Chinese Literature in Translation
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"Aftershock": The Movie, the Screenwriter and the Part-time Censor
Director Feng Xiaogang graces the covers of at least 5 major publications this week, thanks to his direction of the red-hot "disaster" movie, Aftershock, based on Zhang Ling's novel of the same name about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 200,000.
But Southern Metropolis Weekly's interview with the screenwriter, who just happens to work for the Film Review Board under the infamous State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), is a gem in itself...
From George Szirtes, poet, translator and blogger: "....Can we have books re-translated? Is it right to do so?
The pragmatic answer is that it is always difficult to to get the copyright and persuade a new publisher to publish something that has already appeared in the language via another publisher relatively recently, in other words in the sales cycle of the book.
The less pragmatic answer has an ethical dimension that can cut both ways. It may, on the one hand, be morally desirable to replace bad work with good, but it may not, on the other hand, be morally desirable for a newcomer to push aside a firstcomer, especially when opinions about quality may vary."
It's been a good year for Chinese to English translation, and it's getting better. Eric Abrahamsen is to translate Wang Xiaofang's well-known novel on official corruption in China, working title Notes of a civil servant. The publisher is Penguin and the book is due out in 2011. Eric needs no introduction, since he is the founder and driving force behind Paper Republic. Great news, Eric!
By Nicky Harman, July 28, 4:13a.m.
Yunnan-Tibetan Trilogy: A Catholic Chinese Author's Imagination Takes Flight
At last author Fan Wen (范稳) has his reward for a decade of immersion in the multicultural wonderland along the Yunnan-Tibet border: Dadi Yage (大地雅歌), the closing novel in his longish trilogy, has just been published in Chinese.
That day in 1999 when he came across the "lonely" grave of a martyred Swiss missionary in Lancangjiang Canyon, Father Maurice Tornay, he realized he had found his "sacred vocation". Indeed, the area straddling the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan and Tibet autonomous region is an anthropologist's dream. One finds Tibetans, Han, Naxi, Yi, Lisu and other ethnic groups living together.
"I find describing the interaction - and collisions - between different cultures a challenging and engaging affair," Fan says. "Conflicts have taken place due to differences in culture and faith, like wars between Naxi and Tibetans, and Tibetans and Han. Irreconcilable contradictions occurred between Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism when the latter was introduced."
Vintage editor on the challenges of finding a translator
Some translators find themselves by bringing you the project in the first place (see my blog of 29 June on how Saramago came to be published by Harvill). Of course, an editor may find themselves in the awkward position of be alerted to a book by a translator who just isn’t right for the job. Fortunately that doesn’t happen very often. If a translator with a good track record feels sufficiently passionate about a novel to persuade a publisher to acquire the rights, the chances are he or she is the right person to translate it. It is important that a translator really likes the text they are to translate. After all, they have to live with it for at least a few months, if not a year – or longer depending on the length of the book. Translators have frequently turned down my offers of work because they just don’t feel a sympathy for the book I’m proposing. As one translator wrote to me today: ‘It sings in a key that is well out of my range.’
Review: In an Age of Prosperity (AKA The Fat Years)
As for the people living in this paradise, they are happy, almost eerily so, in a manner that has resonances of the Stepford Wives or a Truman Show, albeit with Chinese characteristics. They have wealth, they have entertainments and divertissements galore, they know how to have fun, and they know their French wines. They spend a lot of time on the Internet and in self-congratulation, frequently combining both activities. They are able to do and get almost anything they want in life, so long as they don’t cross certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour, including those related to political expression. Because these boundaries have a way of shifting, people involved in borderline activities such as worship in non-sanctioned Christian churches tend to remain more alert and anxious than most. But who cares? Lao Chen describes this situation as ‘ninety-percent freedom’ (jiucheng ziyou 九成自由).
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (http://asiancha.com/) iis now accepting submissions for "The China Issue", an edition of the journal devoted exclusively to work from and about contemporary China. The issue, which will be published in June 2011, will feature poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, scholarly works and visual art exploring the modern Middle Kingdom. We are looking for submissions from a wide range of Chinese and international voices on the social, political and cultural forces which are shaping the country. If you have something interesting, opinionated or fresh to say about China today, we would like to hear from you. Please note that we can only accept submissions in English. More information here: http://asiancha.blogspot.com/2010/07/call-for-submissions-china-issue.html
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 17, 2:08p.m.
