2016年年诺贝尔文学奖得主莫言瑞典文学院演讲全文(英文稿)yan-lecture_en.pdfVIP

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2012 General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language after December 7, 2012, 5:30 p.m. (Swedish time). Publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied. Mo Yan: Storytellers Nobel Lecture December 7, 2012 1 Distinguished members of the Swedish Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen: Through the mediums of television and the Internet, I imagine that everyone here has at least a nodding acquaintance with far-off Northeast Gaomi Township. You may have seen my ninety-year-old father, as well as my brothers, my sister, my wife and my daughter, even my granddaughter, now a year and four months old. But the person who is most on my mind at this moment, my mother, is someone you will never see. Many people have shared in the honor of winning this prize, everyone but her. My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. We buried her in a peach orchard east of the village. Last year we were forced to move her grave farther away from the village in order to make room for a proposed rail line. When we dug up the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted away and that her body had merged with the damp earth around it. So we dug up some of that soil, a symbolic act, and took it to the new gravesite. That was when I grasped the knowledge that my mother had become part of the earth, and that when I spoke to mother earth, I was really speaking to my mother. I was my mother’s youngest child. My earliest memory was of taking our only vacuum bottle to the public canteen for drinking water. Weakened by hunger, I d