豬尿泡，幫老師挑水，幫輝庫裡的伙房打豆腐。 只要???朋友的急難之事，他都願意兩肋插刀。」
「口口声声饶不了强姦犯，口口声声她的大腿和腰都被抓破了，非得把那小流氓剐皮抽筋不可—一个个身体部位都说得很具体。男人们在地坪裡交头接耳。再一次投入了对她身体的关心。如果说她很长一段时间没有引导过这种关心了，那麼叁耳朵是不是荣任了她又一次引导的工具？她是不是担心人们已经淡忘了她的大腿和腰身？」
February 11, 2017
"Is history nothing but a war of words?"
"All language is just language, and nothing else; no more than a few symbols describing facts, just as a clock is no more than a symbol describing time."
The narrator's personal dictionary to a village called Maqiao reads like fables in each dictionary entry. Han Shaogong uses the slipperiness of language and dialect to both attempt to pin down truth and to suggest that reality is perhaps forever out of that sort of definition—good or evil, right or wrong, contemptuous or admirable.
I'm reading Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno at the same time, and the two read in a surprisingly similar way—the authors are both masters of the last-sentence grenade, slipping quietly in at the end of paragraphs to turn the sense of the preceding ideas upside down.
"All language is just language, and nothing else; no more than a few symbols describing facts, just as a clock is no more than a symbol describing time."
The narrator's personal dictionary to a village called Maqiao reads like fables in each dictionary entry. Han Shaogong uses the slipperiness of language and dialect to both attempt to pin down truth and to suggest that reality is perhaps forever out of that sort of definition—good or evil, right or wrong, contemptuous or admirable.
I'm reading Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno at the same time, and the two read in a surprisingly similar way—the authors are both masters of the last-sentence grenade, slipping quietly in at the end of paragraphs to turn the sense of the preceding ideas upside down.
December 30, 2020
Unquestionably original, crafted with care, and imparting deep couleur locale. I had a bit of difficulty connecting to any of the characters as they were referred to somewhat sporadically, though it can't be said that they lack depth. This difficulty probably reflects my individualistic cultural origins, which would account for my expectation that characters will be developed in a linear way and will represent the primary means of communicating the author's intentions. One is, rather, left here with a full sense of a village and its character. Getting this sense across (and to non-Chinese-speaking readers at that!) is no small feat. All the same, my enjoyment was slightly diluted by the above traits, whether mine or the book's, and by the quasi-dictionary format.
October 31, 2018
This is as close as I could come to sitting down with someone displaced during the Cultural Revolution and finding out what daily life was like to be dropped hundreds of miles away from everything you know into a culture that is foreign in every way. We don't learn much about the narrator but learn tons about life in a rural community culturally cut off from the rest of the country and world. Life here is truly nasty, brutish and short. Outsiders are viewed with mistrust. Women are written out of the language.
May 6, 2023
A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong. Have you ever wondered how many different meanings a single word or phrase can have? A Dictionary of Maqiao is a story told with the framework of words and differing colloquialisms showing windows into a village's life and the people in the years after the cultural revolution in China.
This is another work that is very non-linear, but as you continue to read it and put the pieces together, it is very enjoyable. I would always get so excited when a character I knew something about would reappear in the text to act as an anchor in a changing settings.
This is another work that is very non-linear, but as you continue to read it and put the pieces together, it is very enjoyable. I would always get so excited when a character I knew something about would reappear in the text to act as an anchor in a changing settings.
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