When the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) recently held the launch party for its new £20 note, one of the designers responsible who should have been in attendance felt her time would be better spent giving a talk on calligraphy amid the alleyways behind Hunan Lu in Nanjing.
苏格兰皇家银行（RBS）最近举办了新版20英镑纸币的发布会，一位本应出席的设计师认为，她最好把时间花在南京湖南路后面的小巷里进行书法讲座。
Susie Leiper was in Nanjing last weekend on a family visit. Both Leiper’s daughters live in China; Chloe in Shanghai, while Francesca is, fittingly, art columnist for The Nanjinger.
苏西·莱珀（Susie Leiper）上周末在南京探亲。莱珀的两个女儿都住在中国；克洛伊在上海，而弗朗西斯卡则是《南京人》的艺术专栏作家。
Yet, that did not stop the creative family from organising an impromptu workshop on the theme of “Chinese-Western Calligraphy”, held on 28 October in Solar Villa. The venue’s previous incarnation, Solar, watering hole and hangout spot for the then in-crowd, has recently been taken over by new ownership intent on turning it into a locale for more artistic events such as these.
然而，这并没有阻止这个创意家族于10月28日在太阳山庄举办了一场以“中西书法”为主题的即兴工作坊。该场馆的前身是 Solar，是当时人群的酒吧和聚会场所，最近被新主人接管，意图将其变成举办更多此类艺术活动的场所。
After giving her talk on Western calligraphy to around 30 attendees, Leiper was countered by her Eastern equivalent, Huang Cen, of the Jiangsu Academy of Art, Jiangsu Artists Association. A Q&A followed, after which Leiper sat down with The Nanjinger to address the accusation that Chinese calligraphy is capable of being more potent than its Western counterpart.
在向大约 30 名与会者发表了关于西方书法的演讲后，莱珀遭到了江苏美术学院、江苏省美术家协会的东方同行黄岑的反驳。随后进行了问答，随后莱珀与《南京人》坐下来讨论了有关中国书法比西方书法更有影响力的指控。
“In Chinese, each word is a character. Each character is a design. So you have a huge bank of things you can pull on to design, whereas with 26 letters, you tend to end up with a string of regularity. But that is beginning to change now.”
“在中文中，每个单词都是一个字符。每个字符都是一个设计。所以你可以利用大量的东西来设计，而如果有 26 个字母，你往往会得到一串规律性的字符串。但现在这种情况开始改变。”
On being commissioned as part of the team to design the new notes for the once-biggest-bank-in-the-world, Leiper recalled, “The design agency said to the bank, ‘Do you want the usual dude with a castle, or would you like something different? And the bank fortunately had somebody quite avant garde in there, so she said, ‘Maybe we’ll do something different’.
莱珀回忆说，在被委托为曾经世界上最大的银行设计新钞票时，“设计机构对银行说，‘你想要一个有城堡的普通人，还是想要一些不同的东西？幸运的是，银行里有一个非常前卫的人，所以她说，‘也许我们会做一些不同的事情’。”
“So this design agency went off all over Scotland and asked the people of Scotland what they wanted on their bank notes, and it turned out what they wanted was the theme of nature.”
“所以这个设计机构跑遍了苏格兰，询问苏格兰人民他们想要在钞票上印上什么，结果发现他们想要的是自然主题。”
Leiper is of 27 designers to see their work on the new RBS currency; the latest five, ten and now £20 polymer bank notes. Leiper’s calligraphy debuted in 2016 on the then-new-£5 note, which features illustrations of Scottish poet Nan Shepherd, and was also the first part of the new series of, as a result of the aforementioned poll, “Fabric of Nature”-themed notes.
Leiper 是 27 名设计师中的一员，他们将在新的 RBS 货币上展示他们的作品；最新的 5 英镑、10 英镑以及现在的 20 英镑塑料钞票。莱珀的书法于 2016 年在当时新的 5 英镑纸币上首次亮相，上面有苏格兰诗人南·谢泼德 (Nan Shepherd) 的插图，也是上述民意调查结果的新系列“自然织物”主题纸币的第一部分。
For the fans of typography, Leiper’s calligraphy on the new notes is written in 16th Century Scottish Secretary hand. “The trouble with [it], is it’s very difficult to read, even for me. So I had to look at old documents and work out, that’s an ‘e’, that’s a ‘d’. I mean it was really hard, and then try to write that with a flow…”
对于印刷术爱好者来说，新纸币上的莱珀书法是出自 16 世纪苏格兰秘书之手。 “[它]的问题在于，即使对我来说，它也很难阅读。所以我必须查看旧文档并计算出，这是一个‘e’，那是一个‘d’。我的意思是这真的很难，然后尝试用流程来写……”
One of Britain’s leading calligraphers, Leiper is known both for her traditional skills in writing with quills on vellum and for her innovative use of the Chinese brush as a writing tool. Leiper’s formative years as a calligrapher were spent in Hong Kong, where she developed her passion for Chinese art and language. Calligraphy, painting, poetry; the three arts most treasured by the Chinese. Leiper aspires to marry western calligraphy, painting and poetry with the spontaneity and harmony of a Chinese master.
莱珀是英国顶尖的书法家之一，她以在羊皮纸上用羽毛笔书写的传统技巧和对中国毛笔作为书写工具的创新使用而闻名。莱珀在香港度过了书法家的成长岁月，在那里她培养了对中国艺术和语言的热情。书法、绘画、诗歌；中国人最珍视的三艺。莱珀渴望将西方书法、绘画和诗歌与中国大师的自然和谐结合起来。
The Scotsman newspaper has described Leiper’s work as, “Western script with the skill of an oriental calligrapher. Text is combined with painting, drawing and sculpture, too”.
《苏格兰人报》将莱珀的作品描述为“具有东方书法家技巧的西方文字。文本也与绘画、素描和雕塑相结合”。