The University of Iowa's "Life of Discovery" program concluded recently: this was the second annual installation of a joint program between Iowa's International Writing Program and the China Writers Association, bringing American and Chinese writers together for a little road-trip bonding. Besides the official webpage above, you can peruse their blog, where the writers (Americans only?) posted photos and blogged their bewilderment. The event consisted of two parts: a week in Iowa last May, and a couple of weeks in China, mostly Kunming, which ended July 9.
This year's participants, on the Chinese side:
Interestingly, nearly all the Chinese participants were ethnic minorities, mostly poets. The Americans:
Great to see these kinds of events going on!
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 16, 4:23p.m.
I was really excited when I saw the title Girl in Translation (published by Penguin), but I didn't know it was going to be a book of literal translation.
The author of Girl in Translation is Jean Kwok. The description on *Girl in Translation is as follows: "When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings."
But what becomes nagging after a while is then obvious － the author translates literally:
"The white disease" for leukemia," “small-hearted" for be careful and "release your heart" for don't worry. Asked about this in the Danwei interview, she said that the reason was this: “It took me ten years to write this novel and one of my goals was to develop a technique that would show English-speaking readers what it was like to be a native speaker of Chinese. I wanted to put the reader into the head and heart of a Chinese immigrant. English comes in garbled and incomprehensible, while the beauty of the Chinese language is easily understood.”
I wonder if when Chinese people say 小心, they really think of small hearts, or when they say 放心, they think of release. With no disrespect for the Kwok, these are just general questions that are interesting.
By Alice Liu, July 14, 1:19a.m.
Turkish Novels, Honor Killing and China's English-language Complex
Zülfü Livanelli, the Turkish writer, musician, singer, journalist and member of parliament, recently toured China to promote the launch of the mainland Chinese translation of his popular novel, Bliss (Mutluluk), or 伊斯坦布尔的幸福.
Now a movie as well, Bliss is a melodramatic tale of a young village woman who is raped by an elder relative. When she doesn’t hang herself out of shame, as is expected, the task of restoring honor to the family (by ending her life) is assigned to another male relative. The novel takes us from Van in the southeast to Istanbul, touching on most every controversial aspect of "Turkishness," from honor killing to the Asia-Europe divide represented by schizophrenic Istanbul, and the guerrilla war waged by the Kurds against the Turkish state.
But how many Chinese readers will notice that this quintessentially Turkish novel has been translated from the . . . English?
Literary translation: A feminine act?
Translation, Maureen Freely said at a recent conference in Qatar, is a feminine, or feminized, act. The translator must remain faithful to the author's words; the contemporary translator is largely invisible; she (or he) is the helpmeet of the more powerful, more famous author.
Freely is best known for her work translating the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. And it is clear, in reading Pamuk's dedication to the English version of his most recent novel, that he took pains to direct the translation. The dedication to The Museum of Innocence acknowledges not Freely, but instead others who helped perfect the English text: Sila Olcur, editor George Andreou, fellow author Kiran Desai.
Haruki Murakami's Chinese Translators on Emulating Style
I am careful in transferring the 'heterogeneous nature' of the original style. Haruki's style has an American flavor, even an unique style 'with several inventions,' which basically means that it's Japanese that doesn't look like Japanese, but Japanese with overtones of English in translation. What I do is simple, since Murakami's writing doesn't look like traditional Japanese, then my translation shouldn't look like literary work that has already been translated from the Japanese, and I try my best to dissipate the accent of normal Japanese translations, and take care to conserve the original text's freshness and appealing strangeness, as well as the beauty of its heterogeneity. At the same time, though, I try as hard as I can to transform it into natural and exquisite Chinese.
Next Tuesday (June 29) Chun Shu will be giving a talk at the Trends Lounge in Beijing about her new book, Light Year American Dream, as part of the Trends Lounge's Cosmo Women's Reading Salon series.
Time: June 29 (Tuesday), 7-9pm
Venue: Trends Lounge, 2F The Place (世贸天地), Beijing
Phone: 010 6587 1999
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 23, 10:14p.m.
My Grandmother, the Chinese Censor
In a panic, I scanned the excerpt I’d selected for my first reading. It described ragged beggars and worldly entrepreneurs and earnest students, a sandstorm and drifting catkins and starless nights, desperate peasants and gleeful swindlers, the click-clacking of mahjong tiles in a teahouse and the serpentine stretch of the Great Wall, elderly calligraphists in Tiantan Park and young prostitutes in a karaoke club.
