Chapter 50 Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Lecture-He and His People

Now back to my new partner.I liked him very much, and in order to make him a useful and capable man, I gave him advice in everything, taught him how to do it, and especially taught him to speak English—he could hear me when I spoke. You know, he's really the brightest student. ——Daniel Defoe Boston, a pretty little town on the Lincolnshire coast, his people wrote.There stands the steeple of the tallest church in all England, and by it the navigator navigates.Around Boston was a swampy country full of breams--the ominous bird uttering a somber groan and cry that could be heard two miles away, like a gun being fired.

But the country is also home to a variety of other birds, common mallards, mallards, mallards and red-necked ducks.In order to catch wild ducks, people in Zeguo (marsh people) domesticated a kind of duck, which they called the bait duck, or the duck. Zeguo is a large wetland. There are such large wetlands everywhere in Europe. There are such wetlands all over the world, but it is not called Zeguo in other places. This name is only used in England and has not been spread outside. These Lincolnshire ducks, his man wrote, were domesticated in bait-duck ponds.When they are caught, they are put outside, in the Netherlands, in Germany.In Holland and Germany, they met their own kind, and witnessed how difficult the life of those ducks in Holland and Germany was. Their rivers were frozen in the cold wind of winter, and the ground was covered with snow.They finally opened the minds of their Dutch and German counterparts in a language they understood, and taught them that in England (where they came from), life is quite different: English ducks live on the coast where food is plentiful. the tide flows freely to the rivers and lakes and ports extending in all directions; there are lakes, springs, and ponds exposed and shaded by trees; There is nothing.

Of course these sights were described in the language of the ducks, he wrote, so that the bait ducks or duck ducks came together with the flock—so to speak—and abducted them.These English ducks took them from Holland and Germany over the sea and rivers to their bait duck ponds in Lincolnshire Moor, and they kept chattering (in their own language) at them, telling the newcomers Said, this is the pond they said, they can live here leisurely. In fact, they have already been stared at by those who domesticate bait ducks. These people sneaked into the hidden place of Zeguo, which was the reed shed they built in the swamp, and secretly threw a handful of grains into the water to domesticate the bait. The duck followed the things the owner sprinkled all the way, followed by the foreign guests.After two or three days of this, leading their guests into narrower and narrower channels, and saying, How easy it is for us in England, they come to a place where many nets have been cast.

At this point the owner of the decoy duck released his duck dogs, which had been trained to swim behind the birds, barking as they swam.The poor duck flew up quickly when being chased closely, but was knocked into the water by the net on top and struggled into a ball, trying to swim out, but the net was getting smaller and smaller, like a purse. The harvester stretches out his hand to catch the prey one by one.The bait ducks were appeased and praised, while their customers were stunned and shaved on the spot, and sold by the hundreds. All this news from Lincolnshire was written by his men with a regular and deft hand, and each day he sharpened his quill before putting the story on paper.

In Halifax, he wrote, stood a guillotine (removed only under King James I), on which the head of the unfortunate man rested, and the executioner knocked off a The pegs, the knives fell from the beams as high as the church doors, and cut heads as neatly as a butcher chops meat. There is such an unwritten rule in Halifax, if the unlucky guy can jump up and escape from the mountain at the moment when the peg is knocked off and the blade falls, and swim into the river without being caught by the executioner again If he lives, he can be free.But in fact, such a thing has never happened since ancient times.

He (not he who wrote him, but himself) sat in his room by the river in Bristol looking at what he wrote.He has lived here for many years, and he is almost an old man now.His face, tanned by the tropical sun before he made parasols of palm fronds and palmflowers, was a little pale now, but still as thick as parchment, and there was a sunburned patch on his nose. Scars that will never grow well. The parasol, which had been with him so far, was in the room, standing in a corner, but the parrot, which had returned with him, was dead.Poor Robin!The parrot used to croak and fly from its talons to his shoulders, poor Robin Crusoe!Who will save poor Robin?His wife couldn't stand the whining of the parrot, and poor Robin flew in and out every day.I'm going to break its neck.But she didn't have the guts to do it, she said.

