Recent Posts
The 'Officialdom Novel' Genre
There are many such hidden rules in official circles, and a special genre titled the "Officialdom Novel" (Guanchang Xiaoshuo) revealing such secrets has been gaining popularity in the past few years, reflecting an "artistic reality" the country is going through.
Following this previous link to an interview with Mo Yan in French, Igor Yegorov wrote in with an English translation so we didn't all have to suffer through the Google translator. Thanks Igor!
Writer Mo Yan : From dictatorship of the Party to that of the market
By Bertrand Mialaret | 24/06/2009 | 12H57
The Chinese writer Mo Yan is spending a week in France to talk about his books and his new novel, due to be published in late August. The meeting with him in Beijing was facilitated for Rue89 by Bertrand Mialaret, chronicler of Chinese literature, and Pierre Haski. The exchange was rendered possible by Chantal Chen Andro, translator of several books by Mo Yan.
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 30, 1:03p.m.
Some folks document contemporary Chinese society with words. Others do it with photography, visual art, music or film. At Paper Republic, we tend to focus on the wordsmiths: the novelists, essayists and poets who form the landscape of Chinese literature, and help to shape our perceptions of modern China.
But some of the most daring work in China today is being done by independent documentarians, guerrilla filmmakers armed with newly-affordable digital cameras, laptop computers and editing software. They tend to work alone, on shoestring budgets, outside the state-owned studio distribution system and - perhaps more importantly - beyond the reach of censors. And they're not the cast-offs, people who couldn't cut it the world of mainstream film: many are graduates of the Beijing Film Academy, alumni of China Central Television (CCTV), accomplished directors or cinematographers who left lucrative commercial careers to make the kind of films they always wanted to.
One of these days, we'll have a section on Paper Republic about Chinese indie film. Maybe we'll call it Digital Republic. In the meantime, my little bio of film work includes synopses of a dozen outstanding documentaries and feature films from the last 8 years, with links to directors (photos/bios/filmographies), film festival awards and reviews in industry publications. Some of the highlights:
Wang Bing - continuing "his run as one of the world's supreme doc filmmakers with Fengming: A Chinese Memoir." (Variety)
Zhao Liang - whose Crime and Punishment "cements China's position as a doc powerhouse" (Variety), says that sometimes he feels "like I’m stealing from the people I shoot. It’s their life that has given me the inspiration to create, and that’s why I feel guilty."
Li Ying - who was forced to relocate his production company offices in Tokyo after receiving right-wing death threats related to his film Yasukuni, a controversial documentary about Japan's Yasukuni Shrine. Although the film was expected to sail through the Chinese censorship process, it has yet to be approved for theatrical release in China.
Cui Zi'en - author, director and university professor widely hailed as one of the pioneers of Chinese queer cinema.
And those are just the filmmakers I've translated, the ones who happened to make the list. Here are some other outstanding documentary directors, not to be missed:
Du Haibin: Along the Railway, Beautiful Men, Umbrella
Wu Wenguang: Bumming in Beijing, Dances with Migrant Workers, Fuck Cinema!
Yang Lina: Old Men, Home Video, The Love of Mr. An
Ni Zhen: Graduation, Postscript
Duan Jinchuan: The Square, No.16 Barkhor Street
Zhang Yuan: The Square, Demolition and Relocation, Crazy English
Yu Guangyi: The Last Lumberjacks, Survival Song
Luo Jian/Jiang Ping: Tale of Zhou
By Cindy M. Carter, June 29, 12:25p.m.
Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour
Chris Irwin, who lives outside London, was irked by the third multiple-choice question, which asked what “incentive” translators would prefer, with five nonmonetary choices including an upgraded LinkedIn account and none (“because it’s fun”). Mr. Irwin checked a sixth choice, “Other,” typing in that he would prefer cash. In a phone interview, Mr. Irwin said he was surprised that LinkedIn “would have the effrontery to ask for a professional service for free.”
Adam Kirsch’s review of David Hinton’s Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology begins with a brief retrospective of Ezra Pound’s work as the first serious translator of 中国古诗. Its use is primarily rhetorical. Though Kirsch is careful to note the obvious care with which Pound handled his task, he spends the greater portion of his word limit in describing the seemingly insuperable gaps in expertise that separated the translator from his subject. This allows him, when he gets to Hinton, to endow the reader with a sense of perspective as well as a vague idea of progress. I say rhetorical because the most dependable avenue by which Kirsch might have been able to derive substantial conclusions regarding Hinton’s relative merits—direct textual analysis—he leaves entirely alone. This may be due to lack of confidence in his own ability to critique pieces whose originals he can’t read, or because he believes that evaluation is a task better left to the reader. Both are worthy considerations.
