【英譯】頒獎典禮致詞(三)Felicitas Von Lovenberg女士致褒揚詞（Laudatory Speech）

Translation by The Hagedorn Group.（德國書業協會提供）

China’s rapid development continues to amaze the entire world. The Middle Kingdom is industrious, hyper-modern and super rich. But has China become more familiar to us now that the Chinese drive the same cars, covet the same fashion labels and use the same Internet as we do? Do we know more about the home of 1.4 billion people because life in major Chinese cities has come to resemble our metropolitan lives to such a large degree? And is it proof of our cultural open-mindedness that we embrace Feng Shui in our offices and use chop sticks more or less proficiently?

One could expect me to stand here today and tell you that Liao Yiwu is a bridge builder, a person whose work deepens our understanding of the unknown China, making all the big differences seem smaller. But that wouldn’t be right. The opposite is true: Liao Yiwu’s own biography and his books’ numerous portraits afford us a sobering, indeed disturbing look behind the façade of this great country. The contrast between everyday life at the lowest levels of society and our perceptions of modern China could not be more glaring.

How easy it is to say that no human feeling is alien to a writer. But in this case it actually applies. For when Liao Yiwu portrays fundamental emotions - hunger, pain, fear, loneliness - he does so not only as a result of authorial empathy, but also due to his own very bitter experiences. The author need invent nothing, embellish nothing and exaggerate nothing to evoke injustice, humiliation and torture. His will to bear witness remains and is not limited to his personal fate. Indeed, Liao Yiwu describes Chinese society through the eyes of those whose voices are otherwise never publicly heard: rickshaw drivers, corpse washers, petty criminals, beggars, toilet cleaners, barmaids, monks, street musicians. These are destinies that have been lost along China’s journey out of its thousands of years of history and tradition and into the 21^st century.

In his most recent work published in Germany under the title “Die Kugel und das Opium”, the author shows us the country from the perspective of those who have escaped from the dungeons as he did himself. The chronicler lets the people speak for themselves, never putting words into their mouths. However, in order to allow these individuals to articulate themselves, they must first be persuaded to speak. Liao Yiwu fells obliged to a poetics of truth, an oral history of China consolidated in literature. This poet, who has sometimes referred to himself as a “recorder of time”, is more than a precise listener with a phenomenal memory, as is demonstrated in his most important work. “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” is a powerful adventure novel about a man who is imprisoned to learn the meaning of fear, and who, after being released from prison, turns the tables and challenges the Chinese authorities through his books.

In the opinion of these authorities, the poet took an irrevocable wrong turn on 4 June 1989, the day of the bloodbath on Tiananmen Square, when he circulated his poem “Massacre”. The previous night Liao Yiwu had hurriedly written it out and recorded it on tape; his almost visionary verse seems to anticipate the bloodbath that would take place hours later when the military violently put an end to the student demonstrations on the Square of Heavenly Peace. Like all of Liao Yiwu’s poetry, the highly expressionistic poem is easily understood; the agony and the horror provoked by the poem have great immediacy –not without warrant is “Massacre” repeatedly compared to Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” in both its impact and meaning. The poem nearly cost Liao Yiwu his life and catapulted him onto the world’s literary stage; but, at the time ,the young avant-garde poet, who up to that point had not thought much about politics, penned “Massacre” as a vehement response to a Canadian friend’s accusation that he loved neither his country nor his compatriots.

The authorities, however, saw no patriotism in his verse; they threw him in prison for “disseminating counterrevolutionary propaganda”. When he was released after four years and just as many prisons, Liao Yiwu took up the life of a street musician with the flute that he had learned to play in prison. And he systematically continued what had become a means of survival during his imprisonment: talking with people situated at the lowest strata of society. His interviews, collected in a volume titled “Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society”, provide an urgent portrait of non-globalised China, a counter-narrative to China’s official portrayal of itself as an economic power. The authorities quickly regretted allowing the initial publication of this book in his home country, and Liao’s work has since been officially unavailable in China. Due to its repeated confiscation by the authorities, his extensive memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs”, had to be written three times before it was finally able to be published abroad. His request to travel outside of the country was denied seven times, with heightened public notice three years ago when China was the guest country of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It has since become forbidden to mention his name in his native land.

