Excerpt from Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village
Since early this year, I have been busy translating [Yan Lianke's] (/authors/yan-lianke/) novel Dream of Ding Village, a story of blood-selling and the subsequent AIDS epidemic in Henan province. In response to some of our readers who have expressed an interest in seeing more of Yan's fiction in translation, here is a brief (unedited) excerpt from the novel, which will be published by [Constable and Robinson] (/publishers/constable-and-robinson/) in 2009.
Although the excerpt is but a very small slice of a novel rich in language and ideas, it highlights the narrative approach Yan has chosen for this book: an admixture of surrealistic dream sequences, omniscient narration and the slightly naive first-person narration of a twelve-year-old boy who has been poisoned in retaliation for his father's activities as a blood merchant or "bloodhead". Balancing these various styles - various voices might be a better way to phrase it - has been my greatest translation challenge.
The sixth thing was that if you got it, you died. AIDS was a new and incurable disease, and no amount of money could save you. But the sickness had only just begun. That was the seventh thing. The real explosion wouldn't come until next year, or the year after next. That's when people would start dying like sparrows, or moths, or ants. Right now they were dying like dogs, and everyone knows that in this world, people care a lot more about dogs than they do about sparrows, moths or ants...
By Cindy Carter, September 6, 12:28p.m.