莫言写作的饥饿诱因:渴望一日三餐有饺子吃

THIS year's Nobel literature laureate chose his pen name Mo Yan, which means "Don't speak," as a reminder to himself that he should talk less and write more.

今年的诺贝尔文学奖获得者将他的笔名选择了莫言，意为“不要说话，”作为自我提醒，他应该少说话，多写作。

Mo, whose real name is Guan Moye, said he had "brought the family a lot of trouble" for his talkativeness when he was young.

莫言原名管谟业，说他年轻时的多嘴多舌“给家庭带来了很大的麻烦”。

"My mother felt so anguished and persuaded me to keep my mouth shut. I was so moved by her painful expression and swore to be silent since then," he said. "That's why I gave myself such a pen name when I started writing in 1981."

“我的母亲感到如此痛苦，并劝我闭嘴，她痛苦的表情使我伸手触动，并发誓从那时起保持沉默，”他说。 “这就是为什么我在1981年开始写作时，给自己取了这样一个笔名。”

That was the year his novella, "Drizzle on a Spring Night," was published.

就在那一年，他的中篇小说《春夜雨霏霏》出版了。

Mo said several years ago that his literature dream stemmed from his crave for dumplings in the late 1950s when China was in economic difficulty.

莫言说，几年前，他的文学梦想源于20世纪50年代末中国处于经济困难时他对饺子的渴望。

He recalled that a writer became his new neighbor in Jinan, capital of his native Shandong Province, and had dumplings for three meals a day, a luxury for a common Chinese then.

他回顾说，在他的家乡山东省省会济南一个作家成为了他的新邻居，并且一日三餐都有饺子吃，那时饺子是一个普通中国人的奢侈品。

"At that time, my family couldn't afford such a meal in one year," Mo said in a speech in Open University of Hong Kong.

莫言在香港公开大学的一次演讲中说：“那时，我的家庭一年之中都负担不起这样的饭。”

Mo said he began to nurse a dream of becoming a writer, with three dumpling meals every day.

莫言说，他开始萌生了成为一名作家的梦想，一日三餐吃饺子。

His early education was cut short at the age of 12 by the "cultural revolution," a decade of political chaos when many of China's schools closed down.

他的早期教育在12岁时被“文化大革命”切断，一场十年的政治混乱，当时中国的许多学校都关闭了。

Instead of avoiding memories of his poverty-stricken childhood, Mo valued it so much he said in a speech at Stanford University in California that "loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation."

莫言不是回避他贫困的童年记忆，而是非常珍视它们，他在美国加利福尼亚州的斯坦福大学那场“孤独和饥饿是我创作的财富”的演讲中说道。

"When I was five or six, the whole nation was hungry. I had a deep love for food. Even now I feel tears in my eyes when I touch the rice in supermarkets," he said.

“当我五六岁时，全国人民都很饥饿。我对食物狂热的爱，即使现在当我在超市触摸到大米时，我觉得我眼里仍含着泪水，”他说。

When he joined the army in 1976, he once filled his stomach with 18 buns.

当他1976年参军时，他曾经往肚子里塞了18个馒头。

Mo has applied his experiences as well as relatives' stories to his works.

莫言把他的经历以及亲人的故事都写到了他的作品中。

He created the figure "rural doctor" based on his aunt in his novel "Frogs," and described a typical Chinese intellectual called Shangguan Jintong to reflect his spirit in the book "Big Breasts and Wide Hips."

他在小说《蛙》里创造的人物“乡村医生”是以他的姨妈为原型的，在他的书《丰乳肥臀》中描述了一个叫上官金童的典型中国知识分子以折射其精神。

"The folk arts and folk culture accompanied my growth and I was influenced by the cultural elements I witnessed through my childhood in the rural areas. When I picked up the pen for the creation of literature, the folk cultural elements inevitably entered my novels and affected and even determined the artistic styles of my works," he said.

“民间艺术和民俗文化伴随着我成长，我深受我童年时在农村目睹的文化元素的影响。当我拿起笔进行文学创作时，民间文化元素不可避免地进入我的小说，影响甚至决定了我作品的艺术风格，”他说。

Though Mo is intellectually sharp, he is an ordinary man in daily life. He married a factory co-worker about 30 years ago.

尽管莫言是思维敏捷，但在日常生活中他是一个普通人。大约30年前他娶了一个工厂同事。