More…
By Canaan Morse, June 29, 12:05a.m.
Mo Yan in France this Week: It's all about money!
« Mao avait dit la politique en premier, l'économie en second ; actuellement tout est au service de l'économie. Autrefois le peuple considérait la politique comme importante, maintenant c'est l'argent. »
A short interview with Mo Yan, 15 (!) of whose works are available in French.
Granta Interview with Ha Jin
For me, the most important of all is to have a sense of the English ear: how much it can receive a foreign language presented in English. In general, if a character speaks Mandarin or another foreign language, the speech should not be too standard in English, but then how much can it be stretched and even distorted? That has to be decided case by case.
My review of Eileen Chow & Carlos Rojas's translation of Brothers 兄弟 by Yú Huá 余華 is out, printed in this summer's edition of Rain Taxi.
Since it's only available in print, you'll have to order a copy from the website or else pick up an issue--for free--where available. They're often on offer at independent bookstores in North America.
By Lucas Klein, June 18, 10:42p.m.
Not Totally Halal
"At the entrance of the theatre, though, JAT noticed this silly, but egregious translation error: '4 Uygur theater admission matters needing attention'."
(To see the poster and text, scroll down to "Out of Character")
Translator Interview: Brendan O'Kane
Sinosplice has an interview with our very own Brendan O'Kane, in which he discusses his background, literary interests and the realities of working as a freelance translator in China. The interview offers practical advice for early-career translators and students of Chinese, and includes a useful summary of print and online dictionaries and Chinese reference materials. I liked the following quotes:
"Chinese-as-a-second-language teaching materials [...] don't really do much to prepare students for dealing with Chinese as a living language. (When asked my opinion of Chinese textbooks, I tend to rate them from 'bad' to 'less bad.') Once you get past a certain level, language environment is the real make-or-break factor."
"Chengyu, while nice, tend to be much less visible to a Chinese reader than they would be to a foreign reader of Chinese, so there's no real excuse for rendering something like 每个字贵如金玉 into chinoiserie like 'every word was as precious as gold or jade' when the text is just using a bog-standard set phrase that would pass unnoticed in Chinese. Knowing what to delete and what to add, what to soft-pedal and what to amplify in a translation is important, and the only way you can really know is by having a sense of what people are actually saying — and that comes from long-term immersion in the environment."
The David T. K. Wong Fellowship
The David T. K. Wong Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr. David Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman, who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of short stories himself. The Fellowship was launched in 1997 and the first Fellow appointed from 1st October 1998. The Fellowship Winner in 2008 was Nam Le. His collection of short stories, The Boat, won the Dylan Thomas Prize (2008). Further details of the Fellowship, including terms and conditions and how to apply, can be found on our website at https://www.uea.ac.uk/lit/awards/wong. The deadline for applications is 31 December 2010.
Erudite confusion
Dressed in a sharp, light summer frock, Professor Yu Dan sits in the cafeteria of a posh Beijing hotel, sipping from a largish glass of green tea. Just back from a book tour in London, where the English translation of her phenomenally-successful discourse on Confucian ideas was launched with due fanfare, the professor of media studies with Beijing Normal University-turned TV show hostess-turned bestseller-author is visibly glowing.
Comma Press is an independent publisher based in the UK, specialising in short fiction. In 2007 Comma launched a translation imprint, with the remit of bringing original, contemporary short stories in translation to UK readers.
Comma is currently exploring the feasibility of publishing an anthology of contemporary Chinese short stories, translated for the first time. They say: "As we begin our search for stories to consider, we’d welcome putative submissions from literary translators interested in taking part and willing to recommend stories for inclusion in the anthology."
More…
By Nicky Harman, June 6, 1:52p.m.
Ha Jin fiction in Granta
‘I can manage. This is easy.’ He smiled, cutting the fish’s fins and tail with a large pair of scissors.
‘You never cooked back home.’ She stared at him, her eyes glinting. Ever since her arrival a week earlier, she’d been nagging him about his being henpecked. ‘What’s the good of standing six feet tall if you can’t handle a small woman like Connie?’ she often said. In fact, he was five feet ten.
