The perennial dark horse of modern Chinese literature, Wang Xiaobo is fiercely loved by readers and writers alike, but the canon, if there is such a thing, does not know how to make room for him. He wrote both fiction and essays, and while he saw himself primarily as an author, it is the essays which have earned him his ambiguous fame. The tone in which he wrote about Chinese society and culture seems light, and is often humorous, but it is the lightness of someone who has seen to the heart of things and takes none of it seriously. Of course, when he was not writing he did take things very seriously, and the pressure of a society which recognized his talent but could not assimilate his ideas may have hastened his death.
Announcements have been made for the 2009 PEN Translation Grants, though the press release has not yet appeared online, we'll link to it when it does. The only Chinese-language grant went to my translation of Wang Xiaobo's collection of essays, My Spiritual Homeland. You can download a PDF translation of "The Silent Majority", one of the essays from this collection, by clicking here. This essay was originally published in the Asia Literary Review.
Of all the types of value judgments, the worst is the vilification of those who have thought too much and too deeply, who have gone beyond the grasp of their accusers. While we experience the pleasures of thought we cause no harm to anyone; unfortunately, there are always some who feel they have taken harm. Honestly, it is not everyone who can feel this kind of pleasure, but we cannot be held responsible for that. I can see no reason for the negation of such pleasures, unless one takes a despicable sort of jealousy into account. There are some in this world who like variety, and some who like simplicity; I have never observed those who love variety to be jealous of those who like simplicity, nor cause them any harm, I have only ever seen the opposite. If I know anything at all about science and art, it is that they are fed equally by the broad river of the pleasure of thought. This river benefits all humankind but it does not, as some imagine, flow for any one of us alone, just as those who take pleasure in thought were not born for anyone but themselves.
A year or two ago I went to a exhibition on Wang Xiaobo’s life at the Lu Xun Museum. Along with the entrance ticket they gave you a DVD with a half hour or an hour of footage of Wang Xiaobo, including an interview he once did for CCTV. I just recently found this interview on Youtube, and am linking to it here, along with a translation of the conversation. This is from 1995, remember, an era caught between the hit-him-with-a-stick Cultural Revolution, and the can’t-be-arsed-to-wag-a-finger 2000s. CCTV, we should note, had not yet achieved the high standards it boasts today.
The interviewer, Liu Wei (刘为), starts off civilly, but by the end he’s nearly given himself a hernia trying to paint Wang as a salacious destroyer of other people’s morals. Observe, particularly, his craftiness as he traps Wang into admitting his books are all autobiographical, and his beautiful parting shot.
An unfortunate bit of news: we've been asked by the State University of New York press to take down our samples of Wang Xiaobo's Golden Age, since the samples apparently conflict with the English-language translation rights they hold for Wang in Love and Bondage. Frankly, I'm not in the least convinced that this is legally viable, but I'm also very unwilling to get into a fight about it. The prospect of a practically penniless university press suing a group of actually penniless translators over stories few are ever likely to read is too depressing to bear consideration, so down they come. We're leaving the stubs up; if you want to read the longer samples email us.
The first of Yu Hua's new book, Cries in the Drizzle. I haven't read the original, but this is one of Yu Hua's earlier books, and it sounds as if it might not be his strongest.
The other is of Wang in Love and Bondage, published on the MCLC website. The review is first of all an excellent background on Wang Xiaobo, which is nice, though it's very positive about a translation I just can't understand anyone liking. I hope this book marks the last of the Chinese/foreign translation team efforts – it's just not the right way to go. Still, the review is quite worth reading.
It was really getting on her nerves that so many fit and healthy men came to her for treatment, not because there was anything wrong with them, but because they wanted a look at the slag. I was the exception because my back genuinely looked like Pigsy had dug a couple of trenches in it and, even if I was pretending it hurt, those wounds were a good enough reason to see a doctor. They gave her some hope that she could get me to agree she wasn’t a slag. One person acknowledging that she wasn’t was hugely different to no one acknowledging it at all. But I had to go and disappoint her.
I'm blowing off deadlines left and right, so don't have time to do a full translation of this chapter. Even though I'm not really in the game, just wanted to toss in a few low-denomination chips and support the translation of this tremendously influential and unfairly neglected Chinese author....long live Wang Xiaobo! And wansui to Brendan, Eric and Feng37 for bringing his words to life.
Her reasoning went like this: although everyone said that she was a slut, Chen Qingyang felt that she was not, because to be a slut you had to sleep around, and she had never slept around. Although her husband had been in jail for over a year, she had never slept around in his absence, nor had she slept around prior to his imprisonment. For this reason, Chen Qingyang simply couldn't understand why people insisted on calling her a slut.
All the needles in the brigade clinic were worn down and bent crooked, and they tended to take chunks of my skin with them. Eventually my back came to look like I’d been caught in some crossfire; the scars still haven’t faded since.
I suppose everybody hears the author's voice slightly differently when they're reading a novel. The translations in Wang in Love and Bondage didn't speak with the voice I'd heard when I read Wang's writing, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to organize a group effort to re-translate 黄金时代, the novella that Wang was fondest of. Wang's widow 李银河 Li Yinhe kindly gave her permission, and so we were off.
Truth be told, she even admired whores a bit. It wasn’t a question of whether whores were good or bad; it was that she simply wasn’t one, the same way a cat isn’t a dog. If everyone goes around calling a cat a dog, the cat’s bound to start feeling out of sorts, and now that everyone was calling Chen Qingyang a whore, she was completely unnerved, as if she didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Download this as a PDF. [No longer downloadable, sorry]
Before we get started here, a disclaimer: we didn’t start this site to snipe at existing translations, or hint haughtily that we could have done better ourselves, had only the gods of publishing smiled on us, rather than some other. Sour grapes have we none. And yet, the pain of seeing a favorite book or author to which justice has not been done… O, how the fingers itch to make amends! And so some of us have put together our own versions of the first chapter of Wang Xiaobo’s 黄金时代, not because Wang in Love and Bondage was so terrible, or our translations so much superior – think of them rather as fond tangents sprung from a work we found adept enough for inspiration, but not satisfaction. We offer them in the spirit of giving. They are also short, so as not to bore.
That spring, the team leader said I’d blinded his dog’s left eye, and now she looked at you cock-headed, like a ballet dancer. Since then he’d been making life difficult for me.