I imagined my grandmother jumping up in the middle of my reading with a pointed finger to denounce me: “You wrote bad things about China!”
Chinese Poetry in The Believer
The reading consisted of one live and surprising voice after another. The poets, men and women, ranged in age from their late thirties to early fifties. They belonged, as did Zhai Yongming, to what critics were calling the New Generation. All of them seemed to me interesting, and—the most surprising thing about them—interesting in different ways. Over the years I’d attended a few international literary gatherings at which Chinese poets had read their work. In those years, in the 1980s and 1990s, you did not, in the first place, know whether the poets you were hearing were the actual poets, given the People’s Republic’s tight control of its public culture, but you did know that, if they were the actual poets, they were nevertheless writing in some utterly opaque code. Poets from around the world—from Vietnam and the Netherlands and Brazil and Canada, quite different from one another, coming from quite distinct literary traditions—were part of the same conversation. They were trying to invent in language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others. That was what I was suddenly hearing in Beijing—that familiar, exhilarating sound, not so much of poetry, but of the power of the project of poetry. It felt like something very alive and new was stirring in China.
"With the PRC now in its swaggering 60s, I would prescribe – to counter the excesses of Beijing bombast – a stiff dose of Lu Xun", Julia concludes in this June 12th 2010 article on the relevance of Lu Xun to contemporary China, in the (UK) Guardian newspaper.
By Nicky Harman, June 13, 7:32a.m.
Thinking Chinese Translation is a practical and comprehensive course-book, intended for translation students and of interest to practising translators too.
By Nicky Harman, June 10, 9:21a.m.
Joel Martinsen on Guo Jingming in Harvest Magazine
Danwei's Joel Martinsen talks to the Book Show, part of Australia's ABC Radio National, about Guo Jingming, the Boy George of Chinese literature, appearing in Harvest, one of China's most staid literary magazines.
Guo Jingming in Harvest Magazine
In Harvest's case, readers who see the magazine as a bastion of serious literature have accused it of betraying its standards to take advantage of Guo's popularity. Making matters worse is the subject matter of Guo's new book: Mark of the Cavalier (爵迹) is the first volume of a new epic fantasy series. Is Harvest repositioning itself to compete with the pulps?
The People's Writer: Zhang Ailing
For me, the recent tributes after the death of J.D. Salinger recalled the reaction in the Chinese press upon the death in 1995 of writer Eileen Chang. On the surface, the two had little in common: he, a 20th-century paragon of youthful rebellion, she, a chronicler of the lives of women in 1940s Shanghai. But both reached the pinnacles of their careers early in their lives, both became famous, both detested literary fame and notoriety and became recluses, and, as a result, both became near cult-like figures, stalked and hounded by fans and admirers.
The winners of PEN's annual translation prize have been announced. Among many worthy winners in many worthy languages, our own particular bias has been satisfied in the form of David Hull's translation of Waverings (presumably 动摇), a novel by Mao Dun. See their official announcement. Congrats to David Hull, a grad student at UCLA.
Nice to see attention paid to the old worthies!
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 2, 7:54p.m.
Pamela Hunt writes: Why are there so many modern Chinese novels in which, as Cindy Carter put it so nicely in an earlier post, ‘faeces play a starring role’? Any reader of contemporary Chinese fiction will tell you that you don’t have to look very far to find a joke about bodily functions. But at the same time humour is rarely discussed in academic writing on Chinese literature, let alone humour that centres around the toilet. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a shame, which is why I decided to tackle the subject myself in a recent essay for the MA in Modern Chinese Literature at SOAS, University of London, focusing on the work of two authors much discussed on the pages of Paper Republic, Han Dong and Zhu Wen.
By Nicky Harman, June 2, 10:31a.m.
Nabokov on the Art of Translation
Two grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.
From the June 1 New York Times:
BEIJING — A security guard apparently angered by a court-imposed divorce settlement shot and killed three people and wounded three others at a courthouse in Hunan Province before turning the weapon on himself, the state media reported.
...the assailant, Zhu Jun, 46, was the head of security at a local Postal Savings Bank branch and had access to a small arsenal.
Thus my question: How does one say, "He went postal" in Chinese?