Thoughts on Brothers and dirty words
Dirty words are a huge part of the book and they don't feel quite right, ever. Sometimes it feels like the swear words are being spoken by a kindergarten teacher and sometimes by, you know, not a kindergarten teacher.
I can't agree that Baldy Li was trying to look at Lin Hong's "pubic area." He was a horny little kid peeping in a public toilet, not a gynecologist. And, yo, she wasn't a "wanton hussy" or a "shameless hussy," she was a "slut." You know? To have Chinese villagers calling someone a "cretin" feels kind of weird somehow.
An Australian publisher just visited my web site, Chinese Books, English Reviews and very kindly took the time to tell me what s/he is hoping for in a potential China author/book:
1) Quality writing
2) Adds to one's knowledge of contemporary China in an interesting, challenging way
3) Would sell many copies
4) Author could be invited to Australia as a guest at writers' festivals
5) Global English rights available.
By Bruce Humes, June 1, 11:53p.m.
Foreign publishers considering attending the 2009 Beijing International Book Fair might want to know about the Special Publisher Program, aimed at publishers who want to attend the fair but are a little tight on funds. The application deadline for this program has been extended to the end of July, so if you're interested click here for more details and application instructions.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 31, 5:29a.m.
Four Articles on the Anniversary
For this anniversary, the Op-Ed editors [of the NY Times] asked four writers, who were students or working at the time, to reflect back on the event.
There's a song that's been making its way around the Internet: Zhou Yunpeng's "Don't Ever Be a Chinese Child"
(不要做中國人的孩子 by 周云蓬) - if the above link is blocked, try this. I've been working on a translation, but felt it was too depressing to post. Maybe it's time:
Don't Ever Be a Chinese Child
Don't be a child of Karamay
whose burns would scorch a mother's heart
Don't be a child of Salan Town
who finds no rest beneath dark waters
Don't be a child of Chengdu
who waits for mum's return
after her week-long binge
Chorus (children laughing)
Don't be a child of Henan
where AIDS cackles in the blood
Don't be a child of Shanxi
where mines turn dads
into baskets of coal
Chorus (laughter)
Don't be a child of Karamay
Don't be a child of Salan Town
Don't be a child of Chengdu
Don't be a child of Henan...
Don't ever be a Chinese child,
or the grown-ups will
eat you when they starve
At least in the wild,
mountain goats are fierce
enough to protect their kids
Don't ever be a Chinese child,
because mommy and
daddy are cowards
When the theatre caught fire,
they steeled their hearts
and let the cadres exit first.
不要做中國人的孩子
周云蓬
不要做克拉瑪依的孩子，
火燒痛皮膚讓親娘心焦
不要做沙蘭鎮的孩子，
水底下漆黑他睡不著
不要做成都人的孩子，
吸毒的媽媽七天七夜不回家
不要做河南人的孩子，
愛滋病在血液裡哈哈的笑
不要做山西人的孩子，
爸爸變成了一筐煤，
你別再想見到他
不要做中國人的孩子，
餓極了他們會把你吃掉
還不如曠野中的老山羊，
為保護小羊而目露兇光
不要做中國人的孩子，
爸爸媽媽都是些怯懦的人
為證明他們的鐵石心腸，
死到臨頭讓領導先走
Zhou Yunpeng is a blind folk musician - singer, songwriter and guitarist - now living in Beijing.
By Cindy M. Carter, May 29, 2:25p.m.
Brothers & English Reviewed by Gregory McCormick
Brothers is not a tale of two individuals struggling to overcome. Rather, it is China’s story, and the experience of Baldy and Song Gang can be seen as the germination of the “modern” and the “old” ideologies that currently duel to establish credibility in modern China.
If the characters in English can be said to determine their fate, then love—most specifically, failed love—is where that individuality finds its expression. The tale abounds in secret crushes, love affairs, adultery, obsession, and broken hearts. Love becomes subversive, a personal route through the complexities of a conformist society.
NPR interview with Yu Hua
"The Cultural Revolution was a craziness for revolution, then we had a craziness to earn money," Yu says. "It's like a pendulum that's swung from one extreme to another. It's gone from being an extremely oppressive society to being an extremely free one with no moderation."
Jiang Rong interview on NPR
In 1967, amid China's Cultural Revolution, he volunteered to go to the countryside to learn from the peasants. He was 21, a fervent revolutionary Red Guard, yet rebellious enough to take two crates of Western literary classics to the countryside with him. He spent the next 11 years in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.
