*The following is the translation of a blog post by Li Yinhe (李银河), widow of the writer Wang Xiaobo (王小波).
Some publishers came to talk about a manuscript, and left me one of their own books as a sample of their work. The writer's name is Feng Tang, both of which characters you can find in the Hundred Names [a compendium of the most common surnames in China]. My guess is that his father was surnamed Feng and his mother surnamed Tang; I've met other people who got their names that way. The title of the book is You Live and Live and Then You're Old (活着活着就老了), which caught my eye. I looked through it and it's excellent, I couldn't put it down once I'd started, and read it all the way through in a day and a half.
Apart from a few later pieces about Beijing and Hong Kong that weren't that good, and apart from a few places where the same phrases were used repeatedly in different essays (was the writer too busy to read the whole thing through before publication?), and apart from some harsh evaluations of Wang Xiaobo, the book was very, very good.
In it he mentioned laughing out loud twice while reading Wang Xiaobo's books. Reading someone's books and laughing however many times: I'll borrow this phrase, and say that I laughed out loud seven or eight times while reading his book. I developed asthma after I came back to China in 1988, and though it got better it never entirely went away: I have an athsma attack every time I have a laughing fit; listening to crosstalk is a risky business for me. This book nearly did me in; there were eight times I almost had an attack. If I ever have the opportunity to meet this person I'll have a bone to pick with him.
In the book he divides writers into those who "spit out" one book, those who "spit out" two books, and those who "spit out" many books. His use of the word "spit" hit me like a thunderclap: I had once imagined that real literature might be in my future, but the word "spit" dispelled my fantasy for good. I asked myself if I really had anything I needed to spit out, and concluded that I should just stick to my sociology, and enjoy life in my spare time.
They say that the media is in the hands of the generation born in the 1970s. Of the people mentioned in Feng Tang's book, I've read the writing of Luo Yonghao [whose Bullog blog site was recently shut down] and He Caitou; they must be approaching 40 now. They're 20 years younger than us, a whole generation. They've already become the pillars of modern China's intellectual world; we should have respect for our juniors.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 30, 5:18a.m.
I’ve received plenty of emails from people wishing me a “happy niu year.” The phrasing represents a kind of translation that I can’t imagine having happened much twelve years ago: since 1997 Chinese and pīnyīn have become much more pervasive and available in the English-speaking world, while knowledge of and the importance of English has grown in China.
But translation, or something like it, also happens within languages. I guess I mean the misfiring, the falling offs, and the avoidance of them that make some people say translation is impossible. In Chinese, homophones and puns take on a sometimes cosmic significance: fish and bats are auspicious because yú 魚 [fish] sounds like yú 餘 [plenty] and biānfú 蝙蝠 [bat] contains the sound of the word fú 福 [fortune] (I’ve been translating a poem recently in which a certain transition hinges on the notion of bats as good omens). But it cuts both ways: sometimes you don’t want to say something because something sounds like something else. These days, a kind of prohibition has arisen, given the bosses’ propensity for layoffs amidst the current global economic slowdown, against saying gōngxǐ fācái 恭喜發財 [“happy new year,” but literally “congratulations on how much money you’re getting”], because cái 財 [“wealth”] sounds like cái 裁 [“to get fired”]? And especially against saying cáiyuán gǔngǔn 財源滾滾 [“may your wealth and resources come rolling”], since it sounds like cáiyuán gǔngǔn 裁員滾滾 [“may you get laid off and may your head roll”]. These phrases, and their homophonic evil twins, are hard to translate, but they exist as their own kind of translation—belles infidèles, or beautiful infidelities—already.
By Lucas Klein, January 26, 6:58a.m.
Is translation an inherently political act? I suppose that depends on your definition of "inherent."
But if nothing else, though, translation--like so much else--provides an opportunity for censorship. One latest example, as many have noticed, is a certain government's censorship of Obama's inaugural speech. Here's the New York Times article about the issue, and here's the China Digital Times report, including a clip.
By Lucas Klein, January 22, 12:07a.m.
As my first post on Paper Republic, I want to be very serious. No "fooling around," indeed.
