我把那些喜欢的叫做英文，那些头疼的叫做英语---------bella 语

我不知道除了我自己和冯头以外还有谁会认认真真逐字逐句读过这个小文章，对于我来说，这个小文章是我在英文系一次贴心的旅程，虽然至今它也不符合冯头三段论的要求，我习惯用一种中文的思维写这个文章，我不打算传达某种英式的理念，我只是传达cissy zhou 的一些想法，只是那时候碰巧用英文写了，初衷不是写一篇合格的英文文章，而是我所想表达的，我尽量用我的方式，让生涩的英文美丽一些，我对语言和文字的态度向来如此，我没有强大的词汇量，语法和拼写都会莫名其妙的出现纰漏（不管是中文还是英文，从小在外语班我就是让helen头疼的女生，我在英文系的时候分数最高的课程是翻译和写作，至于都说我文章写得好的语文，考试的时候常常是主观题不太扣分，客观体一塌糊涂），我终于明白我爱的是文字感觉，却又不是它的本身，赫赫就是字里行间的东西，我着迷琅琅上口的语言和文字，但是并不愿解刨，原来我喜爱的是一种感觉呢，你明白吗？其实我自己也不明白，呵呵

至少这个文章可以映射我最近的一种状态，……过段时间，我会学一把林语堂的《京华烟云》，把它翻译成中文，（京华烟云可是先有英文版再有中文版的哦）哈哈

Andersen is Angry

By C. Zhou

At the bottom of one’s heart, there is a world, where the reality is never allowed to enter, while the dreams, whether sweet or dreadful, however, can turn out to be true fantastically. There are varieties of methods for me to set foot in this world, such as, falling head over heels into the habitat of Mr. Rabbit¹, climbing up along a green magic pea vine onto the yellow moon²; or traveling by Kansas’ wind flying over the colorful rainbow³. Otherwise, I can browse my favorite Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales.

However, Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Denmark’s most illustrious son’⁴, and his fairy tales were feted all over the world for

 centuries is not appreciated by everyone, as well as many other great writers and their works. In history, ignorance and misunderstanding are always like a shadow following some of the famous writers and their works. These great writers are forced to face such an odd neglect: through those abridged and mistranslated versions, people can hardly find any brilliance of the writer. What is left after reading are only misunderstanding and incomprehension. It is just one of the typical examples, Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales are always branded as readings written merely for kids. Many adults and even a few children doubt about my addiction to Andersen’s fairy world. In their suspect, those who abandon oneself to the fictitious and untrue world must be some ignorant people growing up with babyish heads, or those never-want-to-grow-up girls and boys who refuse to accept the adult’s world.

In my perspective, for those once going on journey through the attractive fairy world, no one but Andersen can bring much more dazzlingly brilliant treasure from this imaginary wonderland. Even his own life is considered as “A Fairy Tale.” Hans Christian Andersen created a world that lived in the imagination, and yet, which also reflected the reality. His 168 stories including The Little Mermaid and Thumbelina together with The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Snow Queen have become part of world culture tradition. Not only set in a beautifully rendered 19th century Europe, the fiction tells of the fairy tale life of the world's most magical storyteller, which is as humorous, inventive and as inspirational as the master's immortal stories themselves. There is human uncertainty, which considered as the great distinction between the tales of Andersen and other traditional fairy tales, such as Tales of Grimm. In these tradition folk narratives, everyone’s path is prescribed; you cannot distinguish between witch and witch, prince and prince, goose-girl and shepherdess.⁵ As a comparison, in Andersen, not only the people have an individual human quality but those silly household objects themselves. He once wrote in his diary: “Even two potatoes are unlike—but two men!”⁶ Actually no two potatoes are alike in Andersen’s tales.

His tales are often tragic or gruesome in plot. His sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity contributed to his mastery of the genre. However, all of these brilliances cannot avoid the bias which always goes with this great writer, even when Andersen, in his honored last years. This was shown in the plan for his projected national statue, a design which included a crowding cluster of children, he angrily protested. “I pointed out”, he wrote in his diary, “that … I could not bear anyone behind me, nor had I children on my back, or my lap, or between my legs when I read; that my fairy tales were as much for older people as for children… The naïve was only a part of my fairy tales; humor was the real salt in them.”⁷

Poor Andersen must have been angry for years. He is angry, because he is almost never thought of as a literary artist, like his contemporaries Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Flaubert. He is angry because he is usually grouped instead with the Brothers Grimm, who did not invent their folk tales but recorded them; He is angry because he is reduced to a cliché, a kindly uncle surrounded by kids, as in the classic movie with Danny Kaye.⁸ This giant of the literary world has dropped to such a low position and even belittled as a nursery governor in kindergarten.

