Tuesday 28 September 2010

What's "Guo Du"


What’s Guo Du?

Guo Du means transition, an interlude, in Chinese. 

It was a nom de guerre when I started this bilingual blog to share my novel Man’s Last Song. It is now a platform for my metamorphosing ideas, fleeting fantasies, evolving opinions, and captured images. 

Writing in two languages as fundamentally different as English and Chinese is fascinating. It forces me to approach an idea from contrasting cultural angles, giving it further depth and dimensions. In Chinese, I write in its simplified modern form for reasons I expounded in the post: "Hong Kong's Voluntary Obsolescence".

It is cultural perspective and equivalence —  not translation — that link my linguistic versions. To tell the same story, I sometimes need to modify dialogues, adjust setting, even change the characters, in order to provide cultural context, invite empathy, or simply be better understood. 

I love to write, but not for the sake of stringing beautiful sentences together. The purpose of writing should be to communicate thoughts and impressions. But opinions and perspectives may change with time and experience. Except for those encased in blind faith, today’s conviction could mature into irrelevance tomorrow. Isn’t youthful confidence a rich source of future embarrassment for people who do not stop observing, learning and changing?

Everything is a Guo Du. What better way to trace the transitions in life than writing down the way they appear to me at the time?  

James Tam
Revised October 2012

所谓 “过渡”

過渡簡介

過渡曾經是筆名。當然筆名也只屬過渡現象。由於種種原因,筆名不中用了。棄掉又可惜,於是暫時保留為博客名稱,繼續登載一些無常故事,反復意見和即興隨筆。

我的長篇小說「笙歌」主要講些「智人」們的傻故事。一群禿猴,憑著小聰明,媲美齊天大聖,自稱「萬物之靈」, 整天千方百計耍花招,破壞自己唯一的生存環境,死到臨頭還洋洋自得;是個豐富滑稽的大題材,寫之不盡。

這裡有「笙歌」的介紹文章:http://guo-du.blogspot.hk/p/blog-page_29.html

這個博客,中英並照,但絕對不是互相翻譯。

用兩種截然不同的語文表達意念和描述感情,是個有意思的學習過程和寫作經驗。它逼使我從不同的文化角度和社會習慣去觀察同一件事情。創作故事的時候,為了盡量與不同文化背景的讀者生動溝通,甚至會把人物,境況和對話等按照語言改動。這過程令我深刻體會到語言背後的文化基因,其實對我們做人處事的方法和觀點影響至深,並非乖巧的三言兩語可以完全翻譯的。

我喜歡寫作,但創作目的並非把文字巧妙鋪排。文字只不過是表達工具,思想才是文章的靈魂。不過「想法」可能隨時間,處境,和經驗變遷。年青的自信,不經常被自己的成熟嘲弄嗎?況且當今世界善變而不循軌跡,甚至反轉邏輯,「思考」變得有些過時。

過時便過時吧!人早晚都要過時的。人生無非一連串的過渡,能夠在每一階段把自己對當世的印象記錄下來,也不失為一種過癮的過渡方式。

譚炳昌 

2018.1.11 修改