As a follow-up to an earlier post on 折騰, here's what my dictionary has to say:
折騰 zhē teng
1. (翻來倒去) turn from side to side; toss about
2. (反復做某事) do sth. over and over again
3. (折磨) cause physical or mental suffering; get sb. down
Based on this definition, this entry--and Paper Republic in general--seems to be an example of def. 1, because we're certainly 翻來倒去, or, to mistranslate that phrase, "translating over and over."
More…
By Lucas Klein, January 19, 2:30p.m.
Publishing houses (all types): 2,330 (UK); 1,738 (Taiwan); 573 (China)
Over 95% of all literary works translated into Chinese over the last five years were published by just 17 firms
China pay for English-to-Chinese literary translation: RMB 50-100 per 1,000 words (US$7.31 to US$14.62) in the target language
Figures from a speech by Kite Runner translator Li Ji-Hong (李继宏) at the recent China-UK Forum on Marketing Literature in Translation in Shanghai (Jan 12-14, 2009). His new firm, 上海帛书文化传播有限公司, will focus on purchasing the rights to foreign books for publication within China.
By Bruce Humes, January 14, 2:06p.m.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 10, 5:33p.m.
The following is a translation of this blog post, which came down the feed reader a day or so ago.
Soon after President Hu, at a very formal meeting, said the words "do not waver, do not slacken, do not mess around" (不动摇不懈怠不折腾), this phrase started to get popular. It was a bit of a shocker to hear something so slangy as "mess around" (折腾, zhéteng) come out of the mouth of a solemn, venerable personage like the General Secretary, and soon everyone was saying it.
But then some official media with nothing better to do started writing reports ("Translating 'Zheteng' from Hu Jintao's Report Stumps International Media") about how the proper English translation of 'zheteng' was "stumping language mavens in both the domestic and foreign media".
They underestimate us! A little phrase like this doesn't need a language maven to figure out, it's a piece of cake. According to the rule of 'crude for crude, elegant for elegant', I can think of a few translations: "no fooling around", "no messing around" or, if you want to get crude, "no fxxcking around" (these are all verb phrases). The translators aren't translating it, and everyone's talking around it, simply to keep from embarrassing President Hu. They're keeping it as "bu zheteng" because they have no other choice.
What's hilarious is that some retards in the Chinese media have written puff pieces saying that the Chinese 'bu zheteng' might even become a catchphrase in English. They shouldn't get their hopes up; the answer would be "No thanks. We've got plenty of words of our own, quit messing with our language." The way I see it, compared to 'bu zhengteng', some other suggestions from netizens' like 'not to huqiunong' (the Shaanxi version) or 'don't xiaqiunao' (Shandong version) have a better chance of making it into English.
Anyway, I suspect Hu Jintao was straying from the script when he said this, it doesn't sound like the sort of a thing a scriptwriter would come up with. Now everyone's elated that a Party boss could talk this way, they though they were off the hook as well. But in olden times they used to say you have to both listen to a man's words and observe his actions – I for one remain deeply skeptical. If a political party that makes a rule of "messing around" were to suddenly straighten up and fly right, they'd have no clue where to even start. Besides, before long they're going to roll out another movement, either "compulsory" or "optional"; they may say they're not "messing around", but it sure looks like it to me.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 7, 8:13a.m.
Interview with the translators of Wang Gang's “English" (王刚写的 《英格力士》)
The Transparent China Translator (II)
By Bruce Humes (徐穆实)
www.bruce-humes.com
Chinese Books, English Reviews
“Among the Emperor Qianlong’s trophies from his conquest of Xinjiang was a girl called Iparhan. She was a beautiful Kashgari whose body was said to give off an intoxicating scent without any help from ointments…the abduction of Iparhan became for the Chinese a symbol of the annexation of the western lands which they had twice before conquered—under the Han and Tang dynasties—but never really controlled.”
(“Wild West China”) (1)
Much has ensued since the 18th century Qing emperor snatched this enchantress from Kashgar, located near today’s Kyrgyzstan, and transplanted the "Fragrant Concubine" (香妃) to his far-flung harem in Beijing.