When he came back to England with the parrot, the parasol, and a big suitcase of treasures, he and his old wife lived in a house he bought in Huntingdon and lived a fairly peaceful and comfortable life, because he had become quite rich, Richer than when he published that book.But years of life on a deserted island, and wanderings with his servant Friday (poor Friday, he felt sorry for himself, croak-quack, because parrots can never say "Friday") only his first name), which made him feel that the life of a gentleman on land was boring.And—if the truth is being told—married life was a disappointment, too.He went to the stables more and more often to tend to his horses, which, thank God, did not make any noise, but gave him a little cooing when he came, to show they recognized him, and then settled down.

On that island, he lived in silence until "Friday" appeared, but when he came back, he found that the world's words were too complicated.Lying next to his old wife on the bed, her nagging and endless rustling made him feel like a rain of pebbles was pouring on his head, when he just wanted to sleep peacefully . So when the old wife turned into a ghost, he was a little sad but had no regrets.Burried her honorably and, some time later, took a room at the Merry Sailor Inn by the Sea in Bristol, and left the Huntington estate to his son to manage.He was accompanied only by the parasol which had made him famous, brought from the island, a dead parrot fastened to a shelf, and the necessities of life.Since then he has lived alone, wandering around several large and small piers during the day, gazing westward at the distant sea-his eyesight is not too bad, while smoking a pipe.As for meals, he usually eats in his own room.He found no pleasure in social circles, and on the island he had acquired the habit of being alone.

He doesn't read books either, and has lost interest in it, but since writing it, writing has become his habit, and it's quite good as a kind of mental adjustment.In the evening, by candlelight, he took out his paper, sharpened his quill, and wrote a page or two of the man who had brought the news of the decoy-ducks in Lincolnshire and the great rack in Halifax ( He said that before the terrible guillotine fell, the condemned prisoner would be saved from death if he could jump up and down the hill, and other such news), and everywhere he went, his busy man Sending in local reports was his top priority.

Walking on the jetty of the harbor, remembering about the killing machine in Halifax, he, Robin, the parrot once called him poor Robin, threw a pebble and heard it fall into the water.One second, less than a second for the stone to fall into the water, the mercy of God came quickly, but perhaps not as quickly as the tempered steel blade (the blade was heavier than the small stone and greased), the big knife would Is it faster than the mercy of God?How do we escape?What kind of a man is that man who is busy scurrying around the empire, sending report after report from death scene to death scene (beating, beheading)?

