Biography of Yasunari Kawabata

Author: Ye Weiqiu
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-10-01
Features: He believes in the classics of the East, praises the mystical and refined spirit of the East, and has his roots in the East. His literature is Japanese, but also Eastern. He has not lost his direction and strives to find a position where he can think together about the fusion or bridge of Eastern and Western cultures. As for Kawabata Yasunari, the path he took was not smooth either. He has experienced the extremes of complete Westernization, identifying modernism as his father, and completely inheriting tradition while absolutizing it. In the end, he established his literary position through the modern exploration of the beauty of Eastern tradition, creating his own brilliance and the brilliance of national literature. Regarding the creative experience and lessons of Kawabata throughout his life, he has published many thought-provoking opinions. He draws from the experience of absorbing Chinese culture about a thousand years ago, to the hundred years of absorbing Western culture during the Meiji Restoration, and puts forward a series of big questions: Did the Heian period truly introduce the solemn and great culture of China? Did it truly imitate it? Could the hundred years of Japan in the Meiji era truly introduce and truly imitate the solemn and great culture of the West, especially the spiritual aspect? Isn't it questionable? Shouldn't it have adopted a Japanese approach to absorption from the very beginning, learning according to Japanese tastes? Soon after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, he answered this series of questions in a speech: "As cultural exchanges with foreign countries become more frequent, it is inevitable that the national culture will stand within it. To create world culture is also to create national culture; to create national culture should also be to create world culture." The great achievement of Kawabata Yasunari, "Snow Country," was born in the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, but it took nearly half a century before its Chinese translation was published with great difficulty on the Chinese mainland. After more than two decades of, through the unremitting efforts of numerous scholars, translators, and editors, it has created the achievements of today. Currently, domestic publishing of Kawabata Yasunari's works of various genres covers about seventy to eighty percent of the works in "The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari." Although China's translation and publishing work started much later than other countries, it has now caught up. Numerous collections and series of Kawabata Yasunari's works have been published domestically, achieving systematic and boxed formats; complete novels and multi-volume essays have been published, as well as many works translated and written by Chinese and Japanese scholars on the life of Kawabata Yasunari and the essays on Kawabata Yasunari. Taiwan has also introduced a large number of Chinese translations from the mainland. Such a publishing scale is probably unmatched in other countries and regions so far, except for Kawabata's mother country. This fact fully proves that the initial assumption that Kawabata's novels could only introduce a few types was completely a delusion. What is even more inspiring is that the difficult-to-produce Chinese translation of "Snow Country" twenty years ago is now designated by the Ministry of Education as one of the essential books for university students in China.