From Sunday 19 - Saturday 25 July 2009, the British Centre for literary Translation (BCLT) at the university holds its tenth annual International Literary Translation Summer School, which will for the first time offer an intensive workshop in translation from Chinese to English. This hands-on networking and training opportunity takes place at UEA from July 19-25 and will involve author Xinran (China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, Miss Chopsticks, The Good Women of China) and her translator Nicky Harman.
Also, as part of the Worlds Literary Festival, to be held at various venues in Norfolk from June 20-25, BCLT is also hosting author and filmmaker Zhu Wen (I Love Dollars, released by Penguin in 2008) and his translator Julia Lovell. The festival, entitled Worlds in Translation, is a celebration of international writing and includes various readings, workshops and panel discussions that will be open to the public.
More…
By Nicky Harman, May 27, 11:04a.m.
Kim Jong Il, a Chinese Orphan and North Korea's Nuke Test
What’s the link between Kim Jong Il, an orphan raised in Nanjing, and Korea’s recent nuclear test?
The answer to that conundrum lies buried deep within Kim Jong Il’s Godson Yang Bin: From Orphan to Sinuiju SAR Chief, a Chinese book soon to be published in English...
Publishing industry reform
The futility has not gone unnoticed. Because of its political sensitivity, publishing is one of the last industries in China to undergo a restructuring. But the government now says that it wants to eliminate subsidies (which are presumably large, but undisclosed) to the many lossmaking state-owned publishers. Instead it will force them to merge with the private “culture studios” that produce the majority of books with popular appeal. These are much more commercially successful, but technically illegal.
Poem of the week: The One Hundred Years of Solitude of Chinese Poetry by Zeng Di
In fact, of course, I came across it in PN Review, not Tesco's. The poet is the leading Beijing writer and scholar, Zeng Di; the translators, Ao Wang and Eleanor Goodman. Outlining their approach to translation, Goodman writes: "We are looking to keep as close as possible to the original poem in voice, tone, meaning, structure and emotional import, while simultaneously producing something readable in English. In fact, our ultimate goal is much more ambitious: an accurate translation that reads like an original poem."
[Note: the poet's name 臧棣 should properly be romanized Zang Di]
In a comment to my post on May 4th & Chinese Literature in Translation, talking about disparities in how different genres of Chinese literature are represented in English, I wrote:
find me one English translation of a single-author collection of poems by a poet living in China.
I was thinking that someone might mention books by Taiwanese poets Shang Qin 商禽 or Hsia Yu 夏宇, both translated by Steven Bradbury (and published by Zephyr Press, a great small press with a large repertoire of translations from the Chinese). And I knew of other works in progress of mainland authors, still awaiting publication.
But I didn't expect that another answer would come from Tibet. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a package sent by A. E. Clark, with a book of his translations of Tibetan-Chinese poet Woeser, Tibet's True Heart, published by Ragged Banner Press.
Woeser writes in Chinese and now lives in Beijing, but her writing is infused with the complexities of her Tibetan cultural background. I haven't yet read Tibet's True Heart, but I look forward to reading Andrew Clark's English versions of her poems.
Sample poems and more recent writing of Woeser can be found on the Ragged Banner website.
By Lucas Klein, May 18, 10:33p.m.
Top China Fiction: March 2009 Chinese Best Sellers
The list of China's Top 30 best sellers for March 2009 is out, lead by Han Han's A Daydream (他的国), with the top ten also featuring Chinese translations of books from the West such as Bernhard Schlinks' The Reader and Meyer Stephanie's Twilight Journals.
But several of the best sellers are part of a series written in Chinese, such as The Story of Lala's Promotion (two volumes), Soldiers and their Commanders (two), and The Tibet Code, a five-volume classic which still hasn't dropped off the charts.
The Guardian's Chinese-language service
In an experimental project, the Guardian is collaborating with Yeeyan, a ground-breaking community translation website, to offer Chinese language versions of a selection of articles daily.
Yeeyan is a network of volunteers who translate material which they think would be of interest to a Chinese audience. The selection of Guardian articles for translation is made by Yeeyan members. You can see all Guardian articles available in Chinese here. Where you see this link - "阅读中文 | Read this in Chinese" - on Guardian stories in English, you can follow the link to a Chinese version. For all Guardian coverage of China, plus reports from Danwei, a Beijing-based website on media and urban life, go to guardian.co.uk/china.
