The orig­i­nal text was writ­ten in Chi­nese on March 8, 2010, as a post­script to Leo Lion­ni’s series of trans­la­tions, and was also pub­lished on Sina Blog.

Over the past year or so, Leo Lion­ni has occu­pied a very impor­tant posi­tion in my life. I often repeat what he said, put one or two of his books in my bag wher­ev­er I go, and search for all the infor­ma­tion about him when­ev­er I think of him… But more often, I will stare at the pages where he wrote and drew for a long time, think­ing absent­mind­ed­ly: What on earth is this guy try­ing to say here?

I feel very lucky to have trans­lat­ed nine of Lion­ni’s pic­ture books in more than a year. It is very sat­is­fy­ing to have in-depth exchanges with this mas­ter in this way. As the trans­la­tion work is com­ing to an end, the edi­tor asked me to write a lit­tle about Lion­ni, but for a long time I did­n’t know where to start. Every­thing about Leo Lion­ni is there, in his books: the lit­tle black fish, Alfred, Cor­nelius, Matthew, Alexan­der… They are all him, what else is there to say? I will talk about some anec­dotes in Lion­ni’s life — main­ly those that have had some influ­ence on my under­stand­ing in trans­la­tion.

On a warm day about thir­ty years ago, in a farm­house in Tus­cany, Italy, an old man in his sev­en­ties was chat­ting with some­one on the phone, but his mind grad­u­al­ly wan­dered, and he was seen scrib­bling on a notepad. The draw­ing looked like the graf­fi­ti of naughty chil­dren. It was rough­ly a lizard, and it looked like a croc­o­dile when you looked left and right, but from the per­spec­tive of nat­ur­al sci­ence, it was nei­ther, because it was a rep­tile that walked upright! It is said that this is how Lion­ni’s “Cor­nelius” the Croc­o­dile was first cre­at­ed.

When I first came across this book, I want­ed to trans­late Cor­nelius as “鳄鱼小克 Croc­o­dile Lit­tle K”, per­haps chil­dren would like it more. But as I learned more about Lion­ni, this name seemed to have a deep­er mean­ing. On the sur­face, it is just sim­i­lar to croc­o­dile, but if you think about it care­ful­ly, it is a com­mon name in Italy, and the most famous one is usu­al­ly trans­lat­ed as Cor­nelius, a cen­tu­ri­on in the New Tes­ta­ment of the Bible, and the first non-Jew to con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty. Is this just a coin­ci­dence? To be hon­est, I don’t know, but I think it’s bet­ter to keep the name Cor­nelius for this unique croc­o­dile, and leave the judg­ment of whether it is a coin­ci­dence to the read­ers.

(more…)