Eric Abrahamsen

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Eric has lived in Beijing since late 2001, when he studied Chinese at the Central University for Nationalities. He began struggling through Wang Xiaobo at an early date, and kept at it through the intervening years while working as a teacher, editor, and freelance journalist. He would like nothing more than to spend his days with a dictionary and a laptop, and his nights out drinking with authors.

August 2007

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Lantern Bearers

Cindy and I are currently working together on a subtitle translation project, for the short documentary films coming out of Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale project. Among the 1,001 Chinese people that Ai Weiwei shipped to Kassel, Germany, fifteen or sixteen filmmakers were included, and they’ve produced a series of small films about certain of the ‘artists’.

My first short film centered around Gouzi and Zhang Chi, which was a pleasant surprise as I’ve only known them, Gouzi in particular, by their writing. Gouzi is mostly famous for being drunk, it seems, and in fact the whole hour-long spot is sodden (the first shot is Zhang Chi blarging in someone’s bathroom). Most of it takes place at group dinners in various restaurants and living rooms around Beijing. The subjects represent a certain slice of Beijing’s literary community – 35 to 50, once hot young bloods, all devastated in one way or the other by the events of June 4th, 1989.

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By Eric Abrahamsen, August 23, 6:01a.m.

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Forget Particle Physics…

I'm re-reading George Steiner's After Babel, one of the great theoretical texts on translation, and this passage made me laugh:

Thus any light I may be able to throw on the nature and poetics of translation between tongues has concomitant bearing on the study of language as a whole. The subject is difficult and ill-defined. Regarding the possible transfer into English of Chinese philosophic concepts, I. A. Richards remarks: 'We have here indeed what may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.'

By Eric Abrahamsen, August 21, 7:54a.m.

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Interview with Didi Felman

Yesterday Bookslut ran an interview with Didi Felman, editor of Words Without Borders, on the joys and travails of running an indie webzine. In the midst of it she dropped a hint that WWB had an upcoming feature entitled 'Olympic Voices from China', so if any writers are currently reading this, hurry up and write something… Olympic? (via Three Percent)

By Eric Abrahamsen, August 1, 1:07a.m.

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