China Censorship Primer: Just Say “No” to Female Orgasms
Don’t let media in the West fool you—talking about sex in China is not taboo. But apparently references to female genitalia and orgasms are still big no-nos.
To see how such touchy subjects are handled in Chinese media, let’s take a look at what happened to the Guardian’s “China to Open First Sex Theme Park” (May 15, 2009) when it was translated and published in China's leading digest of international news, Cankao Xiaoxi.
A 1989 Dinner with Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, from The China Beat
"The first time I met Mao..." Mr. Yang said with a clipped British inflection, sounding rather like a seasoned raconteur who needed no prompting to start telling an oft-repeated tale, "the Chairman asked me if it was really possible to translate Chinese into English. He was really puzzled by that. Mao had a good mind, but he was not skilled at foreign languages..."
The Drawbridge welcomes submissions, translated from Chinese, for its upcoming issues, Silence and First Love.
The Drawbridge is an independent literary and cultural quarterly based in London, with a worldwide outlook. You can get a sense of its scope at its website. Each issue casts a broad net around a specific theme. The Silence issue publishes in August, with a text deadline of 26 June. The deadline for FirstLove (November) is 11 September. Short fiction and non-fiction equally welcome. Target length 1,200-2,000 words.
The Drawbridge is unable to offer a fee for contributions,but any published work reaches up to 15,000 intellectually curious and internationally aware readers, including many UK and international publishers and agents.
Contact the commissioning editor, Mark Reynolds:
mark@thedrawbridge.org.uk
By Nicky Harman, May 15, 9:49a.m.
TNR article on classical Chinese poetry
The ideograms, which Pound turned into an obsession, that make up some (though far from all) Chinese characters; the very notion of words as single characters, rather than permutations of an alphabet; the tones that determine the meaning of words, and whose patterning is a central element of Chinese verse; the attenuation or absence of many features of English grammar, including pronouns and tenses--all these factors make it impossible for the reader of an English translation to have any accurate sense of how a Chinese poem sounds, moves, and feels to a Chinese reader.
A Tribute to the Chinese Earthquake Victims
My friend Wen Huang — translator of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Xianhui Yang’s Woman from Shanghai — contacted me this morning about the article below that Liao Yiwu wrote in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the devastating Beichuan earthquake.
Three Percent Reviews Brothers
Along the way, there are endless reverses of fortune—Song Gang ends up marrying Lin Hong, Baldy Li’s grand schemes bankrupt him and lead him to collecting trash—and numerous side stories that give this novel a sort of Dickensian quality, allowing Yu Hua to really sketch out Chinese society both during and after Mao. The epic scope of the novel, along with Hua’s ability to shift from warm humor to sheer horror in the same sentence, are the real high points of this book. It’s easy to get sucked into Hua’s world, even when the reader knows exactly what’s going to happen next, which is true a good deal of the time.
St. Jerome may be the patron saint of all translators, but for those of us working in Chinese literature, David Hawkes is something like a living buddha. His work on the first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone would be enough, but there's also Songs of the South (translations of Qu Yuan and other 楚辞), and A Little Primer of Tu Fu, an authoritative introduction to the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu.
Hawkes, now long retired, lives in Oxford, and when we were in London recently, we made a special trip up to the original college town (absolutely beautiful) to pay him a visit. He and his wife graciously received us, and fed us, and we had two short hours to talk about China and Chinese literature. We exchanged reminiscences about Beijing – apparently we have lived in spots only a few blocks apart – which I later had to re-evaluate when I realized that the last time he was in Beijing it still had its city walls, and he arrived there by steamship.
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, 4:32a.m.
The following is a translation of this article from Caijing magazine, entitled 译书有禁区 (Book Translation's 'Forbidden Area' in China).
Here's a comment left by a netizen on this writer's blog post, 'Huiyuan is a Foreign Enterprise':
"Is there a Chinese language version of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics? Can you buy it on the Mainland?"
My blog post described a few ideas from a new book by Professor Huang Yasheng, at MIT's Sloan School of Management (Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Professor Huang is an overseas-Chinese scholar, and his book is written in English. But I must agree with the commenter's point: there's little chance that a Chinese translation of the book could be published.
In fact, very few books published abroad by overseas-Chinese scholars are translated into Chinese, particularly when the books are written on the subject of China. Some scholarly works are translated into Chinese, but with some of the contents altered. Of course, works by non overseas-Chinese also meet with the same treatment.