Nevertheless, Andersen was not the only victim of today’s reading bias. Jean－Henri Fabre, dropped in the same fate as Andersen. His Souvenirs Entomology is unusually considered as a children’s popular science book. Actually, in Souvenirs Entomology, the vivid pictures of these lovely tiny insects serve as a mirror reflects the truth of science and humanity. Jean-Henri Fabre’s pursuing for science and his pleasure gained from his little ‘hoc erat in votes’ ⁹ form the special Fabre’s spirit which is lacking in the characteristics of people in modern society. And also Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are only names familiar to most of the people just as part of collective memory of one’s childhood. In fact, these two adventures have their significant standards in the American literature world as prisms of the American history with Mark Twain’s fantasies, which are derived from and turned against the contemporary literary context within which he was working.

This does not mean that people don’t read books or classic works nowadays. Everyday, increasing numbers of books are published and sold through varieties of methods; classic works have been printed in several editions by different presses; huge advertisements with well-printed pictures of books can be seen in almost every window of bookstores. It seems that in every living-room, there should be at least one huge bookshelf with various books on it. In this ever-running modern world, through the Internet or other modern methods, famous critics are writing numbers of articles talking about new literature works for Cultural Pages of newspapers and magazines. There are special TV programs introducing new books and exchanging feelings of reading. Different kinds of best-seller-lists are renewed with every hit. It seems that people read more books and become more knowledgeable today. However, this kind of reading habits turns out with preconception and blindness. People read the book, but never communicate with its writer from heart; people know about the book, but are utterly ignorant about the sprit. People read the book because the advertisement said so, because it is heard to be famous. It is fatuous that some read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, because the Hollywood beauty Nicole Kidman has acted Virginia Woolf in the movie The Hours; some read the Unendurable Lightness in Life, because today reading Milan Kundera’s fictions are considered as a fashionable lifestyle of petty bourgeoisie. People know about Hu Lancheng, the famous scholar who wrote the History of Chinese Literature, only because he once was Eileen Chang¹⁰’s lover and husband, but neglect his elegant and beautiful writing style. Sometimes they open Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, get ready to read a few lines to the child in bed, but are shocked by finding sex hint in The Snow Queen or the bloody and terrible ending in The Red Shoes.

Isn’t that just as absurd as the naked emperor¹¹ walking in the street self-deceivingly? Walking on the bustling road of

Zhongguancun, crushing my way through the crowd in entrance and exit of Beijing subway, carrying my huge and heavy schoolbag into the school library, I actually realize that I encounter so many “emperors” everyday. Possibly used to be one among them, however, thank goodness, I have fortune Hans Andersen and his fairy world, which just like the small child in the story, who piped up with his ‘voice of innocence’, ¹²wakes me up.

People’s reading habits are usually fully influenced by many reasons. Faced with the speculation in book business, the diversity of culture and the high-speed modern society, we sadly find that the modern life have often failed to offer us time and space to get down to read some books. People can only cast in an instant of these classics through the abridged edition or movies and TV series which are adapted from original works. It is really a great loss to humanities that these invaluable human heritages are gown with the wind under the atmosphere of modern civilization.

Just imagine how angry and frustrated these Andersens are when they found their work for which they work their heart out, are misunderstood by so many readers. Remember their works can take you into wonderful worlds where you can meet fantastical people and see remarkable things. They can carry you to far off lands and show you extraordinary sights beyond what you thought was possible. They can teach, guide, comfort, and amuse you. They are a doorway that you can carry under your arm.

Excuse yourself from the usual weekend parties in the noisy disco, instead lay languidly on your bed, trying to look as if you had a headache and pretending to read a very fancy story called, I think, The Princess and the Pea, or The Little Mermaid, until the room quieted, the building quieted, and the whole world quieted. Follow these ‘Andersen’s into the fairy world in the heart. Whenever you are in sadness or happiness, in leisure or in business, in youth or in age, and in ups or in downs, do not leave them in the dust, do not disappoint them, and do not make ‘Andersen’s angry again.