A businessman, he thought to himself.Let the man be a corn wholesaler, or a leather wholesaler; or a manufacturer, or a tiler in some place where there is an excess of clay, that is to say, must be a trader people.Let his business prosper, give him a wife who loves him, doesn't talk too much, and has a bunch of kids, mostly daughters; give him a reasonable amount of happiness, and then bring his happy life to an abrupt end.For example, the Thames suddenly flooded in winter, and the tiles in the kiln were washed away by the flood; or the grain in the warehouse was washed away by the flood; or the hides in the leather workshop were washed away; he was all over. Well, his man was left with nothing, and then the creditors came upon him, like flies and gadflies, and demanded him; and he had to run away from his wife and children, and hide himself in the worst mean streets.All of this—flood, bankruptcy, hiding, penniless, rags, solitude—makes up the story of the characters on the wrecked ship and the deserted island where he, poor Robin, was alone with the world. Living in isolation for twenty-six years, he was almost insane (seriously, who's to say he wasn't? Maybe on some level?). Or let the man be a saddler, with a home, shop, and warehouse at Walterchapel, with a mole on his chin, and a wife who loves him, doesn't nag, and bears him a A bunch of children, mainly daughters, gave him a lot of happiness, until one day the plague came to the city, before the Great Fire of London in 1665: people died of the plague every day, and gradually destroyed the whole city, the corpses Pile up like a mountain, no matter poor or rich man can escape death, because the plague knows no direction and no one, so the harness merchant's worldly wealth can't save his life.He sent his wife and children to the country before planning his own escape, but then dismissed the idea.Don't be afraid of the threat of the night, he opened the "Bible" at the critical moment: You will not be afraid of the arrow that flies by day, nor the plague that travels by night, or the poisonous disease that destroys people at noon.Although thousands of people fall by your side and ten thousand people fall by your side, this calamity will never come near you.Cheered up by these omens of peace, he remained in London in agony and began to write a report.He wrote, I met a large group of people in the street, and one of them was a woman pointing to the sky.Behold, she cried, the plain-clothed angel wielding the gleaming sword!The crowd were all nodding, really, that's right, they said, an angel wielding a sword!But he, the saddler, saw no angel, nor any sword.All he could see was a grotesque cloud, one side brighter than the other because of the sun. It's a symbol!cried the woman in the street, but he could see no sign of his life.He wrote about it in the report. One day, while walking by the river, his people—formerly a saddler, now unemployed—saw a woman at her door calling out to a boatman on the river: Robert!Robert!she shouted.The man brought the rowboat to the shore, took out a sack from the boat, put it on a rock on the shore, and rowed away.The woman went to the river and took the sack home with a sad look on her face. He turned to that Robert to talk to him.Robert told him that the woman was his wife, and the sack contained a week's daily necessities for his wife and children, meat, rice and butter. The plague broke his heart.All this—the man named Robert and his wife who kept in touch by shouting at each other across the river, and the pocket left by the river—of course represented itself, but of course it also represented one of his characters, Lu Binson's loneliness on the desert island: in the darkest moment of despair on the island, he called his relatives in England to rescue him through the waves; at other times, he swam to the wrecked ship to search for daily necessities. Reports are still being written about the harrowing scenes of those days.With unbearable swelling and pain in the lower abdomen and armpits, a sign of the plague, a man ran from his house, naked and stinking, howling into the street, into Harrow Lane, Walterchapel , His man (the saddler) said that he saw the man jumping, strutting, and making all kinds of strange movements. His wife and children chased him, yelling for him to go back.But this leaping and striding has its own implications.Since the disaster of the wrecked ship, he ran left and right on the shore to search for traces of his companions on the ship, but found nothing except a pair of unmatched shoes. He realized that he had been abandoned on a lonely desert island, like Like annihilation from the world, there is no hope of rescue. (But what he wondered was, besides his loneliness and desolation, what was he whispering about this poor plague-stricken man he was reading about? Across the sea and deep ocean, through time and age, his secret inner fire was burning calling for what?) A year ago, he, Robinson, paid two guineas to the sailor who brought the parrot. The sailor said he brought the parrot from Brazil. It was a handsome bird--green plumage, bright red crest, and a quick beak, if the sailor's words were to be believed.The bird always stood on a shelf in his room at the inn, with a thin chain tied to its foot, in case it should fly away, it always called: Poor Paul!Poor Paul!Barked and barked until forced to hood it.You can teach it no other words, such as: Poor Robin!Maybe it's too old to learn. Poor Paul, gazing through the narrow window at the tops of the clump of masts, and beyond the tops of the masts, on the gray waves of the Atlantic: what island is that?Asked poor Paul, I was thrown on this island, so cold, so bleak, where were you, my Saviour, when I needed it most? One man, drunk that night (another report by his people), lay in the doorway and fell asleep.The corpse truck came (we are still in the plague era), and the neighbors thought the man was dead, so they put him on the corpse truck and mixed with the corpses.The corpse truck loaded the corpses one by one, and then piled the corpses into a death pit on the mountain. The driver wrapped his face tightly to prevent the suffocating stench, and threw him into the pit as well.He woke up struggling in the death pit.Where am I?he shouted.The driver said: Almost buried you with the dead.Am I dead?said the man.This is also a portrayal of him on that desert island. Some Londoners went on with their business because they thought they were in good health, thinking that the plague would be over.But the plague was secretly in their blood: once their hearts were infected, they fell there and died.His men reported it as if struck by a bolt of lightning.It is a story of life itself, of a whole life.To prepare early, we