Bridge of Ajia

Category: Story of the storyteller

  • 唤起生命活力的善良与野性的魔法——评张奕颖自写自画的两部作品

    The Magic of Kindness and Wildness That Awakens the Vitality of Life — A Review of Two Author-Illustrated Works by Gracey Zhang

    Children’s kind­ness and wild­ness are, at their core, com­ple­men­tary forces—both are essen­tial ele­ments in awak­en­ing the vital­i­ty of life.

    Cov­er of the Chi­nese ver­sion of “Lara’s Words ”

    Gracey Zhang has quick­ly emerged in the field of chil­dren’s books with her unique visu­al style and del­i­cate abil­i­ty to cap­ture emo­tions. Her debut pic­ture­book “Lala’s Words”, pub­lished in 2021, was eye-catch­ing and won the indus­try’s pres­ti­gious Ezra Jack Keates Illus­tra­tion Award in 2022. In recent years, Gracey Zhang has col­lab­o­rat­ed with authors on at least six pic­ture books, all of which have been wide­ly praised. Among them, The Upside Down Hat (writ­ten by Steven Balt­sar) and Nigel and the Moon (writ­ten by Antwan Eady) have already been pub­lished in Chi­nese edi­tions. How­ev­er, it is her author-illus­trat­ed works that remain the most com­pelling. Her sec­ond solo title, When Rubin Plays, will soon be intro­duced to Chi­nese read­ers along­side her debut, Lala’s Words.

    When Rubin Plays

    Lala, as described by Gracey Zhang, is a Chi­nese immi­grant girl who is ener­getic and kind-heart­ed. In her moth­er’s eyes, she is a lit­tle “wild”. She is always unwill­ing to stay at home and would rather spend the whole day with wild flow­ers and weeds. What her moth­er can­not under­stand is that Lala actu­al­ly express­es her love for the world through “dia­logue” with plants. “Lala’s Words” not only shows Lala’s unique con­nec­tion with nature, but also con­veys the pow­er of lan­guage and the heal­ing pow­er of kind­ness. “When Rubin Plays” focus­es on the growth of a local Boli­vian boy, Rubin. The back­ground is set in a small town on the edge of a “wild” for­est. Rubin con­ducts his own musi­cal explo­ration with the help of ani­mals, high­light­ing the joy of free and unre­strained self-expres­sion. Both books explore the impact of cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences on indi­vid­ual growth and show the “mag­ic” of the coex­is­tence of kind­ness and wild­ness in chil­dren’s hearts.

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  • 闲聊李奥尼的人生花絮

    Talking about Leo Lionni’s life

    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.

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