摘引阮一峰的网志，看看谁是宋以朗：

香港有一个著名英文网志“东南西北”（ESWN），专门将热点的中文文章翻译成英语，影响极大。

…..

我一直觉得这个人很传奇，且不说他是张爱玲作品的版权持有人，单单是他的翻译能力就很了不得。试想完全利用业余时间，将一篇5000字汉文译成英文，平均每个星期译三篇，一连干上4年，这是什么样的工作量！职业翻译家也很难做到吧，简直是活的翻译机器。我很好奇，他的动机是什么？他又是如何做到这一点的呢？—- [关于宋以朗]

If you’ve heard of him, chances are you also know what a human flesh search engine is; and while he may have not have coined the term, it can definitely be stated that he has single-handedly defined the term in English, provided dozens of examples of these engines in action, and written the book on what exactly it is that makes these engines tick.

So to us it just makes sense to say that Soong, aka the EastSouthWestNorth blogger, is best described as none other than a human flesh translation blogger. As for what makes him tick, though, we gave up trying to guess years ago. He says there is no secret but our most recent polls show that nobody believes that…

Media researcher, history documenter, uber blogger, hatchet man, second-generation Shanghai gang member, call him what you will. He’s all that and even more in Chinese; most notably, inheritor of Eileen Chang’s literary estate.

Don’t let the hatchet man repute set you off, though; he’s more likely to giggle than chop you one, and our experience has been that not even the dumbest of questions will go unanswered. So for those hoping to leave a good lasting impression, we turn to the 2005 profile done of him by Andrés Gentry:

3. Who are your intellectual heroes? What was the most powerful book you ever read?

Susan Sontag, without doubt, is foremost in my heart. I would not be the same person otherwise. Above all, I inherited her sense of guilt and ambivalence about being a privileged intellectual in a western society without any responsibility for the rest of the world. Whereas that sense of guilt impelled Susan Sontag to action, my guilt is compounded by my lack of significant action.

I can also include Elena Poniatowska, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Clarice Lispector, Natalia Ginzburg, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras (by the way, I just noticed that they are all women!). These are the authors whose works I go to bed with every night (that is, I pull a book of theirs off the bookshelf and start reading until I fall asleep) …

As for books, I would have like to say, NONE, for the reason that no book has changed my life. If I must, I will list Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. After the first few pages, I realized that I could never ever understand another human being. Here was this French-Canadian woman in her twenties writing about the Roman emperor in a way that I could never ever hope to. Alas, I will never understand Hadrian, nor Marguerite Yourcenar, nor any other human being … there exists an unbridgeable gulf between human beings ….
[...]
13. Is China a nation, a civilization, or an empire?

None of the above. I have no idea what these classifications mean. Instead, I quote the opening paragraph in the preface of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography — breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

We can’t finish this off without making a reference to Mr. Soong’s contribution to the cause of bridge-blogging, and in that adding that there’s probably nothing better that you could be doing with your time. As far as we know, he’s never made the point in that many words, but as many translation-oriented bloggers in these parts will tell you, he definitely does define it, that being the gist of fellow CNBloggerCon fellow speaker Michael Anti’s 2005 quote: “If an event was not described in English, it did not really happen.”

Funniest thing we’ve ever seen him translate:

Answer 4: From when I was young, the animal that I have come into contact with most often is the human. I have not spent any time with other animals and I don’t want to make love with them. Oh! I once accompanied a friend to a horse riding venue in mainland China. I did not dare to get on the horse so I just walked around. I suddenly spotted a horse — we looked at each other. Then I saw that it got an ‘erection’! Stupid! It was huge! The erection rose up bit by bit until it got very big. Then the horse showed its teeth to me. It was very strange, but the horse showed its teeth to me. Its teeth were dirty. Later on, I was moved at the idea that it got an erection when it saw me (a long time afterwards, I thought about it and I was sorry that I did not smile back at the horse).

“Do not wrestle with pigs in the mud. You get dirty and pigs enjoy it.”