should prepare early for the coming of death, otherwise we will be hit by it anytime, anywhere and fall to the ground to die.For him, Robinson Crusoe, on his deserted island, he had seen this fate suddenly befall him.One day he saw a person's footprint on the island, which was a footprint, so it became a kind of mark: one foot, one person.But there's more to it.You are not alone.This mark says.It also says: No matter how far you go, no matter where you hide, you will be found. In the days of the plague, his men wrote, there were people who, out of fear, left everything behind—their homes, their wives, their children, and fled London as fast as they could.Once the plague is over, their behavior will be contemptible, and they are cowards in every way.But we forget what kind of courage is called upon to face the plague.This is not just the courage of a soldier, nor the courage to grab a gun and kill the enemy, but the courage to challenge the god of death riding a white horse. The parrot on the desert island is at his best (he still prefers the parrot out of the two mates) or doesn't speak words that his owner hasn't taught him.How is it that this man of his, who belongs to the parrot class and does not receive more love, can write as well as his master, or even better?There is no doubt that it is because he has mastered this wonderful pen.It's like challenging Death himself on a white horse.His own skill was learned in the counting room, and he was good at calculating accounts and keeping accounts, not at choosing words and sentences.Death himself on a white horse: such words did not occur to him.A punchline like that comes only when he surrenders to his person. Decoy duck or duck duck: does he, Robinson, understand these things?Didn't know it at all until his people started sending out reports about it. Decoy ducks in Moorland, Lincolnshire, decapitation machines in Halifax: reports after a great excursion, his man seems to be circumnavigating the British Isles, and here he is circling that deserted island in a raft he made portrayal.The voyage turned out to be on the farther side of the island, rugged, dark, and gloomy, and he always avoided it--though later colonialists came to the island, and they might still want to explore and settle there Woolen cloth.It is also a portrayal, of the dark side and the light side of the soul. When the first plagiarists and imitators seized upon his island experience and sold their own invented shipwrecked tales to the public, he was nothing more than a gang of cannibals who fell on his flesh.He has no scruples: When I defend myself from the cannibals who knocked me down, roasted me, and ate me, he wrote, I should defend myself from the thing itself.Little did it occur to me, he wrote, that these cannibals were really wicked, insatiable things, and that it was the very substance of truth that they were gnawing at. But thinking a little deeper, he felt that he seemed to have a little sympathy for those imitators.In his opinion, since there are only so few adventure stories in the world, if the newcomers are not allowed to gnaw on these old things, they will have to keep their mouths shut forever. And in his desert-island adventures, he tells readers how he awoke one night in terror, convinced that the devil had climbed into his bed in the form of a large dog and jumped on him.He jumped up, and seized a short cutlass to defend himself, slashing left and right, while the poor parrot sleeping by his bed flapped its wings in panic.Many days later, he realized that what was pressing on him was neither a big dog nor a devil, but a temporary paralysis that prevented his legs from moving, so he imagined that something was pressing on him.The lesson from this incident seems to be that all disease, including plague, comes from the devil, and is the devil himself; the visitation of the disease can be seen as a visitation of the devil, or as a dog representing the devil, or as a A visit from the devil of the dog.In the saddler's account of the plague, visitation signifies disease.So neither the man who wrote the devil tale nor the man who wrote the plague tale should be considered a forger or a plagiarist. Many years ago, when he decided to spread out the paper and write down his adventures on the deserted island, he found that his mind lacked words and sentences, his clumsy pen froze, and his fingers were stiff and uncontrollable.However, the days passed, and that day when he wrote about living in the cold north with "Friday", he suddenly understood the business of writing, and he wrote fluently and easily, without even thinking about it, the words and sentences came to him. Under the pen. But God, the ease of composition suddenly left him again. He sat in front of the small writing desk by the window overlooking the Bristol harbour, his hands were stiff again, and the pen in his hand was as unfamiliar as before. Did he (the other him, the one he wrote about) find writing easier?The stories he wrote: Ducks, the Guillotine, and the Plague in London, were fairly fluent, though he had been quite fluent in his own stories as well.Perhaps he misunderstood him, and that well-dressed little man with a mole on his chin who walked fast was sitting at this very moment in some rented room in this vast country dipping his pen and Dipping again, my heart was full of doubts, hesitation and fleeting thoughts. How should I describe this person and him?Is it master and slave?A brother, a twin brother?Comrades arm in arm?Or an enemy, a hater?What should he name that man?The man with whom he spent his evenings, and sometimes his sleepless nights, was not with him except during the day.For during the day, he, Robin, paced the docks and inspected the new arrivals, while his men galloped across the country in search of what they had seen and heard. Will this man come to Bristol on his travels?He longed to be in physical contact with his man, to hold his hand, to walk with him on Quay Avenue, to listen attentively when he told him he was going to that dark northern island, or to write about his adventures.But he was very afraid that he would never have such a chance to get together, not in this life.If he had to bring these two together—his man and him—he should have written that they were like two ships going in opposite directions, one going west and the other east.Or rather, they were coolie sailors on a ship, on the west and east ships respectively.When their boats rendezvoused, they were close together, close enough to catch each other.But the sea was choppy, and the storm was raging: the wind and the rain washed their eyes, their hands were hurt by the cables, and they passed each other without even waving. Last Revised on December 11, 2003 Wen Min translation