By Bruce Humes, June 1, 8:17p.m.
A little Monday-morning horn-tootling: Our very own Nicky Harman has been chosen to translate Jin Shan, aka Gold Mountain Blues, by Zhang Ling.
Nicky's situation is a little unusual in that her translation is being commissioned and published by multiple publishing houses in various regions simultaneously, rather than the usual practice of a single commissioning publisher who then sells the rights on. Hopefully this will result in slightly better terms for Nicky.
Gold Mountain Blues will come out with Atlantic in the UK/Commonwealth and Penguin in Canada, and is scheduled to appear in late 2011/early 2012. It has also sold into eight other languages/territories.
Congratulations, Nicky, and we look forward to reading it!
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 1, 12:19a.m.
What looks like a great event at the One Way Bookstore this Saturday, 3-5pm. Jiang Yitan discussing his new book Lu Xun's Beard (鲁迅的胡子), in an event themed "Reading Quiet Fiction in an Unquiet Age". Also speaking are Li Er, one of our favorites, Ge Fei, often considered Li Er's mentor, Bei Cun, and Qiu Huadong, a writer of urban fiction to watch.
The One Way Street Bookstore's website appears to be down, here are the details:
Date/Time: June 5 (Saturday), 3-5pm
Address: Beijing, Solana (蓝色港湾), building 11, number 16
Phone: 010-59056973
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 31, 11:49p.m.
Mian Mian goes ahead with Google lawsuit
“Mian Mian — known for lurid tales of sex, drugs and nightlife — filed suit in October after her latest book, ‘Acid House,’ was scanned into the library. Google says it removed the work following Mian Mian’s complaint but the author is suing for damages of 61,000 yuan ($9,000) and a public apology.”
[originally via the AP]
Granta: Natasha Wimmer on translating Roberto Bolaño
I think you do need empathy, but I resist the familiar notion that the translator somehow becomes the author, or has some sort of special telepathic relationship with the author. Frankly, I think that’s a bit presumptuous and grandiose, and it obscures the delicate process by which the translator adjusts his or her own voice to the author’s voice. It requires a kind of harmonizing, by which I mean that the translator must find a tone in her own register that somehow suits the author’s. It is easier, at least for me, to translate an author or a character for whom I have a natural affinity.
For the past couple months I've spent my Thursdays teaching literary translation classes to translation-studies majors at the Beijing Foreign Languages University. When they first came calling about this program, I suspected that it was of a piece with the government's plan to train an army of domestic Chinese-English translators, thereby liberating Chinese literature from the hands of fickle foreign translators with their imperfect comprehension and questionable loyalties (the final step of this plan is to train an even larger army of domestic readers to consume these domestically-produced English translations, whereupon the whole of Chinese culture will fold up and disappear with a "Foop!", leaving a blank space that can be filled with 喜羊羊 re-runs), and I was leery. They assured me that it was simply a cunning plan to use literary translation to improve the students' English, banking on the old chestnut that there is no more careful reader of a text than its translator, and I agreed.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 24, 10:25a.m.
The website for Oklahoma University's virgin publication Chinese Literature Today is up here, and it looks like they're working on it daily. It (the website) is appearing two steps ahead of CLT's inaugural issue, due to be published this July.
By Canaan Morse, May 23, 2:34a.m.
New Comments
on Eric Abrahamsen to translate Gongwuyuan Biji/Notes of a civil servant
Congratulations, Eric!
posted by Brendan
Hurray!!!
posted by Gray Tan
Great news, Eric!
posted by Alice
on Don't Ever Be a Chinese Child.
Hi Cindy, your translation is excellent except for one possible misunderstanding. Let me put it into context: The Chengdu mother did not return home not because of "week-long binge" but for that she was detained by police for taking drug ...
posted by Fu Lei
on Event: Chun Shu talks about her new book
@Tom
I haven't read Light Year American Dream, nor am I likely to.
It's hard to imagine that she has much to say, to be honest. The invite to her recent talk was full of pretentious babble about ...
posted by Bruce
A copy of the SMW article is here. I liked this bit about what she thinks is the difference between the youth of the US and the youth of China:
“与中国最大的不同是美国年轻人乐观，身上完全没有过去的束缚和阴影，中国青年太沉重，背负了五千年的压抑，太TMD丢人了”。她用愤怒的口吻谈起中国的80后遭遇过的东西 ...
posted by Alice