I'll give a few other examples of which I'm aware:
In 2005, Hu Danian, professor of history at the City University of New York, published China and Albert Einstein through the Harvard University Press (China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979, Harvard University Press, 2005). One year later, Professor Hu translated his own book into Chinese as 爱因斯坦在中国 (1917－1979), adding quite a bit of newly-discovered historical material, and it was published by the Shanghai Science and Technology Education Publishing House, part of the Shanghai Century Publishing Group.
The part of the book describing criticisms of Einstein and his theories during the Cultural Revolution was deleted, and the names of several famous people, including famous scientists, were removed. Interested readers can compare the published versions with some chapters available online:
http://www.tecn.cn/data/18249.html
The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, 2004), by Professor Oded Shenkar, Ohio State University's School of Business, was published in Chinese in 2005 by the People's University Press. But the chapters on intellectual property rights were deleted altogether, because the translator did not agree with the writer's point of view.
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, 3:03a.m.
NEA funds contemporary Chinese poetry anthology
The National Endowment for the Arts today announced that Copper Canyon Press, an internationally renowned nonprofit literary publisher, will be the U.S. publisher for its International Literary Exchange with the People's Republic of China. NEA International Literary Exchanges support U.S.-based presses in publishing and promoting contemporary anthologies in translation. Based in Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication, and promotion of a bilingual anthology of work by 30-40 Chinese poets born after 1945.
Expected to be published in spring 2011, the anthology will be edited by award-winning poet and editor Qingping Wang, who also will write the introduction to the volume. The anthology will be co-translated by noted Chinese literature scholars and translators Howard Goldblatt and his wife, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, who jointly received the American Translators Association Translation of the Year award in 1999 for their translation of Notes of a Desolate Man by Taiwanese novelist Chu T'ienwen.
Via Three Percent.
Han Han and the post-80s
Han’s magazine, which still doesn’t have a name to avoid imitations, is presented in this blog post. A very Chinese and a very “hanhan” announcement, interesting for several reasons. But before I speak of it let me give some background on Han Han. I’ve been planning to write about him for ages, and never found the time until today.
Talking Translation at the London Book Fair
As an avid reader of the blogosphere since 2002, not a whole lot said was new to me (which makes sense since the primary audience was supposedly people in marketing/publishing—although most all of the questions were from translators). But as a student of literary translation, it was good to hear more about the active role that translators can take in promoting their books. This was actually the first question of the session and the individual made the point that translators already have to know about promoting their work to get publishers interested in the first place, but asked about what translators can do to promote their books to the public.
To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the South China Morning Post runs an article investigating
Left on the Shelf: Ninety years after the May 4 movement spawned a host of Chinese literary giants, Ben Blanchard examines why mainland writers remain largely unread internationally
As a tribute to the May Fourth Movement goes, it's no last-year's Sunday New York Times Book Review, featuring four new translations of Chinese literature, but then again, May Fourth doesn't fall on a Sunday this year.
What the South China Morning Post article does raise, implicitly at least, is the question of World Literature and its relationship to Chinese literature.
More…
By Lucas Klein, May 4, 5:04p.m.
New Comments
on The 'Officialdom Novel' Genre
Who says fiction is dead in China?
posted by Brendan
I don't think anyone anyone said fiction is "dead" in China. There's an awful lot of it on the TV news and in the newspapers every day!
Meanwhile, it's interesting to see how at least one writer ...
posted by Bruce
on Brothers Review
As a matter of fact...
Thanks to Powell's & their Review-a-Day feature of selected Rain Taxi reviews, my take on Brothers is available online.
Enjoy!
Lucas
posted by Lucas
on Forays into Film: Independent Chinese Documentary
Also worth checking out for screenings of new documentaries, and interesting chat and projects on the subject, is CNEX, run by a Taiwanese collective and headed up by the similarly multi-talented Ben Tsiang. See more http://beijing.cnex.org.cn ...
posted by Jennyniv
I didn't know about CNEX. Just checked out their site...very cool. There are some familiar names too: Ben Tsiang, Sina co-founder; director Hao Zhiqiang; other talented people. Many thanks for posting this, Jenny.
posted by Cindy M. Carter
on David Hinton and Ezra Pound: from TNR
I'm no native speaker of English so I can't really tell which translation is the best, but I find it interesting that both translators obviously thinks that the gauze is important and needs to be there, while the ...
posted by Anna Chen