莫言獲獎(jiǎng)演講英文版

　　in the midst of mind-numbing military life, i welcomed the ideological emancipation and literary fervor of the nineteen-eighties, and evolved from a boy who listened to stories and passed them on by word of mouth into someone who experimented with writing them down. it was a rocky road at first, a time when i had not yet discovered how rich a source of literary material my two decades of village life could be. i thought that literature was all about good people doing good things, stories of heroic deeds and model citizens, so that the few pieces of mine that were published had little literary value.

　　in the fall of 1984 i was accepted into the literature department of the pla art academy, where, under the guidance of my revered mentor, the renowned writer xu huaizhong, i wrote a series of stories and novellas, including: "autumn floods," "dry river," "the transparent carrot," and "red sorghum." northeast gaomi township made its first appearance in "autumn floods," and from that moment on, like a wandering peasant who finds his own piece of land, this literary vagabond found a place he could call his own. i must say that in the course of creating my literary domain, northeast gaomi township, i was greatly inspired by the american novelist william faulkner and the columbian gabriel garcía márquez. i had not read either of them extensively, but was encouraged by the bold, unrestrained way they created new territory in writing, and learned from them that a writer must have a place that belongs to him alone. humility and compromise are ideal in one's daily life, but in literary creation, supreme self-confidence and the need to follow one's own instincts are essential. for two years i followed in the footsteps of these two masters before realizing that i had to escape their influence; this is how i characterized that decision in an essay: they were a pair of blazing furnaces, i was a block of ice. if i got too close to them, i would dissolve into a cloud of steam. in my understanding, one writer influences another when they enjoy a profound spiritual kinship, what is often referred to as "hearts beating in unison." that explains why, though i had read little of their work, a few pages were sufficient for me to comprehend what they were doing and how they were doing it, which led to my understanding of what i should do and how i should do it. 

　　what i should do was simplicity itself: write my own stories in my own way. my way was that of the marketplace storyteller, with which i was so familiar, the way my grandfather and my grandmother and other village old-timers told stories. in all candor, i never gave a thought to audience when i was telling my stories; perhaps my audience was made up of people like my mother, and perhaps it was only me. the early stories were narrations of my personal experience: the boy who received a whipping in "dry river," for instance, or the boy who never spoke in "the transparent carrot." i had actually done something bad enough to receive a whipping from my father, and i had actually worked the bellows for a blacksmith on a bridge site. naturally, personal experience cannot be turned into fiction exactly as it happened, no matter how unique that might be. fiction has to be fictional, has to be imaginative. to many of my friends, "the transparent carrot" is my very best story; i have no opinion one way or the other. what i can say is, "the transparent carrot" is more symbolic and more profoundly meaningful than any other story i've written. that dark-skinned boy with the superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity represents the soul of my entire fictional output. not one of all the fictional characters i've created since then is as close to my soul as he is. or put a different way, among all the characters a writer creates, there is always one that stands above all the others. for me, that laconic boy is the one. though he says nothing, he leads the way for all the others, in all their variety, performing freely on the northeast gaomi township stage.