Those who did not keep quiet during and, above all, after the Tiananmen Square massacre were banished to a place where China thought even Liao Yiwu would be silenced: the margins of society, a realm where those who were not still physically and spiritually broken by their prison time would find an audience only of people like themselves. Because after being imprisoned, whether for two, four or fourteen years, no one returns to his old life. Liao Yiwu attests to this fact in “Die Kugel und das Opium”, a collection of conversations that he conducted in secret, requiring great effort and risk to do so. Most merely exchange their small prison for a big one while losing their work, their wives and their homes; many are forced to move in with and live off their elderly parents or to roam the country as homeless vagabonds. Their bodies have escaped the executioner, but what ultimately threatens to demoralize them is the constant ineffectiveness of their suffering, not only because the expectation that the June 4 insurgents would be rehabilitated and compensated had not yet been fulfilled, but also because no one takes any interest in the so-called “rowdies” of June 4 - except the secret police. And Lao Yiwu.

For many years he tracked down victims of the official historiography and , with much patience, convinced them to talk. He presents these fatal lives using the raw material of the individual portraits. He once described how painstaking and tedious this literary process is: “There is nothing particularly aesthetic about meeting these protagonists. They are very ordinary people, struggling, fighting for their existence and their survival. There are often only a few captivating minutes in a story; you have to pick the essential bits. It’s like being in a dark cave: suddenly you notice a light in the dark, a mouse hole with two tiny glinting eyes peeking out. Then I can’t tear myself away.” The same is true for his readers.

His newest book conveys to us both the anger and sadness as the bloodstains and memories of 1989 continue to fade with each passing year. “The masses, which seemed to lose their senses in lunging into the country’s transformation, became so pragmatic overnight, so united in their love of money”. Liao Yiwu denounces this historical amnesia that replaced memory with wealth. After being released, convicts find this shift in mentality to be particularly glaring. As the street fighter Doug Shengkun expressed: “Life outside has changed so dramatically, the city has changed so dramatically, but above all, the people have changed so dramatically; we were gone for too long, they didn’t prepare us for this. We are yesterday’s people! We are rubbish! We are forgotten!”

Liao Yiwu fights to prevent the people of June 4 from being forgotten, along with those who carried China’s economic and technological revolution on their backs. He tirelessly documents what the Communist Party wants not to be written. We can recognise how effectively those people ostracized and repressed by the booming Middle Kingdom have been silenced when we consider the fact that the author needed seven years just to gather his material for “Die Kugel und das Opium”. He was unable to publish many interviews because his interviewees later became fearful and withdrew their consent; others didn’t want to rehash their memories of times past. Was it really worth it? That brief moment of revolt that could not bring back the dead, but for which most have sacrificed their entire future?

To get an idea of the reprisals prisoners of the regime could expect, one need only read of the ordeals by Liao during own imprisonment, as he describes in “ For a Song and a Hundred Songs”. Inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and its equal in terms of shock valve, the work is at once a novel of personal development, a passion narrative and a heroic epic. Liao Yiwu starts off with his beginnings as a hippy poet who cared nothing for politics and strove so hard to emulate Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg that no metaphor was glaring enough. Then literally over night, with his poem ”Massacre” , his affectations were displaced by existential rigor. Confined in close quarters with murderers, criminals, lunatics and rapists, his odyssey through various prisons mired him in an inferno of filth, hunger and unspeakable brutality. But remarkably, while its material could not be any more gruesome, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” is neither hopeless nor pessimistic. Among the living dead and with prose fighting sadism and torture, Liao finds the appropriate dimensions for his words, which become ever more confident, graphic and sensual. The physicality of his descriptions spare no detail, as the scars and cracks in his skin create an exceedingly specific indictment of a regime that remains distant and abstract. But on hundreds of pages full of agony and pain, there is still room for humour and subtle irony. In circulation among the prisoners is an extensive “menu” of indigestible “meals”, which is even more perfidious than one the Marquis de Sade might have devised. Liao Yiwu almost relishes in reciting it . For example, menu item 11, “Lamb skewers, served hot”, involves the following, still comparatively harmless torture; “A cotton strip soaked in oil is wrapped completely around all the captive’s toes, the end of the strip is lit and then extinguished, creating a gradual glow.”

