Here's a video from XTX and Cold-Blooded Animal, a band I consider - hands and other extremities down - the finest live rock act in China today, perhaps even the whole of Asia.
Although they have toured in Europe, the U.S. and Japan, they sing only in Chinese and record no western cover songs. When asked why he doesn't record western covers, lead singer XTX had this to say: "I'll start singing covers [the day] I run out of other things to say."
The band (see Wiki website) has been a fixture of the Beijing rock scene for twelve years, has released three albums and has sold hundreds of thousands of official copies, and perhaps millions of pirated copies.
The song here is titled "Grandfather". Don't know if it is a coincidence that XTX is wearing a t-shirt depicting Chairman Mao, the grandaddy image of them all.
By Cindy Carter, September 19, 8:23p.m.
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...
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By Cindy Carter, September 6, 12:28p.m.