The ethnic make-up of Xinjiang, for instance. Once home to an overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkic-speaking population—94 percent of the residents when the PRC was founded in 1949—the “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” has been mightily diluted by Han Chinese who, by 2007, reportedly accounted for four of ten inhabitants.(2)
But the legendary fascination of Chinese for Things Xinjiang—the music and dancing of the Uyghurs, the cuisine and particularly the women—endures. In its own unique way, the upcoming publication of “English,” a novel by Wang Gang, a Han who grew up in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, brings those fantasies firmly into our era, and embellishes them a bit.
More…
By Bruce Humes, January 2, 8p.m.
The One Way Street Bookstore is putting on a talk with A Cheng this weekend at its Wanda Plaza location. A Cheng is renowned as a free spirit and a bit of a contrarian; I've run into him a few times, though, and he's usually just seemed crotchety and confused. Still, he's a Personality, and the event ought to be interesting.
Update: The Bi-Cultural Freak went to this event, and wrote a bit about it, plus pictures. We hereby steal one of her pictures, though stealing with permission takes most of the fun out, doesn't it.
Her write-up is in Chinese, but here's a translation (of her transcription) of A Cheng's ramblings:
Art arises from witchcraft. It has no religious faith; it's good at dispelling all that. It dispells stress. Errenzhuan [a kind of two-person song and storytelling routine from northeastern China] is a kind of witchcraft. In ancient times witchcraft was a primary form of performance. There were all types and kinds. Many artists suffer now. It used to be that if you were a painter you just painted… Now it's about politics, publication… You work all day, then struggle all night. Errenzhuan: it's a soporific; the northeast; jumping rope. One person says: I'll make your Granny appear, the other: okay, no problem.
And it really sounds like his grandmother's voice. All the bystanders get involved. I worked in a labor team in the northeast when I was young, it snowed starting in September, so what could you do but listen to errenzhuan? Errenzhuan's got these robes, and they squat and waddle around – that's all witchcraft. And it makes you laugh out loud, it can make you laugh at anything, like that Zhao Benshan [a comedy actor from the northeast] – it's a soporific. Art. It has a hold on everything, on every craft.
[The Chinese word for art, 艺术, is made up of two characters which roughly mean "art" and "craft". 术 by itself, however, is closer to "magic", here "witchcraft".]
As I said: a little crotchety, a little confused.
PS: Can someone weigh in authoritatively on the A Cheng vs Ah Cheng vs Ah-Cheng issue? My fingers type something different every time.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 2, 7:20p.m.
Two big grant deadlines are coming up:
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The NEA Literature Fellowship Translation Project grant is due January 9 (sorry, we should have said something earlier), and can net you either $12,500 or $25,000, so get online and apply!
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The American PEN deadline is January 16, and you can also apply online.
Go forth and get funded!
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 2, 9:55a.m.
New Comments
on Dunhuang Novel Set in Cultural Revolution Alarms China's Censors
In his foreword, Xiao Mo describes what sort of book he's written:
posted by jdmartinsen
on Romancing the Office Chair
The use of "X-chǎng" as a genre label has produced an interesting reanalysis of 商场: 商场小说 (shāngchǎng xiǎoshuō) refers not to books set in malls or bazaars, but to fiction involving the intrigues of high-level business executives.
posted by jdmartinsen
I'm with Lucas and his "administrative battlefield."
I can't see using a term including "political" as in "political arena." It's all about backstabbing and intrigue among party members and officials, not "politics" as we know it in ...
posted by Bruce
Oops -- "backstabbing and intrigue among party members and officials" does seem rather like politics in the West, doesn't it?
But given there are no elections or involvement with the "will of the people," "guanchang" still seems far from party ...
posted by Bruce
I vote for "officialdom".
posted by Jonathan
Wow, thanks for all the suggestions!
@Joel: Shangchang is definitely a better example than zhichang, that's really the right feeling.
@Jonathan: "Officialdom" is the term which has become accepted (how did that happen?) as the genre label, but I ...
posted by Eric Abrahamsen