I got back to Beijing from Sydney yesterday, where I was lucky enough
to have been invited by the Writing and Society Research Group of the
University of Western Sydney (actually a front for the guerilla
publishing and literary activities of one Ivor Indyk, the man
behind Giramondo Publishing and
HEAT magazine), to run on at
the mouth about Chinese literary translation at a symposium entitled
the
Sydney Symposium on Literary Translation
Before you raise an eyebrow, I'll admit I was junior member at what
was largely a gathering of really pretty intimidating literary and
academic figures—I was approximately fifteen years and two
university degrees behind the median. But that made for a wonderful
experience: a relatively small group of people presenting fascinating
papers and talks on topics ranging from poetry to "the classic" to
"nonsense", drawing from languages including French, Italian, Chinese,
Spanish, Japanese and Aboriginal Australian.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 7, 6:23a.m.
[Note: the research I mention here was used for an article titled Broken in Words Without Borders]
I’ve been doing some background reading on the Duanlie (断裂, ‘Broken’ or ‘Split’) literary movement, something Zhu Wen instigated in 1998. It was an important, if low-profile, attempt to voice dissatisfaction with the literary establishment (academia, the Writers Association, the literary journals), and to remind authors that they were not alone in their frustrations. Over the course of several years and a series of Duanlie publications (put out by the Shaanxi Normal University Press), the movement did much to foster independence and diversity among the newer generations of Chinese writers.
Duanlie started as a list of questions which Zhu Wen, Han Dong and a few others mailed around to 70 Chinese writers, 55 of whom responded. They were leading questions, questions meant to snap writers out of their diffidence and goad them into defiance, a call for a vote of no-confidence in modern Chinese literature. Through the good graces of Lü Zheng I was able to get my hands on a copy of a book called Duanlie, published in 2000, which contains a series of interviews with the authors most closely associated with the movement: Wei Hui, Chen Wei (one of the writers responsible for the Heilan website), Huang Fan, Gu Qian, Li Xiaoshan, Wu Chen, Zhao Gang, Liu Ligan, Zhu Zhu, Lu Yang, Chu Chen, Han Dong and Zhu Wen. The book also contains the thirteen original questions, which I’ll translate below. I’m leaving the answers out: there are many, and they are predictable.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 27, 2:02a.m.
