Bridge of Ajia

Tags: Postscript

  • 《秋千》：一本值得送给未来的“自己”的非定制图画书

    “The Swing”: A Non-Customized Picture Book Worth Gifting to Your Future Self

    writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Brit­ta Teken­troup, trans­lat­ed by Ajia, Xin­jiang Youth Pub­lish­ing House, 2025

    The swing has always been there.

    It looks out to sea and invites every­one to take a seat.

    …

    The swing is still there.

    It looks out to sea and invites every­one to take a seat.

    It is a place of begin­nings

    …

    This is the begin­ning and end of “The Swing”, writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Ger­man pic­ture book artist Brit­ta Teck­en­trup. It is like the ebb and flow of the tide on the beach, ris­ing is also falling, falling is also ris­ing; it is also like a cycle of time, the begin­ning is also the end, the end is also the begin­ning…

    ​This pic­ture book is 160 pages long, far exceed­ing the length of a nor­mal “chil­dren’s pic­ture book”. The small square size book opens into a stretched rec­tan­gle; the pages are some­times half text and half pic­ture, some­times the whole pic­ture with­out words fills the whole page, some­times the words are dot­ted like musi­cal notes, some­times the pic­ture is reduced to leave blank space beside or above and below, and some­times it is divid­ed into reg­u­lar or irreg­u­lar small pic­tures, the rhythm is accel­er­at­ed, and the imaged text also sways along… The lay­out com­po­si­tion is like a poem and paint­ing, reveal­ing a qui­et con­tem­pla­tion, and in the con­stant change, it hides a gen­tle and warm leap. Turn­ing the pages gen­tly and read­ing qui­et­ly, it seems as if you can hear the sooth­ing sound of the waves, or a famil­iar and vague piece of music.

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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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