One’s past plays no role in prison; a poet is worth no more than a man who dismembered his wife. But in just such a place, where his live body is stripped of its “romantic poet skin”, Liao Yiwu develops a radical in whose context he is no exception. “To understand something precisely, to feel it in one’s bones, one must drill into it like a fly, abhorrently buzzing, and one must be incredibly careful”. However, “you do this filthy job your entire life, like the doctor form antiquity who diagnoses the suffering of his epoch by the taste of people’s excrement.”

In this sense, Liao Yiwu’s “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” is a breathless balancing act along the threshold of any trace of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. After two suicide attempts, Liao’s forced humiliation and brutalisation became a means to perform resistance even before he began writing about his experiences. And then, as soon as his writing began, it became the last bastion of self-preservation even in the face of overwhelming existential doubts with respect to the relevance of his words: ”I, that was a leftover, twirled by a formless tongue, I didn’t want to be swallowed and digested, I reached out my hand to say “No!”

Liao Yiwu later called his time in prison one of his four mentors. Although he was unable to attend university, he unquestionably holds several degrees in the science of survival and has chosen to designate all of his experiences - some of which almost cost him his life - as necessary lessons for his literary work. His prison years are his fourth and hopefully final master course. The three others: Hunger, existence as a person without residence status, and homelessness.

Psychologically, Liao Yiwu, he is still in prison today. This is manifest externally in his decision, for fear of bugs and scabies, to never again let his hair or beard grow. Because, in the prisons, at the hour of his greatest humiliation, he made a pledge: whatever the cost, he will testify in writing to his “unique way of living”: against the government. “When an individual engages in a game of risks with the state, power is distributed very unevenly, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to lose”. The price he must pay for this is high. When he fled his native land on 2 July 2011, his exit forestalled the renewed prison time he was threatened with if he ever published “ For a Song and a Hundred Songs” in the west. He has lived in exile in Germany ever since.

Liao Yiwu embodies a resistance performed by heart. Indeed, it is based “on a terror located at a deeper level than the long confinement and the physical agony”. It is the fear of being forgotten, of having lived and suffered in vain - a fear he shares with all those affected by the events on Tiananmen Square. “We hope that those on the outside remember and appreciate that we are trapped in this reality because of conscience, because of justice, because of truth”.

Liao Yiwu critique applies not just to the reality of today’s China, but even more to the unresolved past within that reality - a past that is in constant danger of being manipulated: “In line with the requirements of state power, fundamental historical facts are continually altered, replaced or discarded whenever necessary... But the individual’s memory of his humiliation runs deep in his blood; it instinctively influences what he says and how he acts - such stigmatisation can never be wiped away”. Besides Liao Yiwu, countless other political prisoners have been forced to learn this same painful lesson, including such prominent people as his friend and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the artist Ai Weiwei.

Liao Yiwu’s fixation with China’s oppressed is imbued with the author’s deep attachment to his country, its people and its traditions- a motivation often lost amid political labels such as “critic of the regime” and “dissident”. In collecting individual histories, Liao Yiwu restores dignity to the countless people that China’s rulers wish to quietly relegate to the “rubbish heap” of history. In doing so he remains true to his belief that people need someone “who raises his voice in the name of reality” more urgently than they need someone to speak in the name of history . This way of writing becomes an act of self-respect and, indeed, a means of reclaiming his own dignity. Liao Yiwu concludes “ For a Song and a Hundred Songs” with this hope. His work being widely read is the only guarantee that his dignity can never again be taken from him.

My esteemed Liao Yiwu, I bow to your courage, your resolve and your perseverance. May the Peace Prize embolden you in your conduct and in your work.