One Man's Bible (42 page)
The organ and a choir. The hotel room has stylish old furniture, a heavy oak table, dark-brown carved wardrobes, and a wooden bed with round carved posts. Outside the window, no cars are flashing past the round streetlights. It is Sunday, late morning, and you are waiting for friends to take you to the airport to catch the plane back to Paris some time after noon.
1996 to 1998, in Paris
Gao Xingjian
is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi Province in eastern China, he has lived in France since 1987. Gao Xingjian is an artistic innovator, in both the visual arts and literature. He is that rare multi-talented artist who excels as a novelist, playwright, essayist, director, and painter. In addition to
Soul Mountain
and
One Man’s Bible
, a book of his plays,
The Other Shore
, and a volume of his paintings,
Return to Painting
, have been published in the United States.
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Mabel Lee, Ph.D.
, is Honorary Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Sydney and an authority on twentieth-century Chinese literature and history. She has translated
Soul Mountain
and
One Man’s Bible
from the Chinese.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
ONE MAN’S BIBLE
. Copyright © 1999 by Gao Xingjian. English-language translation copyright © 2002 by Mabel Lee. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“ ‘No-isms’: A Conversation with Gao Xingjian.” Copyright © 2001 by the Asia Society of New York. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
“Translating Gao: Mabel Lee on Gao Xingjian.” Copyright © 2002 by Mabel Lee. All rights reserved. A slightly different version was published by Purdue University Press in
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal
. Reprinted with permission.
EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780061760303
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION 2002
First published as
Yige ren de shengjing
in Taipei, Taiwan, by Lianjing Publishing House, 1999.
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